>>Steve Meany: Hello everybody.
How ya doin'?
Thanks for joining us today.
My name is Steve Meany, I'm a Googler and
it's actually my pleasure to bring a friend
of mine of all people, Jason Felch, to come
speak with you all.
For those that don't know everything about
Jason like I do, he is an award winning journalist
from the L.A. Times, he's also a finalist
for the Pulitzer Prize, and he's actually
gonna be discussing what he and his colleague,
Ralph Frammolino, put into that work not just
in the L.A. Times but also into the book entitled
Chasing Aphrodite which chronicles basically
the illicit antiquities trade as it existed
in one of the world's richest museums.
And as you'll see from today's discussion
how that sort of, that web actually got larger
and larger and spread to many of the world's
most well known museums.
Their book, Chasing Aphrodite, uncovers really
the roots of Jason and Ralph's discovery and
what was chronicled in the L.A. Times.
His talk is gonna provide basically the insider's
view of the illicit antiquities trade as well
as the international black market in recently
excavated artifacts.
So Jason and I sort of talked about like what
is the purpose, like he's done talks like
this before from anywhere from the Commonwealth
Club to NPR to wherever it might be and we
talked about what should be the purpose in
coming to Google and sharing this with you
all here today and the folks who are gonna
watch this on video later?
It's really sort of boils down to three pieces:
one is to really just educate you on the findings
and the research in the book, that's of course
very important and I wouldn't actually be
a card carrying sales person here of this
company if I didn't mention that the books
are for sale right over here so feel free
to buy one later, also to give you a greater
appreciation of this topic and really why
it's important to all of us.
And the last piece is really, I think, uniquely
Google and that is Jason's here to actually
solicit some help.
This, as you'll find out from today's discussion,
this topic doesn't end today, like, it's going
to spread.
And what I mean by spread is that while Jason's
uncovered and Ralph have uncovered a problem,
they need help to solve that problem.
A And so as we sort of think about this today
I wanted all of you to think about just our
quest, organize the world's information, didn't
necessarily start in 1998; it actually extends
to the past.
And we actually have, in my opinion, a chance
to sort of recover and organize historical
data, historical knowledge, and for those
of you that are interested in reaching out
to Jason and helping him in this quest, I
actually think it's very worthwhile endeavor.
So Jason'll touch on sort of how we can all
help him as he moves forward.
So without further ado, Jason.
[applause]
>>Jason Felch: Thank you Steve.
Steve and I went to high school together in
San Francisco and played on the volleyball
team and I've seen him a few times since,
but it's a pleasure to be back here with Steve
and thank you all very much for coming today.
As Steve mentioned I wanna talk for probably
about half an hour about the book and about
the world that we got into in the book and
then save some time at the end for your questions,
for a conversation, and for pitch because
as Steve hinted I need help.
I have an idea for a project that could harness
technology to address some of the problems
raised in the book in the illicit antiquities
trade, but I'm not a tech guy.
I'm a journalist so I'm hoping some of you
here might either be people or know people
who might be able to help out with this.
So I'll save some time at the end to talk
about that.
Before I start can I just get a sense for
who's in the room, how many people here are
Googlers?
[pause]
Oh wonderful.
And of the Googlers here how many of you are
engineers or do actual technology stuff?
Nice, wonderful.
And how many people, I noticed there's some
Stanford archeology people here?
Wonderful, hello, welcome.
You'll correct me if I get any of the archaeological
references wrong?
To start I wanted to tell a little bit of
story and it's the story that's kind of at
the heart of the book.
It's the story of the J. Paul Getty Museum
and it starts with this man.
J. Paul Getty was, in his day, the world's
richest man.
Getty was something of a miser, he was a misanthrope,
and he was a thoroughly unpleasant person
to most people who knew him, but he was a
passionate collector.
He was passionate really about three things
in life, the first you see here.
The other two were money and art.
He was known to keep a running diary everyday
of every dollar that he spent on everything
down to the penny and the rumors about him
having a pay phone in his house at Sutton
Place, this huge manor outside of London,
are true.
In fact, I just, giving a presentation the
other day, ran into somebody who visited Getty
at his Italian villa and there was a pay phone
there, too.
So Getty didn't like to spend money when he
didn't have to.
He had made his vast fortune in the oil fields;
he inherited his father's oil business, Getty
Oil.
And in the oil business you drill holes in
the ground hoping to hit oil and that was
kind of the approach he took to art, too.
He was out there looking for bargains and
hoping to find something that was under-priced
that he could buy and kind of find this lost
marvel.
The area of art that he was most passionate
about was ancient art; he imagined himself
as something like the reincarnation of the
Emperor Hadrian who'd been this great philanthropist
and patron of the arts in his time.
And he imagined his oil company, which by
the time Getty took it over as a young man,
really spread its arms all around the world;
he imagined that as something like the Roman
Empire.
And so he had fantasies of grandeur and ancient
art, antiquities, gave him an opportunity
to kind of feel the past in his own hands.
And so he was a passionate collector, he was
not always a very good collector, a lot of
the objects he bought ended up proving to
be fakes or not what he thought they were,
but he bought a lot particularly in the 50s
and 60s and the 70s.
He being a skin flint didn't like having to
pay taxes on this growing art collection and
so his tax advisor in the 1950s told him,
"Well you know if you dedicate these two rooms
in your house in Malibu and call them a museum,
a public museum, you can actually treat these
art purchases as a tax write off."
And so the Getty Museum has its origins in
a tax dodge.
Eventually Getty went on to build a much larger
building for his collection; this is the Getty
Villa today.
Getty ordered this built from his house in
London in the 1970s and he based it off of
a Roman villa that had been excavated just
outside of Pompeii and it had been buried
by the eruption of Vesuvius.
And so Getty had found the plans for this
Roman villa and built what we today call the
Getty Villa to emulate that villa and filled
it with his art collection, his rapidly growing
art collection.
Getty never saw this museum, he, from really
the 1950s on, lived in London and Europe,
he was deathly afraid of flying and so he
never came back to the United States, but
even though he sent all his art here and had
this amazing building built.
So when he died in 1976 he left this incredible
personal fortune, most than $800 million and
there was a big mystery: who's gonna get this
money?
He basically aliened all of his family members;
he had five ex-wives and five sons, one to
each of them, and had kind of fallen out of
touch with all of them and alienated all of
them.
He had this harem of women who kind of surrounded
him who he always promised to take care of
in his will; you saw them in the first picture.
He didn't leave his money to them either.
What he did to the surprise of almost everybody,
was he left his entire personal fortune to
the Getty Museum.
Overnight the Getty became, went from a very
kind of provincial, middling, regional museum
that not a lot of people visited to the richest
art museum in the world, a status that it
still has today.
Today it's called the Getty Foundation, there's
an umbrella foundation over it, but it has
an endowment of about $6 billion so it's the
wealthiest arts organization on the planet.
It was to this organization that this young
woman came in 1982.
This is Marion True; she came to the Getty
in the early 80s as an Assistant Curator for
Antiquities.
She had been trained at Harvard, she was something
of a refugee when she came to California;
she was leaving behind a bunch of unsatisfying
jobs in the art market on the kind of market
side of the trade.
She had not finished her studies yet at Harvard
so she was kind of leaving that behind; she'd
had a failed marriage that she was getting
away from, so like a lot of people, she came
to California as something of a refugee to
start over and she arrived at the Getty just
as it was coming into this enormous wealth.
So when Getty died in '76 he bequeathed his
money but it was tied up in litigation until
the early 80s.
So suddenly in the early 80s, the Getty is
enormously rich and it has really one mission,
it's to go out into the world and to buy the
very best art that there is.
Well Marion True was well positioned; she
came into the Getty at a time of a lot of
flux, in fact her boss, the Curator of Antiquities
at the Getty was a man named Jiri Frel, a
very colorful character.
When you read the book, he's kinda my favorite
guy in the book, the guy I'd wanna have a
beer with in the book, 'cause he was completely
corrupt but very up front about it.
He was one of the very few people in this
world that was not kind of two-faced about
what he was doing; he was just basically blatantly
corrupt.
Well, he was driven out of the Getty after
a tax fraud scheme was revealed, that he'd
been defrauding the Federal Government through
kited appraisals and phony donations.
So when he was driven out, Marion True was
suddenly elevated to the position of Antiquities
Curator.
And it was not long after this, in 1987, that
she went to London on her first buying trip
and she was going out to find the best ancient
art in the world and buy it.
Well, the first people that she went to visit
were these two gentlemen.
On the right you see Robin Symes, on the left
is Christo Michaelides.
In the 1980s, these men were the very tippy
top of the market in ancient art; they were
dealers of antiquities; they had the very
best stuff out there.
And so good in fact that very few museums,
American museums, could afford to buy from
them; most of their clients were private collectors.
Well, the Getty could afford to buy from them
and so this is who she went to visit.
Robin Symes said to Marion, "Thank you so
much for coming.
I have something very important that I wanna
show you."
And they popped into his maroon Bentley and
drove out of London into this kind of warehouse
neighborhood of Battersea and he took her
to this big warehouse, this kind of run down
area of town, and he opened up the door and
turned on the lights and this is what Marion
True saw: it was a seven and a half foot Cult
Statute of a Goddess.
She had her breath taken away when she saw
this; nothing like this existed anywhere else
in the world.
This is an acrolithic statute which means
that it's made of two different materials;
you'll see that the head and the arms are
made out of a white marble, that's Parian
Marble from the Green island of Paros; it's
one of the finest marbles there is.
The body is made of limestone.
This was a cult goddess that would have sat
at the center of a Greek temple as the object
of veneration for likely Greek settlers in
the kind of outskirts outside of Greece.
She knew from the fact that it was an acrolith
that it was almost certainly from southern
Italy.
This technique was used when there was a shortage,
there was a scarcity, of actual local marble
and so the extremities, the marble for the
extremities would be imported from Greece
itself, but in the colonies, in the Greek
colonies they would use the local limestone
to carve the actual body.
Well, she knew three things when she saw this
statute.
First of all, she knew that this was an incredibly
important piece of art.
As I said there was nothing like it anywhere
else in the world; the closest reference she
could come up with was the Parthenon Friezes.
When Pheidias had sculpted those sculptures
which we sometimes refer to as the Elgin Marbles,
they're now in the British Museum in London;
when Pheidias the Greek sculptor had sculpted
these he had developed a new style, a new
artistic technique and this goddess was a
direct reflection of that.
It was this wet drapery style and so it was
a clear reference right back to what our historians
would consider really the apex of Western
civilization, the highest moment of classical
Greece that you can come up with.
And so it was enormously important for that
as she wrote later in her proposal there was
nothing like this anywhere outside of Athens
itself or Great Britain, meaning the Elgin
Marbles in the British Museum.
So it was clear that this kind of acquisition,
an object of this caliber, could immediately
put the Getty on the map, make it a credible
institution in the eyes of its East Coast
peers, and would be a career making acquisition
for a young curator like Marian True.
Well, there were other things that were also
immediately clear about the statute.
If you look at these photographs of the statute
before restoration you see that before she
was cleaned up she was a little bit dirty.
On her face, you can see the encrustation,
that's not acne she has that's actual dirt
that's been encrusted there over the centuries.
And if you look at the limestone body of the
statute you'll see that there are two prominent
break points: one in the waist and another
at the knees.
Now when she walked up to the statute, she
ran her finger along those cracks and they
were sharp; they'd been recently made.
Ancient statutes with ancient breaks wear
down over time and so they wouldn't be sharp
breaks like that.
Well, all of these things were a clear indication
that this statute had been recently found
and judging by the fact that it was an acrolith,
it must have been found in southern Italy
or Sicily and so this bore all the clear signs
of looting.
Closer inspection showed that it actually
still had dirt in the folds of the gown.
Now when she asked Robin Symes, "Where did
this thing come from?"
She was very curious because it had never
been studied before.
Art historians and archaeologists and scholars
of classical art are very passionate and very
diligent researchers and anything of this
size or proportion even it had been in a private
collection would have been known and documented
if it had known to exist.
So this thing was completely out of nowhere.
Robin Symes wouldn't say much about where
it was from.
He said he'd gotten it from a Swiss supermarket
magnate who had had it in his family collection
since the 30s.
And that was good enough and fine for Marion
True.
The decision to acquire it wasn't hers; it
was really her boss's decision.
But she knew very well that this thing bore
clear signs of being a recent discovery and
therefore it was hot; it was potentially dangerous
for the museum to be involved with.
Well, this created a dilemma and it was not
a new dilemma for the Getty.
The Getty had been wrestling with the issue
of whether and how to acquire antiquities
particularly antiquities that appeared to
have been recently excavated for many years.
The decision really fell to these two men:
John Walsh on the left was the Director of
the Getty Museum at the time.
He was a very respected curator at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art; his specialty was Dutch art.
He was really one of the leading up and coming
museum figures in the country and he had been
brought to the Getty to kind of bring seriousness
to the Getty Museum.
And his boss was Harold Williams.
Harold Williams was the CEO of the Getty Trust,
the umbrella foundation over the museum.
Harold Williams also had a pretty good lineage;
he had worked for Carter, he was the Chairman
of the Securities and Exchange Commission;
he had been an advisor for many years to Norton
Simon so he had some knowledge of the art
world, but really he was a financially credible
person who could manage this enormous endowment;
he had been trained as a lawyer.
So John and Harold had been going back and
forth for several years over this question
about antiquities, the antiquities collection.
The Getty was aggressively trying to build
its collection but it kept running up into
this issue, which is a lot of these objects
on the market, in fact Harold Williams had
been told 95 percent of the objects on the
market, had been recently excavated.
And under not just foreign law but also American
law, knowingly buying something that had been
looted from a country that had a patrimony
law like Italy's that said, "Objects in the
ground belong to the state," doing that under
American law was a violation of the criminal
statutes and could end up getting the Getty
into a lot of trouble.
And as an attorney, Harold Williams was keenly
aware of this and concerned about it.
Well, John Walsh was a museum guy and he made
the case to Harold, he said, "Look Harold
this has been going on for decades, this is
how we buy these things.
And yes there's some risk involved but these
cases are almost never proven and furthermore
don't we have a moral obligation to buy these
objects?
Isn't it really our duty in the world to purchase
antiquities like this even if they've come
out of their country illegally?
If we don't buy them what will come of them?
If we don't buy them they could end up back
in the black market and we'll never see it
again.
It could end up in a private collection and
it will never be studied and available for
the public to admire.
So isn't it our moral duty as a museum, and
a very wealthy museum at that, to buy and
conserve and protect and study and make available
for the public just these kind of objects?"
Well, into this mix came the Aphrodite and
it really drew this long ongoing debate to
the fore.
And thankfully we have an actual record of
the conversation that Harold Williams and
John Walsh had in September of 1987 while
they're debating this very issue.
Now I should say Walsh and Williams claimed
that the conversation I'm gonna tell you about
it purely hypothetical.
The Aphrodite was under proposal at the time,
it was being considered for acquisition, but
Walsh and Williams would tell you that they
were considering a new acquisition policy
for the Getty not the Statute of Aphrodite.
So keep that in mind as we read John Walsh's
handwritten notes from the meeting.
"Acquisition policy antiquities."
They were creating a special policy just for
antiquities.
"Harold Williams: 'We're saying we won't look
into the provenance.
We know it's stolen.
Symes is a fence.
Must we no try?? to find out where it came
from?
Why not ask Symes?"
[pause]
Harold Williams is worried; he's worried that
buying the Aphrodite is gonna get the Getty
in a lot of trouble.
Well, John Walsh says, "Don't worry, Harold.
There's no information about where this thing
came from and if we ask Symes and we push
him for information about where it came from,
he'll lie to us because that's what dealers
do.
The dealers that we are doing business with
are liars and fences and we can't trust them,
so let's not ask them."
Well, it became clear that the Getty, if it
was going to acquire the Aphrodite, needed
a new acquisition policy.
The existing acquisition policy in 1987 said
that the Getty museum wouldn't be able to
buy anything if it had any reason to believe
it has been illegally exported from its country
of origin.
If there were any doubts about it those doubts
needed to be investigated thoroughly.
Well, investigating the Statute of Aphrodite
thoroughly would only bring trouble and so
they created a new policy, one that would
allow for the acquisition of the Statute of
Aphrodite.
This policy would basically put the onus of
proving that the statute was looted not on
the Getty Museum but on someone else, anyone
else.
And so what the Getty did is they said, "We're
gonna notify foreign governments in the likely
country of origin.
We're gonna say, 'Do have any proof that the
statue was looted, speak now or we're gonna
buy this thing.'"
They would also get a warranty from the dealer
Symes saying that he warranted that this wasn't
looted and they would publish and display
the object and let everybody see it and so
if anybody had a claim against it they could
come forward and the Getty said, "Well, if
they come forward, we'll deal with 'em when
they come forward."
Well, this is the new policy, there was one
more aspect of the new policy and it's written
in black and white in these discussions: "No
investigations."
The Getty made a concerted effort not to look
into where the objects it was buying came
from.
The reason for that is pretty clear; at the
time, American law said that if you have knowledge
of buying a looted antiquity you could go
to jail.
So the decision at the Getty was to never
gain that knowledge and absent that knowledge
they thought they'd be safe.
[clears throat]
Well, Harold Williams was a lawyer and he
wasn't entirely comfortable with this still
so he leaves John Walsh and Marion True with
a parting thought.
He says, "Are we willing to buy stolen property
for some higher aim?"
Well, to me this is a remarkable document
because of its frankness and also because
it really captures a moment in time in the
American museum world.
American museums had been buying recently
looted antiquities with knowledge for decades.
And this is really one of the few times where,
because of changing tides in this world, senior
museum officials were saying, "Can we keep
doing this and get away with it?"
Well, the answer to Harold Williams question,
"Are we willing to buy stolen property for
some higher aim?" the answer was yes.
The Getty bought the Statute of Aphrodite
for $18 million, it was a record price at
the time and American museums kept buying
looted antiquities really for the next few
decades.
[clears throat]
Buying ancient art, buying other people's
culture is really nothing new this has been
going on for centuries if not millennia.
The earliest known legal document we have,
clears throat] excuse me, is called the Abbott
Papyrus; it's the trial of two looters in
Egypt about 2,000 years before Christ.
I may have that number wrong.
It documents their attempts to raid the tombs
of the Pharaohs; it's not in Egypt by the
way it's in the British Museum.
For centuries, people have been debating the
propriety of acquiring other people's culture
and for the most part, the rule has been "might
makes right."
When a country conquers another country is
hauls home the best art and puts it up on
display at home.
This has been the subject of dispute and debate
for centuries.
The most prominent example, the one you're
probably all familiar with, is the debate
over the Elgin Marbles when Lord Elgin went
and took those Parthenon Friezes off the Parthenon
and brought them home to London.
There was a big debate in London about whether
he had done something right or wrong.
A lot of the British aristocracy had been
doing very similar things.
As part of their grand tour, they'd go around
the world and bring home beautiful remnants
of antiquity, but even for members of the
aristocracy in Britain at the time this was
kind of a bit too far; he had gone a bit overboard.
The debate really changes, that historical
debate, really begins to change in the 1960s
because what becomes very clear is, particularly
in the United States in the post-war boom
years, regional museums across the United
are buying up antiquities, ancient antiquities,
in particular classical antiquities at a huge
rate; they're gobbling up everything they
can get and filling their collections with
these remnants of Roman and Greek culture.
Well, the archaeologists in the field saw
the results of this pillage not just in the
classical world but also all across Latin
America, across Asia, across the Middle East;
archaeological sites were being devastated
by the looting.
There was a huge demand for these objects
and it had created a huge problem with plunder.
And so this kind of culminated in a treaty
in 1970 that we refer to as the UNESCO Accord.
It has a very long name which I have given
you here.
In essence what it said is, "We, the world's
nations, are going to try to respect each
other's patrimony laws and to discourage looting
to kind of curb this terrible destruction
that's going on.
We're going to agree to respect each other's
laws.
And so if we think that that object was looted
we're going to put import restrictions on
it and not allow it into the country."
And there was this kind of international regime
that would be built to kind of curb this destruction
of our history.
Well, it was all fine and good, the museums
said they were on board, they loved this,
too, of course.
And Thomas Hoving, the Director of the Metropolitan
Museum of Art got up and he pronounced, "The
age of piracy has ended.
This is it.
We're changin' the way we do business."
Well, two years later Thomas Hoving and the
Metropolitan Museum of Art bought this.
This is known as the Euphronios Krater, it's
perhaps one of the finest ancient Greek vases
that we have.
It had been looted just a few years earlier
from a tomb outside of Rome, smuggled through
a network of dealers, and presented to the
Met.
And the Met had a pretty good idea, Thomas
Hoving himself had a pretty good idea, that
this thing was a fresh find but he couldn't
turn it down, it was too nice, it was just
too good and the Met wanted it; so he bought
it.
And there was a big outcry and there were
rumors that it had been looted and people
thought they knew the guys who had looted
it, but the Met stood by its guns and said,
"Well, unless you can prove it we're not giving
it back."
And nobody could really prove it 'cause the
Italians didn't have the evidence to prove
it.
So eventually the kerfuffle died down and
the Met kept its vase and it became known
as the Hot Pot.
This is Norton Simon in a wonderful quote
from the New York Times just to capture the
spirit of the times this is all post-UNESCO,
here's Norton Simon, "Hell yes," he's just
bought an enormous, beautiful Indian Vishnu
and he's got it and somebody says, "Well,
India says this thing was recently looted
and smuggled out of the country."
And Norton Simon says, "Hell yes, it was smuggled.
I spent between $15 and $16 million in the
last two years on Asian art, and most of it
was smuggled."
So not exactly a secret, this is business
as usual in the museum world.
Well, that continues apace really for 40 years
and I would argue, and over those 40 years
there's changes in the law, there's changes
in practice, there's lot of changes that go
on, but I would argue that this single photo
is really what changed the actual practices
not the rhetoric but the actual collecting
practices of American museums more than anything
else.
This is a 2006 photograph of Marion True,
who you saw earlier, walking into her criminal
trial in Rome.
She was accused by Italy of trafficking in
looted art with some of the other dealers
who were implicated.
So it was really this that got museums to
pay attention after 40 years.
The origin of this criminal case really goes
back to the early 1990s and a car crash.
A low level middleman in the illicit antiquities
trade in Italy crashes his car, dies, the
police find some artifacts in the car, they
go back to his house and they find this document.
This document is a org chart for the illicit
antiquities trade in Italy.
What you see at the bottom of the org chart
is Elio and Angelo and Dino and the different
men at the bottom of the food chain; these
are the guys out in the fields digging; they're
feeding their wares up to the principal middleman
in Italy.
On the right you see Giacomo Medici.
Giacomo Medici was a young man who grew up
in this trade and was the bright guy who made
good for himself, moved the operation to Switzerland,
got a big warehouse in the Freeport, and started
becoming a huge supplier to American museums.
So he really controlled the illicit trade
really from kind of Rome north, particularly
the Etruscan areas just around Rome and Tuscany.
On the left you see Gianfranco Becchina.
Gianfranco Becchina was a Sicilian guy, same
kinda story, got his start in the trade but
kinda figured out how to make good money out
of it, moved his operation to Switzerland
where the laws protected him, and became a
major supplier for objects again to the American
museums and others.
At the top of the pyramid is Robert Hecht.
Robert Hecht was an American, he was a classically
trained archaeologist at the American Academy
in Rome but decided to go to the dark side;
he opted to get involved in the trade as a
dealer instead of being a dirt archaeologist.
Hecht really since the 50s had dominated the
illicit trade in classical antiquities; he's
an amazing man, I got to know him pretty well
while reporting this book and he just died
three days ago.
In fact, my obit of him was in the Los Angeles
Times and I think is in the Washington Post
today.
He's a remarkable figure, somebody should
make a movie about him.
I won't go into a lot of detail today, but
he basically helped organize, systematize,
and revolutionize the illicit antiquities
trade over five decades and supplied most
of the leading museums in the world with many
of their finest classical antiquities that
we have.
Once the Italians had that org chart they
said, "Okay, now we've got something to go
on; now we've got some teeth for our investigations."
They'd been investigating this world for years
and not been able to really get up the chain
of commands to the big guys, the middlemen
'cause they were all just across the border
in Switzerland.
Well, they finally built enough evidence to
convince the Swiss that they could execute
a search warrant in Switzerland, something
that a lot of people in the field thought
would have never happened.
So they get to Switzerland and they raid Giacomo
Medici's warehouse in 1995 and what do they
find?
It's Ali Baba's cave.
Giacomo Medici has thousands of antiquities
all over the place in various states of restoration;
some are in crates labeled Cerveteri, the
little town outside of Rome that's got a beautiful
Etruscan necropolis; these things had just
come out of the ground and were shipped to
Switzerland just like that, still in pieces,
covered in dirt.
Others were kind of partially reconstructed
and then there were the things on the shelf
which are kind of display quality, ready for
market, cleaned up, ready to go.
Well, the Italians were stunned, they really,
until this moment, had no idea how sophisticated,
organized, and massive the illicit antiquities
trade was.
I mean, this was a sophisticated operation.
They noticed, by the way, that a lot of the
objects on the shelves curiously had auction
tags on them; Sotheby's, Christie's, lot number
332.
Well, how could that be?
This took 'em years to figure out, they couldn't
figure out how Medici, a guy who had all the
sources across Italy, why would he be buying
objects at auction?
Well, eventually they figured out, this is
kind of a side story, eventually they figured
out that Medici had figured out how to game
the market; he was a bright guy.
He was consigning objects for auction at Sotheby's
and then having straw buyers in the crowd
bid them up to the price, the market price,
that he felt was right.
Then they would buy them and give him back
to Medici.
Well, what did that do?
A, it set the market for antiquities, he could
basically decide what objects would be worth,
and B, it laundered them, it gave them a clean
provenance 'cause at the time anybody would
feel comfortable buying from a reputable auction
house like Sotheby's and having an auction
tag from Sotheby's was good enough for anybody.
So, these were bright guys, they had figured
out how to game the system, but far more important
than the thousands of archaeological objects
they found in his warehouse were these binders
of Polaroids.
Medici was not a big record keeper, he didn't
have elaborate business records, what he did
was he had Polaroids.
He had photographs of everything he'd ever
bought from the looters and sold on and he
had a very primitive code that he wrote on
the back of them basically indicating what
he'd paid for it, what he'd sold it for, and
who he'd sold it to.
So, it was these Polaroids that really cracked
the case for the Italian investigators.
They began going through these Polaroids and
finding all kinds of really amazing archaeological
objects that had been recently looted; tens
of thousands of them.
Well, whadda you do?
You know these objects were looted.
For the first time Italians had something
they'd always been missing which was kind
of smoking gun proof of where these things
had come from.
What they needed to do at this point was find
out where these things had ended up.
Well, it took 'em a long time, I'll describe
the process 'cause I'm gonna come back to
this at the end of the presentation when I
solicit your help.
Essentially, imagine a giant game of Concentration,
you remember that game Concentration?
You turn over one card, you look at it, you
turn it back over, you turn over another card,
and you're trying to make matches.
So these two wonderful Italian investigators
were sitting in the basement of the Villa
Giulia, the Etruscan Museum in Rome playing
an enormous game of Concentration.
In one pile, they had Medici's Polaroids and
they'd look at 'em and they'd study them and
they'd say, "Okay, I got those in my mind."
And then they'd open up catalogs of the world's
known antiquities collections and they'd leaf
through them and they'd say, "Gee whiz, that
looks familiar.
Now where was that?"
Then they'd go back into the, well, this is
a tedious, incredibly time consuming process.
They spent 10 or 15 years doing this and they
came up with a few hundred matches.
And those matches is what ultimately led to
the controversy, the turning point that we
write about in the book.
The reason is because this is the Getty's
Apollo, this is a statute of Apollo that's
been on display at the Getty and here is the
Apollo soon after it came out of the ground.
You can see the power of these images; when
you see something recently excavated from
the ground there's not a lot the Getty can
say to argue that this thing was in some old
Swiss collection.
This thing had been recently excavated, photographed
in a Polaroid so they didn't have to take
it to the Photomat and send out through the
supply chain to Switzerland, laundered, and
then sold to the Getty.
So these images had an enormous power to them.
This is Griffins Attacking a Fallen Doe, a
fabulous, enormous sculpture, you can see
that it still has traces of its original paint.
The archaeologists in the crowd know that
what we think of as these beautiful white
marbles in their day were actually vividly
painted with bright colors and so very little
of that paint has survived antiquity.
On this thing, you can really get a sense
for what these things must have looked like
when they were made, really vividly painted.
Well, here is the Griffins Attacking a Fallen
Doe in the trunk of a car just after it was
excavated.
And here it is sitting on a piece of newspaper
which when you zoom in you can tell it's an
Italian piece of newspaper.
And here is Giacomo Medici, the man who supplied
this to Robert Hecht who supplied this to
the Getty Museum, I'm sorry who supplied this
to Maurice Tempelsman, a private collector,
a paramour of Jackie Onassis, diamond magnate
in New York City.
He put it in his private collection, held
it for a few years, sold it to the Getty where
it went on display.
Well, Medici was so excited, this was really
a beautiful object, that Giacomo and Robert
Hecht went on a tour of American museums and
they visited and they took photographs of
themselves next to the objects that they'd
help to smuggle out of the country and loot.
So, thanks to Giacomo's vanity we have the
wonderful pictures of Giacomo posing next
to these looted objects.
This is an Etruscan Antefix, this is a roof
decoration from an Etruscan house and here's
the Antefix soon after it came out of the
ground.
So the Getty Museum in 2005, is confronted
by Italian authorities with this shocking
evidence and they're forced to do something
that they'd been reluctant to do for years;
they had to look into their own archives and
examine their own past and confront their
history of buying these objects.
And what they found was pretty alarming.
They found that in their, in the conclusions
in their own internal attorneys, that the
museum had apparently been knowingly buying
looted antiquities for decades, that this
was a rather common practice, and that is
was done with a wink and a nod, that there
was an attempt to kind of cover it up or at
least obscure it, but essentially that this
was common practice.
Well, on April Fool's Day of 2005 Marion True
was indicted by Italy and accused of being
a co-conspirator of Hecht and Medici and trafficking
in these objects.
There was a human cry in the art world because
Marion True, really since the mid-90s, had
emerged as the leading opponent, the leading
critic of the antiquities trade.
She had been denouncing really the trade for
its corruption and saying, encouraging her
museum colleagues to stop relying on what
was clearly a black market and that we all
needed to face the facts.
She told museum directors in 2001 in Denver,
"We all need to face the fact if an object
comes to us without a known collecting history,
that's a looted antiquity and we shouldn't
be buying it 'cause we're encouraging the
destruction of archaeological sites as museums
or educational institutions if we promote
the destruction of these things, we're betraying
our own mission."
So, when she was indicted she had kind of
become transformed in the mind of her peers
as a kind of a leading crusader against this
thing, but her past had caught up with her
and so she was indicted and put on trial in
2005 along with Hecht and Medici.
Medici was convicted.
Both Hecht and True, their trials just expired;
True's in 2010, Hecht's just a month ago without
any conviction.
It's noteworthy because the Italian criminal
justice system is not well prepared to handle
these type of cases; they're incredibly complex
investigations.
The investigative phase of this spanned at
least 15 years and amassed an enormous amount
of evidence but it was not enough to ultimately
convict people, who I think the evidence would
suggest, were involved in this illicit trade.
So the Getty based on its own internal investigation
created its own org chart.
This is what their internal review came up
with in terms of the supply chain that they
had been dealing with.
At the bottom you see Italy, interesting that
most of these things come to them with some
cover story about being in an old Swiss collection;
they clearly thought these things were coming
right out of Italy.
You see Robin Symes, Robert Hecht, Fleischman
is Larry Fleischman, a prominent New York
art dealer who had donated his collection
to the Getty and Tempelsman, Maurice Tempelsman,
who we'd mentioned earlier.
And then these things going to the Getty.
Well, this looks a lot like this other org
chart; in fact, if you put these two org charts
together what you see is the full chain of
custody essentially of the illicit antiquities
trade.
You have from the very guys out in the fields
digging all the way up through the system,
through the private collectors to the museum.
This is really a revolution, this is really
the first time that investigators were able
to trace a massive amount of objects through
an illicit black market, this illicit black
market.
And so this is an important discovery, it's
an important understanding about how sophisticated
the supply chain in this antiquities, in these
looted antiquities became.
As I said, Marion True was indicted in April
Fool's Day of 2005; she was never convicted;
her trial ended in the fall of 2010 when the
statute of limitations expired and so now
she's living with her husband outside of Paris.
But she was disgraced in part because, in
stories in the Los Angeles Times, we revealed
not only the evidence in the Italian case,
but also the internal evidence inside the
Getty, which the Getty decided not to share
with the Italians, though they were promising
their full cooperation.
So there was a cover up that happens, we saw
some of the documents that were covered up
including those notes from Walsh that clearly
indicated there had been a problem.
These headlines ultimately created a big international
controversy.
We also found that Marion True had accepted
a personal loan from a lawyer associated with
Symes and Michaelides to buy a $400,000 Greek
vacation home; she had repaid that loan ultimately
with a second loan from the Fleischman's,
the Getty's biggest donors who she'd been
cultivating for years.
That second loan came just days after the
Fleischman's completed a $60 million transaction
with the Getty.
So it all looked very bad, it was a very clear
conflict of interest that Marion True was
caught in.
She was fired after we revealed that, even
though the Getty had known about it for years.
And it wasn't just the Getty, I want it to
be clear through these headlines that what
the Getty had been doing was really a case
study in American museums in the 70s, 80s,
and 90s.
The Metropolitan Museum was forced to give
back many of its objects including the Euphronios
Krater that you saw earlier.
The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, this is the
Statue of Sabina that had been a really keystone
of their collection; it went back.
This is the Euphronios Krater back in Italy
now with the Carabinieri celebrating its return.
And here is the Statute of Aphrodite; never
shown in the Medici Polaroids, but through
really shoe leather detective work by Italian
investigators, by Getty's own investigators,
and by journalists we were able to piece together
the kind of story of how this thing had been
looted from an archaeological site in central
Sicily, a site called Morgantina, a very important
Greek city state, smuggled in a carrot truck
out of the country to Switzerland, laundered,
and then sold to the Getty.
The Getty, by the way, has photographs of
the Aphrodite in this kind of very disturbing
state just after it arrived in Switzerland;
it's kind of being poured out of a bag with
all kinds of dirt and it's broken in pieces,
it's before restoration.
They refused to release these photographs
and when we keep demanding them and they keep
saying, "No."
Remember these are institutions presumably
here to serve the public, I mean they're tax
exempt, they're getting a big tax break on
that $6 billion to serve us, but they won't
show us the smoking gun picture of the Aphrodite
they say because they cut a deal with the
[chuckles] smuggler who gave them the photos.
So here's the Aphrodite being mounted in its
new museum in central Sicily, Morgantina.
And here she is at a big press conference
with a crush of Italian politicians and journalists
admiring the statue in her new home.
In all, the effect of the scandal, this needs
updating because there's been a number of
recent returns, but essentially you've got
American museums returning more than 100 of
their finest pieces of classical antiquities
when confronted with this really clear evidence,
just from the Medici archive remember, of
the looted origins of these things, these
objects were estimated at a billion dollars;
they really are some of the finest pieces
of classical art that we had in America and
they're no longer here.
Now, having mixed feelings about that I think
is understandable; Italy has its fair share
of classical antiquities, it certainly doesn't
need our stuff.
But think about it, I think about this as
kind of a token penance; this is really the
tip of an iceberg, it's a very large iceberg.
Most classical antiquities in American museums
do not have a documented provenance, meaning
we have no idea where they were found or how
they got to those museums.
That's alarming; it's a suggestion that they
may have illicit origins.
This is just a hundred of them so it's, in
my mind, these returns were really a token
penance saying, "Yes, we got caught cheating
and we're giving you back some of these finest
things as kind of a way of saying we're sorry."
The byproduct of this has actually been somewhat
of a happy story; there's a happy ending which
is that as a result of this really contentious
battle between Italy and American museums,
there's been this whole new era of cooperation
that's come out of it and oddly enough the
Getty has really been a pioneer in this area.
Here is James Cuno, the new CEO of the Getty,
shaking hands with the Greek Minister of Culture
just earlier this year, I'm sorry, late last
year.
This is them sealing a cultural collaboration
agreement and essentially, and other museums
that have given back antiquities have signed
similar agreements.
In essence they're saying, "Look Italy, Greece
you have tons of antiquities, more than you
could ever display in your museums.
We wanna display antiquities, we wanna educate
our public, we wanna display them and we're
gonna stop relying on the black market.
So, if you share your antiquities with us
and send 'em to us on loan, we'll stop relying
on the black market and we can help you restore
them and protect them and study them and there's
really a way for us to all get along."
Well, this new approach is, I think, spreading
rapidly and I think it's being seen as a kind
of a paradigm shift in the museum world not
just in the antiquities world, but I think
people are realizing: do museums really need
to own all the objects that they display?
Is it really about possession or is it about
stewardship?
And is it about sharing these things and protecting
them and learning about them and collaborating?
And so that's a really positive sign that's
come out of this controversy and one that
I think you'll see more and more of.
There are also some alarming signs; there's
recent signs that the museum world's reliance
on the illicit antiquities trade has not ended.
Very briefly, if you wanna follow these cases
we track them on our blog, we break news on
our blog, chasing Aphrodite dot com is where
you can follow the kind of ongoing chase.
But these are some recent cases that we've
been writing about.
On the left is Michael Padgett, Antiquities
Curator at the Princeton Museum of Art.
The Princeton Museum of Art was one of the
museums that gave stuff back in 2007; they
signed an agreement; they made happy noises
with Italy, everything was fine.
Well, a few years later we learned that the
Italians are now criminally investigating
Michael Padgett for participating in a network
of illicit antiquities that looks a lot like
the one that Marion True was involved in.
And that this alleged conspiracy to traffic
in these objects continued through 2006 when
everybody was making happy noises.
In the middle, is Michael Govan the curator
at LACMA, the Los Angeles County Museum of
Art.
They have a wonderful collection of Southeast
Asian antiquities.
Michael Govan is asking federal agents whether
he can come into his museum because they showed
up early one morning in January of 2008, raided
the museum and four other southern California
museums after a five year undercover investigation
of an illicit antiquities network smuggling
Southeast Asian antiquities out of Thailand
and Burma and Cambodia through Los Angeles.
They were being donated to museums like LACMA
at inflated appraisals.
This is a tax fraud scheme that echoes the
very one that got Marion True's boss fired
in the 80s at the Getty, and it appears to
still be going on.
No charges, certainly not against the museum
in this case yet, it's an ongoing investigation.
On the right you see Joseph Lewis, a collector
of Egyptian material here in the United States.
He was arrested or indicted under an alleged
conspiracy to traffic near Eastern material
recently looted Egyptian antiquities, smuggled
through Bahrain into New York City where they
were distributed to collectors and dealers
and being sold on the open market in New York.
So this is still going.
The age of piracy unfortunately is not yet
over, it's an ongoing issue.
So that's the end of my chat.
I apologize for my quick pace but I'm trying
to get through it so I can pick your brains
about what I see as a potential use of technology
to address some of these issues.
So let me talk about that briefly.
In essence, is that still, no it's not, apologies.
[pause]
While reporting this story, we came across
what I see as a problem.
There are these thousands and thousands of
photographs of recently looted antiquities
that have been seized by Italian authorities
and Greek authorities.
It's an enormously time consuming and difficult
task for these wonderful archaeologists in
the basement of the Rome Museum to find out
where these things ended up.
And so, in the course of reporting, we got
access to many of these photographs, we have
them on five DVDs full of photos and documents
and business records of this illicit trade
and is there way to process this information,
this data, more effectively, more efficiently?
The other problem is that our knowledge of
the illicit antiquities trade is really rather
poor because of this lack of data.
There's a real, even among experts, uncertainty
about how big, what the scope of the illicit
market in classical antiquities is; estimates
range from $200 million a year to $6 billion
a year and everybody's just guessing 'cause
like most illicit trades, it's pretty hard
to measure.
Well these investigations that have been happening
in recent years have churned up an enormous
source of data about this illicit trade: business
records, photographs.
All of this data is being processed at a snail's
pace by a handful of people.
We have an opportunity to change that and
so what I am trying to do and need some help
with is essentially crowd source the task
of analysis of this information; make it public
on the Web and get everyone out there who
has an idea about this stuff to contribute
to our understanding of what happens.
It's a project that I refer to half jokingly
as WikiLoot mostly because it's a, I think
of it as a Wiki, a distributed analysis process
and a community effort to contribute.
What I'd like to do is create a Web interface
that would build a community of people who
will go through these images, tag them, identify
them, find out where they are today, and further
our understanding of how the illicit trade
works and the scope of the problem.
A more sophisticated approach and one I've
talked about with some people at Google but
have yet to find kind of the right person,
is to use computer vision as a potential technical
way of having essentially a Web crawler go
out into the world and find where these objects
are today.
We all know that Picasa for example and iPhoto
in Apple's iPhoto they have this facial recognition
technology that lets you find all the pictures
of your Aunt Sally.
Can that technology be harnessed to recognize
a specific piece of art and go out into the
World Wide Web and find where that art is
today?
That would dramatically increase our ability
to understand the scope of this problem.
This is something that I've been discussing
with a kind of small group of archaeologists,
people in law enforcement, journalists, there's
a lot of interest in this.
What we don't have is a technology partner,
somebody who could help us develop this technology.
And so one of the reasons I'm here today is
I'm excited to be at Google is because, not
surprisingly, this is something you guys are
already doing in lots of different ways.
You had a question in the back.
>>male #1: Who have you spoken to at Google
so far?
>>Jason Felch: To Eric Limon and, well I can
get you their names.
Both gentlemen I ran into and aren't in this
field per se but they've been, I've been kind
of pitching this is a 20 percent time project
through them and we haven't quite found yet
the right people to connect with.
So I'm still --
>>male #1: I know the group, so let's met
afterwards.
>>Jason Felch: Wonderful, great.
I'm glad you're here.
Problem solved, right?
[laughter]
Okay, next problem.
No, there's a lot of interested people in
this, this is an important cache of data that
could really tell us a lot about this world
and my vision for it is that it be something
that it's wide open to the public.
I mean, I think, one of the problems is law
enforcement isn't quite the right way to address
this issue and academics are very good at
what they do, but there's a gap there between
them and the public.
And the public essentially is not, doesn't
completely understand the scope of the problem
and, I think, particularly in the United States
there's a sense that looting is victim-less
crime because we don't see the devastation
of the archaeological sites, they're not for
the most part here.
And so I think public awareness is a big part
of this and I'd there to be a way in which
the public could engage in this potentially
by, for example, going to their local museum,
looking at these lovely antiquities that have
no provenance, snapping a picture and uploading
it onto WikiLoot and allowing either experts
or an algorithm to see if it matches any of
the objects in the archives.
This is something that I think could really
raise public awareness about this issue and
help get out heads around the scope of the
illicit antiquities trade.
I'm gonna end with that, it's just a brief
overview of kind of something I hope to do.
I'd welcome all of your questions; I'd also
welcome your suggestions.
You know technology far better than I do.
Are there other ways in which technology could
be brought to bear?
I'll throw one out there because I was asked
to: a lot of field archaeologists and governments
in antiquities rich countries that have troubles
monitoring their archaeological sites rely
on Google Earth and Google Maps for their
images.
Essentially they're desperate to monitor their
archaeological sites but they're frustrated
because the pace at which Google Images is
being updated, these great satellite views
of archaeological sites could be harnessed
to track looting and kind of monitor archaeological
sites at risk, but they can't quite get a
handle on how to get the most recent updates.
I think the answer may be to buy the satellite
images from the for profit providers but there's
not always money for that.
So that's another way that Google might play
a role in the illicit antiquities trade.
Thank you so much for your patience, I know
I kind of rambled through that quickly so
I'm happy to take any questions or comments
or thoughts.
[pause]
[applause]
Anybody have any thoughts?
Yeah.
>>male #2: I'm just interested in your last
comment there about the amount of money involved.
Museums always seem to be struggling for money
--
>>Jason Felch: Yeah.
>>male #2: and yet --
>>Jason Felch: Not the Getty.
>>male #2: the amount that these things are
being bought for and the amount of trade seems,
it seems like a disconnect like they're always
short of money and yet they're spending $20
million on a --
>>Jason Felch: Particularly when you think
that you could get some of these incredible
objects on loan, for almost free, why would
museums be going out and spending $18 million
on something that could get them into a lot
of legal trouble?
I think that the hard times that everyone's
been having in the last couple years with
the recession have encouraged museums to move
in this direction and think beyond ownership
in part because ownership, they can't buy
what they want always.
And so are there other ways to get it?
But I think you make a good point.
Do you wanna say a little bit about your work
'cause it sounds like you have related ideas.
>>male #2: No, just the idea of doing computer
vision and matching pictures either user generated
with images that are on the Web is something
we do so --
>>Jason Felch: Yeah.
>>male #2: I mean, these DVDs you talk of,
they're just all images?
>>Jason Felch: No a lot of them are images
and I should say a lot of them are poor images,
they are essentially digital photographs of
Polaroids and so they're not all very good
images and a lot of times, I mean this is
a challenging task for computer vision which
I know is kind of quickly evolving.
But a lot of times you've got objects that
are in various states of restoration or partial
objects that are later, when we see them at
their museum they look pretty nice, but in
some of these Polaroids they look kinda dirty
or broken up.
So I don't know where the cutting edge of
the technology is and it's abilities to kind
recognize a fragment and associate it with
something existing out there.
But let's talk more after.
Yeah.
[pause]
Yes.
>>female #1: Hi [ indistinct ] one of the
Stanford archaeologists.
So I like your idea of crowd sourcing using
these images to identify objects that museums
have acquired but it seems to me like you're
trying to circumvent the hierarchy of the
museums.
Have you approached museums directly or talked
to them 'cause it seems like you're working
under an assumption that museums are still
not functioning ethically in terms of trying
to identify --
>>Jason Felch: I am an investigative reporter
after all.
[laughter]
trying to identify looted antiquities --
>>Jason Felch: Yes.
>>female #1: within their own [indistinct
].
>>Jason Felch: Yeah.
Fair point, I am somewhat suspicious of whether
museums have completely embraced the wave
of reforms, I think it's a mixed bag.
We test this theory almost weekly.
If you follow our blog chasing Aphrodite dot
com what you'll see is that we are continuing
to chase these cases as they emerge.
So the Princeton case which is the one that's
kind of hot right now involves a dealer named
Edoardo Almagia and there's a cache of photos;
we don't have them the Italian authorities,
this is a case that's kind of ongoing.
But they've linked these photos to museums
around the country so we've been contacting
these museums and saying, "Would you please
tell us what you bought from this gentlemen
and what you know about its origins?"
And there's different degrees of transparency,
I mean it would be nice to think that museums
were all completely transparent 'cause they
see themselves as public institutions here
for our benefit, that's not always the case
particularly when there's a criminal investigation
going on.
So, I think museums could play a very active
and important role in this.
After all some of the leading experts, some
of the people who know how to identify these
objects better than anyone else, work at museums.
I mean, who better than museum curators to
go onto this Web portal and help identify
and tag and locate where these objects are?
I mean when Marion True in her deposition
by the Italian prosecutor was shown a lot
of these Polaroids, off the top of her head
she could say, "Boston Museum of Fine Arts,
Santa Fe Museum, Cleveland."
I mean, she just knew 'cause this is her field.
So I would hope that museums could be encouraged
to participate in this, I think that even
people in the dealers' community have a real
interest in having this information out there
to know what their exposure is on the market.
Right now the situation is everybody knows
there's thousands of Polaroids out there but
not which objects are in them and so there's
a lot of fear and nervousness.
And my hope is that everybody could kind of
join together on this type of task to kind
of wrestle it to the ground.
[pause]
Yeah.
>>female #2: Following up on the last question,
you mentioned how auction houses are often
used to launder items, so have you thought
about somewhat involving them in this project
of yours or maybe sending them the photos
so that they can watch out for those types
of items if they come up for sale or someone
has a [indistinct ] auction house?
>>Jason Felch: Yeah, I mean auction houses,
like museums, keenly interested in what these
photos show with the expertise in house to
identify many of these objects.
And I think no one has an interest right now
in getting caught with looted antiquities.
The pain has been so great over the last couple
of years during this controversy, that they're
all interested in kind of not getting caught.
And so the idea of putting it out there on
the Web and crowd sourcing, it is that anybody
who is interested in this.
I mean there's also some hobbyist in Ohio
who happens to know a lot about this and has
hundreds of hours of free time to go through
and do this work.
So there's people all around the world who
are interested in this and again it's global,
it's not just the United States, there are
experts all across the world who know these
things.
I've also heard from archaeologists that the
world that I've really been delving deeply
into and the kind of smuggling network that
we've been documenting is a pretty small one,
it's classical antiquities from the Mediterranean,
mostly Greece and Italy, going through to
classical collections in the United States.
This is a worldwide problem and it's one that
involves Southeast Asia, it's one that involves
pre-Columbian art, and there are similar types
of archives, I'm told, of objects and of middlemen
in the trade from these different communities.
So my idea is build it with what you've got,
in this case it's classical, in this particular
smuggling network with classical antiquities,
and then if you build it they will come; build
it out as it grows.
It's also because there's some graduate students
and academics in the audience, it's a potential
for a fascinating dataset to conduct really
serious analysis that I think hasn't really
been done before.
I've been trying to review some of the academic
work on the issue of looting and it's pretty
sparse 'cause there's just not a good dataset;
there's imperfect ways of analyzing this.
This is a fabulous dataset, we've got thousands
and thousands of business records from some
middlemen in the trade operating over decades
and it would several great dissertations in
there somewhere.
So for those academics out there interested
in this there's a little bait.
Anyone else?
[pause]
Thank you all very much for your patience
and for coming today.
[applause]
I'd be happy to sign a book if you wanna buy
one I'll be around.
