During the acquisition of the Aphrodite, True had become friends with Symes and his companion, Christos Michaelides. “They made being a collector part of a whole world,” True says. “They were very much involved in the lives of the people they sold to—as much friends as they were dealers.” True saw them whenever she was in London, and when she was in Greece she attended dinner parties at their villa on Schinoussa. “They owned a peninsula,” True says. “When you arrived, the peninsula would have two or three giant yachts tied up. And all of a sudden there would be fifteen or twenty people. At first, everyone would be standing around having cocktails, laughing, telling whatever news there was to tell. Then everyone went to different tables for dinner. After dinner, there might be dancing, there might be music. It was just a jolly evening.” The socializing was important for True’s job—she was often in intense competition with the private collectors who were Symes’s principal clients—but it also had its own appeal. “I have to say, I enjoyed it,” she says. “I enjoyed these people.”

In the late eighties, True met the New York collectors Lawrence and Barbara Fleischman, who were important clients of Symes’s and had been filling their East Side duplex with spectacular examples of classical art. Fleischman was a successful dealer in American art from Detroit, and he and his wife were prominent patrons of the Met and other museums. (Lawrence Fleischman died in 1997.)

“Larry was apt to call me up and say, ‘Symes was just in and he showed me a bronze—you know it?’ ” True says. “And if I said, ‘Yeah, I’ve seen it,’ he would ask, ‘Why didn’t you buy it?’ He was very worried. If I’d seen it and didn’t buy it, there was something wrong with it. But Larry was more likely to invite me over for a drink to see him and Barbara, and he would have right in front, in the entrance hall, his latest acquisition. To sort of say, ‘See what I got and you didn’t get offered!’ And he was happier to have trumped me.”

Occasionally, True’s friendship with Symes, an extravagant man, put her in complicated situations. Barbara Fleischman told me about a dinner that Symes once hosted for True, in the mid-nineties: “Symes says, ‘We have a surprise, Marion’s having a birthday.’ And he takes out a box, and hands it to Marion, and in it is a very beautiful lapis-lazuli necklace. And she looked at it, and said, ‘Oh, it’s beautiful!’ and put it back in the box and said, very quietly, ‘I don’t think so, I can’t accept it.’ Later, she told me, ‘I will go to their place for lunch, I will be taken out to dinner. But I will never be their house guest, and I will never be on their premises overnight. Or any dealer’s.’ She had a very strong moral code.” (True says she so loved the necklace that she eventually arranged to buy it, for some twelve hundred dollars, from the New York jeweller who had sold it to Symes.)

Another dealer whom True befriended was Giacomo Medici. She had been introduced to Medici in 1984, at an auction in Basel. “I didn’t know who he was, but people were chattering,” she says. “He was bidding a lot, and he was flashing this smile around.” Afterward, True and some colleagues went to the Euler Hotel. “He came in to buy champagne for everybody—that’s the way Giacomo was.” Medici did not have special training in classical art, or possess the social connections of the more established museum dealers. He also spoke very little English. “Medici was a real bandit, not an antiquarian,” Paola Pelagatti, the archeologist, says. But True, who speaks little Italian, says that she did not sense anything awry: “He had opened a gallery in Geneva. The Getty had bought things from him in the past, including things that he had bought at auction.” He had also done business with well-known dealers like Robert Hecht. True kept in touch.

In the spring of 1987, True met with Medici and Hecht at Medici’s showroom, in Geneva. They showed her two Etruscan bronzes, a tripod and a tall candelabrum. True was interested, and the objects were sent to the Getty for consideration. Shortly thereafter, True wrote to Medici in Italian—the text, she says, was translated by her secretary—that she hoped “to be able to acquire” the objects “within the next year.” But the Getty did not buy them until 1990, and then it dealt exclusively with Hecht’s New York gallery, Atlantis Antiquities. In the acquisition documents, Atlantis Antiquities declared that the objects had been acquired in Geneva in 1985, and legally exported; no mention was made of Medici.

According to Ferri, the Italian prosecutor, these negotiations are part of a pattern that was repeated during True’s tenure: True corresponded directly with Medici about desired objects, but his name never appeared in the Getty acquisition files. In 1995, Italian and Swiss police launched the first of several raids on Medici’s Geneva warehouse, in which they discovered thousands of ancient artifacts and photographs of ancient artifacts—many of the pictured objects were sporca di terra, or “dirty with earth,” and had ended up at the Getty and other museums, via Symes or Hecht. Both the bronze tripod and the candelabrum were traced to the Guglielmi Collection, a well-known private collection in Rome, from which they apparently had been stolen. (The Getty has returned both objects.) In 2004, Medici was sentenced in Rome to ten years in prison and fined ten million euros for antiquities smuggling. Claiming innocence, he is appealing his sentence.

Ferri argues that True’s letters to Medici, which are written in a “very friendly” style unusual in Italian business correspondence, show she was aware of his illicit dealings. In a January, 1992, letter that has figured prominently in the investigation, True thanked Medici for “the information on the provenance of our three fragmentary proto-Corinthian olpai”—earthenware pitchers. “To know that they came from Cerveteri and the area of Monte Abatone is very helpful for the research of one of my staff members.” She enclosed a catalogue of vases in the Getty collection, noting, “I think that you will find many pieces included that you will recognize.” She went on to say, “I intend to be in Rome” in February, and again a few weeks later, and “I hope that we will be able to get together and have some further discussions about future acquisitions.” For Ferri, these statements expose True’s collusion with Medici to buy looted Italian artifacts. “It’s a smoking gun,” he says.

But True says that she had no reason to avoid contact with Medici, who was not suspected of any crime at the time: “It was not an intentional covering up. Otherwise the letters in our files wouldn’t have existed.” She sent the catalogue to Medici, she told me, because the Getty had just published it, and it included pieces that had been acquired from Medici’s Geneva gallery by her predecessors. The three olpai discussed in her letter had been acquired years earlier by Jiri Frel, without any records. “We had simply been trying to find out who sold the vases to Frel,” she says. “What I got back from Medici was where he said the vases had been found.” A specialist in proto-Corinthian vases had suggested, on stylistic grounds, that the olpai came from Vulci, a site northwest of Rome, and True and her staff concluded that Medici’s information was unreliable. “With a lot of things dealers say or repeat, you don’t necessarily know what the source of that information is,” True says. “With the Medici photographs, all of a sudden we knew Medici was working with people who were excavating.”