May 12 (Bloomberg) -- During a March 2001 raid on an antiquities warehouse in Geneva, police came upon a scene that made their skins crawl.

The Italian and Swiss officers waded through a room scattered with pots dug up in Iraq and Italy, a wooden Egyptian coffin sawn into pieces and mummies of humans and cats. In the back they found cupboards, and inside the cupboards, boxes.

``On closer examination, one of the boxes in the cupboards was found to contain gold rings with the finger bones of the dead still attached to them,'' write Peter Watson and Cecilia Todeschini in ``The Medici Conspiracy: The Illicit Journey of Looted Antiquities From Italy's Tomb Raiders to the World's Greatest Museums'' (PublicAffairs, 384 pages, $26.95).

``Clearly, when the tombs had been looted, the hands and fingers of the long-dead had simply been broken off by the tombaroli, to save time,'' they write, using the Italian word for ``tomb robber.''

The scene is the most vivid of many that Watson, a British journalist, and Todeschini, a Rome-based researcher and translator, use to make their argument that museums and private collectors are destroying archaeological sites -- and therefore human historical records -- through purchases of antiquities of undocumented origins.

Wiretaps and Luck

They tell the story as a detective adventure, following Italian police and prosecutors over more than a decade that leads to the indictment of a curator at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and an agreement by New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art in February to return 21 allegedly looted objects.

``The Medici Conspiracy'' refers to Giacomo Medici, an art dealer convicted by a Rome court in December 2004 of smuggling ancient pots and statues that ended up in the Getty, Met and many other museums and private collections around the world.

Yet this tale isn't so much about Medici, 67, who denies the charges and is free while appealing his 10-year prison sentence, as it is about the delicious unraveling of the conspiracy of dealers, restorers, curators, collectors, auctioneers and tomb robbers. Persistence, phone taps and incredible luck (evidence is found in a car wreck and several smugglers kept impeccable records) pave the way.

Watson and Todeschini's delight in exposing secrets of the trade is tempered by disgust at the discoveries themselves.

Cataloging Loot

In one 2003 raid of a home near Lake Bolsena, north of Rome, Italian police find hundreds of ancient pot fragments and bronzes. More important, in seven photo albums and nine diaries seized at the house, the robber cataloged his loot and kept track of sales from 1997 through 2002.

Over the four years for which records were most complete, the man excavated 204 tombs, discovered 1,764 objects and ``earned'' 185,000 euros ($235,000).

``This amounts to a tomb a week, each yielding an average of roughly nine objects,'' the authors write.

Watson and Todeschini make no secret of the side they take in the debate over the antiquities trade. In their eyes, the police are the good guys, while most dealers, collectors and curators are villains. The authors dedicated the book to the retired general who led Italy's art police, Roberto Conforti.

In fact, the authors helped him crack a case they've written about. Watson's 1997 book, ``Sotheby's: Inside Story,'' which Todeschini helped research, used internal documents from the auction house to show how loot makes its way to the market.

Grander Purpose

He then turned over the papers to the Italian police and has testified at the Rome Tribunal in the trials of Medici and Marion True, the Getty's former antiquities curator. True, who is charged with conspiracy and illicit receipt of antiquities, denies the charges.

The trials, and others that Italian prosecutors plan to start in coming months, have served a grander purpose, the authors argue. ``There is a sense that the legal fate of these figures is, if not an incidental matter, no longer the main event,'' they write. The Met agreed to return objects, and the Getty, Princeton University in New Jersey and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston are all answering Italian claims privately.

``The sheer scale of the illicit trade in looted antiquities, its organized nature, the routine deception, the superb quality of so much of the material, the close proximity of museum curators and major collectors to underworld figures --that is now there for all to see,'' Watson and Todeschini write.

Nowhere is that body of evidence seen more clearly and completely than in this one timely volume.

To contact the reporter on this story: Vernon Silver in Rome vtsilver@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: May 11, 2006 21:37 EDT