Thomas R. Kline

Thomas Kline was chief attorney for the Republic of Cyprus and the Church of Cyprus in the Indianapolis suit over the Kanakaria mosaics. Dan Hofstadter describes him as of Manatt, Phelps, Rothenberg & Phillips in Washington, a lawyer who specialized in environmental and antitrust law; neither he nor Joe Emerson, counsel for the dealer Peg Goldberg, had tried an antiquities case¹. Discovery took two months and more than twenty depositions. Kline's argument had two tiers: Indiana law gives no title from a thief, and under Swiss law Goldberg was not a good-faith purchaser¹. He deposed Goldberg in April and May 1989¹.

At the trial in late May 1989, before Judge James E. Noland, Kline did not call Michel van Rijn, fearing sympathy for Goldberg¹. He questioned Robert Fitzgerald about the $350,000 paid to Aydin Dikmen against Goldberg's price, which left roughly $650,000 unaccounted for, and he cross-examined Goldberg, a performance Hofstadter calls a disaster for her¹. Judgment went to Cyprus on 3 August 1989; a motion to set it aside was denied and the Court of Appeals upheld the judgment¹. Hofstadter later thanked Kline, then of Andrews & Kurth, for legal help with his book, and Kline told him that Dikmen was probably a constructed "identity"¹.