When the FBI announced the Geronimo arrests at a press conference that week, I took my regular spot in the back of the room, out of camera shot, careful to preserve my undercover identity. This time, Vizi took an extra precautionary step, one that probably saved us from inadvertently ruining my case in Santa Fe.
She spoke to the journalists off the record and asked them not to report my name or the fact that an undercover agent from Philadelphia was involved. The information about my name and my role was publicly available—as required by law, it was filed in the court affidavit I’d signed laying out the facts of the case, and it was the kind of document reporters routinely used to write their stories. Thankfully, all of the journalists honored her request.
WHEN I CALLED Baer in Santa Fe the day after the Geronimo press conference, it was the first thing he mentioned.
“Bob! You OK? Man, I thought maybe you got swept up in that thing in Philly. You know, some guys got busted trying to sell a headdress. It was Geronimo’s!”
I played dumb. “No kidding? For real?”
“Yeah, I got the paper right here. Big story in the New Mexican.” Baer began reading the story aloud: “‘An FBI affidavit filed yesterday said an undercover agent received an electronic message early last month in an Internet chat room.’” I recognized the wording. It was the story from the Philadelphia Inquirer, reprinted word for word in the Santa Fe paper. Damn, I thought, good thing Vizi got to the reporters. Baer, still fired up, read through the whole article.
I said, “That’s incredible, Josh, just incredible.”
“Yeah, well, you have to be careful, because of who is running these things and is behind these stings. It’s nuts. Hey, you know what, Bob? That Geronimo war bonnet was way overpriced. I wouldn’t have paid more than a hundred grand.”
I flew out to see Baer in November. I enjoyed his company, despite his crimes, and he taught me a great deal about Native Americans and their fascinating rituals. Between mid-August and January, I met with him more than a dozen times in Santa Fe and spoke with him on the phone at least ten times. I ate at his home and treated him to dinner at his favorite restaurants. We talked about our families, but mostly about art deals. Baer was an intellectual, a connoisseur of fine Indian art and good wine, but he was no snob—he didn’t sniff when I told him I didn’t drink alcohol or roll his eyes when I asked an ignorant question about Native American traditions. He’d begun his career in New Mexico in the mid-1970s, spending years on the pueblos building relationships with the Navajo, and brokering their rugs, their art, and their sacred artifacts. Baer was a San Francisco liberal who fit in easily in hoity-toity Santa Fe, but many in Indian country found him off-putting, the epitome of a patronizing White Man. He lived in a fine home and drove a Mercedes, but he lived precariously. His bank balance varied widely month to month and he always seemed on the cusp of the big deal. Baer had a ready justification for selling illegal Indian religious and eagle-feathered artifacts: “It’s all about karma,” he would say. “I’ve given so much stuff back, repatriated it to the tribes—they give me stuff, I give them stuff. It’s all good karma. You gotta be careful, do things right, or it will come back to haunt you.”
Early on, Baer aired suspicions that I might be a Fed. He never directly confronted me; he would say that others suspected it. Once, he began asking me so many questions, I tossed him my wallet and told him he was free to rifle through it. “I don’t have anything to hide,” I said. I think the thing that ingratiated me with him the most was my offer to rip off my own client. I proposed that we inflate Husby’s price, then split the profits fifty-fifty. In Baer’s eyes, my crime—fraud against the Norwegian—was far worse than breaking some silly law about eagle feathers. That’s when I knew I had connected, that I had him.
I flew to Santa Fe a week after we spoke on the phone, and Baer offered good news: He’d found an eagle-feather bonnet in Colorado. We could buy it for $75,000, he said, and charge the Norwegian $125,000. I brought Husby to the gallery.
Baer beckoned us to the back room. “This is your lucky day,” he said. He lifted a shopping bag and pulled out an eagle-feather headdress, laying it across a table. “I’m proud to show you this,” he said, then left us alone to appreciate it. The headdress was intoxicating: seventy golden eagle feathers stitched together in a five-foot-long tail, with domed brass buttons, rawhide, and strips of braided human hair. Husby noticed a tiny label that said “RI66Y,” clearly an inventory mark from a museum. When Baer returned, Husby acted thrilled. Baer explained that the headdress, of course, would be a gift and that Husby would buy a quiver and a few other legal artifacts at sharply inflated prices. The total sale price would be $125,000. We shook hands and celebrated that night with a dinner at Baer’s home with his wife. After dinner, Baer took out the headdress and placed it on Husby’s head, a crowning end to a fun evening.
It would have been perfect, too, if not for an incredibly frustrating discovery late that night—the batteries on my hidden tape recorder had died. I’d have to find a way to get Baer to repeat his incriminating statements.
I called Baer the next morning and steered him toward reliving the moment when Husby first saw the headdress. Together, we mocked the gullible Norwegian.
Baer laughed. “The look on your guy’s face was just—”
“Shocking.”
“Priceless,” Baer said.
I told him Husby ought to have the $125,000 available in a few days. Baer reminded me that our take would then be $25,000 each. We were talking like partners now, working together, watching out for each other.
“We just have to proceed in a sensible fashion,” Baer said. “I mean, we got the quiver as a bona fide transaction.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Exactly.”
IF YOU LISTEN to the undercover tapes I made during the Santa Fe sting, you’ll hear me whistling quite a bit—whistling as I stroll to Baer’s gallery, whistling as I walk away.
I’m whistling because it reduces my stress.
The physical and mental demands of going undercover can be overwhelming. It’s stressful to stay focused, to toggle between personas, even simultaneous cases, especially when there’s downtime between acts, waiting for deals. I whistle as I ramp up and whistle as I ramp down.
That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy the thrill of going undercover. I do enjoy it, especially the challenge of outthinking a criminal, feeding him enough rope to hang himself with his own words.
It’s kind of weird. Sometimes, when I’ve slipped into a role, I really don’t want it to end. Which is why, when a case does end, I always feel a little deflated.
Almost everyone who goes undercover experiences this letdown. It’s normal to feel a sense of loss. After working so hard to ingratiate yourself with a target, thinking about a case day and night for weeks and months, it’s only natural to miss that high, to even feel a bit depressed. You invest a great deal—turn it on, turn it off, call your target, call your wife—and then suddenly, the case is over.
Sometimes, I feel slightly guilty about the betrayal. If I’ve done my job correctly—built rapport with the target, befriended him—I’ll feel a gnawing in my stomach. It’s normal, I guess, but that doesn’t make it any less mind-bending. FBI agents are trained to uphold our motto—“Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity.” Working undercover, we violate every tenet of that creed: We are disloyal. We act cowardly. We lie.