On a steamy day in August 1995, a retired Italian customs cop named Pasquale Camera was driving home after lunch about an hour and a half south of Rome when he lost control of his beige Renault and went careening into the railing on the side of the highway. When the police arrived to investigate the accident, paramedics had already pronounced him dead at the scene; his car had flipped over, and without his seat belt he hadn’t stood a chance.
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The traffic police also found, in the glove compartment of Camera’s car, photographs of vases, sculptures, and various other artifacts that looked like they could be antiques. By chance, the local chief had previously worked on a team that specialized in tracking down looted antiquities, so he called his former colleagues in Rome. Incredibly, they had been on Camera’s trail for months.
The photos got the police a search warrant, which led to a raid of Camera’s apartment, which turned up a chart of the names of people in the antiques trade, along with their locations. That analog piece of evidence, laid out neatly in Camera’s handwriting, led investigators down a rabbit hole of museum robbers, art dealers, collectors, and shell companies hidden in off- shore jurisdictions.
The probe had every feature of an archaeological dig, only instead of excavating dirt and rocks to find buried treasure, investigators sifted through layer upon layer of fictitious corporate entities before landing in a Geneva storage room leased by an art dealer named Giacomo Medici. On the fourth floor of a steel-gray warehouse, a trove of illegally obtained Greek, Roman, and Etruscan antiquities—some looted from archaeological digs in Italy, some with Sotheby’s labels dangling from them—were arranged on shelves and in boxes, like apples and bananas in a supermarket.
“All the cupboards were shelved—and each and every one of the shelves was packed—crowded, teeming, overloaded with antiquities: with vases, statues, bronzes; with candelabra, frescoes, mosaics; with glass objects, faience animals, jewelry, and still more vases,” write Peter Watson and Cecilia Todeschini in their book on the heist, The Medici Conspiracy. There were also invoices, checks, letters, and IOUs.
It was clear that the outer room was where Medici received prospective buyers, and where objects for sale were displayed in secure and discreet circumstances. It was equally clear…that Medici had never expected anyone to come calling here—everything was just lying around, with no attempt at concealment.
The warehouse in question was not your average mini storage. It was the Geneva Freeport: a place where, since 1888, goods have entered the building and remained there, perhaps even for lifetimes, accruing value, hiding from scrutiny, evading taxes, even changing hands, all without leaving the confines of the warehouse. The warehouse had stood largely unnoticed in a nondescript commercial district of Geneva for years, until all of a sudden, it found itself at the center of spectacular highway accidents, unscrupulous millionaires, a team of cops called the “art squad,” and real-life tomb raiders.
The warehouse had stood largely unnoticed in a nondescript commercial district of Geneva for years, until all of a sudden, it found itself at the center of spectacular highway accidents, unscrupulous millionaires, a team of cops called the “art squad,” and real-life tomb raiders.
The investigation reached halfway across the world, prompting the Italian authorities to seek stolen artworks in museums from Boston to Toledo, Ohio. It ensnared figures linked to institutions as far away as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Getty.
It also led the Swiss to regulate the storage of ancient artifacts and empower the police to conduct inspections of the warehouse. The Medici affair turned the lights on, if briefly, in this cloistral corner of the hidden globe.
But as quickly as it began, the scandal faded from memory and the freeport returned to obscurity. The lights wouldn’t be back on for more than a decade.
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Freeports are all around us. Known interchangeably as foreign-trade zones, free-trade zones, or free economic zones, they are designated areas, often but not always near an airport, seaport, or border, where goods can enter a country and be kept there without being subject to that country’s trade tariffs or other tax regulations.
They can be stand-alone warehouses or industrial sites, entire districts, or one floor of an office building. If you live in the United States, chances are, the car you drive, the appliances in your kitchen, and the Amazon packages on your doorstep all spent time in a freeport of some kind before making their way to you.
The freeport was conceived hundreds of years ago in Italy, to serve two commercial needs. Merchants on long journeys could use the storage facilities to stow grain and other perishable merchandise at a foreign port for a short time without formally importing it or having to deal with customs authorities. And the governments in charge of their respective locations could use these zones—which included warehouses or silos, but also land around them—to relax certain rules and benefit from the influx of certain types of foreign commerce (and people) without committing to more wide- ranging domestic reforms.
Freeports function thanks to what’s essentially a legal hack that creates a new, different set of boundaries for new, different people and things: “economic dualism” is how one academic paper describes it. And like the empires and nations that established them, freeports have come in all shapes, sizes, and configurations. What they have in common is the way they fence off what happens inside.
The early Tuscan freeport of Livorno, for instance, emerged in the late sixteenth century, an era when the notion of a territorial state, with discrete boundaries, laws, and hierarchies, was inching away from the chaotic fiefdoms of the Middle Ages and toward something a little more orderly, with plenty of gray area left to exploit in between. The grand duke of Tuscany used Livorno as a kind of sandbox, inviting in foreign merchants, mariners, and slavers when they might not otherwise have been welcome in his territory proper.
The Dutch Empire deployed freeports, too, beginning in the seventeenth century. Such entrepôts helped the Dutch to undercut their rivals by pulling trade away from the Mediterranean and toward the Nordic states. They also let them maintain commercial outposts farther afield, in places like Curaçao in the Caribbean, and enjoy foreign goods and expertise.
“The attitude was ‘We can welcome a Jewish community, an Armenian community, we can have them perform consular functions, and we can invite trading houses from England,’” explains Koen Stapelbroek, an economic historian at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia. “‘This is how we make sure [trade] isn’t a Trojan horse: we can welcome them but also limit their influence.’”
There’s evidence that enslaved Africans in the Caribbean were able to use these loopholes on occasion as well. In The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789), Equiano, an enslaved sailor, recounts buying gin at a Dutch freeport in the West Indies and reselling it in British Montserrat until he had enough money to buy his freedom.
In 1766, the British Parliament gave in to pressure from commercial lobbies and passed the Free Port Act, opening up four colonial ports in Jamaica and two in Dominica to allow trade with foreigners. This broke with previous policies severely restricting foreign trade in the Americas, though the goal was still very much to benefit British merchants, sailors, and economic interests.
The British later established freeports in Singapore, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, in the first half of the nineteenth century. Again, these weren’t peaceful free-trade agreements drawn up between equals in a boardroom: as colonial powers, the British occupied these places by force and managed them to further their interests.
The facility is a lot like the Hotel California: objects check in, but they never need to leave.
Freeports shared a form and a function—to suspend their contents in time and space—but for whom, at what cost, and for how long varied, confusingly, by jurisdiction. This is still the case.
The contents of these entrepôts also depend on the facilities: some have all the sophistication of a Home Depot, while others engineer their environment to the millimeter. Pharmaceutical companies stored COVID-19 vaccine in extra-cold freezers inside U.S. foreign-trade zones as they awaited FDA approval.
An oenologist told me that when she worked at a vineyard in Bordeaux, the wine they produced was bottled and immediately shipped off to a tax-free warehouse in London to age. “I don’t think the buyers ever drank it,” she said.
There used to be a natural limit to how long perishables could be left in this liminal state. After all, wheat rots. Rice goes bad. Steel rusts. Even wine can be stored for only so long without climate control.
When the Geneva Freeport opened in the late nineteenth century, its main feature was a large grain silo, but that fell into disuse as new kinds of wealth slithered into the city: gold bars in times of crisis, humanitarian supplies in times of war, and, in our more recent decades of growing economic inequality, the surplus lucre of the one percent. Sophisticated cooling and humidification systems were developed to help time stand even stiller yet the fundamental bylaws of the freeport governing time did not change. The goods in these zones remained in a suspended state: physically sedentary yet legally in transit.
Like Konrad Witz’s painting of Christ on Lac Léman, an object in the Geneva Freeport appears before us but casts no shadow. The facility is a lot like the Hotel California: objects check in, but they never need to leave.
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From The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian published on October 8, 2024 by Riverhead, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2024 Atossa Araxia Abrahamian.
