Peg Goldberg

In July 1988 Peg Goldberg, an Indianapolis dealer in nineteenth- and twentieth-century art, bought four sixth-century mosaics from the church of Panagia Kanakaria at Lythrankomi in Geneva. Hofstadter writes that she had been a social worker and, from 1986, a county commissioner³; Hoover says she began dealing in art in 1981². The mosaics, two roundels, an angel and the Christ Child, were offered to her in Amsterdam through Robert Fitzgerald and Michel van Rijn, and the seller was said to be Aydın Dikmen in Munich³. She agreed on 3 July to buy them for a little over a million dollars, borrowing $1.2 million from Merchants National Bank^2,3. Discovery later showed that the purchase agreement was for $1.08 million; Hofstadter infers that the bill of sale shown to the bank carried a false price, while Goldberg said the lawyer Ronald Faulk drew it up and she signed on his urging³.

The Church of Cyprus and the Republic sued in federal court in Indianapolis on 29 March 1989, represented by Thomas Kline. On 3 August 1989 Judge James E. Noland held that the mosaics belonged to the Church. Indiana law gave her no valid title, and under Swiss law, he found, her inquiries fell short^2,3. Goldberg maintained that she had done nothing wrong and that Cypriot officials had themselves dealt with Dikmen³. The Court of Appeals upheld the decision, and the Supreme Court declined review in 1991³. Hofstadter, who wrote a book on the case, did not think she had knowingly bought stolen goods but judged that she had played along in a "perilously passive way"³. The mosaics reached Cyprus in early September 1991, and Hofstadter saw them in a back room of the Byzantine Museum in Nicosia³.