2. A PERFECT SCHEME

AMONG THOSE WHO gathered to toast the death of J. Paul Getty was Jiri Frel, the museum's roguish antiquities curator.

Frel had been hired by Getty four years earlier while he was working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as an assistant curator under Dietrich von Bothmer. He was a refugee from Communist Czechoslovakia, which he fled in 1969 after a twenty-year career as a noted classics professor and expert in Greek art at Charles University in Prague. He came to the United States under a fellowship from Princeton University's Institute for Advanced Studies and brought with him a refugee's state of mind: keen survival instincts and a healthy disregard for the rules.

Frel cultivated a closer relationship with Getty than most of his colleagues at the Malibu museum. The two met as Getty was pursuing the bronze athlete, an object that inspired awe in both men. Frel's guile served him well in convincing his stingy benefactor to purchase expensive antiquities. Mindful of Getty's fear of death, Frel presented an ancient tombstone to Getty as an "archaic relief." He once manipulated the old man into purchasing a stone Roman chair by having it delivered to Sutton Place and set before Getty, whom he gently pushed into the seat. The fit was so preternaturally comfortable that Getty approved the purchase on the spot.

Not long after their first meeting, Getty offered Frel a job. Frel broke his three-year contract with the Met to become the Getty Museum's first antiquities curator. Garrett and Fredericksen, Frel's nominal bosses, gave the imperious Czech a wide berth. They knew of his tendencies. Frel had casually mentioned to Fredericksen that the Met had paid off a Lebanese dealer to help concoct a cover story about the provenance of the Met's famous Greek vase, the Euphronios krater. When Fredericksen expressed shock, Frel shook his head and said condescendingly, "You Americans are so naive."

With wild gray hair, oversize black glasses, and a pathological confidence in his own opinion, the fiftysomething Czech paraded around the museum grounds like an emperor. When not bullying people with his intellect, he was delighting them with his old-world charm. He wore rumpled suits with flapped pockets and open-toed sandals over socks. He hugged colleagues and playfully bumped heads with strangers. A polymath, Frel played the violin, was an accomplished mathematician, and was fluent in six modern languages and Latin. Around him, no conversation was dead for long. Frel was always ready with a Shakespearean quote or the saucy story about why the Lansdowne Herakles, one of the antiquity collection's centerpieces, was missing its penis: Getty had been too cheap to buy the member, which Lady Lansdowne had chiseled off and discreetly hidden away.

While living under Communist rule, Frel had learned to be a charming manipulator, all things to all people. When speaking with Jews, he was quick to pull out the Star of David he carried with him, "in solidarity" with those persecuted in World War II, he would say. Frel spewed vitriol about Eastern Europe totalitarianism but once revealed in an interview with the FBI that he had tried unsuccessfully to join the Communist Party when he was at Charles University. In the same interview, he waxed eloquent about America as a "great and good country." In reality, he detested everything American, from the mustard to the bread to the dummkopf-producing public schools.

Frel was perhaps best known as an uncompromising womanizer. At the Met, female employees devised a telephone code to warn one another when he left his office for the stacks, where he was known to accost young research assistants. Many happily complied, succumbing to his craggy looks, his kiss of the hand, his deep gaze into their eyes as he explained how the likenesses of Jesus and the Apostles in early Christian art were copied from Roman portraits. Left in his wake in Prague, Princeton, and New York was a trail of ex-wives, heartbroken girlfriends, and abandoned children.

But for all his flaws, Frel recognized Getty's death for what it was. As his colleagues hoisted their champagne glasses in gleeful unison, Frel was uncharacteristically quiet. He eventually pulled Fredericksen aside and whispered darkly in his thick accent, "This sudden wealth is going to cause us a great deal of grief."

GETTY'S GIFT CAME with one big string attached: it was to be controlled by a board of six museum trustees, many of whom possessed no knowledge of art.

Prior to Getty's death, the board existed mostly to fulfill the legal requirements for nonprofits in the U.S. tax code. The trustees met quarterly to rubberstamp the old man's decisions. Getty had stacked the board with his accountant, a Getty Oil executive (Harold Berg), the firm's outside attorney, his sons Ronald and Gordon, and his Italian art adviser, Federico Zeri, an outspoken Renaissance art historian who guided many of Getty's acquisitions, often in exchange for a kickback from dealers, some believed. The chairman was Berg, a paunchy Getty Oil vice president who had befriended Getty when both worked as young roughnecks in the East Texas oil fields. Berg's aesthetic sensibilities ran from unfiltered cigarettes to gigantic martinis, and while running museum board meetings, he sometimes nodded off. A blunt Kansan, he once rejected as "bullshit" a plan to excavate the rest of the Villa dei Papiri, where unknown treasures remained untouched under Vesuvial ash. Berg had a better idea: why didn't the Getty pool its money with other institutions and just buy out the National Archaeological Museum in Naples?

With the founder's death, this was the motley crew that would now control the Getty fortune.

Frel regarded the board with loathing. They were "fucking American morons" who valued their ancient art like pinkie rings—the bigger and shinier, the better. With the exception of Zeri, they didn't understand art or what it took to build a world-class antiquities collection. The Louvre, the National Museums in Berlin, the Metropolitan Museum of Art—these institutions hadn't become great just by buying marquee items. They also gobbled up pottery shards, architectural fragments, second-rate statues, and crumbling votive urns. These pieces might not be worthy of exhibition, but they formed the spine of a deeper "study collection" that attracted scholars from around the world.

Frel was determined to build such a collection at the Getty, hoping to convert the boutique museum into a hub of modern scholarship. The board saw no point to the endeavor. So, even before Getty's death, the antiquities curator set in motion a scheme to work around them: if board members wouldn't buy the objects, Frel would acquire them as donations.

Frel began canvassing everyone he knew for gifts. On a trip through New York, he visited the Manhattan flat of Malcolm Wiener, an investment fund manager and Met board member. Frel found Wiener, an antiquities buff, near tears. Someone had just knocked over a Mycenaean pot, shattering it. Frel got down on all fours to tenderly gather the pieces into a dirty shirt pulled from his travel bag. "I'm going to take every little piece of clay and have the Getty staff glue this back together," he said. A few weeks later, Wiener received a letter thanking him for his "donation." Frel had accessioned the restored piece in Wiener's name.

Frel also put the arm on antiquities dealers who wanted to keep good relations with the newly rich Getty. One donated a bust of the Greek historian Thucydides. Another contributed a head of Livia, the wife of the Roman emperor Augustus. A third handed over $9,000 worth of ancient silver and gold crowns.

Still, the pace of donations was too slow. Frel was determined to find another way.

THAT WAY APPEASED thanks to a twenty-five-year-old coin dealer named Bruce McNall. A natural-born salesman with cherubic looks, McNall had converted a boyhood fascination with ancient coins into a thriving numismatic business. During the early 1970s, with the Dow bottoming out at 600 and America reeling from sticker shock at the gas pumps, McNall peddled coins as lucrative investments. He threaded his way through the trimmed hedges and tennis courts of Bel Air, California, toting a boxy briefcase of samples. Placing his wares on the table, he regaled prospective buyers with colorful anecdotes about the Roman emperors depicted on the coins. Then he moved in for the kill, explaining that Greek decadrachms had appreciated 350 percent just between 1970 and 1974. His client list quickly grew to include the likes of record mogul David Geffen, Charlie's Angels producer Leonard Goldberg, and Motown chief Berry Gordy.

By the time Getty died, McNall had branched out to antiquities. He was co-owner of Summa Gallery, a richly appointed storefront showroom on Rodeo Drive and the only major antiquities dealership on the West Coast. His plan was to upgrade coin customers to ancient art, then start selling directly to museums, taking a slice of business from the Manhattan dealers who had long dominated the market. Summa showed off its artifacts like stars at a Hollywood premiere. They sparkled under spotlights and lined glass cases in rooms with padded velvet walls of ocher and orange, colors intended to evoke a Grecian krater. A portrait sculpture of Caligula stared out from its pedestal. A golden funerary wreath that had once rested on the head of a dead nobleman shimmered under its own Plexiglas dome.

McNall's supplier and silent partner was Robert Hecht, the preeminent middleman of the classical antiquities trade, whose swashbuckling career was legendary in the field. An heir to the Baltimorebased Hecht's department stores, Hecht had served in the naval reserve during World War II before receiving a scholarship to study classics and archaeology at the American Academy in Rome. But his passion for ancient objects couldn't be satisfied by the plodding pace of academia, and poverty held no appeal. By the time his two-year term there ended in 1949 (amid rumors that he had been expelled for punching out a classmate), he was already buying and selling ancient art. His network of loyal suppliers reached deep into the tombs and ruins of Greece, Turkey, and Italy.

Since the 1950s, Hecht had sold some of the finest pieces of classical art to emerge on the market. His clients included dozens of American and European museums, universities, and private collectors, including J. Paul Getty, whom Hecht had once persuaded to buy an intricately carved Roman bust. For decades, Hecht single-handedly dominated the antiquities market with his brilliance, brutality, and panache. He cited Virgil as readily as the lyrics of Gilbert and Sullivan, and he was known to break into operatic arias. He often drank to excess and was known to gamble his money away in all-night backgammon games. He tamed competitors with an unpredictable temper and eliminated rivals with anonymous calls to the police. Even those who sold directly to museums gave Hecht a cut of the deal, earning him the nickname "Mr. Percentage."

But the 1972 Euphronios krater imbroglio with the Met had unmasked Hecht as the source of the museum's "hot pot." In the wake of the scandal, Italian authorities declared Hecht persona non grata and exiled him from his home in Rome. The episode forced Hecht to be more discreet, but he continued to provide a steady stream of freshly excavated objects through middlemen. McNall, whom Hecht had met at a Munich coin auction a few years earlier, presented the perfect frontman for expanding Hecht's access to the American market. Their deal at Summa was strictly fifty-fifty: McNall provided the Rolodex and handshakes; Hecht provided the merchandise.

The arrangement worked beautifully with the important, museumquality objects Hecht was able to obtain. The problem was what to do with the thousands of lesser objects Hecht felt obliged to buy to maintain his suppliers' loyalty. McNall considered them "crap" and an impediment to getting Summa off the ground. But they caught the eye of Frel, who often walked into Summa unannounced to rifle through the stockroom. "You know, Bruce," Frel purred during one visit, "we actually need these kind of things."

ONE DAY AROUND the time of Getty's death, McNall went to visit Frel at the museum. The two men started talking: what if McNall marketed the bric-a-brac not as long-term investments for his clients, but as quick tax breaks? If he found customers with seven-figure incomes who were willing to buy the objects on the cheap, they could then donate them to the Getty and get tax write-offs for much higher values. Frel said that he could help close the deal by arranging appraisals through his friend Jerry Eisenberg to back up values reported to the Internal Revenue Service.

The plan was brilliant. McNall could clear his shelves of leftover stock. His clients could actually make money on their donations. Hecht could keep his suppliers happy. And Frel could acquire objects through donations, without having to go through the Getty's board of trustees for approval.

It also appealed to the triad of forces that drive Hollywood—greed, ego, and instant gratification. Actors, producers, film executives, and others who profit in the halo surrounding the entertainment industry are forever looking for ways to reduce their tax liabilities. The opportunity to make a buck while appearing to be philanthropic donors to the Getty offered a cultural immortality that rolling credits on a movie screen could not.

The scheme might even be legal. McNall ran it past his tax attorney, who said that donors could legitimately argue that the antiquities they bought at "wholesale" values were worth a lot more by the time the Getty shined them up in its conservation lab and accepted them into its collection. After all, a reconstructed Greek vase was worth more than a bunch of pottery fragments on a shelf.

For a test case, McNall turned to one of his best coin customers, Sy Weintraub, the former chairman of Panavision. The short, wiry, often profane mogul's claim to fame was as originator of the old Superman television series and the producer of a string of schlocky 1960s Tarzan movies with titles such as Tarzan Goes to India. What he lacked in taste he made up for in business sense. Weintraub had bankrolled McNall's coin business in exchange for a piece of the action. He had backed McNall at Summa, steering his friends to the gallery and even buying a couple of sarcophagi and a mummy to scatter around the red-velvet interior of his Beverly Hills mansion.

Weintraub was intrigued by McNall's donation scheme, but only if he could make back at least five times his investment. By the end of the year, Weintraub was on the Getty books as the proud donor of twenty Etruscan terra-cotta roof ornaments, six thousand coins, and the head from a Greek grave marker. The value of the gifts, second only that year to J. Paul Getty's bequest, earned Weintraub a tax deduction of $1.65 million. He followed up by donating two fourth-century B.c. frescoes cut from a tomb fifty miles south of Naples. He paid Summa $75,000 but told the IRS they were worth $2.5 million. He pocketed $1.2 million in tax savings—a return of more than 1,500 percent.

With that, the donation scheme spread like a southern California brushfire.

Weintraub told his pal Gordon McLendon, who had made millions by reformatting AM radio with Top 40 hits and all-talk stations. McLendon's son once joked that his father couldn't even spell the word "art," much less recognize it. But within months, the radio legend had been transformed into a cultural benefactor, giving the Getty more than 120 pieces of ancient amber jewelry carved to look like tiny ships, girls' faces, and animals. The gift, which cost McLendon $20,000, went on the Getty's books at $2.1 million. McNall said later that McLendon had claimed as much as a $20 million tax write-off.

The spark of self-serving generosity jumped through the network of McNall's clients and friends. Donations began showing up on the Getty's books in the names of prominent professionals and some of Hollywood's high rollers. Lowell Milken gave an estimated $300,000 worth of antiquities along with his brother, future junk bond impresario Michael Milken. Alan Salke, the president of McNall's new movie production company, gave the Getty a cup painted by the Greek artist Phintias with a claimed value of $300,000. Comic Lily Tomlin gave the Getty a cache of ancient coins with a book value of $123,000. Dozens of donations were attributed to Jane Cody, a University of Southern California classics professor who happened to be McNall's girlfriend (and later wife). Even two of the city's most powerful entertainment attorneys, Skip Brittenham and Ken Ziffren, appeared in Getty records as donors of $405,000 worth of antiquity donations in 1982.

Frel did his part to find customers as well, even approaching two Los Angeles Times reporters to see if they wanted in. One was art critic William Wilson, who had written the scathing review of the Getty Museum when it opened but had since become a devotee of the charismatic curator.

Frel invited Wilson home one afternoon for lunch. As the men balanced paper plates on their laps in the living room, Frel described the idea. "Let's say I can get these dealers to give me things for the museum, but I can't be the one who donates them," Frel said. "But I'm able to give them to someone else who needs a tax break, someone who can make a gift to the Getty under their name and use the write-off..."

"Jiri, is this ethical?"

Frel paused. "I can see you don't need a tax break," he said, biting into his sandwich.

Frel brought up the subject again at dinner one night in an Italian restaurant with Wilson and his pal Tim Rutten, editor of the Los Angeles Times' opinion section.

"Well, let's say, you know, we were to come into possession of a fragment, an arm or something. Maybe it comes from Syria, maybe not. So you donate it to the museum..."

"I donate it to the museum?" Rutten said. "And where did it come from, Jiri?"

"Your aunt donated it. Your great-aunt. You remember, maybe your aunt left it to you and you donate it and get a nice tax write-off."

"Jiri, I'm going to forget you ever asked me this."

The journalists also agreed not to tell anyone else at the paper.

FOR MCNALL, THE scheme was a sideshow, a way to move the lesser material while selling more significant objects to museums and collectors across the country through Summa. Yet the side business was substantial enough to warrant some accommodations. Hecht began shipping objects directly to the Getty, where Frel picked out the items he wanted for donations and took them "on loan" until McNall could arrange for a donation over the phone. Many donors never even saw the items they gave.

McNall, meanwhile, began to use the Getty like an extension of his gallery. He quietly paid museum conservators to work on objects destined for sale at Summa. Some of the gallery's best merchandise found its way into museum exhibit halls, giving McNall's A-list customers the illusion that they were buying from the Getty itself. With a cheery wave to the guards, McNall took his best clients on personal tours of the mock Roman villa with the long reflecting pool before positioning them in front of the object he wanted to sell. Then, with Frel often hovering in the background for support, he closed the deal. Many hard-bitten businessmen tumbled to the psychological seduction, including Nelson Bunker Hunt and William Herbert Hunt, the Texas oil barons who bought several items off the Getty floor.

As the scheme gained momentum, Frel himself seemed to prosper. He built a swimming pool in the backyard of his Topanga Canyon home with $25,000 in cash from McNall—a "loan" never committed to paper because both parties knew it wouldn't be repaid. One day the curator came to work in a shiny BMW. It bore the tags of an Orange County car dealership owned by Vasek Polak, another Czech refugee and former racecar mechanic. As it happened, Frel got the car around the time Polak showed up on the Getty's books as donating $761,000 in antiquities.

Within four years, the trickle of gifts had turned into a deluge—and one of the largest museum tax frauds in American history. More than a hundred donors had given six thousand antiquities valued at $14.7 million to a museum that had absolutely no need for the help. While older, more respectable cultural institutions cultivated patrons for years before making an "ask," Frel was raking in antiquities from nobodies in embarrassingly huge numbers. Each gift was publicly reported to the IRS on the museum's annual 990 form.

Museum director Stephen Garrett seemed amused, even proud of how Frel wrung donations from the most unlikely of sources. In a 1976 letter to Bernard Ashmole, Garrett bragged about "the panache and intrigue for which Jiri is famous (and dear to us all)."

Others viewed the donations, and Frel's increasingly reckless behavior, with distress. In New York, Eisenberg became alarmed at the increasing prices Frel was demanding for appraisals of the antiquities. He stopped signing the appraisal forms.

Fredericksen began hearing about Frel going in and out of the museum with artifacts stuffed in his pockets. He also noted that a number of the donations came through Frel's new wife, Faya Causey Frel, a UCLA graduate student, and her family in Orange County. And he found the sheer number of gifts suspicious. After all, how many people could there be who wanted to buy antiquities and then give them to the richest museum in the world?

Although Fredericksen was Frel's immediate boss, he knew that he couldn't rein Frel in. He approached Garrett for help.

"Jiri's doing things that could get us in trouble," Fredericksen said.

"I don't know," Garrett said, after Fredericksen listed his reasons. "I don't quite see what the problem is."

Fredericksen then went to Federico Zeri, the Italian art expert and Getty board member. After the curator confided his fears, Zeri said that he wasn't concerned enough to take on the resourceful Frel. "I don't want to make any enemies on the board," he said.

With no support up the line, Fredericksen saw only one option. He asked for a demotion, stepping down as head curator to run the paintings department. The move meant taking a pay cut of $1,000, not an inconsiderable amount, given his annual salary of just $20,000. But Fredericksen was willing to do it. He was no longer Frel's boss, and he wouldn't be in the line of fire if Frel ever got caught.