A MURDER FORETOLDUnravelling the ultimate political conspiracy.
by David Grann
APRIL 4, 2011 "Guatemala is a good place to commit a murder, because you will almost certainly get away with it," a U.N. official has said.SHAREPRINTE-MAILSINGLE PAGE
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Video: David Grann on a sensational Guatemalan murder.
KEYWORDS
Rodrigo Rosenberg; Guatemala; Murder; Carlos Castresana; International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, (CICIG); Luis Mendizábal; (Pres.) Álvaro Colom
Rodrigo Rosenberg knew that he was about to die. It wasn't because he was approaching old age—he was only forty-eight. Nor had he been diagnosed with a fatal illness; an avid bike rider, he was in perfect health. Rather, Rosenberg, a highly respected corporate attorney in Guatemala, was certain that he was going to be assassinated.
Before he began, in the spring of 2009, to prophesy his own murder, there was little to suggest that he might meet a violent end. Rosenberg, who had four children, was an affectionate father. The head of his own flourishing practice, he had a reputation as an indefatigable and charismatic lawyer who had a gift for leading other people where he wanted them to go. He was lithe and handsome, though his shiny black hair had fallen out on top, leaving an immaculate ring on the sides. Words were his way of ordering the jostle of life. He spoke in eloquent bursts, using his voice like an instrument, his hands and eyebrows rising and falling to accentuate each note. (It didn't matter if he was advocating the virtues of the Guatemalan constitution or of his favorite band, Santana.) Ferociously intelligent, he had earned master's degrees in law from both Harvard University and Cambridge University.
Rosenberg had been born into Guatemala's oligarchy—a term that still applies to the semi-feudal Central American nation, where more than half of its fourteen million people, many of them Mayan, live in severe poverty. His mother had inherited a small fortune, and his father had acquired several businesses, including a popular chain of cinemas. (As a boy, Rosenberg had spent hours in the plush seats, entranced by the latest American films.) Rosenberg was accustomed to privilege. A car enthusiast, he drove a Mercedes and made an annual pilgrimage to Indianapolis to watch Formula 1 races. He had been married twice but was now single, living in an elegant high-rise overlooking Guatemala City.
Though his wealth allowed him a desultory life, he was "driven and motivated by his goals," as a relative put it. When he began his studies at Cambridge, he had spoken almost no English, so Rosenberg informed his professors that he had recently undergone surgery on his vocal cords, and could not yet talk in class; in the meantime, he bought a television and watched it each night with closed-captioning until, after three months, he spoke with confidence.
He was not a religious man, but he maintained a stark sense of good and evil, castigating others, as well as himself, for transgressions. When he was a child, his father had abandoned the family, a betrayal that Rosenberg had never forgiven; he even refused to accept an inheritance that his father had left him. One of Rosenberg's closest friends noted that, if he thought you had crossed him, he could be brutal: "He was always very honest—sometimes, perhaps, too honest. He would say things that are true, but sometimes things that are true that you shouldn't mention." Though Guatemala's judicial system was notoriously corrupt, Rosenberg was drawn to the clarity of the law, to its unflinching judgment. He argued, successfully, before the Constitutional Court, Guatemala's equivalent of the U.S. Supreme Court, and in 1998 he became the vice-dean of a prominent law school. At the same time, he served as counsel for some of Guatemala's most powerful élites—its coffee barons and corporate executives and government officials.
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And, according to Rosenberg, it was a case involving one of these clients, Khalil Musa, that had placed his life in jeopardy. A Lebanese immigrant, Musa had risen from poverty to great wealth, manufacturing textiles and producing coffee. Stern, traditional, and hardworking, he liked to recite the inspirational poetry of Khalil Gibran, and was admired as one of the few magnates in Guatemala who refused to plunder the state or make payoffs for favorable deals. At seventy-six, he suffered from vertigo, and he increasingly relied on the younger of his two daughters, Marjorie, to help him manage his business. Marjorie, who was forty-two, was married with two children, and she had an easy ebullience that infused her simple features with beauty. She had mastered the intricacies of finishing fabrics, and she had always been—as her sister, Aziza, acknowledges, without rancor—their father's favorite.
Musa lived in an affluent neighborhood of Guatemala City, and Marjorie often drove him from their factory, on the outskirts of the capital, home for lunch. On April 14, 2009, they had set out on such a routine trip. The rainy season was a few weeks away, and so clouds had not obscured the steep volcanic cones that tower over the city, periodically showering the streets with ash. When Marjorie stopped at a red light, just outside the factory, a man got out of a car behind her and approached the Musas' vehicle from the passenger side, as if to ask a question. He then aimed a 9-mm. pistol at Musa, and opened fire—a blur of smoke and light. The gunman sprinted to a motorcycle, where a driver was waiting for him, and hopped on the back seat. They sped away. The stoplight in front of the Musas' car turned green, then red, and then green again, but the car remained in place, the engine still rumbling. One of the tinted windows on the passenger side had shattered, revealing father and daughter lying in one another's blood. They had both been shot in the chest. The police arrived within minutes, but by then they were dead.
Rosenberg had frequently expressed despair over the violence that consumed Guatemala. In 2007, a joint study by the United Nations and the World Bank ranked it as the third most murderous country. Between 2000 and 2009, the number of killings rose steadily, ultimately reaching sixty-four hundred. The murder rate was nearly four times higher than Mexico's. In 2009, fewer civilians were reported killed in the war zone of Iraq than were shot, stabbed, or beaten to death in Guatemala.
The violence can be traced to a civil war between the state and leftist rebels, a three-decade struggle that, from 1960 to 1996, was the dirtiest of Latin America's dirty wars. More than two hundred thousand people were killed or "disappeared." According to a U.N.-sponsored commission, at least ninety per cent of the killings were carried out by the state's military forces or by paramilitary death squads with names like Eye for an Eye. One witness said, "What we have seen has been terrible: burned corpses; women impaled and buried, as if they were animals ready for the spit, all doubled up; and children massacred and carved up with machetes." The state's counter-insurgency strategy, known as "drain the sea to kill the fish," culminated in what the commission deemed acts of genocide.
In 1996, the government reached a peace accord with the rebels, and it was supposed to mark a new era of democracy and rule of law. But amnesty was granted for even the worst crimes, leaving no one accountable. (Critics called the policy "the piñata of self-forgiveness.") In 1998, the Guatemalan Archdiocese's Office of Human Rights, led by Bishop Juan Gerardi, released a four-volume report, "Guatemala: Never Again," which documented hundreds of crimes against humanity, identifying some perpetrators by name. Two days later, Gerardi was bludgeoned to death, a murder that was eventually revealed to be part of a conspiracy involving military officers.
After the peace accord, the state's security apparatus—death squads, intelligence units, police officers, military counter-insurgency forces—did not disappear but, rather, mutated into criminal organizations. Amounting to a parallel state, these illicit networks engage in arms trafficking, money laundering, extortion, human smuggling, black-market adoptions, and kidnapping for ransom. The networks also control an exploding drug trade. Latin America's cartels, squeezed by the governments of Colombia and Mexico, have found an ideal sanctuary in Guatemala, and most of the cocaine entering America now passes through the country. Criminal networks have infiltrated virtually every government and law-enforcement agency, and more than half the country is no longer believed to be under the control of any government at all. Citizens, deprived of justice, often form lynch mobs, or they resolve disputes, even trivial ones, by hiring assassins.
Some authorities have revived the darkest counter-insurgency tactics, rounding up undesirables and executing them. Incredibly, the death rate in Guatemala is now higher than it was for much of the civil war. And there is almost absolute impunity: ninety-seven per cent of homicides remain unsolved, the killers free to kill again. In 2007, a U.N. official declared, "Guatemala is a good place to commit a murder, because you will almost certainly get away with it."
After Rosenberg heard that the Musas had been shot, he rushed to the scene. Luis Mendizábal, a longtime friend and client of Rosenberg's, told me, "I asked him to come and pick me up, so we could go to the place together. He said, 'No, no, no. I'm not going to lose any time. I'm going directly.' So he went. He couldn't believe it. Then he came back over here, and cried, easily, for two hours." His oldest son, Eduardo, who was twenty-four, told me that it was only the second time he had seen his father break down, the first being when Rosenberg revealed that he was separating from Eduardo's mother. He seemed "completely destroyed" by the Musas' deaths, Eduardo recalled.
Though the crime was horrific, Rosenberg's deeply emotional reaction was surprising. Musa was not a big client or someone he knew that well. Then Rosenberg told his son a secret: for more than a year, he and Marjorie had been having an affair.
They had planned to marry, but had not wanted to disclose their relationship until Marjorie got a divorce. Almost every day, they had exchanged text messages. On March 3, 2009, five weeks before the shooting, Marjorie wrote to Rosenberg, "I love you like I've never loved before. And, yes, I will marry you." A few days later, she said, "Good night my love, my prince, my whole life. You don't know how much I love you, how much I adore you, and how much I need you. You are so tender with me. And you're the sweetest man I know." She added, "I'm dying to live the rest of my life at your side." He called her "my Marjorie de Rosenberg" and told her that she gave him "the strength to be a better man" and that they were "living an incredible love story." Hours before she was killed, he ended a message with the words "Your prince forever."
In tears, Rosenberg told his son, "They killed her! They killed her!" He told Mendizábal the same thing, repeating the words over and over.
The shootings unnerved the most powerful members of Guatemalan society. Khalil Musa knew Guatemala's President, Álvaro Colom, who had also worked in the textile industry; Marjorie was a good friend of Gustavo Alejos, who was Colom's private secretary, and whose brother was the head of Congress. An adviser to President Colom told me, "If the Musas could be killed, there was a sense that anyone could be."
Thousands of people showed up for the Musas' funeral, Alejos among them. Rosenberg, concerned that his affair with Marjorie might cause a scandal, stood outside the chapel, watching from a distance. A few days later, Rosenberg received a call from a jeweller, who informed him that Marjorie had ordered a gift for him before her death—a wedding ring. "This is the message she sent me," he told Mendizábal.
That week, business leaders held a press conference, declaring that the assassinations were another sign of Guatemalans' "helplessness" and demanding that authorities fully investigate the crimes. Rosenberg, who had the conservative outlook shared by most Guatemalan élites, had long yearned for un estado de derecho—a state based on the rule of law. In 2005, he had joined an effort to extradite from Mexico a former President of Guatemala who was accused of embezzling millions of dollars while in office. A close friend of Rosenberg's said that the failures of Guatemala's judicial system "ate at Rosenberg's guts."
Rosenberg warned family and friends that the Musa murders would never be properly investigated. The criminal networks would either block the investigation or destroy the evidence, and if a probe somehow proceeded they would frame a scapegoat; finally, if all else failed, the gangsters would threaten to kill members of the judiciary system, who would bury the case. The Musas' deaths, he predicted, would become just another statistic. Nevertheless, Rosenberg could not let the matter go: Why, he asked, had an honorable man like Musa been "put down like a dog"? And what had Marjorie, an exemplary daughter, done to deserve this?
Mendizábal, the longtime friend, says that after the funeral Rosenberg asked him for help, vowing to "go all the way to find out who killed the Musas." Mendizábal was the one person Rosenberg knew who could help him take on the parallel powers that dominated Guatemala. A genteel-looking grandfather, with a silver mustache and birdlike eyes, he was known for making business deals, sometimes with the government, and he owned a clothing shop, in Guatemala City, that catered to a wealthy male clientele. But Mendizábal was no mere entrepreneur. It was whispered that, as in a John le Carré novel, the boutique also served as a meeting place for military-intelligence officers, coup plotters, and death-squad leaders.
Mendizábal was Guatemala's most notorious spy. Relying on an extensive network of orejas, or "ears," he regularly compiled intelligence dossiers, vacuuming up even the most vaporous rumors and searching for patterns in the chaos of information. A former high-ranking U.N. official, who spent years investigating crimes in the country, told me, "Mendizábal has probably records on everyone in Guatemala. He knows everything: who is the lover of whom, who has money in the Cayman Islands, who has committed a murder. Everything." Such information placed Mendizábal in great demand, and he had served as an adviser to several Guatemalan Presidents, including, for a while, Colom. Mendizábal presented himself as a fanatical anti-Communist, but his ideology, apparently, was flexible when it came to business: according to the newspaper El Periódico, he had once been caught smuggling weapons to Communist guerrillas in El Salvador. Mendizábal told me that he had never played both sides of Central America's civil conflicts, but he seemed to embrace a Machiavellian persona: "The one who has the knowledge has the power. That's why some people are afraid of the stuff that I do."
Mendizábal agreed to help Rosenberg, and they began investigating the case. Shortly after Marjorie's funeral, Rosenberg obtained a copy of a security video that documented the scene outside the Musas' textile factory on the day of the murders. Mendizábal, who watched it with him on a computer at the clothing shop, said that Rosenberg played the video over and over, searching for clues. Unlike the escapist movies that Rosenberg had seen at his father's cinemas, the grainy black-and-white images had the blunt force of unscripted narrative. They showed a truck parked in front of the Musas' factory. The driver kept getting in and out of his vehicle, peering down the road. Mendizábal told Rosenberg that the man was clearly acting as a lookout.
Rosenberg stared helplessly at the implacable sequence that came next. A silhouette appeared in the corner of the screen: Marjorie, getting into her car. Rosenberg touched the television screen—she was there but not there. As Marjorie drove onto the street, with her father at her side, the car with the assassin raced up behind them, followed by the driver on the motorcycle. (The hit men were obeying a new law banning two people from travelling on a motorcycle—a law that was supposed to curb assassinations, since so many were carried out by hit men riding on back seats.) Rosenberg braced himself. After a flash, Marjorie vanished from the frame.
The hit squad had displayed military precision, raising the prospect that the crime was carried out by the state's security apparatus. The ballistics report indicated that Khalil Musa was hardly a random victim. He had been shot nine times. The bullet that killed Marjorie was a stray—it had apparently passed through Musa's body before piercing hers.
In Guatemala, impunity has created a bewildering swirl of competing stories and rumors, allowing powerful interests not only to cloak history but also to fabricate it. As Francisco Goldman describes in his incisive 2007 book, "The Art of Political Murder," about the assassination of Bishop Gerardi, the military and its intelligence operators concocted evidence and witnesses to generate endless hypotheses—it was a robbery, it was a crime of passion—in order to conceal the simple truth that they had murdered him. "So much would be made to seem to connect," Goldman writes.
Guatemalans often cite the proverb "In a country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." Fighting his way through the political fog, Rosenberg searched for a motive, stubbornly insisting that, if two people were assassinated, then somebody had a reason to kill them. In notes he kept about the case, he reported that authorities had initially suggested the shootings stemmed from a dispute over a fired factory worker. But, by all accounts, Musa had treated his workers well. Were the police and authorities trying to cover something up, spinning another web of disinformation?
Finally, a lead emerged. Mendizábal advised Rosenberg to look into the murky business surrounding two government positions for which Khalil Musa had been nominated in the months before his assassination. The nominations were for seats on the boards of directors of two institutions with strong ties to the state—most notably, the Rural Development Bank, known as Banrural. President Colom has called Banrural "our Administration's financial arm," and has relied on it to fund major social-welfare programs for the poor. These programs were administered by Guatemala's First Lady, Sandra de Colom, a powerful politician who is often compared to Eva Perón, and who aspires to succeed her husband.
Before Musa died, he had talked to Rosenberg about whether to accept the positions. Rosenberg considered entering Guatemalan politics a folly. With friends from law school, he had once started a conservative political party, but he had quit after it joined forces with traditional corrupt hands. Rosenberg told Musa, "Truthfully, I don't think it's a good idea." Musa, hoping to help the country, accepted the offers anyway.
But the nominations, mysteriously, had never gone through. Rosenberg learned from Mendizábal that there had been a fierce struggle over control of the two boards, which, together, manage enormous financial resources. According to Mendizábal, Musa's uncompromising ethics posed a threat to parties with stakes in these institutions. Indeed, Marjorie's sister, Aziza, told Rosenberg that, after her father was offered the nominations, he had attended a lunch where officials connected to the institutions discouraged Musa from taking the posts, and even insulted him. Afterward, Aziza recalled, her father sent letters to some of these officials, saying, "You won't tell me what to do." Musa soon received threatening text messages and calls, including one noting that the farm of a meddling government official had been torched.
Rosenberg eventually ferreted out from Musa's papers several documents concerning the appointments. One was a copy of a letter Musa had sent to the head of a group of small coffee growers that had a stake in the direction of Banrural. Musa said that he would not tolerate messages embedded with "double meanings," adding, "I protect myself from my enemies."
Aziza said of her father, "He always says the truth and I think that is why he was murdered."
As Rosenberg dug deeper into the subterranean world of Guatemalan politics, he told friends that he had begun receiving threats himself. One day, Mendizábal says, Rosenberg gave him a phone number to write down—it was the number that showed up on his caller I.D. when he received the threats.
Rosenberg told friends that his apartment was under surveillance, and that he was being followed. "Whenever he got into the car, he was looking over his shoulder," his son Eduardo recalled. From his apartment window, Rosenberg could look across the street and see an office where Gustavo Alejos, President Colom's private secretary, often worked. Rosenberg told Mendizábal that Alejos had called him and warned him to stop investigating the Musas' murders, or else the same thing might happen to him. Speaking to Musa's business manager, Rosenberg said of the powerful people he was investigating, "They are going to kill me." He had a will drawn up.
Mendizábal says that on Friday, May 8, 2009, he advised Rosenberg to leave the country. Rosenberg promised that he would, but not yet. He felt that he was on the verge of identifying who had ordered the hit on the Musas, and was collecting irrefutable proof, which he intended to present at the International Criminal Court. On Saturday evening, Rosenberg called Marjorie's sister and told her that he planned to go for a bicycle ride the next morning, to clear his mind. On Sunday, just after 8 A.M., he pedalled away from his apartment building, listening to his iPod. After a few hundred yards, Rosenberg turned onto a service road. A gunman approached quickly, running across a grassy median toward him. No one saw the assassin as he pointed a 9-mm. pistol at Rosenberg's head and repeatedly pulled the trigger.
Not long afterward, Rosenberg's chauffeur was on his way to Rosenberg's apartment when he saw his boss lying on the ground, surrounded by paramedics and police officers. He phoned Eduardo Rosenberg. "He told me I had to go near my dad's house, about a block away," Eduardo recalled. "He didn't want to say what had happened. He just told me that I had to go there. So I hung up the phone. I started panicking, trying to get dressed. I picked up the phone again and called the driver. And I demanded to know what had happened. He still didn't want to say. So I asked him, 'Is my dad dead?' He said, 'Yes.' "
On Monday morning, May 11th, President Colom went to work in his main office, a secure, windowless room on the second floor of the Presidential House. Underneath the building, a tunnel led to the National Palace. Both buildings had been commissioned by Jorge Ubico, a caudillo who ruled the country during the nineteen-thirties and early forties; he had seen himself as the reincarnation of Napoleon, and the monumental stone architecture reflected his megalomania. (A motif of five archways—a tribute to the five letters of Ubico's surname—ran throughout the building.) As Colom shuttled between his office and the palace, he faced reminders of the country's violent history: the executive office where a President was ousted in a coup; the dining room where a military dictator had been assassinated by a security guard, who then turned the gun on himself.
Colom, who was fifty-seven, was unusually reticent for a politician. Tall and severely thin, with bent shoulders, receding gray hair, and owlish glasses, he looked like a seminarian, which he had studied to be before turning to politics. A congenital lip deformity caused him to speak in a nasal, almost unintelligible whisper. He had experienced a number of tragedies: his first wife was killed in a car accident, and in 1979 his uncle, a popular progressive politician, joined Guatemala's pantheon of martyrs when the military, after chasing him through the capital on motorcycles and in a helicopter, assassinated him.
In 2007, Colom, representing a social-democratic coalition, won the Presidency—the first time in five decades that a left-of-center leader had ruled Guatemala. The election was one of the bloodiest in the country's history: more than fifty local candidates and party activists were murdered, and Colom's campaign manager was nearly killed by three grenades thrown at his motorcade. Colom defeated Otto Pérez Molina, a conservative former general who had once overseen military intelligence. In the eighties, he had taught at the School of the Kaibiles, which produced an élite force of commandos whose training included slaughtering animals and drinking their blood, and whose motto was "A Kaibil is a killing machine."
Colom declared that the country must not return to a "past of darkness," and he vowed to end the violence and the corruption. Yet, even if he was well intentioned, he was too weak to control the parallel state. A former U.N. official recalled asking Colom why he had given a ministry post to someone who was widely known to be corrupt. Colom replied, "He was not my choice." Since Colom took power, two of his interior ministers have been indicted for corruption (a third died in a mysterious helicopter crash), and four consecutive heads of the national police have been dismissed, indicted, or jailed for alleged malfeasance. At the same time, Colom has been subject to a campaña negra—"black campaign"—conducted by many in the conservative oligarchy and in the political opposition. One day, President Colom and the First Lady discovered that the palace and their offices had been infiltrated with spy cameras.
Earlier that Monday, Rosenberg's funeral had been held, at the same cemetery where Marjorie was buried. Colom was in a meeting when he was interrupted by Gustavo Alejos, his private secretary. Alejos had received a call from a friend alerting him that something surreal had just happened at the funeral—something with implications for the entire government. Alejos called his cousin, a government minister who had been one of Rosenberg's closest friends. The cousin, who had attended the ceremony, reported that Eduardo Rosenberg had given a eulogy and played a recording of "El Salvador Blues," by Santana. Then Luis Mendizábal had stood up and addressed the hundreds of mourners: "Everybody here loved Rodrigo Rosenberg, and all of you are wondering why someone like Rodrigo, who couldn't hurt anyone, was killed." He paused, then said, "Well, Rodrigo left me with the answer." He explained that Rosenberg had given him a video, with instructions to release it only if he was murdered. Mendizábal offered a CD to anyone who was interested.
Mendizábal, who says he looked at the video only after Rosenberg's death, knew that his actions would unleash "big trouble," as he put it. But the previous day, as rain fell, he had visited the site where Rosenberg was shot. "I started thinking, What am I going to do? Keep silent?" Mendizábal recalled. While praying, he had seen on the ground a discarded metal plate inscribed with the word "ON." "I realized then what I was supposed to do," he said.
Alejos's cousin had taken one of Mendizábal's CDs, and Alejos told him to come straight to the President's office. By then, members of Colom's inner circle had heard about the video, and they, too, rushed to the President's office. Vice-President José Rafael Espada, who was a former cardiothoracic surgeon, also joined them. The cousin arrived, and the group gathered around Colom's computer to watch the video.
Suddenly, Rodrigo Rosenberg was staring at them, sitting alone, with a microphone, in front of a spare table. He was dressed in a navy-blue suit, a starched white shirt, and a pale-blue tie—the kind of muted, formal ensemble that he had worn ever since his father had deserted the family, leaving him the head of the household. On his wedding finger was the ring that Marjorie had ordered for him.
"Good afternoon," Rosenberg said. "My name is Rodrigo Rosenberg Marzano and, alas, if you are hearing or seeing this message it means that I've been murdered by President Álvaro Colom, with the help of Gustavo Alejos." Rosenberg went on, "The reason I'm dead, and you're therefore watching this message, is only and exclusively because during my final moments I was the lawyer to Mr. Khalil Musa and his daughter Marjorie Musa, who, in cowardly fashion, were assassinated by President Álvaro Colom, with the consent of his wife, Sandra de Colom, and with the help of . . . Gustavo Alejos."
Rosenberg said that he had "direct knowledge" of a conspiracy. He alleged that the President, the First Lady, members of the Colom Administration, and their business cronies were using Banrural to embezzle and launder money. (In a document summarizing his charges, which he had given to Mendizábal along with the recording, Rosenberg wrote, "Musa did not suspect that illegal, million-dollar business transactions were taking place daily in Banrural. These transactions range from money laundering to the channelling of public funds to nonexistent programs belonging to the President's wife, Sandra de Colom, as well as the funding of shell companies used by drug traffickers.") Because Musa would not have tolerated such corruption, Rosenberg said, he became a threat when he was nominated to Banrural's board. At that point, Rosenberg said, the President, the First Lady, Alejos, and others conspired to kill him.
Initially, Rosenberg spoke slowly and stiffly, but then his hands began to rise and fall, along with his eyebrows, the power of his voice growing—a voice from the grave. "I don't have a hero complex," he said. "I don't have any desire to die. I have four divine children, the best brother life could have given me, marvellous friends." He continued, "The last thing I wanted was to deliver this message. . . . But I hope my death helps get the country started down a new path." He urged Vice-President Espada—whom he described as "not a thief or an assassin"—to assume the Presidency and insure that the guilty parties wound up in jail. "This is not about seeking revenge, which only makes us like them," Rosenberg said. "It is about justice." He predicted that the Guatemalan government would try to cover up the truth, by smearing the Musas and inventing plots. "But the only reality that counts is this: if you saw and heard this message, it is because I was killed by Álvaro Colom and Sandra de Colom, with the help of Gustavo Alejos." He concluded, "Guatemalans, the time has come. Please—it is time. Good afternoon."
The video, which lasted about eighteen minutes, appeared to have been made cheaply. A blue sheet had been hung behind Rosenberg, to deflect glare, and there was a dull hum in the background, perhaps from cars on a nearby street. As with a hostage video, the eerie, amateurish quality of the production lent authenticity to Rosenberg's claim: he had been rubbed out.
When the video ended, President Colom and his staff were unable to speak. One aide later told me that he felt as if they had been transported into another world—a world of movie thrillers. Finally, Colom muttered that his enemies were trying to destroy his Presidency. "They want us out of here," he said.
No one in the room asked the President or Alejos if the allegations were true. An official who is close to Colom told me he could not believe that the President had been involved in ordering a murder. But, given the history of Guatemala, the official said, it was possible that others in the Administration had done so: "You never know."
The room was filled with unacknowledged tensions and questions: Why had Rosenberg called for Vice-President Espada to take the reins of the country? Was Espada involved with Rosenberg, trying to orchestrate a new kind of coup? President Colom told me that the video "put the Vice-President in a compromising position." The palace was at war with itself.
According to a member of the government, Alejos acted as if he were "going to be arrested." He called his wife and told her that she and their son had to leave the country. He then offered his resignation to the President, but Colom told him, "We'll get through this."
The video was almost instantly uploaded to YouTube, and it was broadcast on national television. The Presidential spokesman's cell phone began ringing: reporters were demanding a response from Colom. "Honestly, for a few hours, we didn't know what to say," the spokesman told me. The President, Alejos, and the aides frantically tried to come up with a statement. Finally, they hashed out a few words. The President didn't think that he should deliver them himself—better to maintain a dignified distance. And so two aides went out and stood before a pack of reporters, categorically rejecting the accusations.
The brief statement only fuelled the uproar: Why wasn't the President himself responding? Why was he in hiding? In a panic, Colom's chief of staff called Roberto Izurieta, a political consultant in Washington, D.C. Izurieta taught crisis management at George Washington University, but he was better known as the James Carville of Latin America—a strategist who had helped elect Presidents across the region, including Colom. Izurieta based much of his tactical thinking on Sun Tzu's "Art of War."
The chief of staff e-mailed Izurieta a link to the video. Izurieta later wrote, in an unpublished report, "After more than twenty years in politics, I can't recall anything that made such a powerful impression on me." He called back Colom's chief of staff and said, "I'm catching the next flight to Guatemala."
Early the next morning, several reporters discovered Guatemala's Attorney General—who was supposed to be heading up an impartial investigation into Rosenberg's assassination—slipping out of a meeting with Colom. A former Presidential candidate said on the radio, "What justice is there going to be if the Attorney General meets together in the private office of the President?"
Meanwhile, the Rosenberg video was entering the public consciousness, multiplying and regenerating like a spirochete. Within days, hundreds of thousands of people had watched it online—so many that servers crashed. A political analyst remarked that Rosenberg's testimony was being translated into more languages than the works of Guatemala's most famous poets and novelists. The video, known by the simple tag YouTube Murder, created what one of the country's largest newspapers called "the greatest political crisis" in the history of Guatemalan democracy.
By Tuesday morning, protesters were streaming into Guatemala City's Central Plaza, dressed in white, a symbol of political purity, and screaming outside the National Palace, "Asesino! Asesino!"
Izurieta, the consultant, arrived at the airport that afternoon and headed to the palace. As he approached, he could see the swarm of white-clad protesters in the plaza—the tsunami blanco, as the press dubbed it. Izurieta told his driver to stop the car, and got out. "I wanted to feel the protests, to see the people's faces, to get the sense of the intensity," he recalled. He knew that there was a moment when a political crisis became unmanageable; at that point, he, too, would be merely a spectator to history.
In the palace, Izurieta set up a war room in the President's office. Sun Tzu warns that, to prevail, one has to "know thy self," and if Izurieta was going to help the President he had to learn all the palace secrets. Late in the day, he found Colom secluded in a room with Guatemala's Archbishop, murmuring words that Izurieta could not make out, as if he were in confession. No one dared to disturb the President, but Izurieta finally had to interrupt: Colom was scheduled to give a live interview on CNN.
Colom spoke by satellite from the old executive office in the palace. He wore a blue suit and tie, and sat in a large wooden chair, staring directly into the camera—a pose that, to Izurieta's dismay, mirrored Rosenberg delivering his posthumous J'accuse. The President claimed that the video was part of a "plot to destabilize the government." Blinking nervously, he looked pale and scared. An aide conceded to me, "Everyone thought he was lying." Not long afterward, the director of El Periódico wrote, "I can't help but express the repugnance I felt during the declarations of President Álvaro Colom. . . . The only thing missing now is for the President and his henchmen to say that it was Rodrigo himself who immolated himself, kamikaze style, in order to discredit the government and that he himself paid the assassins to murder him."
The President's chief political rival, the former general Otto Pérez Molina, demanded that Colom step down. But the President insisted that he would forsake his position only if "they kill me." In an interview on Al Jazeera, Colom warned Guatemalans to "be careful of crossing the line," and added, "Accusing a President of murder publicly could be sedition."
A young Guatemalan, furious with the government, sent out a message on Twitter that said, "The first concrete action should be to take cash out of Banrural and bankrupt the bank of the corrupt." Soon afterward, authorities, fearing a run on the bank, stormed his apartment and detained him. Twitter provided a stream of data from a new democratic class of informants and orejas, creating a narrative of unpunctuated fragments from sources known and unknown, verified and unverified. There was chatter that Mendizábal feared for his life, and that the Musas' house had been broken into.
Each day, the demonstrations grew, mobilized by messages on Facebook and Twitter. The place where Rosenberg was killed became a shrine, with a large wooden cross and signs reading "You didn't die in vain!" Protesters erected a movie screen and broadcast Rosenberg's final testimony, so that his body and voice floated over the crowd. The video looped over and over, in an eternal present tense. A columnist said that Rosenberg had become "the voice of millions of Guatemalans."
In the war room, Izurieta told President Colom, "We don't have much time." Aides bused in Colom supporters to the Central Plaza and filmed them, distributing the footage to television stations. (It was "pure propaganda," the spokesman said.) But Colom wasn't just losing a media battle; the government was on the verge of collapse.
The U.S. Ambassador, Stephen McFarland, paid an urgent visit to the palace. During the Cold War, America had frequently supported Guatemala's brutal security apparatus. In the nineteen-fifties, the C.I.A. had contemplated an assassination campaign against left-wing Guatemalan targets and disseminated a treatise on the art of political murder: "The subject may be stunned or drugged and then placed in the car, but this is only reliable when the car can be run off a high cliff or into deep water without observation." In 1999, President Bill Clinton, speaking of such policies, said that the U.S. "must not repeat that mistake."
McFarland stressed to President Colom that there was only one way out of the crisis: to turn over the investigation of the Rosenberg case to a U.N.-backed organization called the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, or CICIG. Created in the fall of 2007, CICIG is a pathbreaking political experiment. Unlike many truth commissions or human-rights bodies, it does not investigate war crimes of the past, or merely monitor abuses. Rather, it aggressively fights against systemic violence and corruption, acting like blasts of radiation on a cancerous organism. Composed of several dozen judges, prosecutors, and law-enforcement officers from around the world, CICIG works within Guatemala's legal system to prosecute members of organized crime and dismantle clandestine networks embedded in the state. Rosenberg's brother, Eduardo Rodas, told the press that CICIG was "our only hope for achieving justice."
On May 12th, two days after Rosenberg was murdered, President Colom agreed to refer the case to CICIG. Not only did the fate of the Rosenberg case and the Colom Presidency depend on this international team of investigators, which was led by a former Spanish prosecutor and judge named Carlos Castresana; so did the fate of Guatemala's democracy. As The Economist put it, "Whether or not Mr. Rosenberg's killers are brought to justice will show whether or not Guatemala is indeed a failed state."
Judge Castresana felt like a prisoner in Guatemala. On May 12th, as the country was erupting, the fifty-one-year-old investigator was isolated inside CICIG's compound—a walled-off villa, in the capital, that had once served as a headquarters for the U.S. Marines. Owing to security concerns, Castresana was not allowed to venture out alone for his habitual cigarette, or to explore the neighboring streets, with their haunting names—Street of Purgatory, Street of Sorrows, Street of Oblivion. He travelled in a caravan of armor-plated vehicles, and was trailed by bodyguards who were recruited from outside the country, in order to reduce the chance that they were sleeper agents. When Castresana first arrived in Guatemala to head CICIG, leaving behind his wife and two young children, he had rented an apartment downtown, but his head of security, a veteran of Spain's Guardia Civil, warned Castresana that he had been targeted for assassination, and so he moved into a room above his office. Castresana sometimes felt like a "fake": he was investigating the politics of a place that he had barely seen. He told me, "I have no life."
A bold and, at times, vainglorious man, Castresana treated boredom as if it were a contagion. In 1998, he was working as a special prosecutor against corruption in Madrid when, in a bout of restlessness, he drafted an indictment against General Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean strongman, for the murder of thousands of his countrymen, which, to the astonishment of the world, led to Pinochet's arrest, in England. Though Pinochet was eventually released, it marked the first time in history that a onetime head of state had been detained on the principle of universal jurisdiction. In 2007, Castresana, after serving in a U.N. mission investigating the unsolved murders of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, came to Guatemala—like a "parachutist," as he puts it. A letter to the editor in El Periódico said, "Welcome, Mr. Castresana, your presence in the country is proof that our institutions simply don't work."
Castresana, who had the look of an aging student radical, with wavy brown hair and glasses with small round lenses, was not a typical diplomat. One of his friends, with a mixture of admiration and despair, describes him as a "loose cannon." Castresana often compared the criminals he investigated to characters from literature, and he seemed to conceive of himself as an Arthurian knight swept up in one heroic battle after another. He spoke incessantly about a "code of honor," and often clashed with his counterparts at the U.N. He told a former Guatemalan Foreign Minister, "I don't plan to be another U.N. bureaucrat."
In 2008, in its first big case, CICIG charged a chief homicide prosecutor with obstructing justice and tampering with evidence. "We thought, as proud international investigators, we were very good at what we did," Castresana recalled. "But, when you come to a country with such extended levels of corruption, it doesn't matter if you have built a good case. So when we brought the case against the prosecutor it was a complete failure. He came triumphantly to the court and he was released." Castresana realized that he could not bring criminals to justice before he had removed at least some of the most corrupt officials. As Castresana later told the press, "Guatemala's institutions must be purged from the inside—they need an exorcism."
Castresana seized upon a rule in CICIG'S charter that permitted the organization to petition local officials to punish unethical officials. Through this process, his team began to remove more than fifteen hundred corrupt police officers, including fifty police commissioners and the deputy director of the national police. CICIG also "invited" nearly a dozen prominent prosecutors to leave their posts, and had a magistrate in Guatemala City banished to the hinterlands. "My team told me not to—that I would put everyone in the judiciary against us," Castresana recalled. "I said, 'No, all the judiciary is already against us. If the judges know that they can say no to CICIG, then it is our death.' " In the summer of 2008, he even asked President Colom to fire his Attorney General, whom CICIG accused of impeding justice. Though Colom found Castresana "very demanding," according to a U.S. diplomatic cable obtained by Wikileaks, he granted the request.
Part prosecutor, part politician, part lobbyist, Castresana also pushed through Congress several laws strengthening the judicial system. They included establishing a viable witness-protection program, setting up a framework for legal wiretapping, and making it possible for prosecutors to arrange plea bargains for suspects who provide evidence against a criminal network.
A former deputy minister told me that Castresana had become like General Douglas MacArthur in Japan, after the Second World War. A columnist later said that Castresana was treated as "the voice of God." Nevertheless, CICIG had been fully operational for barely a year when Rosenberg was killed, and the case threatened some of the country's most untouchable figures. A newspaper columnist observed, "The odds that the investigation will be successful . . . are slim to none. Like the Battle of Waterloo, where Napoleon was defeated, Castresana faces the prospect, in Guatemala, of the first great failure of his international career."
Castresana told a reporter that the Rosenberg case was "like a John Grisham novel, but it's real." Before formally launching an investigation, he went to visit President Colom. With his security detail, Castresana passed by the protesters in the Central Plaza, and slipped through a side entrance into the palace. Despite its grandeur, the building had a ghostly quality, with its dark, musty rooms, creaking doors, and gossamer curtains that fluttered aimlessly. Castresana found Colom in his office, his bony wrists and neck poking out of his suit.
Castresana told the President, "To take the case, I need complete independence." Colom, who spoke so softly that Castresana had to lean forward to hear him, promised not to interfere. But Castresana could not know if he was sincere or if the First Lady, Sandra de Colom, would abide by the President's wishes. In the palace, the First Lady was nicknamed "the bulldozer," for the way that she flattened aides and even the President. A leading human-rights official told the St. Petersburg Times that Sandra de Colom was considered "malignant and malevolent," and "the head of a parallel power." (To circumvent the Constitution, which bars the relatives of a President from succeeding him, the Coloms recently filed for divorce, in the hope that she can run in an election, in September.)
That same day, Castresana met with Rosenberg's son Eduardo. He looked like a younger, more dashing version of his father. He had graduated first in his class from law school, and since the killings he had become a partner at Rosenberg's law firm, moving into his father's old office. Castresana vowed to him, "I give you my word that, if we have to, we will bring down the President and impeach him."
Back at his office at CICIG, Castresana gathered a dozen or so of his top investigators. He suspected that there was at least one mole inside CICIG, and worried about leaks; his office was swept each morning and night for bugs, and he used a white-noise machine when discussing delicate matters. He told his agents, "This is the most important case of this commission."
A linguistic expert from the National Institute of Forensic Sciences, in Guatemala City, was asked to authenticate the Rosenberg video, analyzing every sound and slur. In a report, the expert said that she could not determine whether Rosenberg had made the video under external pressure (as President Colom had suggested). But the expert concluded that Rosenberg appeared "sincere" and "rational."
A team of CICIG agents scoured the Rosenberg crime scene for clues. Curiously, Rosenberg's body had fallen backward, onto the curb, and his bicycle had fallen away from him, onto the road. Near the body, in the dirt beside the road, was a series of deep gashes; they appeared to have been made by the tires of a car.
One day, while CICIG agents were canvassing the neighborhood, they detected an unmarked vehicle following their car; a passenger was taking photographs of them. Weeks later, agents were meeting with a potential witness, in the lobby of a hotel outside Guatemala City, when swarms of police officers suddenly descended, trying to seize the witness. Fearing that the witness might be tortured and "disappeared," CICIG agents fled with him into one of the hotel's rooms. As they prepared for a gun battle, a CICIG agent shouted to the police, "You will have to kill us all!" Meanwhile, Castresana phoned the head of the national police and Vice-President Espada, commanding them to order the police to back off. The police eventually withdrew, and CICIG was able to process the witness. After all that, the man had no reliable information—but somebody had clearly been terrified that he did.
Castresana and his team, still lacking a key witness, confiscated all the relevant security tapes from buildings near the crime scene. Images caught on multiple cameras revealed that the moment Rosenberg left on his bicycle, at 8:05 A.M., a coffin-black sports car with tinted windows and a racing spoiler began shadowing him. The fact that the hit men were in position from the start of the bicycle ride—an activity that was not a regular part of Rosenberg's Sunday routine—suggested that a person with inside knowledge had tipped them off. The vehicle's license plate was not visible, but the car was a Mazda 6, and there were only fifty such models registered in Guatemala. And the one at the crime scene, digital enhancements revealed, had, in addition to the spoiler, distinctive red-rimmed tires and a sticker on the lid of the gas tank. After an intensive three-week search, investigators identified the car as belonging to a thirty-three-year-old man named Willian Gilberto Santos Divas, who lived outside Guatemala City. Records showed that, on the morning Rosenberg was killed, Santos's cell phone was making and receiving a flurry of calls—all in the area of the shooting. "He was there," Castresana said.
One other detail in Santos's file caught Castresana's attention. Santos was a former member of the national police force. Castresana was certain that CICIG had found the first sign of a conspiracy.
In President Colom's war room, Roberto Izurieta, the strategist, believed that he, too, had found threads of what one member of the government called a "finely woven conspiracy." Izurieta had always thought that Colom could not be behind the murders of the Musas and Rosenberg, and that the killings had to be part of a plot to bring down the government. The idea was outlandish only to the innocent. As Don DeLillo has written, "A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It's the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and a daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act." Izurieta, who had lost ten pounds since the crisis began—and who had violated his ban on caffeine, which made him, by his own admission, "electric"—thought that the conspirators were finally being pulled from the shadows of Guatemalan politics.
The investigators had found, for example, someone who had admitted shooting the video of Rosenberg's testimony. His name was Mario David García. A squat man with a crisp mustache, he was an ultra-right-wing journalist and a former Presidential candidate who was thought to have participated in multiple plots against the state. In the late eighties, the government accused him of being part of a cabal, known as the Officers of the Mountain, which orchestrated two failed coups. García understood the power of images: he had been the producer of a television show that had fanned the cabal's rebellion. Another figure accused of orchestrating the coups was none other than Luis Mendizábal. Both men denied being part of the plots.
Izurieta wondered if it could be just a coincidence that García and Mendizábal—with their "impressive dossiers of conspiratorial services," as one reporter put it—had been involved in the manufacturing and distribution of Rosenberg's video. García was now the host of a political radio show, "Straight Talk," and after Rosenberg's death he repeatedly attacked the government, stoking the unrest. As for Mendizábal, Izurieta and other members of the government suspected that he had a vendetta against President Colom, who had hired him to be a security adviser in 2007, only to fire him. What's more, according to CICIG Mendizábal had lost a bid for a lucrative government contract to produce national I.D. cards. Mendizábal denies having any such business interest, but Castresana told me that Mendizábal had a "motive for revenge."
Could García and Mendizábal have manipulated and then killed Rosenberg in order to unleash his video and topple the government? After all, Mendizábal was not only a specialist in gathering information; he was also a master in the art of disinformation. In the late nineties, he had been a member of a clandestine intelligence unit called La Oficinita—The Little Office. (It was named for the space above Mendizábal's clothing boutique.) Mendizábal insisted to me that La Oficinita helped solve kidnappings and murders. But, according to human-rights observers, government officials, and the press, its purpose was to deceive the public—using fake evidence and theatrical witnesses in order to cover up the military's crimes.
Izurieta knew that intelligence operators had previously deployed disinformation to topple a democratically elected government in Guatemala. In 1954, C.I.A. operatives had teamed with the new "scientists" of advertising to overthrow President Jacobo Árbenz—Guatemala's last left-wing leader until Colom—by creating the illusion of a domestic uprising. Operatives set up a radio station, the Voice of Liberation, which was supposedly broadcast from a rebel camp "deep in the jungle" but, in fact, was transmitted from Miami and often broadcast from the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City. The station caused national hysteria by reporting fake news of the government poisoning the water supply and of phantom troops marching on the capital. One operative referred to the scheme as "the big lie."
In May, 2009, Mendizábal and García, who were being pressed by the media, acknowledged their roles in producing the Rosenberg video. The Archdiocese's Office of Human Rights, citing their histories, warned that there might be a sinister force at work. It noted that Rosenberg's assassination had the hallmarks of "fictitious scenarios" from Guatemala's past.
If there was a plot to topple the government, the next question was who was the main beneficiary—and hence the prime mover behind it. One person seemed to have the most to gain. It was Colom's longtime political rival Otto Pérez Molina—the notorious former general and head of military intelligence who, after the video was distributed, had demanded that Colom resign. Pérez Molina, who appeared on García's radio program to denounce Colom, had previously declared that he was running again for President.
Scattered dots seemed to form a picture, like a constellation in the sky. Then, less than a month after Rosenberg's death, President Colom's Minister of the Interior, who was a confidant of the First Lady, informed Castresana that he had found what amounted to a smoking gun—a witness who would reveal the entire conspiracy.
Castresana dispatched a team of investigators. At the Interior Minister's suggestion, the investigators flew on the First Lady's helicopter to a soccer field in San Luis, a town near the Mexican border, where the witness was waiting for them. According to a summary of his account, which he later provided to the newspaper El Quetzalteco, the witness stated that a street gang named Pythagoras had been hired to kill Rosenberg, at a price of a hundred and eighty thousand dollars. The witness, who expressed fear for his life, said that he was close to the gang's ruthless leader. "I do not want to continue to kill people," he said. Then he revealed a bombshell—or, as he put it, "This will explode, because there are politicians involved."
The witness said that the gang received the first installment of its fee from Roxana Baldetti, a member of Congress who is running as Otto Pérez Molina's Vice-Presidential candidate. The witness said that he had saved text messages that he had exchanged with a member of Pérez Molina's party, who had offered him a car and money to remain silent. Castresana, speaking of the witness, recalled, "With this testimony, we could have arrested the leader of the political opposition and put him in jail."
Castresana had asked President Colom's Interior Minister to make sure that nobody from the media was at the stadium, fearing that the identities of CICIG agents might be exposed. (At one point, a clerk handling evidence in the Rosenberg case was gunned down in Guatemala City.) But a pack of reporters suddenly appeared, and the news soon broke around the country that Otto Pérez Molina and Roxana Baldetti were the alleged masterminds of Rosenberg's murder. "PROOF DELIVERED," the banner headline in one newspaper read.
But, when Castresana and members of CICIG tried to confirm elements of the witness's story, they were stymied. They checked the security cameras in the hotel parking lot where the witness claimed that the payoff from Baldetti had taken place—nothing of the sort was on tape. Other evidence that the witness provided was fabricated. Even his name was an alias. The whole meeting was an elaborately staged act of misdirection. The witness later confessed, "I received a call from a member of the government saying, 'I have a job for you,' and he offered me money . . . to give false evidence." The witness alleged that Colom's spokesman and the First Lady were part of the scheme.
The government denied the allegations. But Castresana was furious. He believed that the government was also behind the unmarked cars following his agents and the attempt to seize the potential witness at the hotel. Perhaps members of the Colom Administration were trying to cover up their crimes. Or, perhaps, after so many years of judicial disarray, they thought that, if they were being framed, the only way out was to frame someone else.
Castresana sent a formal complaint to the Colom Administration, and forwarded copies to the U.N. It was only then, Castresana told me, that the government stopped meddling.
"Botar un palo grande," the voice said. "Knock over a big stick."
A Chilean agent of CICIG was sitting in a small, stuffy room, nearly three months after Rosenberg's death, eavesdropping on Willian Santos, the owner of the black Mazda. The Rosenberg case marked the first time in the history of Guatemala that wiretapping was being conducted by a legal entity, rather than by secret military intelligence or some other unauthorized body.
For weeks, CICIG had been monitoring Santos's conversations and tracking his movements. Castresana and his team had mapped out, with flowcharts and photographs, at least part of the criminal network to which Santos belonged. So far, investigators had identified ten members of the gang. Nearly all of them were current or former police officers; one was a veteran of the military. Their conversations confirmed that the men had become professional killers. The question was who had hired them to assassinate Rosenberg.
CICIG agents had intercepted more than ten thousand of the gang's fugitive conversations. But, even in an age of listening devices and satellite surveillance and Wayback Machines, much of history remains beyond confirmation, out of earshot, buried with the corpses. One of the leaders of the gang was recorded saying that he wanted to hear "zero comments" about the Rosenberg "job," because there were extremely powerful people who didn't want anyone "running off their mouths."
As the Chilean agent listened to Santos, she wondered what he had meant by "knock over a big stick." The gang had developed its own coded language: "greens" meant money; "to lift" was to kidnap a person; and "shooting up a car" was an assassination. The more the Chilean agent listened to the conversation, the more she realized that to knock over a big stick was to kill someone important.
Though Castresana was careful not to blow CICIG's undercover operation, he interceded repeatedly to foil the gang's plans. When he learned that the gang was about to rob a bank, he made sure that extra police were stationed out in front, and he tipped off a Korean businessman after discovering that the gang had plans to "lift" him. By September, the gang had begun to suspect it had a mole. As a hit man said on the wire, someone was "letting out the soup." The leaders assumed that the culprit was the military veteran, since he didn't come from their group of policemen.
On September 8th, CICIG picked up another conversation between two gang leaders. "We have a problem," one of them said of the military veteran. "He's going around talking about Rosenberg." There was a long silence. "I'm not going to freak out but I want to cut that son of a bitch down already." The man explained that he was just waiting for "the green light."
Castresana felt that he could no longer wait. At dawn on September 11th, four months after Rosenberg was assassinated, three hundred CICIG agents, prosecutors, police, and soldiers swept into more than a dozen locations across Guatemala, apprehending the ten suspected hit men. By inspecting call logs from the suspects' seized cell phones, CICIG identified an intermediary who had been in contact with the gang on the day of Rosenberg's assassination. The intermediary, a man named Jesús Manuel Cardona Medina, was brought in for questioning. As Castresana knew, every secret is embedded with the possibility of betrayal, and after sustained interrogation Cardona Medina turned on his co-conspirators, coöperating with CICIG in exchange for a reduced sentence and placement in Guatemala's witness-protection program. Two other gang members also flipped.
According to the hit men, the gang had been hired by Francisco and Estuardo Valdés Paiz, two brothers who owned one of Guatemala's largest pharmaceutical companies. Surprisingly, the brothers were related to Rosenberg—they were cousins of his first wife. The Valdés Paiz brothers had contacted the gang and agreed to pay forty thousand dollars for the hit. The target was described to the hit men simply as an "extortionist," and Cardona Medina was given a cell phone for communicating with a mysterious inside man, who provided minute details about what the extortionist looked like. The inside man also indicated the ideal place to shoot Rosenberg, which is why there were tire marks at the scene of the crime: the previous night, the hit men had marked the spot.
A hidden design was finally emerging. But why would the Valdés Paiz brothers—who, by all accounts, loved Rosenberg—want him dead? What did their actions have to do with Rosenberg's video and his allegations? And who was the inside man? Susanne Jonas, a scholar who spent years studying the country, once wrote, "Guatemala mocks me: 'Just as you think you understand, we'll show you that you understand nothing at all.' "
In addition to investigating the hit men, Castresana and his team reconstructed Rosenberg's final months as best they could, trying to pinpoint who might want him dead. As CICIG agents were exploring the question of motive, the investigation took, as Castresana put it, a series of "stupefying turns."
Investigators had obtained from Mendizábal the telephone number from which Rosenberg had reported receiving threats. Phone records confirmed that Rosenberg had answered a series of calls from this number. The calls, which originated from a cell phone, began on May 5th and ended on May 10th, the day Rosenberg was killed. During that period, the calls were made almost every day and were usually relatively short—just enough time, it seemed, to convey a threat.
Records also indicated that this cell phone had communicated with only one other telephone—the one that Cardona Medina had reported receiving from the Valdés Paiz brothers. And so whoever had made the threats to Rosenberg appeared to be the same mysterious inside man who had given instructions to the killers. The inside man had communicated with Cardona Medina for the last time at 8 A.M. on May 10th—to alert the executioners that Rosenberg was on his way.
Castresana and his colleagues tried to trace the cell phone to its owner. It had been bought with cash, in order to insure anonymity. But a sales-tax form for the phone contained a faded signature—that of Rosenberg's driver. Castresana believed that they had found the inside man.
Investigators brought the driver in for questioning. He did not deny that he had purchased the phone, but he swore that Rosenberg had instructed him to buy it, along with another cell phone. The driver said that he was told to pay in cash and not to identify himself in paperwork; he had accidently put his name on the sales-tax form.
Castresana suspected that the driver was lying. But Rosenberg's secretary at the law firm confirmed that on the day the driver bought the phones he had turned in a receipt for reimbursement. If he was a conspirator, it seemed inconceivable that he would have done so.
The driver said that Rosenberg had kept one of the phones, and had instructed him to deliver the second one to Francisco Valdés Paiz. Records showed that this cell phone was the same one that Cardona Medina had received. Suddenly, the disparate lines of the investigation were converging toward one conclusion: Rosenberg had purchased the phones used by his own killers. CICIG investigators then made an even more startling discovery. Telecommunications experts determined that the purportedly threatening phone calls had all originated from one place: inside Rosenberg's own apartment. Castresana thought, Rosenberg had been making threats to himself.
Any lingering doubts about who was behind the killing dissolved once Castresana and his team discovered that Rosenberg, just before his death, had issued a check for forty thousand dollars—the amount owed to the hit men—and had asked his secretary to deliver it to the Valdés Paiz brothers. Rosenberg had drawn the money from the Panamanian account of a client, in order to conceal his hand in the scheme. As inconceivable as it seemed, Castresana and his team were now certain that Rosenberg—not the President, not the First Lady, not Gustavo Alejos, or anyone else—was the author of his own assassination.
Castresana believed that Rosenberg would have pulled off "the perfect crime"—his secret plot permanently lost to history—had the driver not signed the sales-tax form. But, thanks to this mistake, CICIG unravelled the rest of the mystery. Castresana and his agents determined that Rosenberg had enlisted the Valdés Paiz brothers to help him find a band of hit men. Rosenberg told the brothers only that the target was a man who had been extorting and threatening him. Cardona Medina testified that, by the time he went to collect the assassination fee, Francisco Valdés Paiz had learned the truth, and was distraught, crying that the hit men had just killed his cousin.
Rosenberg had been careful in planting false clues that would confound investigators. Not only had he repeatedly called his own home number from the cell phone, creating the appearance of continuous threats; he had also called the hit men on the morning of his death, informing them that the target was leaving his house. This explained why a man purportedly threatened with death had ventured out alone, on a bicycle, in one of the most murderous cities in the world. It also explained why the inside man had known exactly where the target would be—the day before the shooting. And it explained why Rosenberg's bicycle and his body were found in such peculiar positions at the crime scene: as the hit man who pulled the trigger confessed, Rosenberg had got off his bicycle at the designated spot and was sitting on the curb, waiting for his assassin, when the hit man shot him three times in the head, once in the neck, and once in the chest. Castresana says of Rosenberg, "He set himself off like a suicide bomber."
As Castresana looked deeper into Rosenberg's life, he began to see a tormented soul—"someone like Raskolnikov." After the death of the woman he loved, Rosenberg wrote to a friend that he felt as if he were "disintegrating, little by little." He initially tried to do what he had always done: find justice through the law. Based on the intelligence he had gathered—primarily from the legendary spy Mendizábal but also from other sources—he was convinced that the government had killed Marjorie and her father. But, as a lawyer, Rosenberg knew that this intelligence was not strong enough to stand up in court. And Mendizábal warned Rosenberg that it would be futile to fight the President, the First Lady, and Alejos. In a country where crimes were virtually never punished, Castresana says, Rosenberg felt powerless. In a meeting at his law firm, Rosenberg complained, "There is no justice in Guatemala." And so, Castresana theorized, Rosenberg had set his plot in motion.
In hindsight, Rosenberg's actions in his final days made it evident that he was not trying to evade death but, rather, was preparing for it. He had his will drawn up; he bought two adjoining plots in a cemetery, one for himself and one for Marjorie; he gave away family heirlooms. He had then constructed a counterfeit reality, believing, however perversely, that it was the only way that the guilty parties would ever go to jail. And he employed the very methods—hit men, misdirection, stagecraft—that, in the past, had been the province of corrupt states and intelligence outfits. Rodrigo Rosenberg had democratized the art of political murder.
After solving the mystery of Rosenberg's assassination, Castresana was overcome with panic, instead of relief. He thought that the plot was so incredible—perhaps the most bizarre in the annals of political conspiracy—that everyone would think that he was weaving yet another fraudulent narrative, in order to protect the government. For days, he could not sleep, and paced endlessly around the compound. "It will be my professional grave," he muttered to himself. "But we cannot change the reality."
In December, CICIG issued arrest warrants for the Valdés Paiz brothers. They went into hiding, and were not apprehended for several months. The ten members of the hit squad were eventually convicted. The Valdés Paiz brothers initially acknowledged their involvement in the plot, according to authorities, but they now maintain their innocence. Their case is still pending.
Castresana prepared to share his findings in a televised national address on January 12, 2010. The day before the broadcast, he met with Rosenberg's son Eduardo. Many members of Rosenberg's family could not accept what had happened: the truth, for all its power, is merciless. But Eduardo seemed ready to confront reality. He later told me that he had been forced to face "a lot of dark truths." In the meeting with Castresana, he made one request: if Castresana believed that his father had been trying, even if mistakenly, to help his country, then he should say so at the press conference.
During his address, Castresana, to the surprise of many viewers, said of Rosenberg, "He was an honorable person." He added, "He wanted to open up a Pandora's box that would change the country."
In the palace, President Colom, the First Lady, Gustavo Alejos, and Roberto Izurieta watched the address on television. Just before the broadcast, Izurieta met with Colom to prepare an official response. Izurieta asked the President, "So who did it?"
Colom said, "You're not going to believe it, but I don't know."
As Castresana built toward his shocking conclusions—which he described as "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth"—the President held hands with the First Lady. Alejos, who told me that the investigation had "cleared my name for my family and my children," began to cry. Izurieta whispered to himself, "Oh, my God."
Though President Colom and others who had been in the war room trusted Castresana's conclusion that Rosenberg had plotted his own death, many of them still privately believed that there remained another shrouded part of the story—a conspiracy within a conspiracy. They felt that Rosenberg alone could not have pulled off such an intricate deception, and that he must have been abetted by García, the talk-show host, and Mendizábal, the spy, both of whom had reasons for wanting to bring down the government.
Castresana told me he believed that García and Mendizábal had tried to exploit the mysterious circumstances of Rosenberg's death. "I don't know if they were aware of the intention of Rosenberg" to kill himself, he said. "But they were preparing some kind of coup." CICIG's investigation eventually found a witness who said that García had met with Rosenberg, and encouraged him in his plans to commit suicide and release the video, saying, "Do it for your country." Castresana told me that García likely helped "induce" Rosenberg's suicidal act.
The conspiracy-within-a-conspiracy may have reached the highest levels of the government. Mendizábal told me that, in the days leading up to Rosenberg's death, he had detected, in his intelligence dossiers, growing divisions between President Colom and Vice-President Espada. "This is where I say that my reports are helping me quite a lot," Mendizábal explained. "I'm beginning to see that the Vice-President and the President are having a lot of friction, because the Vice-President would like to be President." A friend of Mendizábal's told CICIG that, about a week before the assassination, he had met with the Vice-President to inform him about Rosenberg's investigation into the Musa killings, which had the power to topple Colom's Presidency. Mendizábal told me that the friend had asked the Vice-President, " 'Do you think you are in a position to take over?' And his answer was yes."
Vice-President Espada has emphatically denied that such a meeting ever occurred, saying that he had no "direct or indirect contact" with Rosenberg or anyone close to him before the murder. García, for his part, has called allegations that he was complicit in Rosenberg's plot "absurd, baseless, and reprehensible." Mendizábal's statements have been more calibrated. He told a reporter, "I was not the instigator. I did what I had to do, and I have no regrets." He showed me the metal plate, inscribed with "ON," that he had found by the Rosenberg crime scene. He turned it upside down, so that it said "NO." "There are always two ways to interpret anything," he said.
Mendizábal had already begun to construct a counter-scenario to subvert CICIG's theory of Rosenberg's death. He said that Rosenberg had not set out that morning to kill himself; rather, he was attempting to collect information on who murdered the Musas—evidence that Rosenberg must have paid forty thousand dollars to obtain. When the Musas' killers learned of his plans, he was double-crossed and killed. As Mendizábal spoke to me with conviction, taking some of the verifiable facts and rearranging them, I began to picture Rosenberg on his bicycle, innocently pedalling through the city, hoping to obtain the final piece of his puzzle. The most effective counterfeit realities are those which provide what only conspirators seem to have: a perfectly coherent plot.
This time, though, the truth was more powerful than fiction. After Castresana's meticulous presentation, the director of El Periódico, who had once written how absurd it would be to imagine that Rosenberg "immolated himself, kamikaze style," called CICIG's research "masterly," and said, "I can only humbly surrender to the evidence." U.S. Ambassador McFarland told me that the CICIG probe helped preserve "Guatemala's stability and democracy," and demonstrated that it was possible to "get to the bottom of things." People beseeched Castresana, who was hailed as Guatemala's Eliot Ness, to run for President.
Still, an essential part of the Rosenberg case remained a mystery: Who killed the Musas? Castresana asked for the public to be patient. After Rosenberg's murder, CICIG had arrived on the crime scene immediately. But nearly a month had elapsed before CICIG had taken on the Musa case—an eternity in homicide investigations, especially in a country where evidence is not properly collected. "We were lost," Castresana said.
At one point, CICIG agents raided the offices of an organization connected to Banrural. As they were carting away documents and hard drives, an investigator overheard a local prosecutor on the phone, leaking what was being taken. Castresana and his agents were still moving in a sea of saboteurs.
If CICIG concluded that the President, the First Lady, and Alejos had, in fact, killed Khalil and Marjorie Musa, then the government could collapse. Though the most prevalent view was that the government was responsible, in the absence of definitive evidence new theories multiplied. One hypothesis, which was given quiet support by Gustavo Alejos and others in the Colom Administration, was that Musa had objected to Marjorie's getting a divorce and marrying Rosenberg, and so Rosenberg had hired hit men to kill him. After Marjorie was accidently murdered, Rosenberg had arranged his own assassination, partly out of despair and partly to cover his own tracks.
While Castresana vowed to solve the case, the entrenched forces in Guatemala launched an all-out effort to destroy CICIG. Military intelligence had once maintained a "love office," devoted to exposing its enemies' private lives. In the factory owned by the Valdés Paiz brothers, CICIG agents discovered a document that hinted at a similar attack on Castresana, asking, "Does he have a girlfriend?" Stories began to appear in the media reporting that Castresana had been having affairs with several women, including his assistant. García, who filmed the Rosenberg video, devoted his radio programs to what he called Castresana's "double life."
Castresana denied the affairs, and said to me, of his assistant, "There were elements in the lie that made it seem true—she was my assistant, she was a beautiful young woman, and we were close." Other reports in the Guatemalan press suggested, falsely, that Castresana was under investigation at the U.N. for ethical misconduct. Anita Isaacs, a political scientist and an expert on Guatemala, who knows Castresana, told me that the networks traditionally relied on three ways to remove an enemy: "The first is to bribe you—but they could not bribe Castresana. The second is to kill you—but they could not kill Castresana. Finally, if all else fails, they destroy your reputation. And that is what they did to Castresana."
Not all public criticisms of Castresana and CICIG were part of a campaña negra. Some Guatemalans and U.N. officials thought that Castresana was too authoritarian, and that he often pursued targets unfairly in the press. Even some former CICIG agents criticized his methods.
As the attacks mounted against Castresana, he became increasingly paranoid, and appeared to conflate legitimate critiques with dirty reprisals. He accused a highly regarded Spanish CICIG agent of being a spy. And he alleged that one of Guatemala's most respected journalists was part of a criminal network. "He was seeing conspiracies everywhere," Francisco Goldman, the author of "The Art of Political Murder," told me. "I think he started to go mad."
Under duress, Castresana escalated his long-standing feuds with colleagues at the U.N. "Basically, they are telling me I'm like Kurtz—some kind of crazy man in the middle of the wilderness," he said. During one confrontation, an official reminded him that CICIG was not, technically, a U.N. body. Castresana replied, "I am the soul of the U.N."
In May, 2010, President Colom chose a new Attorney General, who, according to CICIG, promptly fired honest prosecutors, seized control over agents' wiretap operations, and shelved sensitive cases. Castresana felt that he no longer had the backing he needed from the Guatemalan government or the U.N. On June 7th, after running the commission for two and a half years, he abruptly resigned.
At a press conference announcing his decision, Castresana, in a final salvo, denounced Colom's new Attorney General for alleged ties to "parallel powers," including organized crime. Within a week, the Attorney General had been ousted. A newspaper declared that Castresana, like Rosenberg, had learned that, in Guatemala, the only way to fight impunity was to "blow himself up."
While CICIG has continued its operations under the command of Castresana's successor, Francisco Dall'Anese—a respected former Attorney General from Costa Rica—Castresana returned to Spain, where he resumed his job as a prosecutor. Even after his resignation, the attacks against him and CICIG persisted. One day, four decapitated heads were placed at prominent locations around Guatemala City, including in front of the Congress; the Guatemala Times called it a clear warning from "the dark forces" that "felt empowered after Dr. Castresana resigned." Castresana told me, "The wolves have smelled blood, and they will not stop until they get the commission destroyed."
Last November, Castresana passed through New York, and I met him at a restaurant. He seemed diminished without his security retinue. He said of the attacks on his reputation, "They have hurt my image forever." He and his wife were divorcing, and he had not been able to see his children. "I have nothing," he said. "I lost my family while in Guatemala. It almost took my life."
Dall'Anese told me, "One day, Guatemala will recognize what he accomplished."
Not long ago, Castresana contacted me again, and for the first time in a while he sounded enthused. There had been a break in the Musa case. He explained that, before he left CICIG, investigators had found partial confirmation of what Rosenberg had alleged about improprieties at Banrural and other institutions. "We discovered some evidence of money laundering, fraud, and embezzlement," he said. Moreover, as Rosenberg had believed, there had been an intense fight over control of Banrural's board of directors, and an effort to block Musa's appointment. But Rosenberg had overlooked a key detail: after receiving threats, Musa had informed the government that he was not taking the posts. By the time of his death, the hidden dispute over Banrural had been resolved, and there appeared to be no motive for killing him.
Castresana told me that CICIG, using surveillance tapes and wiretaps, had recently identified the alleged hit men who killed Musa. After they were interrogated, several of them confessed, and the baroque narrative took its final twist. It turned out that Musa, despite his impeccable reputation, had been buying contraband for his textile factory from a criminal network. When Musa got into a dispute with the gang, and refused to pay for the contraband, he was assassinated. The Musa family has refused to accept the prospect that its patriarch was corrupt, and took out a full-page ad in a newspaper denying the allegations. But twelve men have been arrested for the murder of the Musas, and the trial is expected to begin later this year.
It seemed as if everyone had a secret. Musa concealed his dirty business practices. Rosenberg and Marjorie hid their affair. Rosenberg misled the world about his death. The Guatemalan government purportedly covered up its own corruption. The proliferation of counterfeit realities underscored the difficulty of ascertaining the truth in a country where there are so few arbiters of it. Even Rosenberg—who, in the land of the blind, had seemed like a one-eyed king—had been wrong about who killed the Musas, triggering a series of tragic events that nearly rewrote a nation's history, based on a lie.
The shrine that was set up at the street corner where Rodrigo Rosenberg died is now deserted. Pilgrims no longer come to leave notes or flowers. When I visited the shrine, the wooden cross was tilted and defaced. Beside it, half buried in dirt, was a discarded banner. Scraping away the mud, I could see the fragment of a story: "Rodrigo Rosenberg, National Hero." ♦
THE MARK OF A MASTERPIECEThe man who keeps finding famous fingerprints on uncelebrated works of art.
by David Grann
JULY 12, 2010
Peter Paul Biro with an alleged Jackson Pollock. Photograph by Steve Pyke.
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Video: David Grann on Peter Paul Biro's controversial attribution of paintings to Leonardo da Vinci and Jackson Pollock.
KEYWORDS
Peter Paul Biro; Martin Kemp; Leonardo da Vinci; Authenticators; Frauds; Con Men; Fingerprinting
Every few weeks, photographs of old paintings arrive at Martin Kemp's eighteenth-century house, outside Oxford, England. Many of the art works are so decayed that their once luminous colors have become washed out, their shiny coats of varnish darkened by grime and riddled with spidery cracks. Kemp scrutinizes each image with a magnifying glass, attempting to determine whether the owners have discovered what they claim to have found: a lost masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci.
Kemp, a leading scholar of Leonardo, also authenticates works of art—a rare, mysterious, and often bitterly contested skill. His opinions carry the weight of history; they can help a painting become part of the world's cultural heritage and be exhibited in museums for centuries, or cause it to be tossed into the trash. His judgment can also transform a previously worthless object into something worth tens of millions of dollars. (His imprimatur is so valuable that he must guard against con men forging not only a work of art but also his signature.) To maintain independence, Kemp refuses to accept payment for his services. "As soon as you get entangled with any financial interest or advantage, there is a taint, like a tobacco company paying an expert to say cigarettes are not dangerous," he says.
Kemp, who is in his sixties, is an emeritus professor of art history at Oxford University, and has spent more than four decades immersed in what he calls "the Leonardo business," publishing articles on nearly every aspect of the artist's life. (He even helped a daredevil design a working parachute, from linen and wooden poles, based on a Leonardo drawing.) Like many connoisseurs, Kemp has a formidable visual memory, and can summon into consciousness any of Leonardo's known works. When vetting a painting, he proceeds methodically, analyzing brushstrokes, composition, iconography, and pigments—those elements which may reveal an artist's hidden identity. But he also relies on a more primal force. "The initial thing is just that immediate reaction, as when we're recognizing the face of a friend in a crowd," he explains. "You can go on later and say, 'I recognize her face because the eyebrows are like this, and that is the right color of her hair,' but, in effect, we don't do that. It's the totality of the thing. It feels instantaneous."
Other authenticators have also struggled to explain their evaluative process, their "eye." Thomas Hoving, the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who died in December, liked to speak of the "ineffable sense of connoisseurship." The art historian Bernard Berenson described his talent as a "sixth sense." "It is very largely a question of accumulated experience upon which your spirit sets unconsciously," he said. "When I see a picture, in most cases, I recognize it at once as being or not being by the master it is ascribed to; the rest is merely a question of how to fish out the evidence that will make the conviction as plain to others as it is to me." Berenson recalled that once, upon seeing a fake, he had felt an immediate discomfort in his stomach.
FROM THE ISSUECARTOON BANKE-MAIL THIS
In March, 2008, Kemp checked his e-mail and saw another submission—a digital image of a drawing on vellum, or fine parchment. Ever since Dan Brown published "The Da Vinci Code," five years earlier, Kemp had been flooded with works, many of them purportedly embedded with cryptic symbols, and, after a lifetime of dismissing forgeries and copies and junk, he was instinctively wary. About thirteen inches long and nine inches wide, the picture showed the profile of a girl, on the cusp of womanhood, with pale skin and glowing brown hair pulled back in a long ponytail. Her left eye, the only one visible in the profile, had a lifelike translucency. Her upper lip pressed secretively against her lower one, and a red bodice peeked out from underneath a green dress. The artist had meticulously rendered the girl's features with pen and colored chalks ("Her face is subtle to an inexpressible degree," Kemp later wrote), and Kemp felt a shiver of recognition. He enlarged the image on his computer screen until it became a mosaic of pixels. He looked closely at the shading—it seemed to have been drawn with a left hand, just as Leonardo had done.
Kemp tried to contain his excitement. A major work by Leonardo had not been discovered for more than a century. This drawing had no clear provenance—a trail of invoices, catalogue listings, or other records that can allow a work to be traced back to an artist. Rather, the drawing seemed to have come, as Kemp later put it, "from nowhere." In 1998, Kate Ganz, a prominent dealer, had paid a little less than twenty-two thousand dollars for the drawing, at an auction at Christie's. (The auction house did not disclose the previous owner's identity, saying only that the picture had been the "property of a lady.") At the time, the drawing was thought to have been executed in the nineteenth century, by a member of a German school of artists known for imitating Italian Renaissance painters. If the drawing was by Leonardo, it had slipped past some of the world's most respected connoisseurs and collectors—people whose eyes are honed to look for fortune in addition to beauty. As Hugh Chapman, an assistant keeper in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, later told the Times, "The market is a fairly efficient place. This would be an amazing miss."
In January, 2007, Ganz sold the drawing at her gallery in Manhattan for roughly what she had paid for it. As is common in the art world, the identity of the new owner was a secret. Officially, the purchasing agent was listed as Downey Holdings, a Panamanian business with an address in Jersey, in the Channel Islands, which is popular as a tax haven. The purchase was made under the guidance of Peter Silverman, a Canadian collector who has a reputation in the business (though he dislikes the term) as a "picker"—someone who scours auction houses for undervalued works. Silverman told me that he had bought the drawing for a collector in Switzerland who is one of "the richest men in Europe." Many people in the art world have speculated that Silverman himself is the owner. He denied this, but added, "Even if it were true, I wouldn't say."
Upon seeing the drawing, Silverman thought that it had to be from the Renaissance, and before long, he said, he began to consider "the 'L'-word"— Leonardo. He submitted the drawing to tests that have become a standard part of the authentication process. Many of the drawing's pigments were analyzed, and it was determined that none of them had been invented after Leonardo's time period. A sample of the parchment was sent to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in Zurich, for radiocarbon dating. The parchment was dated between 1440 and 1650, making it conceivable that the drawing was by Leonardo, who was born in 1452 and died in 1519. After receiving these results, Silverman contacted Kemp and sent him the image.
As Kemp well understood, countless artists could have made the drawing in that two-hundred-and-ten-year span. And many modern forgers come out of the field of restoration, where they learn not only how to copy an artist's style but also how to exploit historically appropriate materials: organic pigments, antique wooden frames infested with beetles, canvases blackened by centuries of smoke. In the nineteen-thirties, the notorious Dutch forger Han van Meegeren, who produced at least nine fake Vermeers, used a canvas from the seventeenth century that still had its original stretcher. (Like many forgers, Van Meegeren insisted that he was "driven by the psychological effect of disappointment in not being acknowledged by my fellow artists and critics.")
Further pitting the powers of perception against the powers of deception are genuinely old forgeries, which would not be exposed by radiocarbon dating and pigment analysis. In Thomas Hoving's 1996 book, "False Impressions: The Hunt for Big-Time Art Fakes," he warned, "It's the Renaissance works of art faked in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that are dangerous. These are nearly impossible to detect." Making matters even trickier, many Renaissance artists operated studios where apprentices contributed to their works. Scholars now generally believe that the "Madonna Litta," which hangs in The Hermitage, in St. Petersburg, and had long been attributed to Leonardo, was painted, at least in part, by an assistant named Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio. (The landscape shown through a windowpane is considered too prosaic to have been executed by Leonardo.)
Martin Kemp made a habit of cataloguing the mistakes of Leonardo's imitators and forgers: an inadvertent right-handed brushstroke; a deadened effect from painting robotically; a failure to layer the paint so that light played subtly off it. The drawing of the girl betrayed none of these failings, and Kemp decided to examine the picture himself. After making arrangements with Silverman, he went to Switzerland. (It's a joke of the trade that all valuable art works end up in Switzerland, Kemp said, but "it's actually true.") The drawing was in a warehouse in Zurich, protected by armed guards and invisible alarm sensors, which was known as the Bunker.
Kemp was escorted into a large, pristine room, where the drawing of the girl was carefully removed from a box and placed, face up, on a table. He circled around it for hours, lighting the work from different angles and staring at it so closely that his nose nearly touched the parchment. Not only had the drawing apparently been done with left-handed strokes; the artist, like Leonardo, had relied on the palm of his hand as a way of softening the shading. (An imprint was visible.) The figure's proportions adhered to geometrical precepts detailed in Leonardo's notebooks; for example, he had written, "The space from the chin to the base of the nose . . . is the third part of the face and equal to the length of the nose and to the forehead." And didn't the girl's radiant iris resemble the eyes in Leonardo's portrait "Lady with an Ermine"? Still, Kemp remained cautious. The reputations of scholars have been ruined after their eye was shown to be fallible. Dr. Abraham Bredius, who in the thirties was considered the greatest authority on the Dutch Old Masters, is now remembered best for having branded a van Meegeren forgery a Vermeer masterpiece.
Kemp returned to England, where for the next year he continued to interrogate the drawing. The hair style and the costume of the girl, he concluded, were similar to those worn in the Milanese court of the fourteen-nineties. The parchment had incisions suggesting that it had been removed from a bound codex; during the Renaissance, volumes of verse, compiled on sheets of vellum, were often dedicated to a princess upon her marriage or death. But, if this was the drawing's origin, who could the princess in the drawing be? Sifting through members of the court, Kemp settled on the most likely suspect: Bianca Sforza, the Duke of Milan's illegitimate daughter. In 1496, at the age of thirteen, she was married to Galeazzo Sanseverino, and died of an abdominal illness only four months later. Sanseverino, as Kemp knew, was a patron of Leonardo. Each new piece of evidence appeared to cohere. Kemp named the portrait "La Bella Principessa"—"The Beautiful Princess"—and, as he looked at the drawing, he could no longer suppress the sensation that had seized him when he first saw the portrait. In the fall of 2009, Kemp announced to colleagues and reporters that it was "the real thing": a Leonardo masterpiece.
Other scholars and connoisseurs examined the drawing and agreed with Kemp. They included Nicholas Turner, the former curator of drawings at the Getty Museum, and Alessandro Vezzosi, the director of the Museo Ideale Leonardo da Vinci, outside Florence, who said that he didn't have "any doubt" that it was authentic. At first, there was little dissent. Generally, connoisseurs are reluctant to repudiate a piece publicly, for fear of being sued by the owners for "product disparagement," or even for defamation. The threat of litigation has often made the authentication industry a clandestine realm, with connoisseurs who refuse to communicate in writing and with confidential agreements that bind authenticators to silence.
Nevertheless, some critics spoke up. Among them was Thomas Hoving, who discussed the drawing with me a few weeks before he died, at the age of seventy-eight. A flamboyant and imperious figure, who once wrote that he needed "great works of art for the uplift of my soul," Hoving became an emblem of the modern connoisseur. He considered himself that "rare breed of cat" who could instantly detect a fake. And he told me he was sure that "La Bella Principessa" was too "sweet" to be a Leonardo. "His subjects are tough as nails," he said.
Carmen Bambach, the curator of drawings at the Met, was also unpersuaded. The greatest scholar of an artist is not necessarily considered the greatest connoisseur, and with a diverse oeuvre there can be different authorities for each medium. When it comes to Leonardo's drawings, Bambach's eye is perhaps the most respected. "Not everyone's opinion carries the same weight," she told me. "It's like in medicine, where a heart specialist looks at the heart and another specialist looks at the kidneys." She added, "With Leonardo, you need the niche specialist." Bambach pointed out that there is no other example of Leonardo having drawn on vellum. (Kemp concurred, but noted finding evidence that Leonardo had questioned Jean Perréal, a painter in the French court, about the technique.) Moreover, according to Bambach, there was a more profound problem: after studying an image of the drawing—the same costume, the same features, the same strokes that Kemp examined—she had her own strong intuition. "It does not look like a Leonardo," she said.
When such a schism emerges among the most respected connoisseurs, a painting is often cast into purgatory. But in January, 2009, Kemp turned to a Canadian forensic art expert named Peter Paul Biro, who, during the past several years, has pioneered a radical new approach to authenticating pictures. He does not merely try to detect the artist's invisible hand; he scours a painting for the artist's fingerprints, impressed in the paint or on the canvas. Treating each painting as a crime scene, in which an artist has left behind traces of evidence, Biro has tried to render objective what has historically been subjective. In the process, he has shaken the priesthood of connoisseurship, raising questions about the nature of art, about the commodification of aesthetic beauty, and about the very legitimacy of the art world. Biro's research seems to confirm what many people have long suspected: that the system of authenticating art works can be arbitrary and, at times, even a fraud.
"Come in, come in," Biro said, opening the door to his elegant three-story brick house, in Montreal. Biro, who is in his mid-fifties, has a fleshy pink face and a gourmand's stomach, and he wore black slacks, a black turtleneck, and black shoes—his habitual raven-like outfit. A pair of glasses dangled from a string around his neck, and he had thick sideburns and whitening black hair that stood on end, as if he had been working late. ("For me, this is not a nine-to-five job," he later said. "I wake up in the middle of the night because something occurred to me. It's basically every waking hour.") In his arms, he cradled a miniature schnauzer. "This is Coco," he said, petting the dog to keep it from barking.
He led me past a room with a piano and shelves crowded with art books, and climbed a long wooden staircase that opened into a living room and dining area. Sunlight poured through tall windows and illuminated, on almost every wall, oil paintings of landscapes rendered with jabs of bold color. The house had once been "a wreck," Biro said, but he and his wife, Joanne, an accomplished mezzo-soprano, had spent the past two decades renovating it—tearing up floorboards, knocking down interior walls, and installing ceramic tiles. With a work of art, Biro liked to say, you want to preserve everything; with a house, you feel compelled to transform it. "Some people call it renovations," he told me, at one point. "Others call it a disease."
Biro speaks English with an accent that seems to combine traces of French and Hungarian—he was born in Budapest—which contributes to an air of unplaceable refinement. One person who knows Biro told me that he had a mystique of "royalty." Though it was still early in the day, Biro reached into a long wooden rack filled with wine bottles and removed one. After examining the label, he poured himself some and offered me a glass. "Every drop is precious," he said, before finishing his glass and refilling it.
Eventually, with Coco and another dog, a Jack Russell terrier, trailing us, he took me outside to a small courtyard that led to his laboratory, which was in a separate building. The courtyard had a fountain and was filled with plants that camouflaged what was, essentially, a vault. A pair of steel doors were bolted shut and there were two alarm systems, including one with motion sensors.
He unlocked the door to his workshop, revealing a large rectangular table with a movable microscope and a high-powered lamp. Stacks of paintings were propped against a wall. Biro was frequently presented with possible Pollocks and Raphaels and Picassos. When I visited him on another occasion, he had placed under the microscope a faded picture of Venice that was potentially by J. M. W. Turner. "Quite worn, quite damaged, but it has all the hallmarks of what a Turner should be," Biro said. In the lower right corner, pressed into the paint, he had found a fingerprint. "You can actually see it quite clearly," he said. I looked in the microscope and, sure enough, I could make out a smudged fingerprint: loops and whorls, a painting unto itself.
Biro said that he was using a scalpel to scrape away a previous restorer's excessive overpainting, in an attempt to discern more of the fingerprint's characteristics. A lot of money lies in obtaining this kind of information, he explained, which is why he had to suspect everything, and everyone, of deception. (One of Biro's friends called him a "human lie detector.")
To my surprise, Biro showed me another laboratory, in a locked basement. Here, he said, he kept his most revolutionary device: a multispectral-imaging camera, of his own design, which was mounted on a robotic arm and scanned a canvas from above. The device could take photographs of a painting at different wavelengths of light, from infrared to ultraviolet, allowing him to distinguish, without damaging the work, the kind of pigments an artist had used. (Previously, tiny samples of paint had to be extracted and submitted to chemical analysis.) The multispectral camera could also reveal whether an older painting was hidden beneath the surface, or whether a picture had been restored. And if a fingerprint was present the camera could pick up extraordinary levels of detail. Biro once boasted that his invention surpassed "any camera today" and was "the only one of its kind in the world."
As we spoke, I noticed that hanging on the walls were more landscape paintings by the artist whose works were displayed throughout Biro's house. They gave the laboratory the feel of a shrine. Before Biro told me about his research into "La Bella Principessa," and what he described as startling findings, he shared with me the story of how he became the world's first authenticator of art works through fingerprinting—a story that began, curiously enough, with the very paintings I was staring at.
"They were done by my father," Biro said of the paintings. "I'm surrounded by them."
His father, Geza, who died in 2008, at the age of eighty-nine, was a serious painter. According to Biro, he studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, and was admired for his sweeping landscapes and allegorical street scenes. During the Second World War, he was drafted by the Hungarian Army, and was eventually captured by the Russians, who placed him in a prison camp. One day, while being transported in the back of a crowded Soviet truck, he tumbled off the side, and his left arm—like Leonardo, the one he painted with—got caught under the wheel. The bones shattered like icicles. After the war, he was released, and he returned to Budapest, where, despite a series of operations, he remained handicapped. "He had to learn to paint with his right hand," Peter Paul's older brother, Laszlo, told me. "It really battered his self-confidence." Geza's work grew progressively darker. "He was very pessimistic," Laszlo says.
After Geza got married and had two sons, he took a job as an art restorer at the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest. For all their seeming kinship, a restorer is the antithesis of a painter: he is a conserver, not a creator. Like a mimic, he assumes another person's style, at the expense of his own identity. He must resist any urge to improve, to experiment, to show off; otherwise, he becomes a forger. Yet, unlike a great actor, he receives no glory for his feats of mimicry. If he has succeeded, he has burnished another artist's reputation, and vanished without the world ever knowing who he is, or what he has accomplished. The art historian Max J. Friedländer called the business of the restorer "the most thankless one imaginable."
While Geza became a skilled restorer, specializing in Baroque and Renaissance frescoes, he continued to pursue his own art. Some of his paintings were exhibited in Europe, Peter Paul said, and one hung at the Museum of Fine Arts. Yet Geza refused to conform to the Communists' ideological vision of art, and he found himself increasingly shunned. "The last straw for him was when he submitted his work for a salon," Peter Paul recalls. "The painting was rejected on the basis that it did not reflect Socialist optimism." In 1967, still struggling to manipulate his left arm, he received permission from the state to undergo surgery at a hospital in Vienna. After the operation, he immigrated to Montreal, and a year later his family joined him.
Finally, he was free to be an immortal striver. Geza went to Newfoundland and the Northwest Territories, painting the gorgeous frozen landscapes. In Montreal, he set up a small gallery to show his work. He garnered some critical support and his work occasionally sold at auction, but money was constantly short, and he found himself, for a few dollars, sketching people who wandered in off the street. In the seventies, Geza converted much of the gallery into the Center for Art Restoration, and devoted most of his days to relining other artists' canvases on vacuum hot tables, retouching chipped paint, and removing smudges and dirt with chemical solvents that stung the eyes. Peter Paul and Laszlo, who were then teen-agers, served as his apprentices. Laszlo, who became a skilled painter, said of his father, "He was very demanding. He was trained to adhere to a strict ethical standard, and that was passed on to us."
Peter Paul dropped out of college to work full-time with his father, immersing himself in the technical aspects of restoration. Then, in 1985, an event occurred, he says, that led to his scientific breakthrough. A man walked into their workshop with an unframed picture that was so blackened with dirt that it was hard to make out much more than a faint rural landscape. When Peter Paul told him that it would cost at least two thousand dollars to restore it, the owner went pale, and offered to sell it for a few hundred. "We bought it with the idea that we would clean half of it, and leave the other half dirty and just hang it" in the shop, Peter Paul recalls. It would be the perfect demonstration of their restoration prowess—"a kind of before and after."
Eventually, the Biros started to clean a small portion of it. They had to purge not only the grime but also thick overpaint from a previous restoration, which resembled clotted blood. "As we got into it more and more, and the cleaned area became larger and larger, we realized there was a rainbow on the painting," Laszlo says. Radiant colors emerged: greens and yellows and blues. The picture showed sunlight filtering through a clearing sky, the rays spreading across a river valley with pale grass and delicate trees and a ruined stone church. The picture "reeked of a master's hand," Peter Paul says. The more he and his brother cleaned it, the more they became convinced that they were looking at a work by none other than J. M. W. Turner.
If so, it was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and possibly millions. The men spent months researching the painting, trying to make the case that it was consistent with Turner's work. After poring over topographical maps, they visited a valley in Millom, England, which they came to believe was the same setting as in the picture. Incredibly, as he and his brother stood there, Peter Paul recalls, the mist cleared and "we actually saw a rainbow."
In 1987, they took the painting to the Tate Gallery, in London, to show it to the world's leading Turner experts and connoisseurs. The verdict was unanimous—the painting was a tattered imitation. As Laszlo puts it, he and his brother were "very politely shown the door." They had been dismissed by what they perceived as an arrogant art establishment—"an ivory tower," as Laszlo called it. There seemed to be no due process. "They just throw opinions around," Peter Paul said of some connoisseurs.
Before the Biros left the Tate, they say, they walked through a gallery that had several Turner paintings on display. Peter Paul paused in front of Turner's "Chichester Canal," peering at the pale-blue sky reflecting off the waterway, which made it seem as if the earth had been turned upside down. In the foliage of several trees, he says, he noticed tiny swirls in the paint. He looked more closely. They were from a partial fingerprint. He felt a jolt: he had noticed partial fingerprints embedded in the potential Turner painting as well. In both pictures, he says, the ridges were deep enough in the original dried paint that they could not have been left by the hands of an owner or a restorer; rather, they were a by-product of Turner's technique of modelling paint with his fingertips. Indeed, Biro says, he subsequently found fingerprints in hundreds of Turner's works, and wondered: Why not compare the fingerprint in an undisputed Turner painting like "Chichester Canal" with the one in his own painting, and see if they matched?
The desire to transform the authentication process through science—to supplant a subjective eye with objective tools—was not new. During the late nineteenth century, the Italian art critic Giovanni Morelli, dismissing many traditional connoisseurs as "charlatans," proposed a new "scientific" method based on "indisputable and practical facts." Rather than search a painting for its creator's intangible essence, he argued, connoisseurs should focus on minor details such as fingernails, toes, and earlobes, which an artist tended to render almost unconsciously. "Just as most men, both speakers and writers, make use of habitual modes of expression, favorite words or sayings, that they employ involuntarily, even inappropriately, so too every painter has his own peculiarities that escape him without his being aware," Morelli wrote. He believed that not only did an Old Master expose his identity with these "material trifles"; forgers and imitators were also less likely to pay sufficient attention to them, and thus betray themselves. Morelli became known as the Sherlock Holmes of the art world.
To many connoisseurs, however, the nature of art was antithetical to cold science. Worse, Morelli made his own share of false attributions, prompting one art historian to dismiss him as a "quack doctor."
In the early twentieth century, as J. P. Morgan, Henry Clay Frick, and other wealthy Americans bid up prices of Old Masters, the search for a foolproof system of connoisseurship intensified. At the same time, the flood of money into the art market led to widespread corruption, with dealers often paying off connoisseurs to validate paintings. In 1928, the art dealer René Gimpel complained, "The American collector is prey to the greatest swindle the world has ever seen: the certified swindle."
The public has long been suspicious of connoisseurship. As John Brewer recounts in his recent book "The American Leonardo," about a Kansas City couple's battle, in the nineteen-twenties, to authenticate a potential Leonardo, this distrust had to do with more than the system's reliability; it also had to do with doubts about the authenticity of the art world itself, with its cult of prized artists, its exorbitant trafficking in aesthetic pleasure, and an élite that seemed even more rarefied than most. In 1920, the Kansas couple, Harry and Andrée Hahn, sued the powerful art dealer Joseph Duveen for half a million dollars after he told a reporter that a portrait they owned could not possibly be a Leonardo. The Hahns argued that connoisseurs offered only "air-spun abstractions and nebulous mumbo-jumbos," and that "smart and tricky art dealers" ran a "racket." Even the judge in the case warned jurors to be wary of experts who relied on means "too introspective and subjective." (Though none of the leading connoisseurs considered the painting a Leonardo, and later technical evaluations confirmed their judgment, the trial ended in a hung jury, and Duveen paid the Hahns sixty thousand dollars to settle the case.)
The desire to "scientificize" connoisseurship was therefore as much about the desire to democratize it, to wrest it out of the hands of art experts. Before the Hahn trial, rumors surfaced that there was a thumbprint in the paint. One newspaper asked, "WILL THUMBPRINT MADE 400 YEARS AGO PROVE PAINTING IS LEONARDO DA VINCI'S ORIGINAL?" But identifying the author of a painting through fingerprints still seemed far beyond the reach of science, and the process of authentication remained largely unchanged until Biro came up with his radical idea.
After returning from London, Biro studied books on fingerprinting and conferred with a retired fingerprint examiner. He learned the difference between a latent print—which is transferred with sweat and often needs to be dusted or processed with chemical agents in order to be detected—and a visible print, which is either impressed in a substance or left by touching a surface with something on one's fingertips, such as ink. He learned fingerprint patterns, including loops, whorls, and tented arches. And he learned how to tell whether two fingerprints had enough overlapping characteristics to be deemed a match. "He basically trained himself," Laszlo recalls. "He read and studied everything."
Biro asked the conservation department at the Tate for images of "Chichester Canal" that were sufficiently high in resolution to show the fingerprint. For days, Biro says, he compared enhanced images of the fingerprint with the one on the rainbow painting; he felt certain that they came from the same person.
Yet the art establishment refused to recognize the painting based on his approach. (As Laszlo puts it, the art world is "very jealous and sinister.") In 1994, after years of frustration, the Biros took the painting to a Turner scholar, David Hill, at the University of Leeds. He thought that the composition and coloring strongly pointed to the hand of Turner, and he enlisted John Manners, a fingerprint examiner with the West Yorkshire Police, to verify Biro's conclusions. "Not my cup of tea, really," Manners said of the painting at the time. "Of course, some Turner canvases are magnificent. Not this one, in my opinion." Still, he said, the fingerprints definitely matched: "It is a Turner." Hill called the fingerprints the "clinching piece of evidence."
The story of the fingerprints circulated around the world—"BURIED TREASURE VERIFIED BY SCIENCE," the Toronto Globe and Mail declared—and many Turner scholars relented on the question of attribution. "It was the pressure of the media," Biro said. "They were beginning to look foolish." In 1995, the painting, called "Landscape with a Rainbow," was sold as a Turner at the Phillips auction house in London. An undisclosed bidder bought it for more than a hundred and fifty thousand dollars—a sum that would have been even higher had the painting been in better condition. It was the first art work officially authenticated based on fingerprint identification. Biro asserted that he had uncovered the painting's "forensic provenance," telling a reporter, "The science of fingerprint identification is a true science. There are no gray areas." Having developed what he advertised as a "rigorous methodology" that followed "accepted police standards," he began to devote part of the family business to authenticating works of art with fingerprints—or, as he liked to say, to "placing an artist at the scene of the creation of a work."
In 2000, Biro took on an even more spectacular case. A retired truck driver named Teri Horton hired Biro to examine a large drip canvas, painted in the kinetic style of Jackson Pollock, that she had bought for five dollars at a thrift shop in San Bernardino, California. After inspecting the work, Biro announced that he had found a partial fingerprint on the back of the canvas, and had matched it to a fingerprint on a paint can that is displayed in Pollock's old studio, in East Hampton. André Turcotte, a retired fingerprint examiner with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, supported the results. But the International Foundation for Art Research, a nonprofit organization that is the primary authenticator of Pollock's works, balked, saying that Biro's method was not yet "universally" accepted. Biro, in a report on Horton's painting, wrote that he had been warned that "science prying into the closed world of connoisseurship is likely to make me many enemies." Horton, meanwhile, became a modern-day Harry and Andrée Hahn, dismissing the method of traditional connoisseurs as "bullshit," and the whole art world as a "fraud."
Biro told me that he maintains a firewall between his research and the sale of a painting, and that he receives the same fee—two thousand dollars a day—regardless of the outcome of his investigation. "If I stopped being disinterested, my credibility will be gone," he said. But he felt "morally obliged" to stand behind his findings.
The effort to authenticate the painting became a crusade. Horton went on "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno," and her struggle was valorized in a 2006 documentary called "Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock?" In the film, Biro is depicted as a champion of science and of a woman with an eighth-grade education battling an autocratic establishment. The main antagonist—"the effete, nose-in-the-air art expert," as he later quipped of his role—is Thomas Hoving. He is shown, in a suit and tie, sitting before Horton's picture and declaring, "Dead on arrival." Later, offering a rationale for his response, he noted that Horton's picture featured acrylic paint, which had not previously been documented in Pollock's drip paintings.
Biro, undaunted, visited Pollock's old studio and extracted pigment samples from the floor, where the artist had once spread his canvases and applied paint. In a report, Biro wrote that he had used a "microchemistry test"—a method of mixing a paint sample with other chemicals to analyze its characteristics. "The very first sample of paint I tested," he said, "turned out to be acrylic." He also revealed that gold paint from a matchstick embedded in the floor was the same as gold paint found in Horton's picture. Hoving remained unmoved. He dismissed the fingerprints, and said of Horton, "She knows nothing. . . . I'm an expert, she's not." In reviews of the film, Hoving was denounced as a "pompous fool" and a "villain"; Biro was called a "hero."
Based on Biro's findings, Horton was offered two million dollars for her painting, but she held out for more. Biro assured her that the art world could not continue to resist a forensic method that had been used to convict criminals for more than a century. And though many connoisseurs and collectors opposed his technique, more and more accepted it. He told me that he had authenticated two Picassos, half a dozen Turners, a Thomas Hart Benton, and close to a dozen other Pollocks. Several of the world's top connoisseurs sought Biro's expertise. Three years ago, two leading Pollock scholars, Claude Cernuschi and Ellen G. Landau, cited Biro's evaluation of a suspected Pollock, saying, "Artists' fingerprints do not show up just anywhere. Their presence cannot be dismissed or simply explained away." Around this time, Biro helped Martin Kemp attribute a painting, partly on the basis of fingerprints, to one of Leonardo's assistants. In an earlier e-mail to a client, Biro wrote, "The world is changing. Not as fast as one would hope but it is changing nevertheless."
In 2009, Biro and Nicholas Eastaugh, a scientist known for his expertise on pigments, formed a company, Art Access and Research, which analyzes and authenticates paintings. Biro is its director of forensic studies. Clients include museums, private galleries, corporations, dealers, and major auction houses such as Sotheby's. Biro was also enlisted by the Pigmentum Project, which is affiliated with Oxford University. His work is published in museum catalogues and in scientific publications, including Antiquity and the official journal of the Royal Microscopical Society. In the media, he has become one of the most prominent art experts, featured in documentaries and news reports. (He was once mentioned in this magazine, in The Talk of the Town.) He even has a cameo—as the man who "pioneered the whole technique" of fingerprint authentications—in Peter Robinson's popular detective novel "Playing with Fire"; the story is about a charming, "chameleonlike" con man who runs an art-forgery ring. On his Web site, Biro notes that law enforcement has adopted his approach: "My analytical techniques were presented internally at a training course at the F.B.I. I am not permitted to go beyond that."
Biro told me that the divide between connoisseurs and scientists was finally eroding. The best demonstration of this change, he added, was the fact that he had been commissioned to examine "La Bella Principessa" and, possibly, help make one of the greatest discoveries in the history of art.
During one of the visits I made to Biro's home, he offered to share with me what he had learned about "La Bella Principessa." We were in the living room, and the sweet scent of his wife's French cooking kept wafting in from the kitchen. "You've never tasted anything so good," Biro said. He went over to a varnished desk, where there was a computer, and clicked on an icon. An image of the drawing appeared on the screen. He zoomed in on the upper-left edge of the parchment, and pointed to a small mark on the surface: a fingerprint. It looked like little more than a smudge, and I squinted at the blurry lines.
Even in a high-resolution photograph, the fingerprint was unreadable; Biro called it "complete visual confusion." Many fingerprint examiners, he said, would have been stymied. Then, as if he were lining up a row of mug shots, he called up a series of photographs from a multispectral-imaging camera. Because the images had been made with different wavelengths of light, none of them looked exactly the same. In some photographs, the texture of the parchment—the background "noise," as Biro put it—was pronounced. In others, the ridge patterns in the fingerprint were accentuated and the parchment all but faded away. From one photograph to the next, Biro said, "the smudge becomes clearer." Still, it was not clear enough. His next step, he said, was "proprietary." Using advanced image-processing software, he subtracted the background noise from each image, until only the clearest parts of the fingerprint remained. Finally, he said, clicking on another icon, "You get this."
The smudge had been transformed into a more legible print: now, at least, there were the outlines of ridges and bumps. When I asked Biro if he worried that his method might be flawed, he said that during nearly two decades of fingerprint examinations he had "not made one mistake." He added, "I take a long time and I don't allow myself to be rushed."
Biro showed me another fingerprint, this one taken from Leonardo's "St. Jerome," which hangs in the Vatican. It was the clearest fingerprint from an undisputed work by Leonardo. On the computer screen, Biro moved the image of the "St. Jerome" fingerprint alongside the one from "La Bella Principessa." "See that?" he said, pointing to an elevated ridge, or "island," in each print. The island in "La Bella Principessa," he said, was identical in shape to the island from the "St. Jerome" fingerprint. He added that he had found seven other overlapping characteristics. The results, Biro said, indicated that the paintings had been touched by the same hand more than five hundred years ago, which pointed to one conclusion: "La Bella Principessa" was a genuine Leonardo.
For a moment, Biro stared at the prints in silence, as if still awed by what he had found. The discovery, he said, was a "validation" of his life's work. After he first revealed his findings, last October, a prominent dealer estimated that the drawing could be worth a hundred and fifty million dollars. (The unnamed "lady" who had sold it at Christie's for less than twenty-two thousand dollars came forward and identified herself as Jeanne Marchig, a Swedish animal-rights activist. Citing, among other things, the fingerprint evidence, she sued the auction house for "negligence" and "breach of warranty" for failing to attribute the drawing correctly.)
In the wake of Biro's announcement, Peter Silverman, the Canadian who had helped acquire the drawing, told a reporter, "Thank God, we have the fingerprint, because there will still be those doubting Thomases out there, saying it couldn't possibly be." To object now, he said, would be to "go against science and say the Earth is not round." Biro, meanwhile, was lauded around the world. As an Australian newspaper put it, "ART EXPERT CRACKS DA CODE."
And so, with this final flourish, the glittering portrait of Peter Paul Biro was complete: he was the triumphant scientist who had transformed the art world. Like "La Bella Principessa," the image was romantic, almost idealized—the version of Biro that was most appealing to the eye. But, somewhere along the way, I began to notice small, and then more glaring, imperfections in this picture.
One of the first cracks appeared when I examined the case of Alex Matter, a filmmaker whose parents had been close to Jackson Pollock. In 2005, Matter announced that he had discovered a cache of art works in his late father's storage space, on Long Island. Ellen Landau, the art historian, said that she was "absolutely convinced" that the paintings were by Pollock. Biro was sent a photograph of a fingerprint impressed on the front of one picture. He identified six characteristics that corresponded with the fingerprint on the paint can in Pollock's studio—strong evidence that the work was by Pollock. But, as more and more connoisseurs weighed in, they noticed patterns that seemed at odds with Pollock's style. Meanwhile, in sixteen of twenty art works submitted for analysis, forensic scientists discovered pigments that were not patented until after Pollock's death, in 1956. At a symposium three years ago, Pollock experts all but ruled out the pictures. Ronald D. Spencer, a lawyer who represents the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, told me, "Biro can find all the fingerprints he wants. But, in terms of the marketplace, the Matter paintings are done. They are finished."
When I first talked to Biro about Matter's cache, he had noted that no anachronistic pigments were found on the picture that he had authenticated, and he said that it was possible that Pollock had created only a few of the pictures, or that he had simply touched one of them. After all, Pollock was a friend of Matter's parents.
His explanation seemed plausible, but I kept being troubled by other details relating to Biro's Pollock investigations. For instance, it was peculiar that even though there were no documented cases of acrylic being used in Pollock's pour paintings, Biro had easily found some on the floor of the Long Island studio—indeed, in the very first sample he tested. I contacted a leading forensic scientist in the art world who teaches at the F.B.I. Academy, in Quantico, Virginia, and who has done research in the Pollock studio. The scientist told me that he had spent hours combing the floor and had not found any acrylic. He added that a microchemistry test was not even considered suitable for identifying acrylic. As for the gold paint particles that Biro said he had uncovered on the studio floor and matched to the pigment in Teri Horton's painting, Helen Harrison, an art historian who is the director of the Pollock-Krasner House & Study Center, which oversees Pollock's old studio, told me that she did not know of Pollock's having used gold in any of his pour paintings.
Reporters work, in many ways, like authenticators. We encounter people, form intuitions about them, and then attempt to verify these impressions. I began to review Biro's story; I spoke again with people I had already interviewed, and tracked down other associates. A woman who had once known him well told me, "Look deeper into his past. Look at his family business." As I probed further, I discovered an underpainting that I had never imagined.
One day, I visited the records office at the Palais de Justice, the provincial courthouse in downtown Montreal. The office was in a windowless, fluorescent-lit room, and, like a remnant of Soviet bureaucracy, it was filled with cardboard boxes and with clerks who were consumed with distinct, but equally dismal, tasks. I asked a clerk if there were any case files connected to anyone with the surname Biro, and after a long wait I was handed a stack of mottled folders. During the eighties and early nineties, more than a dozen civil lawsuits had been filed against Peter Paul Biro, his brother, his father, or their art businesses. Many of them stemmed from unpaid creditors. An owner of a picture-frame company alleged that the Biros had issued checks that bounced and had operated "under the cover" of defunct companies "with the clear aim of confusing their creditors." (The matter was settled out of court.) As I sifted through the files, I found other cases that raised fundamental questions about Peter Paul Biro's work as a restorer and an art dealer.
On February 12, 1981, Sam and Syd Wise, brothers who were art collectors in Montreal, stopped by the Biros' gallery. Peter Paul Biro was present, along with his father, Geza. The restoration business was in the back of the gallery, and the Biros often wore white laboratory coats. Although Peter Paul was the youngest member of the family, people familiar with the company say that he often seemed to be the dominant figure. A lawyer who was involved in cases brought against the Biros said that Peter Paul was "the brains of the operation."
Though the gallery was filled mostly with Geza's landscape paintings, Peter Paul told the Wises that they had for sale an exemplary oil painting by Goodridge Roberts, the Canadian artist. The picture was signed and showed what appeared to be Georgian Bay, in Ontario, which Roberts had often rendered in his paintings. The Wises bought the picture for ninety-five hundred dollars. Soon afterward, Peter Paul informed the Wises that he had another landscape painting by Roberts, and the Wises, who had already sold the first picture to a local gallery, agreed to buy the second one, for seventy-five hundred dollars.
In 1983, Goodridge Roberts's widow, Joan, happened to visit the gallery where the Wises had sold the Georgian Bay painting. She had been intimately involved in her husband's work, keeping a catalogue of his paintings, and she was immediately drawn to the picture. As she subsequently testified, it mimicked her husband's paintings, but the trees were "feeble imitations," the play of the colors was jarring, and the signature appeared oddly slanted. Moreover, she had never catalogued the work. She went up to the dealer and cried, "That's a fake."
The Wises, alerted to the allegation, rushed to see Peter Paul Biro. "I indicated to him that it was very important for us to establish the authenticity," Syd Wise later testified. Biro refused, multiple times, to divulge where he had obtained either of the paintings. According to the Wises, Biro insisted that the person who sold him the paintings was in Europe, and that it was impossible to contact him.
Soon afterward, three of the world's most highly regarded experts on Roberts confirmed that they were fakes. As one of them later testified, usually "a man who makes a forgery makes mistakes," and these had some obvious ones.
Customarily, art dealers are bound to stand behind what they sell, and the Wises refunded the gallery that had bought the Georgian Bay painting. But Peter Paul Biro insisted that the works were genuine—and that, in any case, the Wises had had an opportunity to investigate the paintings before buying them. He refused to reimburse the Wises, who ultimately sued. In an affidavit, the Wises said that Biro and his father had "perpetrated a fraud, in that they knowingly sold . . . a forgery." The Wises were represented by G. George Sand, who handled many civil cases involving art. In 1984, during a sworn deposition, he questioned Peter Paul Biro. For the first time, Biro disclosed the name of the person who had sold him the Roberts paintings. "George Pap," Biro said, adding, "Actually, the proper name is Zsolt Pap. Pap is the family name."
Sand pressed Biro about Pap's identity. Biro said that Pap was of Hungarian descent, and lived in Montreal. Sand seized upon this, asking, "Did you tell Mr. Wise that this person was in Europe?"
"No," Biro said. (Later, at trial, he said that he had told the Wises that it was Pap's father who was in Europe.) When Biro was asked why he hadn't revealed Zsolt Pap's name to the Wises, he said, "I didn't want to."
Sand sought proof of a financial transaction—a check or a credit-card payment—between Biro and Pap. Biro, however, said that he had obtained them in exchange for two musical instruments: a Steinway piano and a cello.
Sand was incredulous: "Is Mr. Pap a music dealer or is he an art dealer?" After Biro could not recall where he had originally purchased the cello, Sand suddenly asked him, "You ever been convicted of a criminal offense, sir?"
"No."
"You are certain of that?"
"Yes," Biro said.
Asked whether anybody in his family had done work on the paintings, Biro said that his father had merely cleaned them. (Later, when Geza was asked if he had done anything more, such as retouching, he said, "No, no." They were "intact.")
Sand demanded that Biro provide an address for Pap, and Biro eventually did so. But Sand told me that he twice issued a subpoena to that location—and that no Zsolt Pap ever showed up.
Meanwhile, Sand had obtained a court order to seize various possessions at the Biros' gallery. Several paintings were confiscated, including one whose frame had a plaque engraved with the name John Constable, the English Romantic painter. When the case went to trial, Sand asked Biro if the Constable belonged to him, and Biro said that it was owned by a client and was being restored. Given the value of Constable's work, Sand asked Biro if he had notified the owner that his painting had been seized. "No," Biro said. "The client lived in Florida and he moved, and we could not locate him."
"A Constable painting, sir, don't you agree with me, is a very expensive painting?" Sand asked.
"Except that this painting was not a Constable."
Biro said that the painting had been bought at an auction, in Montreal, for five hundred dollars.
"You are restoring something that was not a John Constable?"
"Sure."
"I see. Even though the name plaque said 'John Constable'?"
"Sure."
Throughout the trial, the Biros and their attorneys maintained that the two paintings sold to the Wises were authentic, but to make their case they presented an art expert who was not a specialist on Roberts, or even on Canadian art. On September 3, 1986, the court found in favor of the Wises, and ordered Peter Paul and Geza Biro to pay them the seventeen thousand dollars they had spent on the pictures, as well as interest.
About two years after the Wises' case, Sand was contacted by another former client of the Biros, an art-and-antique collector named Saul Hendler, who has since died. According to court records and interviews with Sand and Hendler's wife, Marion, the Biros approached Hendler in 1983, saying that they had found a suspected Renoir, signed by the artist, which, if authenticated, was worth millions of dollars. The Biros asked Hendler to front them nine thousand dollars to buy the painting, a portrait of a nude woman; the Biros would then authenticate the work and sell it, sharing the profits. Hendler gave them the money. Not long afterward, Peter Paul Biro consulted a leading Renoir expert, who determined that the painting was a fake and that the signature was forged. The Biros refunded Hendler half his money, and eventually agreed to give him the painting, which still had some value as a decorative piece.
When Hendler picked up the picture, he thought that the composition looked vaguely different. He had previously made a photo transparency of the painting, and at home he compared it with the canvas he had just been handed. "My late husband was furious," Marion Hendler told me. "Then I saw it, and I was horrified. It was clearly not the same painting." Had the Biros sold the original painting without telling Hendler?
Marion and her husband went to the Center for Art Restoration, and confronted Geza Biro. Marion recalls that Geza—who often referred to himself with the honorific "Doctor," though he lacked a Ph.D.—was charming but also arrogant: "It was as if he was the great artiste, and whatever he said was true." One of Geza's sons, she said, inadvertently began to "spill information," revealing that Geza liked to "copy a real artist's work." She added, "The whole thing suddenly came together: He's the one who does it. The father did this to our painting."
Hendler, unable to get back what he considered the original painting, sued the Biros for the rest of the money he had paid. In a written response, the Biros called the allegations "false and untrue and defamatory," adding that "the sole difference in the painting was the work which had been performed on the painting by the Defendants in lifting the paint in order to discover the original painting which had appeared on the canvas." During the trial, which took place in 1992, Sand called to the stand an art expert who testified that the painting was not the same as the one Hendler had bought. The court agreed, awarding Hendler several thousand dollars. But Marion asked me, "What did we win?" She went on, "Where's that piece of art? We never got it back. He probably sold it for a lot of money and we got this piece of junk in return."
Lawsuits had piled up against Peter Paul Biro and his family business. In two instances, there were allegations that art works had vanished under mysterious circumstances while in the care of Peter Paul. In one of the cases, Serge Joyal, who is now a senator in Canada, told me that he left a nineteenth-century drawing with the Biros to be restored. Before he could pick it up, Peter Paul notified him that it had been stolen from his car and that there was no insurance. Biro, however, never filed a police report, and Joyal says that Biro pleaded with him to wait before going to the authorities. During their conversations, Joyal says, Peter Paul acted evasive and suspicious, and Joyal became convinced that Biro was lying about the theft. As Joyal put it, "There was something fishy." Though Peter Paul said that there was nothing "suspect" about his behavior, and that he should not be held liable, the court awarded Joyal seven thousand dollars, plus interest.
Elizabeth Lipsz, a Montreal businesswoman who had once been close to Biro, and who won a lawsuit against him for unpaid loans, described him to me as a "classic con man." Her lawyer told me that Biro "was so convincing. He was very suave, soft-spoken, but after a while you catch him in different lies and you realize that the guy is a phony."
Within Montreal's small art world, there were whispers about Peter Paul Biro and his father. But the lawsuits appear to have attracted virtually no public attention. In 1993, Peter Paul Biro filed for bankruptcy, and he never paid many of the judgments against him, including what he owed the Wises and Joyal. Lipsz's lawyer said of Biro, "He oiled his way out of that whole thing. . . . He got away scot-free."
When I met with Sand at his law office, in Montreal, he told me he was amazed that Biro's history had not tarnished his reputation and that he had reached such an exalted position. He said that, for years, he had read with curiosity about Biro's authenticating paintings using forensic science. He looked at me intently and asked, "What's the deal with all those fingerprints?"
In December, 2004, Ken Parker, a New York private investigator who had no experience with the art world, went to Montreal and showed Peter Paul Biro a drip painting that he and his siblings had received from their father. Parker hoped that the work was a Pollock, and he had read about Biro's celebrated efforts on Teri Horton's behalf. Several weeks after Parker left his painting with Biro, he received an e-mail from him about fingerprints that he had found on the back of the painting. "You are so lucky," Biro wrote. "I am able to confirm a match to a print that appears on a paint can in the Pollock-Krasner House. It is also the same print as the one on Teri Horton's painting."
According to dozens of e-mails between Parker and Biro, and tape-recorded conversations, Parker was thrilled by Biro's findings, but over time he and his wife, Kathy, grew concerned. As Biro held out the promise of authenticating their painting, and thus making them a fortune, he kept asking them for additional funds for his research. At one point, he requested several thousand dollars for a camera platform, offering, in return, to "produce an image of your Pollock that could not be made any other way." Then he wanted two thousand dollars to get his camera "up to speed." Then came another request: "Can you continue to pitch in smaller amounts? I am now quite certain that with $5,000 I can have the unit up and running." Biro also stressed that in order to improve the painting's value he had to restore it perfectly. "I don't want to see one rusty staple on it," he said, adding, "I would be very happy if you sent me $5,000 as I have seriously underestimated this last phase of the work." Kathy Parker later recalled, "Every time we turned around, he was asking for more money."
Biro soon asked Ken Parker—whose late father and stepmother had won several million dollars from the New York Lotto—to make a much larger investment. Biro was part of an effort to launch a venture named Provenance, which would provide, as he put it, the "clever strategy" necessary to sell "orphaned" paintings for tens of millions of dollars. According to a business prospectus, marked confidential, Provenance would acquire art works that had been forensically validated by Biro and several colleagues, and sell them in a gallery in New York City. The company chose a thumbprint for a logo. The driving force behind the venture was Tod Volpe, an art dealer who had once represented celebrities, including Jack Nicholson and Barbra Streisand. Biro, who had suggested that Volpe might serve as the Parkers' dealer, described him, in an e-mail, as "brilliant, resourceful, and extremely well connected." Biro said that his brother, Laszlo—whose "knowledge was invaluable"—would also be a central part of the company. Once Provenance was established, Biro told the Parkers, "there really is nothing we can no[t] do."
The plan called for raising sixty-five million dollars from investors, part of which would go toward buying J. P. Morgan's old headquarters, on Wall Street, and turning it into a palatial arts complex anchored by a gallery. Surprisingly, at least five million dollars of investors' money would also go to purchasing Teri Horton's painting—even though Biro had authenticated the work and Volpe had tried to sell it. By capitalizing on the media interest surrounding the painting, the plan said, the work could be resold for between forty and sixty million dollars, maybe even a hundred million. Although Biro has always publicly maintained that he had no financial stake in Horton's painting, Horton sent an e-mail to the Parkers saying that after the sale of her painting Biro would "collect" and that it would "set him for life."
The business plan noted that Biro had access to "more than 20" other valuable orphaned paintings, all of which could be sold at Provenance. Among them were paintings by artists with whom Biro and his family had long been closely associated, including three by Turner and a landscape by Constable. The plan estimated that each year Provenance would accept anywhere from twenty to thirty new possible masterpieces for scientific evaluation, of which nearly half would be authenticated, creating staggering profits. (The forensic expert who works with the F.B.I. expressed surprise at this prediction, telling me that, in the overwhelming majority of cases involving disputed art, the work fails to be authenticated.)
Provenance was cleverly tapping into the public's desire to crack open the art world, offering the tantalizing dream that anyone could find a Pollock or a Leonardo or a Turner languishing in a basement or a thrift shop. The company combined the forensic triumphalism of "C.S.I." with the lottery ethos of "Antiques Roadshow." (An associate producer at "Roadshow" had already sent Biro an e-mail about possibly doing a segment on the Parkers' "unbelievable discovery.")
The public's distrust of the cloistered art world helps to explain why a forger, or a swindler, is so often perceived as a romantic avenger, his deceptions exposing the deeper fraudulence of the establishment. When Han van Meegeren was tried for his Vermeer forgeries, in 1947, his lawyer insisted, "The art world is reeling, and experts are beginning to doubt the very basis of artistic attribution. This was precisely what the defendant was trying to achieve." In fact, most art swindlers have no grand intellectual design; rather, they are, as Thomas Hoving once put it, "money-grubbing confidence men, delighted to cobble up something that will get by in the rush for big profits."
According to Parker, Volpe asked him for a "contribution" of five million dollars toward launching Provenance. (In an e-mail, Volpe had assured the Parkers that "when people lie it takes a part of their souls with them.") Even if the Parkers didn't want to help open the gallery, Biro wrote to Ken Parker, he hoped that they would invest "about 1.5 to 2 million" dollars for his research and equipment. "I think you could really do something for art and science if you supported this (not to mention your painting)," Biro said.
Ken Parker estimated that, by this point, he had given Biro between "thirty-five and fifty thousand dollars." Kathy Parker later recalled, "He basically took our money and we thought he was real. He's got a great lab, has a great line. . . . Then what would happen was that he'd be away—'I'm off to Paris with my wife for two weeks'—and he'd give us some reason." She went on, "He came down to New York, he's staying in wonderful hotels, eating, drinking—he loves to eat and drink. . . . And every time he wrote he's, like, 'I haven't gotten to your work because I had the flu.' "
Biro previously had been suspected of creating an investment scheme around a seemingly precious object, with the promise that it would eventually reap huge profits. In the late nineteen-nineties, he persuaded a Canadian financial adviser, Richard Lafferty, who is now dead, to invest in a venture to authenticate and sell a work purportedly by Raphael's disciple Perino del Vaga. Three of Lafferty's colleagues confirm the story, as do letters, memorandums, and other documents.
Biro claimed that he and his brother had found the circular painting, which looked like Raphael's "Madonna della Sedia," at an antique store in Boston; Biro had purportedly found a fingerprint on it that matched a fingerprint on an undisputed work by Perino. What's more, he said, he and his brother had invented a unique ultrasound instrument—they called it a Perinoscope—and used it to detect a note hidden inside a secret compartment in the picture's frame. The note was written in Italian and was dated April 5, 1520—the day before Raphael died. The Old Master appeared to have dictated a message to Perino, just before his death. The note said, "These are the words of my master as he instructed me to say and to do. If my faithful Perino has finished my last Madonna he has now the greatest treasure of all in his hands." Raphael's signature appeared in partial form, suggesting that he had been too ill to finish writing his name.
According to colleagues, Lafferty, who had once been a combative and astute financial analyst, was nearing the end of his life, and had grown less mentally agile; bored and lonely, he was drawn to Biro. One colleague recalls that the painting, which Lafferty spoke of as the "holy grail," gave Lafferty "something to live for." In a 1999 letter, Lafferty wrote that he had already invested eight hundred thousand dollars in the project. Lafferty's accountant, Luc Desjardins, told me that altogether Lafferty spent well over a million dollars—but the painting never sold. A research team at Harvard analyzed the secret message, and, according to Lafferty's summary of its findings, it had never seen "sixteenth-century ink act as it does on that particular document." Caroline Elam, a leading scholar on the Renaissance, suggested that the work was "a very skilled, elaborate and expert hoax." Lafferty's longtime business partner, Allan Aitken, told me that he believed that "Biro was either a shyster or a con man, and had found in Lafferty an easy mark."
By the fall of 2005, Ken Parker had begun to look into the people behind Provenance. It turned out that Tod Volpe, in the nineties, had defrauded his art clients, including Jack Nicholson, of nearly two million dollars, and had served two years in prison. Parker discovered that one of Volpe's principal partners in Provenance was also an ex-con, who had done time for tax evasion and for running a drug-smuggling operation in the United States. (Volpe told me, "We all have skeletons in our past.") Parker confronted Biro, who, in a subsequent e-mail, told Parker that he had "severed all communication with Volpe." To avoid any potential conflict of interest, he said, he was rescinding any request for investment money: "I must maintain absolute neutrality."
Biro told me that his request for millions of dollars from the Parkers came after he had finished his authentication of their painting. But, according to e-mails at the time, the Parkers were still waiting for his final report. And only months after rescinding his request for money he asked the Parkers to fund another new project: a privately endowed department for him and a colleague at Oxford University. "Naturally it is 100% tax deductible," Biro wrote, in an e-mail. "Those who support the foundation of a bold and new department for us at Oxford will have their name on a plaque or have the department named after them such as 'The Ken Parker Department for Forensic Art History.' Sounds cool?"
Parker, meanwhile, launched an investigation into the provenance of his painting. He learned that his father had obtained the work from a couple named Thelma and Norman Grossman. Parker tracked down the Grossmans. According to Thelma Grossman, she had bought the painting for a few hundred dollars from a young artist in Brooklyn who was skilled at imitating famous artists. As she put it, it is certain that the painting "is not a Jackson Pollock." Later, Parker had a forensic scientist examine several paint samples. The test indicated the presence of acrylic emulsion—the kind of paint that has not been documented in a Pollock painting.
In March, 2007, the Parkers' widening inquiry led them to a company called Global Fine Art Registry. One of the main services of the registry, which is based in Phoenix, is to provide art works with a tag, rather like a Vehicle Identification Number, and catalogue them in a database, in order to create a record of their provenance. The founder of the company, Theresa Franks, although not well known in the art world, has cast herself as a crusader against fraud in a realm that she describes as the "last wild frontier." Operating out of her home, she pursues her own investigations, hiring independent experts and posting reports on her Web site. (One of her recent campaigns was against a company named Park West Gallery, which, she alleged, was selling fake prints by Salvador Dali. The gallery's founder, who called her attacks "cyber-terrorism," sued for defamation. In April, a jury ruled unanimously in Franks's favor, and awarded her half a million dollars in a counterclaim.)
Franks became particularly interested in Biro's methods after Frankie Brown, an artist in California, told her that he had seen a photograph of the Teri Horton painting, in People, and wondered if it might be his own work. Franks hired as an expert Tom Hanley, the chief of police in Middlebury, Vermont, who had more than two decades of experience as a fingerprint examiner. Hanley told me that he approached Biro, who had previously stated about Horton's painting, "My work is (and has been) available for evaluation to qualified experts." Yet Biro declined to share his evidence, saying that Horton had objected to the idea.
Hanley was thus forced to rely on bits of information that Biro had posted on his Web site, several years earlier. The online report contains a photograph of the partial fingerprint that Biro said he had found on the back of Horton's painting. In Hanley's judgment, the impression lacked the kind of detail—the clear ridges and furrows—that is necessary to make a proper comparison.
After Hanley revealed his findings to Franks, she raised questions on her Web site about the reliability of Biro's fingerprint methodology. Biro then inserted a clarification to his online report. It said:
For security reasons, several images in this report are watermarked in a way that is not apparent to the observer. The fingerprint images have also been reduced in resolution so as to render them unusable except for illustration.
I advise against evaluating the fingerprint images illustrated in this report as if they were the actual source material. Any attempt to do so is pointless.
Biro told me that such secrecy protected the privacy of his clients and prevented anyone from misusing the fingerprint. To Hanley, this was baffling: what forensic scientist avoids peer review and even admits to doctoring evidence in order to prevent others from evaluating it? "If what he found are truly fingerprints, why isn't he sharing?" Franks asked me. In any case, Hanley, unable to examine Biro's evidence firsthand, had reached a dead end.
Then Ken Parker told Hanley and Franks about his drama with Biro. Parker said that Hanley was welcome to examine his painting. For the first time, Hanley was able directly to observe Biro's fingerprint evidence. He noted several fingerprints on the back of the picture, including two on the wooden stretcher frame, which were black, as if they had been made with ink. Looking through a magnifying glass, Hanley focussed on the most legible fingerprint, which appeared to be covered with a clear finishing coat, like a varnish. Parker said that before giving the painting to Biro he hadn't noticed a fingerprint on it. "I don't know where it came from," he said. He said that Biro had told him he had used some sort of "resin process" to make it more visible. Hanley had never seen a print developed in this fashion. Based on the clarity of the impression, Hanley thought that the fingerprint had to be relatively new—certainly not from half a century ago, when Pollock was alive.
Parker also retained the services of Lawrence Rooney, a retired detective sergeant and latent-print examiner who had worked in the Suffolk County Police's identification unit, and who had more than two decades of experience as a fingerprint analyst. Rooney agreed that the fingerprint appeared too recent to have come from Pollock. He was also alarmed by the "resin process," and, as he wrote in a report, the use of a "liquid seal" coating was "beyond all acceptable professional methods of latent print preservation and opens the door to many valid questions relating to the latent prints' origin of placement and development."
Hanley kept staring at the way the fingerprints rested on the surface of the wood, without the usual smudging or obliteration. He noticed that they shared an eerily similar shape. And he began to wonder if he was seeing something virtually unheard of: forged fingerprints. In a 1903 Sherlock Holmes story, "The Adventure of the Norwood Builder," the detective discovers that a criminal has made a wax impression of a solicitor's fingerprint and then framed him by stamping the forged fingerprint at an apparent murder scene. "It was a masterpiece of villainy," Holmes says. The scheme became a common trope in detective fiction, but there are almost no documented cases of a criminal forging another person's fingerprint. In the nineteen-forties, a safe burglar named Nedelkoff set himself up as a fortune-teller in Eastern Europe, and asked clients to press their hands into a soft clay tablet. Later, he poured liquid rubber into the clay impressions, creating soft casts of their fingertips. During his robberies, Nedelkoff pressed his former clients' fingerprints onto safes. (Eventually, his scheme was unravelled by police.)
There were only a few examiners with any expertise in forged and fabricated fingerprints, and Hanley recommended that Theresa Franks hire Pat A. Wertheim. A bespectacled man with gray hair and a thick mustache, Wertheim works in the crime lab of the Arizona Department of Public Safety, and is also a private consultant. He teaches fingerprint analysis to law-enforcement officials around the world and has published numerous articles on the subject. Though forged fingerprints are rare, he says, a person with expertise could produce one with a rubber stamp, or even with an engraving made from a photograph of a fingerprint.
On October 27, 2007, Wertheim went with Hanley to the Parkers' house, on Long Island, to examine their painting. Looking at four fingerprints on the back of the stretcher frame and the canvas, Wertheim was struck by their extremely irregular shape—the bulges and curves along their boundaries. Then he noticed something even more peculiar. Each one of a person's ten fingers leaves a distinct impression, and the elasticity of skin makes it all but impossible to leave precisely the same fingerprint impression twice. Yet the two most visible fingerprints on the Parkers' painting, Wertheim says, were virtually exact overlays of each other: the same shape, the same pressure, the same ridge patterns. What's more, the visible parts of the two other fingerprints also lined up perfectly with these prints. In his more than three decades as an examiner, he had never seen a set of fingerprints like this.
When Wertheim examined one of the prints closely, he could make out several bubble-like voids. Although a person's sweat pores often leave voids in a fingerprint, Wertheim says that these voids were unusually big and elongated.
Wertheim had a hunch about what had caused the voids, and he went with Hanley to Pollock's old studio. Wertheim examined the fingerprint impression on the paint can. It matched the clearest fingerprints on the Parkers' painting, Wertheim says. Hanley then made a silicone cast from the impression on the paint can. Incredibly, Wertheim says, all four fingerprints on the Parkers' painting fit snugly within the boundaries of the cast impression. As Wertheim suspected, the cast also produced similar voids—they were caused from air bubbles that had formed in the rubber.
Altogether, Wertheim says, he tallied eight characteristics that were inconsistent with normal fingerprints. In a final report, he concluded that all of them had been made by a cast from the fingerprint on the paint can. As he told me, the fingerprints "screamed forgery."
When a forgery is exposed, people in the art world generally have the same reaction: how could anyone have ever been fooled by something so obviously phony, so artless? Few connoisseurs still think that Han van Meegeren's paintings look at all like Vermeers, or even have any artistic value. Forgers usually succeed not because they are so talented but, rather, because they provide, at a moment in time, exactly what others desperately want to see. Conjurers as much as copyists, they fulfill a wish or a fantasy. And so the inconsistencies—crooked signatures, uncharacteristic brushstrokes—are ignored or explained away.
If a forgery's success were to depend on fake fingerprints, rather than on the sly imitation of a painter's style, it would represent a radical departure from the methods employed by art forgers over thousands of years. And yet such a forgery would perfectly reflect the contemporary faith in science to conquer every realm, even one where beauty is supposed to be in the eye of the beholder.
Many owners of faked art works are reluctant to bring charges that may demolish the value of their property—one of the reasons that art crimes are often difficult to prosecute. Early on, Parker had told Franks that, if he became convinced that Biro had perpetrated a fraud, "I fully intend to prosecute this guy." In April, 2008, when Franks informed Parker that Wertheim had concluded that the prints were forged, Parker told her that he had his own news about the painting: "We sold it about two weeks ago." He said that he had showed Biro's authentication report to the buyer. Parker recently told me that a group of investors had bought the painting for a "substantial sum," though he still owned a share in it. He suggested that Thelma Grossman's story about buying the painting in Brooklyn might be "mistaken," and he called Theresa Franks a publicity seeker, adding that he did not want to be part of a "witch hunt" against Biro. He told me, "I have no reason to believe it's not a Pollock."
On a recent summer day, I paid a final visit to Biro's home. Biro told me that Laszlo would be joining us, and he soon appeared—a more compact and muscular version of his younger brother. The three of us sat around a table on a balcony overlooking the courtyard. Biro had opened a bottle of a Hungarian white wine ("a fantastic Tokaji"), and he calmly sipped from his glass as I asked him about the allegations that had been made against them.
Peter Paul said that the old lawsuits had involved relatively small amounts, and, as he later wrote in an e-mail, often stemmed from disgruntled "treasure seekers" who "hoped to turn a thousand into ten or even into millions and then turned on us and still make nasty comments because their greed did not turn to gold." He said that although Richard Lafferty, the financial adviser, may have spent more than a million dollars on the purported painting by Raphael's disciple, not all the checks went to the Biros. Laszlo added that Lafferty had "the last word" in what he spent. Peter Paul, who referred to the allegations by Lafferty's colleagues as "hearsay," told me that no scholar had questioned the authenticity of the picture or of the note tucked inside the frame. When I subsequently uncovered documents indicating otherwise, Peter Paul said, "I don't recall anything of that nature."
At one point, I mentioned that a scientist deemed it incredible that Peter Paul had found acrylic on Pollock's studio floor with his "very first sample of paint." He said that he had been referring simply to his "first visit" to the studio. I asked him why he had performed a microchemistry test, given that it is not an accepted method for detecting acrylic; he said that the test "was just one first step." He assured me that he had no financial stake in Horton's painting. (She had told me that she might "give him a gift," but she could not "let that get out in the media that he has a percentage, when he does not.")
I had heard that Biro had recently gone to New York and met with a Russian who was considering buying the Horton painting, for a few million dollars. It was true, Biro said, but he was no more than a facilitator between interested parties: "I connect them." He acknowledged that he had been involved with Tod Volpe and the plan to create Provenance, but he said, "Eventually, basically, I just turned my back on it, because it became far too commercial in its scope and I didn't see that the integrity of my work would be suitably protected."
Laszlo added, "It would've been just way too racy."
I asked whether their father had forged the fake Goodridge Roberts landscape, or the painting given to Saul Hendler, or any other works of art. Laszlo stood up, circling the table, and for the first time Peter Paul became agitated. "It's upsetting," he said. "It's pure fantasy." He went on, "It's so easy to make this kind of an accusation. Because somebody's a painter, therefore he can forge. It's like saying that if somebody is a surgeon he can kill, because he's got a sharp instrument in his hand."
We discussed "Landscape with a Rainbow," the purported Turner painting that was Peter Paul Biro's first fingerprint-authentication case. There appeared to be notable discrepancies in the various statements that the family had made about the origins of the painting. Peter Paul Biro and Laszlo usually told the press, and had repeated to me, that they were present when the purported owner had taken it to their shop to be restored. They told me that Laszlo had purchased it. Yet, during depositions for Peter Paul Biro's bankruptcy case, Laszlo said that his father had obtained the painting. When Laszlo was asked where Geza had acquired it, he said, "I don't remember." Peter Paul Biro, at the same hearing, said, "I don't specifically recall the circumstances."
After I pointed out such inconsistencies, there was a silence. Laszlo stammered, "What? No."
Peter Paul finally spoke, insisting that he could not have said "such a thing, because we knew where the painting came from." Aware that I don't speak French, he asked, "Are these French documents?"
"No, they're English," I said.
When I asked Biro about the allegedly forged fingerprints on the Parkers' painting, he peered intently at his glass of wine. I suddenly noticed how blue his eyes were. Calm again, he denied that he had ever forged a fingerprint. The "resin process," he explained, was just a varnish applied to help the prints stand out. And he said of Pat Wertheim, the fingerprint expert, "He's wrong. He's presenting a theory and, in his conclusion, he treats his theory as fact. . . . And the fact that he's producing this work for a do-it-yourself art-authentication Web site—for me, that's quite tainted." In an earlier written statement rebutting the allegations, he noted that without his unparalleled equipment many fingerprint examiners could not attain reliable results: "My laboratory is . . . equipped with an imaging system capable of Gigabit resolution in hyperspectral imaging, surpassing any camera in existence today. The instrument was developed and built here in the lab and it is the only one of its kind in the world." Conventional fingerprint examiners, he told me, lacked the training necessary to evaluate fingerprint impressions on art works: "This is not police work." Wertheim and Hanley expressed surprise to me that Biro, who had no formal training as a fingerprint examiner, somehow possessed unique skills. As Wertheim put it, "So Mr. Biro invented the concept, designed the camera, built it, and it is the only one in the world?"
Biro later noted that he had spent only a "few hours" in Pollock's studio, in the "presence of staff," making it impossible for him to have made a rubber stamp. But when I asked Helen Harrison, who oversees the studio, about this, she said, "That's not true." Her records show that he visited four times, once with Tod Volpe, and that he was "there for hours." She said that she did not watch over him all that time; indeed, in her absence he had removed, "without authorization," a match from the floor, which he took to Montreal to analyze for possible paint particles. (When she saw him holding up the match in the documentary "Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock?," she demanded that he give it back, and he eventually returned it. Biro claimed to me that an assistant had given him permission to take it.)
He said Wertheim was wrong to think that the fingerprints on the Parkers' painting had to be forgeries simply because they were so similar. Biro took my pen, wrote an "X" on his fingertip, and pressed it three times on my notepad. "Look at this," he said, pointing to the faint "X"s. "All of them identical. It's as simple as that." I noted that Wertheim had told me he welcomed a second opinion from a qualified authority, such as the F.B.I. As I continued to question Biro about whether any fingerprint on the Parkers' painting was a forgery, he suddenly asked, "What if maybe it is?" Though he disagreed with Wertheim's analysis, his conclusion "could be right." Still, Biro had said, this didn't mean that he was the culprit: "Why is everybody after me?"
In the case of "La Bella Principessa," Biro did not handle the drawing, and was sent multispectral images from another laboratory, which he then developed and enhanced. Martin Kemp, the Leonardo scholar, told me, "In terms of what Biro did for us, I have absolutely no problems with any potential ethical issues." He emphasized that his opinion of the drawing did not depend on the fingerprint evidence: "I'm entirely confident that it is by Leonardo."
A final verdict on whether "La Bella Principessa" is genuine may not be reached for years, but more and more connoisseurs have voiced doubts. Skeptics express surprise that there is no apparent historical record for the drawing, given that Leonardo was one of Italy's most famous painters during the Renaissance. They note that vellum lasts for centuries, and that it would be easy for a forger to obtain old sheets. Many of the critics share the view of the Met's Carmen Bambach: it just doesn't look like a Leonardo. ARTnews, which has reported on Wertheim's findings, recently interviewed Klaus Albrecht Schröder, the director of the Albertina Museum, in Vienna. "No one is convinced it is a Leonardo," he said. David Ekserdjian, an expert on sixteenth-century Italian drawings, wrote in The Burlington Magazine that he "strongly suspects" it is a "counterfeit." Other art critics have suggested that Kemp has succumbed to a fantasy.
In March, "La Bella Principessa" went on display at an exhibit in Gothenburg, Sweden, and Biro saw the drawing for the first time. The crowds were enormous. For several minutes, he stared at the portrait. "It was stunningly beautiful," he said, adding, "I felt that Leonardo definitely had to have had a lot to do with the drawing."
Kemp recently published, with a colleague, a book called "La Bella Principessa: The Story of the New Masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci," which contains a chapter by Biro, entitled "Fingerprint Examination." In the manner of a law-enforcement officer presenting forensic evidence in court, Biro arranges the images of the "St. Jerome" and the "Principessa" fingerprints side by side, with arrows pinpointing what he identifies as eight overlapping characteristics between them. I asked Charles Parker—a latent-fingerprint examiner with more than thirty years of experience in the field, who has helped to establish guidelines for fingerprint examiners in the United States—to review the chapter. He said that most of the arrows don't point to actual overlapping characteristics, just random details, and that, judging from the images presented, the partial fingerprint on "La Bella Principessa" is too poorly detailed for an identification to be made. "No other examiner I know would sign off on it," he said. "I couldn't even get it past the door." Wertheim agreed with this assessment, and suggested that Biro's approach was the equivalent of trying to identify a man based on seeing his ear poking out from behind a bush for a fraction of a second.
"The fingerprint community can get quite dogmatic," Biro told me in another conversation. "They don't like people who rock the boat, and I could be seen as a loose cannon to some, because I'm questioning a lot of things."
Whereas Biro had once spoken of the absolute objectivity and infallibility of fingerprint analysis, he now sounded more like a connoisseur than like a scientist. "I'm trying to define, for example, what is the point that something becomes a matter of interpretation," he said. "In other words, where is that line? O.K., on the one hand, fingerprint practitioners state that fingerprint identification is a science. I'm more toward the other side, where I'm convinced by my own personal experience that it is very much like connoisseurship, because of . . . things I see they don't."
In law enforcement, a fingerprint examiner can issue only a positive or a negative identification, and is prohibited from speculating on probabilities. But Biro told me that he was now "pushing into the gray areas." When he first revealed his findings on "La Bella Principessa," Biro did not use the term "match," as is standard among law-enforcement analysts, and as he had done in his reports on the paintings owned by Horton and the Parkers; rather, he said that the fingerprint on "La Bella Principessa" and the print on Leonardo's "St. Jerome" were "highly comparable."
"What does that mean?" the forensic scientist who works with the F.B.I. asked me. "Homo sapiens and bull mastiff—are they 'highly comparable'? Give me a break."
By the time that Biro took on "La Bella Principessa," his reputation had become so solid, and the public appetite for forensic solutions had become so strong, that he no longer seems to have worried about watermarking his evidence or presenting a perfect match. Many people, not just experts, can look at a painting and argue over what they see, but few individuals, inside or outside the art world, can evaluate fingerprints. In that sense, Biro's authentications were far less democratic than traditional connoisseurship. Though he told me that he did not want to be "judge and jury," he had positioned himself as a singular authority.
Jeanne Marchig's lawsuit against Christie's may finally lead Biro's methods to be subjected to review by top fingerprint examiners. Biro emphasized to me that his findings in the case should not be "overblown," and that he never meant for them to be conclusive: "I see this as the beginning of a process. For me, this is not a closed case."
I asked him whether he might have been wrong in suggesting that Leonardo had ever touched "La Bella Principessa." He looked up at the sky and said, "It's possible. Yes."
During one of my final visits, Biro led me through his lab, where a new stack of orphaned paintings awaited inspection. In an e-mail to me, he had written, "I am busy as a bee, now working on several Michelangelo attributions as well as a new possible Leonardo. I guess when it rains it pours. Fingered another Turner, too." Some of his new research was to be featured in an upcoming documentary on PBS.
I followed Biro into his basement laboratory, where his father's landscape paintings hung. I wondered what had consigned them to this fate—hidden from the public, seen only by an adoring son. They had, I thought, a certain anguished beauty, but they also seemed derivative. Perhaps Biro's father had lacked that divine spark of originality, or perhaps he had sacrificed it while inhabiting the skin of immortal artists. In a corner of the laboratory, propped near Biro's camera contraption, was Teri Horton's canvas, splashed with blue and red and white paint. As I looked at it, I thought of Thomas Hoving and what he had seen in that initial instant. Connoisseurship is rife with flaws. It is susceptible to error, arrogance, even corruption. And yet there is something about that "strange breed of cat," as Hoving referred to the best connoisseurs, who could truly see with greater depth—who, after decades of training and study and immersion in an artist's work, could experience a picture in a way that most of us can't. Connoisseurship is not merely the ability to discern whether an art work is authentic or fake; it is also the ability to recognize whether a work is a masterpiece. Perhaps the most uncomfortable truth about art is that such knowledge can never be truly democratic.
Biro showed me the back of Horton's canvas and pointed to the fingerprint. With growing excitement, he told me that he was pioneering a forensic method that would further revolutionize the process of authenticating art: DNA analysis. I learned that he had reported collecting several hairs on Horton's painting, which were the same brown color as Pollock's. He said that he had also removed hairs trapped in the dried paint on Pollock's studio floor and on other potential Pollock paintings. In an e-mail to a client, who paid him more than fifteen thousand dollars for DNA testing, Biro wrote, "If this keeps up I'll be reconstructing Pollock's toupee very soon."
Biro was planning to use DNA analysis in a project that he said would rival that of "La Bella Principessa": the discovery, in California, of a cache of more than fifty drip paintings possibly by Jackson Pollock. Biro, who had repeatedly examined the works, said that he had extracted a sample of hair that had been embedded in one of the pictures. With the help of the owners of the paintings, Biro had obtained a DNA sample from a living relative of Pollock.* Matching an artist's DNA on a painting, Biro told me, would finally remove any doubt from the authentication process. It would be, he said, a "holy grail." ♦
An Inconvenient Truth - The Truth Shall Not Set Us Free
Submitted by Cognitive Dissonance on 04/10/2011 19:17 -0400
BLS Bureau of Labor Statistics Cognitive Dissonance Corruption Fail Herd Mentality Japan Moral Hazard Nationalism Reality Too Big To Fail
An Inconvenient Truth - The Truth Shall Not Set Us Free
By
Cognitive Dissonance
There is a widely held belief among those who wish for 'the truth' to be exposed that once this is accomplished the insanity will begin to unravel and a new day will dawn. Unfortunately this belief is erroneous, delusional even, and by itself also a part of the insanity. The uncomfortable and extremely inconvenient truth is that 'truth', regardless of where it originates or whether it's really truth or not, will never set us free because the official lies are not the ultimate source of our bondage. Instead the lies are just a small part of the overall control system, a system that relies upon our willing (some would say informed) consent not only to exist but to endure.
Hidden somewhere deep down inside any discussion of true and false statements by politicians, the Bureau of Lies and Statistics (BLS), psyops and disinformation programs, WikiLeaks or any other governmental, corporate or individual propaganda is a simple and fundamental truth that's widely known but carefully ignored. We are being lied to by hundreds of entities about dozens of different subjects, all for the purpose of maintaining or increasing control and power over the masses. The truth of these fundamental lies is all around us and yet we are still not free.
The only way a relatively small nucleus of people can control a much larger population is through psychological manipulation regardless of whether it's by way of brutality or baubles. Spending our days minimizing, dismissing or bargaining with these controlling lies is simply the process we use to avoid dealing with our own internal self deception. This is also a well understood and universal truth that is self evident, obvious even, to those who wish to honestly look. Yet it is denied as well.
We hide this fact from ourselves by differentiating between big and small lies, from their evil propaganda and our harmless little tales. And we always tell ourselves the ultimate controlling lie, that we don't really 'lie' so much as we tell small fibs and half truths in order to feel better or to get through the day. We want to believe that we are different from 'them', that we know we aren't really lying because we know ourselves and thus can't lie. We all deceive ourselves into believing that to ourselves we are true.
The ugly truth is that we expend a tremendous amount of energy each day maintaining our extensive network of internal denial and self deception. The result is a mishmash of fact, fiction and fantasy we call our world view and the act of denial itself becomes such an integrated component of us that for the most part it's seamless and nearly invisible. The control system enables our denial by feeding us a constant stream of 'news' and information that serves to reinforce this internal narrative while massaging our confirmation and normalcy biases.
Why do we need 'proof' of something that's self evident, of something we know to be true? Exactly what sort of proof would satisfy us that we're being systematically and consistently lied to? More to the point, what would we do once the perfect proof is offered that we would refrain from doing without it? So many of us fall into the trap of demanding specific and infallible proof before we'll ever consider changing our beliefs, an almost impossible condition to meet and precisely why we require it. Others demand that the liars admit they are lying. What then? Do we forgive them for their past transgressions so we won't need to confront them (or ourselves) the next time it happens?
What proof of truth (or falsity) do we need to receive in order to be absolutely certain? And will we ever receive enough proof to overcome our aversion to taking a stand and declaring that enough is enough? All of these questions are reasonable queries to ask, but we avoid them like the black plague because following them to their logical conclusion would sweep away all our self deceptions and delusions. Asking these questions, then candidly answering them, would force us to be honest with ourselves, an outcome we collectively and studiously avoid.
Clarity of Vision
Contrary to popular belief clarity of vision, which is what truth and proof is supposed to provide for us, is the last thing we want because clarity removes any remaining plausible deniability we might cling to in order to justify hiding within the faceless herd. Clarity compels action in the same manner that a clear and present danger compels action. If we don't act once we finally have clarity, especially after demanding it for years, then we must confront our own lack of moral courage. In effect we either deal with this cognitive dissonance or we kick the can down the road and bury our denial in another layer of justification and rationalization.
For example, let's say you're startled awake at 3 AM by the apparent sound of someone breaking into your home. Are you going to roll over and fall back to sleep until you receive absolute "proof" of a break in or are you going to react to the information at hand no matter how limited it might be? While the answer might be obvious, the question is so simple it's often dismissed as silly. I'm not talking about confronting the potential intruder, but simply acknowledging his or her presence instead of demanding more proof before rousting yourself from bed. Of course you'd acknowledge the potential break-in. Then you'd begin to react accordingly.
What it really comes down to is not whether we receive enough proof to act, but rather how close we perceive (or deny) the danger to be in order to overcome our reluctance to deal with whatever it is we are avoiding. The noise downstairs demands our immediate attention because it's coming from within our home at a time of night when we're most vulnerable. It's hard to ignore this frightening situation. However as long as we can successfully deny proximity we can avoid the singularity of confrontation regardless of the actual circumstances.
And a skilful manipulator will encourage our denial using a variety of tools and methods. Consider that the Nazis took deliberate steps to enable the concentration camp inmates to remain in denial about their inevitable destruction. Most knew what was really going on, but the façade was convincing enough to enable just enough denial of proximity to keep the majority calm and under control. This was mutually beneficial for both parties involved, allowing the Nazi's to use very few guards relative to the large number of inmates. Our master(s) benefit from our denial as well, thus they expend large amounts of energy to enable our denial rather than just forcing the issue.
It appears to me that those who are unaware of, or outright reject, their inner spiritual connection are more likely to engage in fantastical thinking and denial framing all in an effort to deny proximity. Let me make it clear here that I'm not talking about a God or religious entity, but more like a centering or recognition of our presence and purpose within the cosmos.
This 'knowing' helps us to maintain a realistic perspective and inner calm when others become deer in the headlights. Our masters are experts at frightening us with continuous fear based mental images of dangerous boogiemen while promising us that the danger will never be proximate to us as long as we do as we're told. And we play along because doing so enables our own internal dishonesty.
In the case of the downstairs burglar it rapidly progesses well beyond clear and present danger and has morphed into red alert proximity since we're trapped upstairs and can't leave without descending the stairs and moving even closer to the very danger we're trying to avoid. But the insanity coming out of Washington, Europe, Libya, Japan or wherever today's madness is emanating from is somewhere way over there, meaning not proximate to us and thus easier to push aside and deny.
Learned Helplessness
Until that is the danger is proximate and can no longer be denied. Of course once the obvious can no longer be pushed aside the next step is to trot out another inconvenient truth redefined in the form of an excuse, that the problem is so big that we can't do anything about it. Intellectually we declare we're quadriplegics trapped in our own wheelchairs and unable to do anything about the situation. This self victimization is called learned helplessness and it's an example of how we actively participate in our own impotence and subjugation. And its use is not restricted to the uneducated and poor. In fact it's a highly refined intellectual tool of the educated and professional classes who twist our self victimization into superiority or entitlement impulses.
What we really want, what we so desperately seek, is for someone else to shoulder the personal and emotional risk that comes with taking responsibility. We definitely want the good outcome, just not the sweat, tears and pain that might also come with it. Our insistence that we know exactly what happened, the so-called truth, followed by our never ending demand for even more proof, is simply our psychological defense to any assault upon our carefully constructed world view that we are just helpless victims and powerless to do anything except to be the perfect injured party and take care of ourselves. This is also the perfect excuse to abandon any sense of obligation to neighbor or community.
The beauty of being the unfortunate victim, of being a planned and intentional failure even if that plan is on a subconscious level, is that this condition is easily accomplished and usually requires little to no active participation on our part. Thus our needed plausible deniability comes from doing nothing, which then reinforces our apathy and justifies our inaction. It just doesn't get any better than this. All that's left to do is to construct an intellectual shield stout enough to justify our inaction, child's play after decades of personal experience shifting blame to the spouse, sibling, boogie man, politician, dog or boss. Our ego immediately takes over and skillfully massages our lying eyes and guilt feelings.
Lost to Ourselves
It's important for the reader to understand that I'm not necessarily speaking of professional, career or even political failure when I address the concept of being a planned failure. Ultimately these are all artificial constructs, fantasy representations of our denied inner being, the outward manifestation of an 'us' we wish to project to those around us for a variety of reasons and purposes. Instead what I'm referring to is our inner being, our spiritual entity, our essence, that part of us that might be called the soul which only we answer to.
This unique sanctuary, our own safe haven or refuge we can flee to when we wish to engage in contemplation and reflection, can be the source of our inner strength and moral courage in the face of hostility or our pitiful failure to be a moral person and spiritual entity. Because we cannot hide from ourselves while visiting our inner being, for the patently self deceptive this is a place to avoid at all costs.
The external 'us' often has little connection to our true inner self unless it is deliberately pursued and sought after. Our inner being doesn't come looking for you or me, but rather the other way around. I have found that the more superficial our outer skin is, the further away we are from connecting to our inner truth and meaning, often described as our centering, knowing or intuition.
The weaker the connection to our inner self the more desperate we become to believe the self validating lie that if only we knew what really happened with unerring proof it would expose our external tormentor (and keep our internal one hidden as well) thus forcing other people to finally act. Is it really surprising that someone who lacks moral courage and strength would try to find others to do his or her bidding?
We convince ourselves that with absolute proof of the official lies in hand the illusion would be unequivocally exposed, thus compelling 'we the people' (meaning 'other' people) to reject them and it. This is the lie we tell ourselves to remain hidden from ourselves and safely within the consensus herd which acts as an extremely poor substitute for our missing inner communication.
We wish to believe that simply knowing the truth will somehow displace the lie, similar to Archimedes splashing water over the sides of the tub as he settles in for his weekly soak. Somehow this absolves us from the obligation to act because "the truth" is now known and the liars will wither away in the bright disinfecting sunlight of truth, justice and the American way. The ugly truth is that a 'truth' (as well as a 'lie') has power only when it's embraced, not simply because it exists. Since we don't wish to embrace the inner truth, we must support the external lies in order to use them to feed our plausible deniability. While we might not fully understand this form of self deception our masters are well aware of it and skillfully use it against us.
Many truths lay abandoned on the side of the road for years, decades even, because their abandonment serves the needs of nearly everyone, not just the official liars, to ignore their own culpability. Once a truth is exposed the liars have no control over the truth except in their (our) ability to convince us to ignore or distort it. The spin doctor's only purpose is to enable our own self deception. They don't 'hide' the truth as much as they help convince us that it's in our own best interest to ignore or distort it. You really don't want to look in there, do you? The con man never forces the mark, but rather skillfully leverages the situation.
Seductive Submission
This entire process reminds me of the quintessential seduction scene in a Harlequin romance novel. The women is 'taken', seduced in the arms of someone who may or may not have her best interest at heart. Very little is said about her willingness to believe the lies and promises, of her own desire to suspend disbelief and accept the attractive lies, other than to present the supposedly mitigating factor that she's emotionally overwhelmed and thus 'not herself'. After all if you're not yourself you certainly can't be held responsible for anything your 'self' might do, right? Naturally no one wants to ask where we might find the 'self' if it's not 'here'.
She's being told what she wants to hear and its music to her ears. The incredible natural high we receive when our egoic lies are confirmed by outside sources, conceits we actively solicit precisely because they induce that endorphin buzz, puts to shame any man made pharmacological magic created to date.
Of course this behavior isn't restricted to the fairer sex. Males are just as accomplished at self medicating as the female side of the species. I guess surrendering to passionate desire (and greed) is justification for any transgression as long as the emotion is pure, intoxicating and oh so good. We wouldn't let our children get away with a bullshit excuse like this yet it seems fine and dandy for the adults in the room.
This is a classic example of self victimization, but it's diplomatically presented as a near innocent who is being intentionally harmed by a scheming evil doer who's only after her lying labia lips. Notice that it's rarely pointed out how the liar would never be in her arms in the first place without her willing consent and active participation. We hear about his 'power' over her, but very little about her willingness to submit and let someone else be responsible for her (in) actions.
Layers of self deception this deep can only occur when we are patently dishonest with ourselves, yet this type of behavior is glorified in far more ways than just romance novels. Nationalism is a perfect example of the process we use to allow ourselves to be controlled by others, to surrender to the herd mentality and any responsibility for our actions. We're all familiar with the seductive urge and the invisible pull to engage in herd behavior where the anonymity of the crowd washes away any personal responsibility for ones actions.
There's nothing more we need to know, no other proof needed, other than the certain knowledge that we are lied to on a daily basis. This is obvious and widely known, but rarely openly acknowledged. Our need to know the truth and our demand for unequivocal proof that it is the truth, proof that we often insist must come from a person of 'authority' (usually one of the authorities who told us the lie in the first place) is a reflection of our inner reluctance to remove the liars from our lives, starting within ourselves.
Doing so would require us to move out of our comfort zone and face who and what we really are, co-conspirators and dance partners rather than helpless soap bubbles blowing in the wind. Our masters know this and to further enable our self deception they constantly shrink our comfort zones, giving us all the more reason to remain safely huddled within our contracting world.
We say we want freedom yet true freedom is just as frightening to us as truth itself. For the most part we are kept animals and as distasteful as this may be to our sensitive egos we like it this way. Many years ago I overheard one woman tell another that "Children like it when we set boundaries and rules for them." I agree. Very young children want, in fact need, to know they are safe in a world that is capricious and unfathomable.
So it makes sense that externally imposed rules and boundaries would give children an artificially implanted sense of order and predictability, at least until their own conditioning is complete and they can maintain their own illusion of personal safety through denial. The same applies to us as adults. We all want our freedom just as long as it comes with a reasonably clear set of rules that thankfully keeps us from straying to far into personal accountability and responsibility.
Love Your Captivity
While few among us would actually admit this we are trained to love our hamster wheels and for the most part we do. Or more accurately, we fear having no hamster wheel because then we would need to be self sufficient and personally responsible for all our actions in a world that has no overall order imposed upon us. That's the key difference here because presently the prevailing attitude amongst us hamsters is quite simple. Just show me the maze, hand me the rule book and I'll figure it out as I go along. Or at least I'll survive long enough to feed and breed. This is of course a crass oversimplification of our social order, but you get the idea.
Because we allow ourselves to be seduced by the rules of a world that's created for us we are easily manipulated by the controllers and the control system. It does this by making the rules……wait for it……wait for it……capricious and unfathomable if we don't submit to the whip. By surrendering our inalienable right (and I submit our inner moral and spiritual duty) to be free and independent souls in return for a set of externally created and manipulated rules and conditions we condemn ourselves to a life of predictable infantile responses that are easily controlled.
The cognitive barriers that define our comfort zone and the lines we claim we don't wish to be violated are all an illusion presented to us. And after sufficient assimilation they are perpetuated by us. They are thus easily modified by us each time the line is crossed by the liar, affording all of the liars plenty of wiggle room. "OK, I'll give you one more chance. But don't cross this line or next time you're really gonna get it." The inconvenient truth is that the battle isn't with the external liars; it is with us and within us. And our external liars, our masters, unquestionably know this which is precisely why the insanity is escalating as they pile lies on top of more lies.
As this spinning top begins to wobble out of control and despite our protestations and demands for the truth, we really don't want the lies to stop because if they do the day of our own internal reckoning will also be at hand. The definition of collective insanity is our willingness to be destroyed as a group so long as we are not judged as individuals. Or worse that we are not forced to judge ourselves. But even this we'll deny knowing in order to maintain our plausible deniability. Thus we begin to understand the reason for the continued lying by all the parties involved, victims as well as the victimizers, and why I constantly describe the insanity at its most basic level as self induced.
We talk about financial moral hazard on Wall Street and within the Too Big To Fail (TBTF) banks as central to their escalating greed and corruption. And yet we all participate in a similar social moral hazard that fully enables our abusers. We're trapped inside this insanity because to acknowledge it means dealing with a life time of denial. It's so much easier to accept one more beating by our master rather than to come to terms with a lifetime of self abuse.
Presumed Informed Consent
Tragically, because we willingly participate in our own subjugation, regardless of whether it's occurring on a conscious or subconscious level, the abusers see this as informed consent and the green light to continue the abuse. This is why they often tell us exactly how they're going to abuse us long before doing so. In our role as victim we declare the abusers to be sociopaths and ourselves as virginal bleeders in order to shift blame and responsibility away from ourselves. It's all part of the dance of denial and the abuser will accept the role of the heavy in exchange for his or her own rewards.
We may say we want the abuse to stop, but our verbal and non verbal communication says otherwise. How is this any different from the Harlequin woman saying "No, please stop" in the arms of her seducer while returning each kiss with passionate urgency? This is the unspoken communication between the abused and the abuser that is witness to and evidence of the real insanity of the dysfunctional relationship, regardless of whether it's between husband and wife, nation and citizens or Ponzi and the world.
By the way I am in no way, shape or form justifying or condoning the abuser, rapist or thief simply because I'm explaining the process involved along with our own participation. My position is simple. If we can't even honestly discuss our own weaknesses and foibles, we are well beyond self redemption. I often say that we are only as sick as our deepest darkest secrets and examining how much of our world is considered verboten and not to be discussed demonstrates this concept superbly.
We've all been in relationships where the dysfunctional discourse goes something like this. I won't ask difficult questions of you if you won't ask them of me. And I'm not talking about being sensitive to someone's unsightly mole or dandruff, but rather avoiding a healthy discussion about our spouse's basic character flaws in order to be spared our own undressing.
This is the fundamental basis for all dysfunctional relationships, including the present one between an intentionally self absorbed and distracted population and our enabling and manipulative masters. As long as we are given the choice between believing the lies and rejecting them, the vast majority will accept the lie rather than risk the perceived emotional and psychological harm of challenging our victimhood which supports our fantasy view of how the world works.
Because we don't wish to undergo a rigorous self appraisal or emotional unveiling, we completely blow out of proportion the intellectual and emotional harm we will suffer if we do so. This serves the dual purpose of creating plausible deniability while feeding our inner victim. In this way we fulfill both roles of the dysfunctional relationship, that of the abuser and the abused. I call this process a familiar circle jerk with me, myself and I. Add anyone else and the room would become too crowded.
The master's lies are a direct and personal challenge delivered to us on a daily basis and our controllers know that as long as their lies are not seriously confronted they are safe………and so are we. So they work very hard at keeping the lies from being contested, expertly using a variety of tools including ridicule to turn public opinion against truth. In reality it's really not that hard to seduce us with lies when so very few of us really wish to hear the truth to begin with.
This explains perfectly the assault upon Assange and Wikileaks from all sides. He's promoting himself as a truth speaker and thus challenging the lies not so much by what he's exposing, but by the very fact that he exists. He is a danger to everyone, not just the official liars. If he is accepted as a truth speaker, we the people must then do something about the truths he speaks of. We definitely don't wish to be forced to confront those who lie to us because then we would be required to openly admit we participated in the lying. This is why we want them to lie, to allow us to remain out of harm's way. "Daddy, tell me another lie so that I can believe it's the truth."
True or False, it Doesn't Matter
Assaulting the truth messenger also removes the need to know if he's a disinformation agent or a real truth speaker. What's missed entirely in this discussion is that it doesn't matter if he is or is not a psyops operative. It's the message of 'truth' he's delivering that's the source of our power, not the actual revelations. The powers that be don't fear the truth; they fear people embracing the truth. Ultimately this is the secret to our inner peace and freedom. Understand that it is not the truth that will set us free because we can free ourselves at any time. The inconvenient truth is that perpetually seeking the truth while doing nothing about the 'truths' already established is the crutch we use to avoid facing the original lies that begin within.
When we have abandoned the willingness to honestly look within for truth, when we are complete strangers to ourselves and no longer posses the capacity to 'know' something without the need for external affirmation we then desperately turn to poor substitutes from corrupted external sources. This is why there's an increasingly desperate need by the population at large to seek 'proof', 'truth' and 'facts' which must always be secured from those who are widely considered to be 'authorities'. The only authoritative source worth consulting when seeking truth lay deep within us, unless of course we are also hopelessly corrupted.
Once we are completely lost within our own insane world of distortions, lies and self deception we become obsessed with finding 'truth' everywhere else in order to validate and sanctify ourselves so that we may continue to perpetuate our own lying. This infantile need for affirmation after we have lied to ourselves and to others is similar to the child who has just lied, then seeks confirmation from the authority figure that the child is still loved. Often the adult knows s/he was just lied to, but chooses to say nothing to prevent opening their own can of worms. This in effect makes the lie socially acceptable and further cements the bond between the two dysfunctional parties. It's also how we teach our children the art of self deception.
The pathological liars and self deceivers we have become serves to compel us to continuously seek external affirmation that we are not a 'bad' liar, meaning socially unacceptable, precisely because we can't provide that 'proof' internally. We can't hide from our own lies since the one thing we always know is the source of them. As was so wonderfully illustrated in the movie 'Inception' we know where the root of the lie originates, thus we must dig ever deeper into our own insanity in order to bury our self deception. This in turn just compounds our raging dysfunction. Because everyone engages in this behavior, yet no one talks about it, everyone's insanity is considered to be a normal part of human nature.
This is the pathology of our insanity and precisely why it must be vigorously dug out and then thoroughly rejected. A quick splash of paint or a rough wall papering will not suffice. If this is not done, ultimately we revert to worshiping Golden Truth Idols and false True Gods as saviors of our lost and abandoned souls. If we are honest in our desire to seek truth and we begin a fearless search within, we eventually come to realize that the external seeking of 'truth' is immaterial and all just part of the control system we gratefully embrace in order to hide from ourselves.
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