MY INVESTIGATION BEGAN years later. In 2000, a subpoenaed VHS tape arrived in the mail from WGBH, the Boston PBS affiliate that produces Antiques Roadshow. I found a player and cued it up.
It was a raw tape from the first season and it began with a familiar scene: two people sitting before what looked like a TV anchor’s desk, a silver sword lying between them, and dozens of casually dressed bargain hunters shopping for antiques in the background. The video opened with a sound check. A man with a well-groomed brown mustache, a three-piece suit, and his hair held snug with hair spray looked into the camera and spoke his name: “George Juno, American Ordnance Preservation Association.” Juno nodded at his guest, a nerdy-looking man in a need of a haircut, perhaps forty years old with a rumpled blue oxford shirt and gold wide-rimmed glasses. The man said his name, “Steve Sadtler.”
The segment began as typically as any on Antiques Roadshow, with an understated, somewhat stilted conversation.
“Steve, thank you for coming in today.”
“My pleasure.”
“This is an interesting sword you brought in. What can you tell me about the background?”
“Well, it’s a sword that I found twenty-three years ago. My folks bought a house down in Virginia and my folks decided they were going to rebuild the house. My brothers and I got stuck with the job of taking down the chimney. That required going up into the attic, and I found this thing”—he paused to point to the sword—“hanging on a post. Pretty much for me, it became a plaything. For the last ten or fifteen years, it’s been stored away.”
“Well, Steve, it’s quite a sword.” As Juno began to describe the object, his name and the name of his company appeared at the bottom of the screen. “If we look on the back of the blade we see the maker’s mark. It says Thomas Griswold, New Orleans. They imported items from England. The blade is etched in the middle, CS, on both sides, for Confederate States. The castle you see etched in the guard is actually a fort, Fort Sumner…. This would have used a solid brass scabbard. They used this for their artillery sabers and their cavalry sabers. It would have been a very flashy sword, gold plated all over the hilt. This is definitely the highest-quality pattern.”
Juno handed Steve a set of white gloves. “It’s always good practice to use the white gloves,” the expert explained, “because your hands have salts in them and after you put the sword away, the salts will continue to rust the blade and cause problems with the brass.” He turned the blade over. “Notice the crossed cannons? And on this side, floral, finely etched.”
When Juno finished his brief lesson, he laid the sword on the table and he paused before the big Antiques Roadshow moment, the one where the appraiser teases, “Do you have any idea what it might be worth?”
Sadtler said, “I was going to tag it for a garage sale between fifty and two hundred dollars.”
“Well,” Juno said, “this sword could have bought you a new garage.”
The camera zoomed in on Sadtler as his eyebrows narrowed with anticipation.
“That’s right,” Juno said. “This sword is worth thirty-five thousand dollars. This happens to be one of the great rarities in Confederate swords.”
“Did you say”—he gulped—“thirty-five thousand dollars?”
“Thirty-five thousand. You’ve made a great find here.”
“Whoa!” Sadtler’s mouth dropped open, and he seemed to struggle to restrain his joy, as if to remind himself that while this was a reality show, it was buttoned-down PBS, not The Price Is Right. He shook his head several times and said, “Man, I was going to get rid of it.”
Juno said, “You made a smart move taking it to us to have a look at it.”
“As a kid, I used this to cut watermelon.”
Juno gave an aw-shucks grin. “You’re lucky you didn’t get too much moisture on it.”
“Wow, thank you very much.”
The segment was so good—an instant Antiques Roadshow classic—that PBS aired it over and over, and used it in a fund-raising video. Some viewers suspected it was too good. Rumors began to circulate in the collecting community about the “watermelon sword.”
I tracked Steve Sadtler through the phone number he provided to WGBH on the standard Antiques Roadshow release form. I reached him in Seattle.
I told him I was investigating Pritchard and Juno for fraud. Look, I said, just tell me the truth and you won’t get into trouble. But don’t lie, I warned. It’s a federal crime to lie to an FBI agent.
Sadtler confessed immediately. The segment was indeed a setup, he said. Pritchard and Sadtler were close; Sadtler was a groomsman at Pritchard’s wedding. The night before the PBS taping, the two met up with Juno in a hotel room, where Pritchard concocted the story about finding it in Sadtler’s Virginia home, and paid him $10,000 for his help.
And that sword?
It belonged to Pritchard and Juno.
“THIS IS THE case we’ve been waiting for,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Bob Goldman said over lunch one summer afternoon, after I finished telling him about my conversation with Sadtler. “I’m telling you, this is it.”
I nodded, and as Goldman spoke I scooped a spoonful of kung pao chicken onto my plate. We sat in the back of Szechuan China Royal, a popular Philadelphia law-enforcement haunt—reliable, reasonably priced specials with well-spaced tables in a discreet basement dining room, a joint generally ignored by the white-collar mob that swarms Walnut Street at lunchtime.
“This is the case where we’ll make a difference,” he said. “This is great.”
Goldman, historian, collector, federal prosecutor, was a huge Antiques Roadshow fan. He watched it nearly every week. But like others, he’d long suspected some segments might be staged. It was too smooth. People offered things they inherited or discovered—a chair, a sword, a watch, an armoire, whatever—and voilà, an expert offered an off-the-cuff appraisal. How could the so-called experts make such quick appraisals? Didn’t they ever have to look anything up? Didn’t they ever make a mistake? Or simply get stumped?
“Bob,” I’d always tell him, “relax. It’s just TV, just entertainment.”
“Yeah,” the prosecutor would say, “but they’re passing themselves off as experts. Television has this way of deifying people. Viewers believe what these guys say.”
Faking a segment on a TV show isn’t, by itself, a federal crime. But faking a segment on TV to further a scheme to defraud collectors is a crime. And now that I was beginning to confirm that Pritchard and Juno had used some PBS segments to help trick viewers into selling other pieces at absurdly low prices, I shared Goldman’s outrage.
We also knew that Pritchard and Juno were busy helping the mayor of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, acquire a collection for a new Civil War museum, not far from Gettysburg. The mayor expected to spend $14 million on acquisitions—enough money, as my prosecutor friend liked to say, “to blind the conscience and steal the soul.” We’d already confirmed at least one case in which Pritchard and Juno used Antiques Roadshow and the Harrisburg museum deal to scam a collector. If there was one, there were probably many more.
Goldman was right: This just might be the case we’d been waiting for.
He and I often lamented over the unregulated, buyer-beware antiques and collectibles market, which operated largely on an honor system, where everyone was a salesman, provenance was sketchy, and dealers lived by their reputations. Hustlers sold fakes and reproductions, and unscrupulous dealers ripped off the naive. Honest brokers complained from time to time, but law enforcement agencies rarely showed interest. The cons were usually too small to attract the FBI’s attention, and too complicated for local police departments with little or no art crime experience and limited resources. Most such sales were poorly documented; often, evidence consisted of little more than a handshake and a promise. Besides, proving fraud in the antiques trade isn’t easy: Who’s to say what’s a fair deal? Where do you draw the line between a sucker deal and a scam?