Harmelin winked at me as I listened in on an extension in his skyscraper office. “His name is Bob Clay. Dot-com guy. You can meet when you come up here Tuesday for the closing.”
When he hung up, Harmelin was ebullient, comfortable enough to tease me.
“Agent Wittman?” he said as I headed out the door with Heine. “Do me a favor? If you’re gonna be an Internet hotshot on Tuesday, find yourself a nicer pair of shoes.”
I WASN’T IN the conference room when the closing began.
I wanted Richardson to see familiar faces, get comfortable. So the only people in the room were the three men Richardson had met once before—Harmelin, a rare-documents consultant, and another Dilworth attorney. Inside his jacket, Harmelin carried a cashier’s check for $4 million.
I waited in another room with Torsella. My backup, five FBI agents, including Heine, stood ready nearby.
We didn’t wire the room for audio or video. I thought it would be too much of a hassle to get permission—recording a sting inside a law firm would have created more worry for the Dilworth lawyers and required layers of approval within the FBI. Besides, Richardson didn’t seem like the violent type. If there was real trouble, we’d hear the shouts through the door.
Agents on surveillance reported that Richardson arrived alone and empty-handed. A few minutes later, the agents reported that a courier was on his way to the conference room with a large folio.
I waited a few more minutes and Harmelin fetched me to join him in the conference room. Laid flat on the conference table, beside stacks of fake closing documents, was the Bill of Rights. I made a show of studying it. It was three feet high, written on faded vellum, its texture varying from corner to corner, making some amendments easier to read than others. Considering the parchment’s journey, it was in remarkable condition. Right there, on the bottom, I could make out John Adams’s neat signature in two-inch-high letters.
I turned to Richardson and pumped his hand. I slapped Harmelin on the back. “Gentlemen,” I said, “this is a wonderful day. This will be a great contribution to the National Constitution Center. I’m so pleased to be a part of this.” I turned to Harmelin, giving him a reason to leave. “Steve, we need to get Torsella in here. He needs to see this.”
The plan was to leave me alone with the document expert and Richardson. With the Bill of Rights essentially secured, it was time to try to make a criminal case. I wanted a few minutes with Richardson, to try to draw him into a discussion about the stolen parchment to see what he knew about its mysterious 125-year journey from Raleigh to Philadelphia. With his mind on a $4 million payday, this would present my best opportunity. I planned to start by asking him how careful I really needed to be, whether there were any marks on the document that would prove it was North Carolina’s stolen copy.
I never got the chance.
As Harmelin left the room to get Torsella, he bumped the door to the office where my colleagues waited. They took it as a signal to move in, positioning themselves between the Bill of Rights and everyone else. Thompson, our squad supervisor, handed Richardson the seizure warrant.
“Am I under arrest?” he said.
“Oh, no,” I said, trying to reassure him. I walked him quietly toward a corner.
“What’s this all about?” he said.
At that point, with my cover blown, I felt compelled to tell the truth. “We’re conducting a criminal investigation into an allegation of interstate transportation of stolen property,” I said. “The document is now evidence.”
As I feared, Richardson now refused to talk.
“Can I leave?” he said.
“Yes,” I said. I didn’t have a reason to detain him. We had no evidence that he knew the Bill of Rights was stolen property. “But first I’ve got to give you a receipt for the document.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Nope,” I said. I took out a standard Department of Justice receipt for seized property, a form I’d filled out dozens of times in my career. As I wrote the words—“Description of item: Copy of United States Bill of Rights”—the history of the moment caught up with me. I thought back to my first day at the FBI Academy, when I took an oath to protect and defend the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. I’d always assumed I’d pledged to defend the ideals, not the actual documents.
Richardson was stammering at me, but I was lost in the moment and didn’t hear what he said.
I just handed him his receipt.
He straightened his tie and walked out the door.
WE RECEIVED SUCH great publicity when we announced the Bill of Rights rescue, Headquarters didn’t hesitate when we asked to use the FBI director’s jet to fly the parchment home.
The flight to Raleigh was scheduled for April 1. That it was April Fool’s Day was a coincidence, but it certainly made it easier to pull off our gag.
Before we left, I stopped by the touristy gift shop at the Independence Mall Visitor’s Center and bought a souvenir copy of the Bill of Rights for $2. Then I went to a drugstore and bought a two-by-two-foot piece of poster board and some superglue. Heine and I mounted the fake Bill of Rights onto the board and slipped it inside the custom three-by-three-foot box holding the real Bill of Rights, which was held inside a special protective plastic sleeve.
When we touched down in Raleigh, four local FBI agents met us at the airport and drove us to their suburban office. The conference room was already jammed with agents, prosecutors, and marshals. We teased our audience by making a show of the official paperwork documenting the transfer of evidence. People started getting impatient.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “Do you want to see it first?”
Of course they did. Heine started to open the box and I shifted strategically in front of him to shield our sleight of hand. He took out the fake Bill of Rights, started to hold it up—and fumbled it to the floor.
“Oops,” I said as Heine bent over. “Geez.”
I heard a slight gasp, and as I looked up, Heine gave it his best Three Stooges stumble, clumsily stepping on the damn thing, twisting the cardboard.
On cue, I screamed, “Oh my God!”
We heard more gasps and saw a supervisor’s eyes bulge.
We waited a beat, then bust out laughing.
The Raleigh supervisor did not laugh with us.
Gingerly, we withdrew the real of Bill of Rights, laid it on the table, and signed it over to the U.S. marshal.
Chapter 16
ART CRIME TEAM
Merion, Pennsylvania, 2005.
STANDING BEFORE A DOZEN FBI AGENTS AND SUPERVISORS in the expansive main gallery at the center of the Barnes Foundation’s museum, I pointed to a towering modern painting of a man and woman carrying flowers.
“This is The Peasants,” I said. “It’s a Picasso, very modern, but it has definite influences from Michelangelo. See the feet and the toes? The sinewy arms? The muscular legs? It’s heroic.”
Fourteen years after my yearlong class at the Barnes, I was returning to help with a daylong training session designed for agents from the FBI’s newly formed Art Crime Team.
“Each gallery you’ll see today is a classroom,” I told my FBI colleagues. “The four walls in each gallery are your blackboards. They are the lesson plans. Each teaches us something about light, line, color, shape, and space. By the way, in this room alone, you’re probably looking at a billion dollars’ worth of art.”