Man ends torment over stolen treasure

Joseph Sisto wanted none of it, not one piece of his father's collection.

Not the 6th century B.C. pottery, not the 12th century parchments marked with papal seals, not the document handwritten by Benito Mussolini. And certainly not the yellowed bones claimed to be those of Catholic saints.

These things are three-times cursed, Sisto, of Duluth, would tell his father, John. Cursed once because they were stolen, cursed twice because they were smuggled, and cursed thrice because concealing the cache in their home had robbed the family of its peace of mind.

"It didn't feel right. It never felt right," Joseph Sisto said. "To me, having the stuff was always a burden."

Now, after a lifetime of secrecy, Sisto, 48, finally feels a burden has been lifted. Early last week, the FBI announced the conclusion of its two-year investigation into the theft and transportation of the artifacts.

Over a period of more than 20 years, John Sisto, of Berwyn, Ill., amassed a collection of more than 3,500 precious antiquities —- manuscripts of kings, documents of popes and delicate pieces of art mostly from Italy —- that would have been the envy of any museum curator.

Just about every piece of it had been looted from historic Italian sites or stolen from private collections, the FBI said. The elder Sisto knew it when he bought the goods, the agents said. Joseph Sisto agrees.

In fact, after his father died two years ago, it was Joseph Sisto who finally picked up the phone and called the police to tell them about the treasures that filled nearly every corner of the house in Berwyn.

"It was a very unassuming house, in an unassuming neighborhood and this nondescript, low-profile guy and here was this literal treasure trove of antiquities," said FBI special agent Ross Rice of Chicago.

This weekend, many of the pieces, about 1,600 of them, are en route to Italy. It took the FBI's art theft unit, working in conjunction with Italian law enforcement, two years to painstakingly verify the provenance of the collection. Much of the written work was in Latin and had to be identified and translated by scholars. Under the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) treaty, stolen cultural artifacts are to be repatriated their mother country.

The FBI estimates the collection's value to be up to $10 million in U.S. currency. Rice said there are no plans to charge anyone in the Sisto family with a crime, since the suspected perpetrator, John Sisto, is dead. Joseph Sisto, in particular, was extremely helpful in the investigation, Rice said. Italian authorities could try to bring charges against someone, though Rice said that possibility was very unlikely.

For all the authorities' efforts, they could not establish the original ownership of roughly 2,000 pieces of the collection. So, ironically, the Sisto family gets to keep the remaining work. Joseph Sisto said his younger brother, from whom he is estranged, can have the lot of it.

"It led to an unhappy childhood filled with work and drudgery," Sisto said.

For the past 15 years, Joseph Sisto has led an otherwise quiet life in Atlanta. He moved here with his wife. Now he's a father. He works as a software division director and sits on the board of the Atlanta Community Food Bank. He's a guy who speaks Italian, loves an afternoon at the High Museum and, by his own admission, is the one you want on your Trivial Pursuit team. In many ways, he is a regular, suburban dad.

Then he begins to tell his story.

His father, John, immigrated to this country in 1958 from Italy and settled in Chicago. At first, his father found work in a bank, then helped run a pizza parlor with other family members. Finally, John Sisto opened a small bookstore and moved his young family to suburban Berwyn.

Collectibles and old texts fascinated the elder Sisto. By the time Joseph was an adolescent, his father was taking him on regular trips to Italy to visit family. The trips were often more drudgery for Joseph than pleasure.

Italian summers were interminably hot, and Joseph and his dad would spend hours looking for rare books and manuscripts in musty old castles and homes in the country. Often, his father would leave with purchased packages or he'd wind up buying the entire contents of the place.

One visit stands out in Joseph's mind —- the night his father took him to a remote warehouse where men were loading things into boxes: paintings, statues, books and what Joseph Sisto now swears appeared to be mummified remains so hard they reminded him of fossils.

"I was scared to death," Sisto said. "It was horrifying."

Months after the Italian visits, crates would arrive at the brick bungalow in Berwyn. Scores of crates, almost never just one or two. That's when the real work began. Joseph, his younger brother and his father would spend every minute of their spare time unloading dirty, messy crates. Instead of playing softball outside with friends or just hanging out, Joseph and his brother had to stay inside and catalogue the contents. But instead of selling the items on the black market (which the FBI said had been part of an original plan), John Sisto kept almost everything.

He converted the second floor of the bungalow into a veritable archive. He had dozens of bookshelves installed. He filled the attic. Then he learned how to read and translate Latin to better appreciate what was in his trove. He quietly and cautiously sought out curators to learn how to properly preserve ancient documents, always taking his absolute worst and most insignificant piece for the consultation so as not to arouse suspicion, Sisto said.

And for that reason, Joseph and his brother weren't allowed to have friends over and his family rarely had guests.

"I had to do what my dad wanted me to do, and you did it even though you knew it was not right," Sisto said.

Even so, Joseph Sisto couldn't escape the influence of his upbringing and wound up studying cultural anthropology at Georgia State University. That's where his fears about the family secret were confirmed and where he learned that the UNESCO treaty demanded the artifacts be returned to Italy. Sisto confronted his father about it several times, but each time his father said he'd done nothing wrong and eventually stopped speaking to Joseph.

Then, about two years ago, Joseph's brother called to say their dad was dead. Their mom had died two years prior. Joseph flew to Chicago and promptly called Berwyn police to the brown brick house, still crowded with a stockpile of the ages.

Through its investigation, FBI spokesman Rice said, the FBI believes that many of those shipments were arranged and some of the contents procured by John Sisto's father, Giuseppe. Authorities said Giuseppe, who remained in Italy until his death, obtained the artifacts from third parties who looted private collections. Joseph Sisto disputes that his grandfather was involved in that way.