Giacomo Medici

Who is Giacomo Medici?

Giacomo Medici is an Italian art dealer convicted in 2004 of dealing in stolen ancient artifacts. His operation was thought to be "one of the largest and most sophisticated antiquities networks in the world, responsible for illegally digging up and spiriting away thousands of top-drawer pieces and passing them on to the most elite end of the international art market".

In 1995, the Tutela Patrimonio Culturale, the unit of the Italian Carabinieri specializing in protecting that country's cultural heritage, determined that a company named Editions Services, owned by Medici, had sold three ancient marble sculptures previously stolen from an Italian collection. On September 13, 1995, Italian and Swiss police raided the Editions Services offices in Geneva, Switzerland which were located in Port Franc, "the special commercial zone near the airport where international goods can be stored, bought, and sold, discreetly and tax-free".

Authorities found "hundreds of pieces of ancient Greek, Roman, and Etruscan art — including a set of Etruscan dinner plates valued at $2 million ... voluminous sales records and correspondence between Medici and dealers in London and New York; and finally, binders and boxes containing thousands of photographs ... of ancient objects ... the archive included sequential photographs of single pieces from the moment they came out of the ground ... to their finished, reconstructed appearance at the time they entered the art market and were sold for tens of thousands, and occasionally millions, of dollars. In a few cases there were even subsequent photos of the same objects inside the display cases of well-known museums".