Priceless (17 page)

“Not sure if this is a prank, nor if it would interest the FBI,” the tipster e-mailed, “but thought it might be of interest regardless. Please see the forwarded post below.”

I e-mailed “Steve.” The next day, a fast-talking Marietta, Georgia, car salesman named Thomas Marciano called my undercover cell phone. Indeed, he said, Geronimo’s eagle-feather war bonnet was still for sale. Excellent condition, he said. I asked about provenance and Marciano explained that Geronimo had worn the headdress in October 1907 to mark the Last Pow-Wow, a carnival celebrating Oklahoma’s transition from territory to state. By then, he said, Geronimo was no longer a legendary military and spiritual leader but a seventy-eight-year-old prisoner of war, a tragic over-the-hill celebrity granted regular leave to appear at fairs and parades. The Last
Pow-Wow was one such gig, but more significant than most because the great chief had dressed in full regalia and took center stage during a ceremony in which he performed spiritual dances. Afterward, Geronimo presented the headdress he wore to his military escort, a half-Cherokee named Jack Moore. Later, Moore gave the war bonnet to a good friend, C. W. Deming. The man’s grandson, Leighton Deming, inherited the headdress and kept it mothballed in a trunk for decades. Deming had recently fallen on hard financial times, Marciano explained, and was looking to sell the headdress.

Wow, great story, I told Marciano. I’ve got an interested buyer in Europe. Mail me some pictures and background, and I’ll take a look, I said. OK, he said, but be careful. It’s illegal, he warned me, to sell eagle feathers in the United States. With the tape recorder rolling, I acted surprised. Are you sure? Yes, yes, he insisted, I’m quite sure. Hmm, I said, I dunno.

There are plenty of dumb criminals out there—the prisons are full of them. But Marciano tops my list. Eager to prove he was correct, that our deal was indeed illegal, he mailed me a copy of the law—16 United States Code 668, The Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act of 1940, which explicitly prohibits the sale of eagle feathers.

“You were right,” I said when we spoke again, acting amazed. I tried to lure him north so I could work the case on my home turf with Goldman, who was restricted to prosecuting cases in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. “Tell you what,” I said. “I wanna do this, but I’m kind of busy. Can you make it up here? How about we meet at the Embassy Suites in Philadelphia, the one right at the airport?”

Marciano and Deming arrived at the hotel room on an early October afternoon, carrying a turn-of-the-century trunk. They set it beside the couch, right below the hidden surveillance camera. I’d brought along a friend from New Mexico—the expert Fish and Wildlife Service agent in my Santa Fe case, Lucinda Schroeder. She would know immediately whether the headdress was made of eagle feathers, or the common fake material, turkey feathers.

Deming and Marciano couldn’t have been more different. Deming
was a laid-back Southerner, fifty-five years old with a bulging nose, tired blue eyes, bushy black eyebrows, thin lips. Back in Sewanee, Georgia, he was a lawyer and president of the Gwinnett County Optimists Club. Deming liked to talk and slowly unspool family yarns in a silky voice—“My grandfather was friends with Jack Moore. Grandfather was in the oil business out there and Jack Moore used to come to his home, break down the door in the middle of the night, and sleep off the whiskey. And then two weeks later, Jack would be all sobered up by now, he’d come back and bring him a cow or something. My grandfather liked Jack Moore, so he never said anything. That was just Jack Moore.” One day, instead of a cow, Jack Moore showed up and handed the grandfather Geronimo’s headdress and a few other souvenirs, including an autographed photo.

Marciano, by contrast, couldn’t sit still. Forty-two and beefy, with thick brown hair that receded to the top of his crown, he bounced about the room, throwing out factoids about Geronimo in a hard Boston accent—how he was a prisoner of war, how he spent his final decade peddling souvenirs. “It’s how he earned his living. He kept a valise of hats. He would put one on and sell it and then get another and put it on. He would cut a button off from his jacket and sell it and then have his wife sew on another one. It’s kind of sad, really.”

As the men held forth, Schroeder studied the headdress a few feet away. After a few minutes, she pronounced the war bonnet likely authentic. We moved to the guts of the deal, and Deming proposed a way around the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act: He would sell me the Geronimo autographs for $1 million and loan my buyer the headdress indefinitely. OK, I agreed, but I insisted that he sign a bill of sale agreement. This was Goldman’s idea—he wanted Deming to admit that he was selling the eagle feather war bonnet. I told Deming that my buyer insisted on a contract to protect him from Deming’s heirs. Without a signed contract, I said, Deming’s children might someday make a claim for the headdress. Deming hesitated.
He eyed the undercover Fish and Wildlife agent suspiciously. “I’m sure you’re a nice lady, but I don’t know you.”

I turned to her. “Why don’t you step outside for a minute?”

After she left, I braced for an argument from Deming, but he instead leaned close and spoke in a whisper. “All bullshit aside, Bob, I’ll sign this and then do another one when she comes back in.” He was offering to sign two contracts, a secret one admitting that he was selling the headdress and another in front of my expert with no mention of the headdress. That way, he figured, if she turned out to be a cop, he’d be OK.

“Absolutely,” I said, pushing the incriminating document in front of him. We signed the contract mentioning the headdress and Deming watched me stuff it in my pocket.

I said, “Before she comes back, between us, how many other people are involved in this? … Because I don’t want to get in any trouble.”

Deming: “Shit no.”

“One other thing,” I said, slowly, almost in a drawl. “Once overseas, this thing ain’t never coming back. We understand that, right?”

They nodded. I let Schroeder back in, Deming signed the second contract and the two men were so pleased with themselves that they dug the artifact out of the trunk to pose for one last series of pictures wearing Geronimo’s headdress.

“You did the right thing bringing it to me,” I told them.

“Well, it’s a piece of history,” Deming said.

I gave the code phrase for the SWAT team: “You guys hungry?”

After the arrests, FBI Philadelphia spokeswoman Linda Vizi received a call from the chief of the Lenape tribe in Delaware. He told her that the headdress, dormant in a trunk for three quarters of a century, needed a spiritual cleaning, to wipe away the bad spirits and influences. He offered to perform a smudging ceremony. The chief repeated what I’d heard in New Mexico: A headdress must be respected and kept pure, because the eagle feather is considered a telephone to God. Vizi and I felt we should honor the request. What
was the point of rescuing a piece of antiquity if you couldn’t respect its raison d’etre?

The next day, the Lenape leader brought a batch of herbs to a sterile FBI conference room in Philadelphia. He lit the herbs like incense, filling the room with a pungent smell of sage. Vizi watched nervously as a trail of smoke drifted toward ceiling fire detectors. The Lenape chief rubbed his hands through the smoke, softly chanting prayers, and began blessing and massaging the wilted feathers. The sage cleansed, he explained, driving away evil influences. Next, he burned sweetgrass, an herb designed to draw positive spirits. He stepped aside when the ritual was over. The feathers had perked up, and the headdress looked like new.

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.

W
HEN
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.”

I
F 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.