Priceless (14 page)

I turned to Goldman and pumped his hand. Forty months! Maybe this marked the start of a trend for art crime cases.

Philadelphia, 1998
.

W
HEN YOU WORK UNDERCOVER
,
IT’S
ALWAYS A GOOD
idea to greet an out-of-town target at the airport. A guy just getting off a plane is less likely to be carrying a weapon.

I met Civil War artifact collector Charlie Wilhite a few minutes after his flight landed from Kansas City. We ducked into a shuttle bus headed to the Embassy Suites near the Philadelphia airport. It was a brisk January afternoon in the mid-twenties, and in the bus Wilhite stayed bundled in a ski jacket and gloves, gripping a large black gym bag. He carried no other luggage. I knew he was booked on a return flight that evening, so I figured he had the merchandise in the satchel. Wilhite was a middle-aged, gangly man with a pale face and a bad blond comb-over. He wore cowboy boots and spoke with a Southern drawl.

When we got to the hotel room, I tried to make Wilhite comfortable. I poured a pair of Cokes and set them on a table with two chairs, in full view of the hidden surveillance camera. “Welcome to Philadelphia,” I said.

“Well thank you, bud.” He peeled off the jacket and gloves. “Thank you very much.”

“First visit?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Hopefully it’ll be a memorable one.”

“I hope so.”

We both laughed.

Wilhite unzipped his carry-on and I stiffened slightly. Though I’d picked him up at the airport, you never knew what a guy might be carrying. Working undercover, rip-offs are always a real threat. Years earlier, I’d nearly been attacked by a man during a hotel sting. He’d claimed to be working for the CIA and wanted to buy $15 million worth of loose diamonds to fund covert operations in Europe. Diamond merchants in Philadelphia alerted the FBI and I had gone undercover as a diamond courier to meet the man. On the phone I played along with his crazy story and agreed to meet at a nearby hotel, telling him I would be carrying the diamonds inside a briefcase attached to my arm with a handcuff. When I met the guy in the warm hotel lobby, he approached wearing dark sunglasses and a heavy overcoat. We turned toward the elevators, but the coat and the man gave me an odd feeling, and I gave the takedown signal right there in the lobby. It turned out he was carrying a gun and a hatchet—no money for diamonds. He planned to kill me, cut off my arm, and make off with the jewels.

So I breathed a sigh of relief when Wilhite pulled from his bag a neatly folded red, white, and blue cloth—a nineteenth-century American flag in fine condition.

He unfolded the flag roughly and draped it over a small round table, the edges spilling over the side, the frayed fringes dangling inches from the ground. My eyes fixed smartly on the thirty-five gold stars in the blue corner square, and I shuddered inwardly as Wilhite manhandled this antiquity, knocking flecks of gold leaf from the stars to the hotel carpet. The stars were unusual, aligned like the night sky, haphazardly in loosely defined circles, set at different angles. At first glance, they seemed to be dancing.

In the middle of one of the seven red stripes, in capital shadow-box letters, were the words
12th REG. INFANTRY CO’ A
.

It was precisely as my tipster at the U.S. Army Center of Military History had described. This was the battle flag of the Twelfth Regiment Infantry, Corps d’Afrique, a near-sacred artifact in African American history, one of only five such flags to survive the Civil War. The Army museum’s historical property tag—“HP 108.62”—was still affixed to the lower left edge of the banner.

Wilhite caught my eye and smiled. “Beautiful, ain’t she?”

“Looks good to me, Charlie.”

A
BATTLE FLAG
is unlike any other antiquity.

Flags hoisted by the soldiers at Fort McHenry, the marines at Iwo Jima, and the firefighters at the World Trade Center are symbols of American resolve. The legend of the Fort McHenry battle flag inspired our National Anthem. Today, the tattered Star-Spangled Banner is the most visited artifact displayed at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, viewed by some six million tourists annually. That flag, hand-stitched with forty-two-foot reams of wool, is the most valuable artifact in the entire Smithsonian collection—worth more than the Hope Diamond, Charles Lindbergh’s
Spirit of Saint Louis
, or the Apollo 11 lunar module.

As an amateur Civil War artifacts collector, I knew that regimental flags played a key role in battle—that they were not merely ceremonial. The soldiers who carried the flags served as beacons for troops to follow in the chaos and cacophony of battle. The regimental flags literally marked the battle lines, where soldiers from the North and South died by the tens of thousands. Each side tried to knock off the other’s flag-bearers, eager to cut off a unit’s chief means of communication. To carry a regiment’s colors into battle was considered a great honor, but also a great personal burden and incredible risk.

The battle flag Wilhite brought to the hotel room was freighted with additional meaning. Missing from the Army archives for more than a decade, the Twelfth Regiment flag proudly stood for bravery, sacrifice, and racial history. After hanging for years in a place of
honor at West Point, the flag was transferred to an Army museum in Washington. In the mid-1970s, the old records showed, it was loaned out as part of an exhibition in South Carolina, but never arrived at its destination.

I first learned of its theft a month before I met Wilhite. Leslie Jensen, an Army historian in Washington, called to say that Army investigators were tracking a tip that someone was shopping the Twelfth Regiment flag on the black market.

Could the FBI help? Jensen asked.

Tell me more about the flag, I said.

“At least five men died carrying it,” Jensen said. “That’s why they call it a blood cloth.”

This Louisiana-based regiment, the expert explained, held a particularly significant place in the history of the War Between the States—and the U.S. military, generally. The Twelfth was among the first African American regiments to see major battle. Free blacks served in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 in limited numbers, and they also served in the Navy in the decades leading to the Civil War, but the notion of arming full regiment-sized units of black soldiers remained controversial. At the outset of war, the South used slaves in support roles for the Confederate Army, but President Lincoln initially declined to enlist black soldiers. After the Union lost several early battles, Lincoln ordered that tens of thousands of black men be used in support positions, but barred them from carrying weapons. His Union commanders fretted that these untested soldiers might cut and run in the heat of battle. Yet faced with the realities and horrors of war, Union generals gradually changed their minds. By the fall of 1862, when Lincoln declared that all slaves would be emancipated on January 1, 1863, self-formed black units were beginning to fight alongside Union whites in Massachusetts, South Carolina, and Louisiana. One of them was the Twelfth near New Orleans.

In May of 1863, when Union troops attacked Port Hudson, the final Southern stronghold on the Mississippi River, black regiments like the Twelfth won the chance to prove their mettle in battle. In
his 1887 book
The Black Phalanx
, Joseph T. Wilson, one of the African American soldiers who fought at Port Hudson, memorialized the battle in patriotic prose:

When a Confederate mortar felled the sergeant carrying the Twelfth Regiment’s flag, Wilson wrote, another scooped it up.

The battle won, white and black Union soldiers, having fought side by side for the first time, found themselves openly bonding, a remarkable sight during that time:

A white Union officer wrote to his family: “You have no idea how my prejudices with regard to Negro troops have been dispelled by the battle.” Even some Southerners were impressed. The Confederate general Henry McCulloch, describing one of his troops’ failed forays, wrote, “This charge was resisted by the Negro portion with considerable obstinance (while) the white or pure Yankee portion ran like whipped [dogs] almost as soon as the charge was made.”

In strictly strategic military terms, the forty-eight-day battle at Port Hudson was critical. It cleared the final Confederate garrison along the Mississippi, a milestone in the Civil War. But perhaps more important, Port Hudson marked a watershed for the U.S. military and race relations. Black enlistment mushroomed following this early engagement. By the war’s end, more than 150,000 African Americans had served in the Union army and at least 27,000 died in battle. They mustered in 160 regiments and participated in thirty-nine major campaigns. Yet only five battle flags from black regiments survive.

A
LL OF THIS
history reeled through my head as Wilhite and I held the blood cloth by its four corners in the hotel room.

I could have arrested the bastard right then and there, signaled the SWAT team and hoped Wilhite resisted. But I wanted more. I wanted to crawl inside his mind. I wanted to know more about a man who could sell such a blood cloth, especially someone like Wilhite, who professed to be a Civil War buff. How could he be so callous, so eager to seek to profit from a piece of stolen history?

Of course, I also wanted him to incriminate himself with the video surveillance tape running. To do that, I needed to prove intent—get him to admit on tape that he knew he was selling a stolen
historical artifact. After the takedown, I didn’t want his lawyer to claim that this was all some sort of misunderstanding, that Wilhite had obtained the flag in good faith, not knowing it was stolen.

Moving in for the kill, I eased back in my chair and sipped my Coke. “Did you ever find out where it came from?”

From a museum in Colorado, he said, making it clear it was stolen. “I’m telling you this upfront. I don’t want to mislead you. Because if I could take this to a show, I know what it could bring. I didn’t want to take that chance.”

This was going to be easy. Wilhite liked to hear himself talk and seemed eager for me to like him. I said, “You’re afraid someone will see it?” In other words, you know this is stolen property?

“Yeah,” he said. “I was told—I don’t know if this is correct—that it came from the West Point museum and was on its way to Colorado.”

I told him that I needed to know who else knew about the flag and our deal. This was important, I explained, because I needed to protect myself and my buyer. The fewer people who knew about the deal the better. This was a trick question, of course. Almost any answer would be incriminating. He might say “no one knows” because he didn’t trust anyone enough to join this illegal conspiracy. Or he might start naming names, vouching for them, not realizing he’d just outed them. He might even give up the name of a big fish, a dealer or broker not yet on the FBI’s radar. Either way, the question would get him talking.

Wilhite unfolded a long tale about buying the flag from some guy on the side at a Civil War show in Chicago, a cash deal consummated in his car in a city parking garage. When he finished, I changed tactics, trying to get him to admit he knew he was peddling a piece of African American history, that men died carrying this flag in battle. “Charlie,” I said, “you know much about the flag?”

“I’ve been told there are only five of these in existence, for colored troops.”

“Colored troops? Is that the same as Corps d’Afrique?”

“Yeah, they mustered in Louisiana and saw distinguished service in Tennessee. You can look it up.”

I had. “Did they have a lot of losses?”

“They had a lot of losses, yeah. They saw combat. They wasn’t just scrubbing pots, whatever, like the colored troop they made a movie on, the Massachusetts group. That’s what makes the piece for me.”

Incredible.
A lot of losses. That’s what makes the piece for me
. I masked my anger with a laugh and a swig of Coke. How far would this guy go? Wilhite seemed content, one of those people soothed by the sound of his own voice. He was tipping back in the chair now, one boot on the table, hands clasped behind his head. I said, “When you heard the history, you didn’t have any problem keeping it, as far as that’s concerned?”

“Me? No. I paid a lot of money for it. My buddy suggested maybe donating it to a museum and taking a tax write-off. I didn’t want to do that and thought about it for a while. This friend of mine said he had connections.” Wilhite pointed a bony finger at me. “Now, how you handle and market it is your business. But you want to be discreet. I don’t advise you to take it to a show. You may never have a problem, but I want to level with you.”