Undercover FBI agents are trained to compartmentalize, to be careful not to get too close to their targets. In theory, it’s a nice thought, but you can’t work well undercover if you suppress your emotions or follow a rulebook. You have to follow your instincts. You have to be human. It’s hard, and it can eat you up at times. I don’t worry about the true criminals, but sometimes basically good people get into desperate situations and do dumb things. Sometimes, it can almost seem unfair.
Baer liked to talk about the influence of karma and mysticism, and in the world of stolen art and antiquities, I think there’s something to that. The Missouri man who sold me the Civil War battle flag died of cancer less than a year after we arrested him. The backflap seemed to haunt all who touched it. The grave robber who discovered the Moche tomb was later killed by police; the first wealthy Peruvian to obtain the backflap died mysteriously; the second went bankrupt; the son of the Miami smuggler Mendez was born prematurely and lived less than two months. As the infant lay dying in his arms, Mendez swore his son’s shriveled face resembled the Decapitator god engraved on the backflap.
I thought about all that as we moved to snap the trap shut on Baer with one final, orchestrated maneuver. His karma was about to take a turn for the worse.
MY JOB ON January 19, 2000—the day Baer was arrested—was simply to do a little friendly hand-holding, ahead of the afternoon raid on his gallery and home.
In the hours before the bust, we wanted to keep in close contact with Baer to make sure nothing unexpected popped up. And I wanted to cement the case. We met in his shop around noon and discussed final arrangements for the purchase of the headdress, a Corn Mother, and a few other items. He reminded me that we now each stood to earn about $32,000 on the $200,000 deal. I promised to meet him for dinner.
I did not join the team of federal agents on the raid.
Baer was charged with illegally selling or trying to sell seventeen artifacts, including the Navajo singer’s brush, the Jemez hair tie, a pair of Hopi wooden birds, the Cheyenne headdress, and a rare and most sacred Santo Domingo Corn Mother, a deity represented by a corncob with sixteen golden eagle feathers wrapped by cotton, buffalo hide, and string. The indictment set the total value of the illicit artifacts at $385,300.
I never expected to hear from Baer again. But two days after the bust, he e-mailed me. The subject line read, “Here’s to the Good Times.” I didn’t know what to make of that as I clicked open the message.Dear Bob: I don’t know what to say. Well done? Nice work? You sure had me fooled?We’re devastated, and I guess that’s the idea. But, even though we’re devastated, we enjoyed the times we spent with you. Thanks for being a gentleman, and for letting us have a pleasant Christmas and New Year’s. If you hadn’t done what you did, they would have brought in someone else to do it, and I don’t think we would have found him as personable as we found you. So there’s no blame involved. We just have a lot of facts to face.This letter is neither a joke, a scam, an appeal nor a message containing anything other than what it says. Best wishes, Joshua Baer.
It was a classy note from a thoughtful guy, and it triggered a momentary pang of guilt. But his graceful e-mail couldn’t change the fact that he had consciously and repeatedly violated the law and violated the trust of the Native American people he so professed to love.
I thought about it for a while and then wrote back the next day. “This was the hardest case I had because I really like you and your family. Call me anytime.”
I meant it.
Chapter 12
THE CON ARTIST
Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, 2000.
IF THE CARDINAL RULE OF WORKING UNDERCOVER IS Keep the lies to a minimum, a close second is Avoid working in your hometown.
For me, “hometown” didn’t just mean Philadelphia. It meant the art and antique circles throughout the Northeast where I’d spent years learning, lecturing, and developing sources. Eleven years into the job, this began to pose a bit of a catch-22: The more people I met in the art world, the more people knew my face, and the more dangerous it became to work undercover.
Sure enough, in 2000 I found myself investigating three prominent Pennsylvania appraisers who specialized in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century arms and militaria, and visited the same Civil War shows I frequented. All three suspects knew me. The eldest was the respected former director of the Civil War Museum of Philadelphia, and we’d chatted several times. The two younger suspects knew me from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania museum case—following the arrests, they’d helped the FBI make a formal appraisal of the value of the works the janitor had stolen for George Csizmazia.
This investigation was also particularly sensitive because it involved a sensational allegation, the kind of accusation against quasi-public figures that made my FBI supervisors nervous. The two younger suspects were star appraisers on the highest-rated program on PBS, Antiques Roadshow.
The integrity of the reality show hinged on the honesty of the on-the-spot appraisals of the items people brought—an heirloom Civil War sword, an Oriental vase discovered at a flea market, an old tea set gathering dust in Grandma’s attic. We’d heard rumors that the fix was in—that the two young suspects were faking the Antiques Roadshow appraisals to market their business.
Because I could not go undercover, and because the case involved a slog through tens of thousands of pages of bank, business, and court records, the Antiques Roadshow investigation became one of the longest of my career. The scandal singed the reputation of a PBS program beloved by million of viewers, disgraced the retired museum director, and left swindled victims, descendants of genuine war heroes, steaming that someone could act so cruelly.
THE CHIEF VILLAIN was a classic con artist. Russell Albert Pritchard III, tanned face, blue BMW, George Will haircut, Brooks Brothers ties, presented himself to all the world as a man who had it made.
Thirty-five years old, the appraiser lived with his comely wife and four children in a five-bedroom stone house at the epicenter of Philadelphia’s rarefied Main Line, half a block from the leafy campus of Bryn Mawr College. The family home, which he’d purchased from his father for $1 a decade before, was worth at least $1 million. Pritchard had trained to be an insurance salesman, but soon joined his father, Russ Pritchard Jr., in the family business, selling eighteenth- and nineteenth-century military artifacts. The father was an established and respected authority in the field—the former director of the Civil War Museum in Philadelphia and author of several books on Civil War weapons, equipment, and tactics. Together, father and son owned two-thirds of a military antiquities and memorabilia brokerage, which they gave the grand and somewhat misleading name American Ordnance Preservation Association, a moniker that suggested it was some sort of charity or nonprofit organization. The third partner was a gregarious thirty-seven-year-old appraiser from Allentown named George Juno.
Pritchard III and Juno scored their big break in 1996 when they won jobs as television appraisers for Antiques Roadshow. They traveled the country with the show for its first three seasons, performing instant, on-camera appraisals of guns, swords, uniforms, and other military artifacts. Pritchard and Juno were not paid for the work. But for such relatively young appraisers, the value of such national exposure—ten million households a week—was incalculable. Business for their brokerage boomed.