I am going to take up one purpose of the criminal trial other than fact finding with respect to the cases of stolen antiquities, repatriation, and the indictment against the curator of the Getty. These criminal proceedings offer themselves as little more than a Kafkaesque incantation to persuade art collectors and museums worldwide to repatriate suspicious antiquities even if the real heart of the issue is problem with lawless, mafioso Sicily, new technologies, and ineffective law enforcement in the area. In light of the prejudiced Italian authorities prosecuting the case against an American, this purpose of the trial, then, is something like a show trial, indeed a symbolic trial. My outline below contains far too much, so I plan to purge a lot of material as the idea takes shape.

Paper Title (TBD)

Introduction: Two Interrelated Functions of Criminal Trials

As the curator of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Marion True was an unlikely figure to find herself in the midst of Italian criminal proceedings. She is charged for conspiracy in connection with a Sicilian antiquities smuggling ring whose goal was to loot, excavate, and export the Aphrodite statute out of Italy. Since 1939, the the cultural patrimony laws have prohibited such activity. As the law decrees, all antiquities discovered on Italian soil become the property of the Italian state who holds the items in trust for the Italian people. Nationalism is a crucial motivating factor in the existence and enforcement of such a law. Hence, it is no surprise that the original law was enacted in the heat of the patriotic fire raging during Benito Mussolinni's Fascist rule. This paper argues that the Italian government has, not substituted, but supplemented the purpose of fact finding in criminal trials by transforming True's trial into a symbol of a cultural crusade against looters and buyers. This purpose, then, takes two forms. First, True's trial functions as a message to cultural institutions that the Italian government is shifting the emphasis of anti-smuggling enforcement from the mafioso looters in Sicily to American museum professionals. Second, it also serves to hurry American museums to repatriate the suspicious antiquities in their collections. True's trial represents less a belief in her factual guilt, more the culmination of two social forces: Italy's unsuccessful enforcement efforts at home and a resurging nationalistic fervor to reclaim Italy's cultural patrimony.

The Problem of Looters, or The First 'Purpose' of Shifting the Burden from Italian Criminals to Foreign Museum Professionals

Birth of a Black Market in Morgantina, Sicily

The Italian government’s shift in emphasis from prosecuting local looters to foreign museum professionals such as True has its origins in a surprising technological development, the portable metal detector. Cheap and easy to find, these devices proliferated in Sicily in the 1970s and allowed local smuggling rings to interfere with the more capital intensive archaeological digs conducted by professional research teams. Sicily represents a largely Mafia-controlled enclave marred by bribery, corruption, and a different form of ‘lawfulness’ than the Western legal system on the mainland. With potential revenue for such antiquities as the $18 million Aphrodite statue, the Mafia is believed to have contributed to the illicit lootings with the help of these cheaper technologies. Orazio di Simone, True’s alleged co-conspirator in smuggling the Aphrodite, has been repeatedly accused of having ties to the Mafia.

The Other Side of the Trial, or the Consistent Failure in Convicting the Proximate Offenders

True’s trial signifies Italy’s failure in successfully prosecuting the looters, smuggling rings, and general Mafioso ‘lawfulness.’ As a villa owner in Sicily and writer of a tourist guide to the archaeological sites, Judge Magistrate Raffiotta led the crusade in the unsuccessful prosecutions against the looters in the 1980s. The problem of prosecuting these actors is simple: When the looter operates in largely uninhabited areas of Sicily during the darkness of night and with few accomplices and technologies, efforts to capture him and prove his guilt are stifled. Of the 36 trials administered by Rafiotta, very few turned up a conviction owing to the lack of evidence. In the late 1980s, Rafiotta moved the Italian cordon sanitaire from around the local criminals to the foreign museum professionals with ties to ‘dirty’ antiquities in an effort to cut off the trade.

The government could decide to offer these looters a “salvage” reward for turning in antiquities yet correctly refuses to follow that path. The reward would encourage the more unsophisticated excavation projects of these looters, which might destroy or decay the antiquities and disorganize the complex excavation projects.

True’s trial intends to emblematize the Italian government’s new focus on discrediting the buyers of these antiquities after years of non-enforcement of the cultural patrimony laws. The night looter hands it to the smuggler, who passes Italian customs and gives it to the dealer in Switzerland, who sells it to an American buyer, who clears it with American customs. The farthest removed from the actual looting of the artifacts, the buyer now bears the brunt of the work in Italy to enforce these cultural patrimony laws against the night looters and Mafioso conspirators. As the only one prosecuting a foreign museum professional, True’s trial cleverly masquerades under the promise of her factual guilt its other purpose of dispiriting looters and enforcing Italian laws at home. An American has unwittingly transformed into utilitarian food for Italian legal enforcement.

A Martyr for Another Country's Cause, or the Second 'Purpose' of Persuading the Buyers to Repatriate Mercilessly

True's Trial as a Powerful Symbol for Repatriation

True's Trial as an Offensive against Cultural Invasions, or the Language of War

It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted.

-- By JesseCreed - 09 Feb 2008

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