HIGH SOCIETY TOMB RAIDER
Part Bond villain. Part Indiana Jones. The extraordinary story of how a suave British art dealer squirrelled away 17,000 of the world’s most valuable relics
WHeN art specialists in the Italian police force levered open 45 crates in a warehouse in Geneva last month, they couldn’t believe their eyes. There, before them, lay a vast collection of Roman and etruscan treasures. Among them were two exceptional sarcophagi of a young woman and an elderly man, lying on their sides.
Both in splendid condition, they date from the second century BC and the etruscan period — the Italian civilisation that predated imperial Rome. More dazzling finds poured forth from the plain crates, stamped with the logo of an obscure company: vases, decorated with Roman gladiators and gryphons; terracotta pots; busts; and chunks of fresco from Pompeii.
Prosecutors in Geneva, working with the Italian police, have said the artefacts were ‘exceptional pieces from clandestine excavations’ — that is, tomb-raiders’ loot. It’s thought they were looted from tombs in Tarquinia, one of the great etruscan cities 50 miles northwest of Rome — and a rich hunting ground for tomb-raiders for decades. Such shadowy figures, with overtones of Indiana Jones, give this story a particularly racy fascination.
For 15 years, these antiquities have been hidden from the world, ever since they were deposited in a concrete and steel warehouse in the Geneva Freeport — effectively a mini-tax haven where valuable goods can be stored without officially entering Switzerland.
The man who deposited them there, police say, is not only a Briton, but one of the most notorious crooked dealers in the antiquities world, Robin Symes.
‘Symes is a sort of Bond villain, a suave, corrupt figure smoothing around elite drawing rooms,’ says Melik Kaylan, an antiquities theft expert in New York, who writes for the Wall Street Journal.
With his tailored cream suits, striped shirts and debonair manner, Symes, 76, looks the epitome of the charming, multi-millionaire antiquities dealer. Despite a double brain haemorrhage in 1979, his voice remains deep, clipped and imposing.
For decades, Symes was Britain’s leading antiquities dealer, flitting around London in a chauffeur-driven silver Rolls- Royce and maroon Bentley. He shuttled between a Greek island villa, an Athens flat, a New York apartment and a Chelsea house with a swimming pool lined with classical statues.
Symes’s gallery — in Ormond Yard, an exclusive square in St James’s — was a magnet for collectors, including the oil billionaire, J. Paul Getty.
‘Robin looked perfect — although his style was a bit manufactured — with slightly dyed hair,’ says Nicky Haslam, the society interior designer who has known Symes for decades.
‘He clearly knew his stuff. His gallery was the holy grail for collectors — all beige suede, with bronze cabinets and wonderful lights, the first really American-looking gallery.’
But, 17 years ago, a tragic accident led to Symes’s downfall — and, ultimately, all the way to that treasurecrammed Geneva warehouse.
On July 4, 1999, he was in Italy with his companion of 30 years, Christo Michaelides, heir to a Greek shipping fortune and a partner in Symes’s £125 million antiquities business.
They were dining with an American banker and antiquities collector, Leon Levy, and his wife, Shelby White, in a rented villa in Terni, Umbria.
AFTeR dinner, Christo went in search of cigarettes and never returned. He was found on the floor after he struck his head on a portable radiator falling down some steps. He died in hospital the next day.
After Michaelides’s death, his family fought a court case, claiming half of the antiquities business — a share worth £43 million. Symes countersued and lost his claim that Michaelides was only an employee, not a partner.
Since that summer night, more and more of Symes’s dirty linen has been aired. His greatest error was to lie about the proceeds from three sales, as he desperately fought to conceal how much money he had. Seven lawyers who had originally acted on his behalf proceeded to give evidence against him.
He testified in court that he had sold an egyptian statue of the Greek god, Apollo, for £1.1 million. It turned out he’d sold it to a sheikh for £3.1 million.
Another egyptian statue — supposedly sold for £2.5 million — went for £5.5 million. He also claimed he’d sold some art deco furniture for £2.8 million; he actually sold it for £9.7 million.
In 2005, Symes was sentenced to two years in Pentonville Prison for what the judge called ‘a serious and cynical contempt of court… to conceal that he had deliberately taken the proceeds [and] used them for his own purposes.’ The judge also accused him of ‘numerous lies on oath’, which Symes later admitted in court.
even in prison — where Symes served seven months — he kept up the high life. One titled friend was so upset by his flimsy prison writing paper that she commissioned some expensive paper for him: plush blue bond, with embossed lettering, in a darker blue shade, which read: ‘PeNTONVILLe, CALeDONIAN ROAD, N1.’
The cheeky writing paper chimed with Symes’s lovable rogue side. ‘He was as dodgy as anything — that was part of his charm,’ says Nicky Haslam. ‘There was always a bit of a nod and a wink with him.’
FACING l e gal c osts of £5 million, Symes declared himself bankrupt. Claiming he couldn’t af f ord his l awyers, he had applied unsuccessfully for legal aid.
During the trial, he lived above the bar of a Wiltshire pub, with no carpet and a single bed. At Christmas, though, he couldn’t resist the old siren lure of luxury, and installed himself in London’s Savoy Hotel.
He said he had friends who supported him through his bankruptcy. But Symes never disclosed all his assets. During the case, he admitted storing antiquities in five warehouses. It later emerged that he had secreted them in 33 warehouses, from Geneva to London and New York.
Among the assets he failed to declare, were, presumably, those astonishing 45 crates of antiquities, stored in the warehouse in Geneva, the city where Symes lived before the trial.
Last month, the contents of the crates were returned to Rome, where they will soon be displayed at a press conference.
But they could be just the tip of the iceberg. At one stage, Symes had a huge Aladdin’s cave of antiquities — before the trial, private investigators f ound he had squirrelled away 17,000 relics, thought to be worth £125 million. However many pieces he managed to sell before his conviction, it would have been hard to sell them all. Some of the remainder must account for what was found in Geneva last month.
By the time liquidators came to sell off the remnants of Symes’s collection, at Bonhams in Oxford, in 2009, he was a discredited man. The 250 lots in the sale, including old masters and a Picasso, had to be sold at rock bottom prices because, as Bonhams said, ‘the liquidators make no warranty to title’ — in other words, the antiquities might have been stolen.
It was impossible to know where the treasures came from because all the paperwork had been destroyed — not quite what you expect of a reputable antiquities dealer.
What a steep fall from grace it had been — almost as steep as Robin Symes’s rise to eminence from tragic
beginnings. He was born in 1939 i n Overy, near Dorchester- onThames, Oxfordshire.
When he was a toddler, his mother was stabbed to death by a soldier. At 21, he married Laetitia Atkinson in Surrey, and they had two sons, Quentin and Innes, born in 1961 and 1963 respectively. But having lost his mother, he was to lose his wife, too.
Laetitia died, aged only 54, in 1995, of alcoholism after being diagnosed with schizophrenia and nymphomania. Two years later, Quentin died, aged 35, a victim of heroin addiction.
His surviving son, Innes, now 52, lives in Bristol, where he is director of a building company, Symes Construction.
Talking to me yesterday from his home, Innes said: ‘This is the first I’ve heard about the Geneva story. I haven’t seen my father for ten years. We lost touch a long time ago. I’ve got no idea where he is.’
What a troubled family the Symeses seem to be. The dramatic turning point in Robin Symes’s life came when he met Christo Michaelides in 1967. Married at the time, with two children, Symes was running a gallery and art publishers on London’s King’s Road with his wife, Laetitia.
Then, one day, 22- year- ol d Michaelides walked into the gallery with an antiquity to sell. Michaelides had a girlfriend, but that didn’t stop the two men setting up home together soon after. Symes admitted t hat ‘ we l oved each other’, but always said ‘we never had a sexual relationship’.
Their business relationship, though, prospered. Buoyed by the Michaelides shipping fortune — Symes dealt with the art side, Christo the money side — their antiquities business quickly became the most successful in London. The only problem was that many of those antiquities had been looted from ancient sites.
In 2006, an investigative journalist, Peter Watson, wrote a book, The Medici Conspiracy, in which he accused Symes — working in cahoots with a crooked Italian dealer Giacomo Medici — of selling those looted relics to leading museums.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the J. Paul Getty Museum have all returned such treasures in recent years.
The greatest of all was a life-size, ivory head of Apollo, thought to be worth £30 million and dating from the first century BC. The head was seized by Italian police. A fragment of fresco from a villa near Pompeii — like the one that’s just been found in the Geneva warehouse — was also recovered.
Pietro Casasanta, a leading Italian ‘tombarolo’, or tomb-raider, admitted he unearthed the Apollo head in 1995 at the Baths of Claudius, a Roman site just north of Rome.
Casasanta sold the ivory head to a middle man, Nino Savoca, for £7 million. Savoca sold it on to a London art dealer who, according to Casasanta, speaking years later, was ‘ a homosexual whose partner died recently’ — in other words, Robin Symes.
After Symes came out of prison a decade ago, his business activities went quiet. But he remained the suave figure of the early days.
‘He was fun — exactly the same, ever so slightly more parchmenty in the skin,’ says Nicky Haslam, who had dinner with him in London’s Chelsea three years ago.
‘He had the same, funny, selfassured, devil-may-care approach. He didn’t seem broke.’
He adds: ‘When I heard the news about Geneva, I wasn’t surprised. I was only surprised it was on such a huge scale.’
What will happen to Symes today, now his hoard has been uncovered?
‘He has had every chance to come clean about this,’ says Melik Kaylan. ‘Ultimately, you have to share information on what came from where. Historical scholarship has a morality. Basically, he’s one of the world’s experts, with hands-on knowledge — he should turn gamekeeper and start sharing his knowledge.’
If past form is anything to go by, though, Symes will keep his mouth firmly shut.
And the real origins of that fabulous treasure trove, lurking for years in a dreary Geneva warehouse, will be lost in the mists of time.