Priceless (20 page)

In a series of FBI interviews and letters to the government, family members described the role Don Patterson and the Museum played in their lives. “My whole life, since I was able to walk, I was with my father picking things out from old antique stores, things from the Civil War,” daughter Robynn wrote. “The Museum was just down the hall from my bedroom from fourth grade through high school,” stepson Robert recalled. “It was always there, always part of us. We didn’t fish, we didn’t play catch, we didn’t go camping—we collected irreplaceable pieces of history. In truth, almost my entire childhood was represented in the collection. My dreams, aspirations,
my values came to be in large part because of my involvement with the collection.” The stepson made a career in the Army, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel.

The Patterson family’s halcyon life shattered in late 1995, when Mr. Patterson killed himself, as well as his secret mistress. “As you can imagine, our whole family was absolutely devastated,” his widow said.

Like a vulture, Pritchard visited Salisbury just months after the murder-suicide. The nice man charmed the widow, driving her to pick up her disabled daughters from school, eating meals at the Patterson kitchen table, and assuring them that the artifacts from the Museum would be in better hands in a real Civil War museum. He told her about the new one rising near Gettysburg and presented letters and brochures from the City of Harrisburg, including one that promised a “Donald Patterson Memorial Collection” room. In 1996, one year after Don Patterson’s death, the family agreed to Pritchard’s plan. The nice man gave them $5,000, packed away the best of the collection, and drove it north. Shortly after he left, the widow noticed, it became harder to get him to return her calls. The betrayal was under way.

By the time I spoke with Mrs. Patterson in 1999, and after three years of Pritchard’s deceptions, she just wanted the truth. I’ve always found it’s just best to deliver bad news directly. So I told her what I’d learned from Pritchard’s records: Her husband’s collection wasn’t in any museum. Pritchard had sold it to two private Civil War dealers for $65,000. It was gone.

“My whole being has been violated and I have been emotionally raped,” the widow recalled.

Pritchard had to be stopped. He wasn’t just conning people out of money. He was stealing their heritage.

I
N
M
ARCH
2001, based on the evidence we presented to the grand jury, Pritchard and Juno were indicted on various federal
charges, including defrauding the Wilson family and the Pickett family. The men faced as much as ten years in prison.

We were not finished. We had brought the initial indictment that March because the five-year statute of limitations was about to expire in the Wilson and Pickett cases. But we still had more time to bring a superseding indictment on charges related to the Zouave uniform, the Meade presentation pistol, and the Patterson family collection. We also weighed whether to charge Pritchard’s father for his role in the Hunt Confederate uniform scam. So far, I hadn’t interviewed the elder Pritchard.

I dreaded the confrontation. I’d known the elder Pritchard for more than a decade and had long respected him as a top man in the museum field. I’d visited him a dozen times at the Civil War Museum in Philadelphia to research cases and learn more about collecting. A well-thumbed copy of his three-volume treatise on Civil War weapons and uniforms sat on my desk at home.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to meet him face to face. The elder Pritchard was living in Memphis at the time, so I called him there. I made it clear that although he and I knew each other, this was an official FBI interview. I told him that we were going to charge his son with the Hunt uniform scam. I gave the father a choice: Cooperate on this one facet of the case or face a felony charge.

“Look, Russ,” I said. “Just tell me the truth and everything will go away.” In other words, you won’t be indicted. If he told us the truth, Goldman planned to exercise his prosecutorial discretion and leave him out of the next indictment. If he lied, Goldman planned to charge him.

“I’m sorry, Bob,” the elder Pritchard said. “I can’t help you.”

He couldn’t admit to me that he’d conspired with his son to swindle the Hunt family. I doubt this was because he wanted to protect his son. He knew it was too late for that. I think he couldn’t admit what he did because he knew it would ruin his reputation in the field.

I gave him one more chance. “Tell me what happened, Russ.”

“Bob, I can’t.”

“OK, but you’re going to go down.”

“I know. But I just can’t do it.”

Juno, on the other hand, played it smart. He knew we had a solid case against him, and he knew he could shave years off a prison term by pleading guilty and cooperating.

Two days after my conversation with the father, we filed the superseding indictment against both Pritchards.

Within a month, the Pritchard son and his attorney came to the FBI office in Philadelphia. He met with me, Goldman, and Heine to give a proffer statement, a private off-the-record confession, the prelude to a plea agreement.

Over two hours, Pritchard confessed to everything, and even dimed out his dad. Proffer sessions and confessions are incredibly stressful for defendants. They have to look their accusers in the eye—the very prosecutor and agents who’ve been hounding them for years, dragging their name into the newspaper, embarrassing their families, scandalizing their friends—and admit that yes, indeed, they did it. They did it all. Proffers are rarely pleasant and sometimes contentious. I’ve seen defendants leave a proffer session looking as if they’ve aged a couple of years. Pritchard? He didn’t look mussed at all.

When it was over, he walked over to shake Goldman’s hand, gripping the prosecutor’s elbow with his left hand, an old politician’s trick to keep the other man from pulling away.

“Mr. Goldman,” he said, “I want to thank you for bringing my act to an end. This is good for me. I’m glad you’re bringing these charges against me.”

Goldman raised his left eyebrow, broke away, and gave Pritchard a hard stare that said, “Don’t bullshit me.”

I
N
2001,
THE
year Pritchard and Juno pleaded guilty, Harrisburg’s redbrick $50 million, sixty-five-thousand-square-foot National Civil
War Museum celebrated its grand opening. It featured state-of-the-art displays and dioramas with genuine artifacts of war, including the kepi hat that Pickett wore at Gettysburg.

Like the Picketts, most families didn’t get their treasures back. The courts concluded that despite the frauds, the descendants no longer enjoyed legal title to the artifacts Pritchard had sold. The mayor of Harrisburg successfully argued that the city, too, was a victim of Pritchard and Juno, and that it was not required to return the items it acquired for its museum.

The Pritchard father would go to trial on the single charge related to the uniform scam, lose, and be sentenced to six months in a halfway house. Juno also got a few months in a halfway house. The Pritchard son would get a year and a day in prison and be ordered to pay $830,000 in restitution.

Despite the relatively light sentences, Goldman and I were thrilled with the outcome. The
Antiques Roadshow
investigation sent several important messages, and I couldn’t help but think of my father and all the other honest antiques dealers down on Howard Street in Baltimore, working to make a living on small margins. To them, the case demonstrated that someone cared, that someone was watching this unregulated industry—and that unscrupulous dealers faced public shame and possible imprisonment.

The public response was even greater than we’d hoped. In the collecting community, the
Antiques Roadshow
investigation represented such a watershed that one of the major trade publications printed the Pritchard indictment word for word. Surfing the wave of publicity the case brought, I received a torrent of tips that led to more important recoveries, including a Confederate regiment’s battle flag and a priceless sword presented to a Union hero of the great
Monitor-Merrimack
battle, missing since its theft from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1931. Goldman and I followed up the
Antiques Roadshow
prosecution with another indictment that shook the collectible world, charging two prominent Midwestern dealers with using fake appraisal documents to con a wealthy businessman into
grossly overpaying for four antique firearms. One of the weapons in evidence was the world’s first Magnum revolver, a six-shot, .44-caliber Colt, the very handgun that Samuel Walker, the famed Texas Ranger, carried into his final, fatal battle against Mexican guerrillas.

But long before the
Antiques Roadshow
scandal wound toward its conclusion and Pritchard reported to prison, I was already turning my attention to my next case, my first international art crime investigation. Within months, I hoped, I’d be stalking stolen art in South America.

Rio de Janeiro, 2001
.

I
N A CABANA ON
I
PANEMA
, A
SSISTANT
U.S. A
TTORNEY
David Hall and I sipped milk from coconut shells. Before us, Brazil’s trendiest beach buzzed under brilliant sunlight. Barefoot kids kicked up sand, playing volleyball with their feet. Rollerbladers in short shorts cruised the sidewalk. Bronzed hunks in Speedos preened, chatting up young ladies in thongs. The Latin pulse from a boom box dueled with the reggae beat from café speakers. At the opposite end of Guanabara Bay, a scarlet sun hovered over Sugar Loaf Mountain.

It was a Monday afternoon in early December, the heart of summer in South America. Blue skies, a pleasant breeze, seventy-five degrees. Back in Philadelphia, temperatures were falling and my FBI colleagues were bracing for a formal inspection by bureaucrats from Headquarters.

I swirled the straw in my coconut and dug my toes in the soft, yielding sand. After landing in Rio that morning following a ten-hour flight jammed shoulder to shoulder in coach, the stress was flowing out of me, down through my toes into that luxuriant sand. I felt well rested and invigorated by the beach scene. A deeply
tanned, nearly nude couple pedaled by on a bike. I shook my head and raised the coconut in toast to my traveling partner.

The federal prosecutor hid behind his shades and Penn baseball cap, silent.

I said, “I can’t believe your bosses thought this was some sort of boondoggle.”

That drew a wry smile. And then a frown. “You know we’ve got a weak hand.”

I nodded. Hall was right. We held few cards.

We were in Rio to try to solve a cold case, one that had frustrated the FBI for more than two decades—the theft of $1.2 million worth of Norman Rockwell paintings stolen from a gallery in Minneapolis in 1978. It wasn’t a well-known art theft, but it was one that resonated with me. How could we fail to go after thieves who stole the works of an iconic American artist?

The U.S. government and the FBI routinely helped other nations retrieve stolen art and artifacts smuggled
into
our country. But the Rockwell case, if we pulled it off, would mark the rare repatriation of American artwork
from
a foreign country. We were only three months removed from the September 11 attacks, and we felt a special duty to recover these classic pieces of Americana. The most valuable of the stolen paintings,
The Spirit of ’76
, depicted a fife-and-drum corps of multiracial Boy Scouts from northern New Jersey, marching with the Stars and Stripes, the faint image of Manhattan and the twin towers in the background.

Our target was a wealthy Brazilian art dealer who claimed that he’d purchased the paintings in Rio in the 1990s and therefore legally owned them under Brazilian law. The dealer was said to be politically connected and shrewd. Hall and I had spent two years working through diplomatic and legal channels to arrange a meeting with him, and that meeting was now set for Wednesday, in two days’ time.

We weren’t sure what to expect, largely because the United States and Brazil had recently ratified their first mutual legal-assistance
treaty and our case would mark the inaugural joint criminal investigation between the two nations. There were a lot of uncertainties. We still didn’t know, for instance, if we would be allowed to directly question the Brazilian art dealer, and if so, whether he would be compelled to answer. In many countries, American prosecutors and FBI agents must put questions in writing or submit them to local magistrates for approval. I had also heard that it was not uncommon for witnesses in foreign countries to invoke the local equivalent of the Fifth Amendment and refuse to cooperate with American inquiries. If that happened here, we’d be screwed, and probably would be met with scorn by colleagues when we returned to Philadelphia tan but empty-handed.

I didn’t know how the week would play out, but I was quickly settling in for a good challenge, an away game with mysterious rules. I enjoyed the uncertainty of it all.

Hall was a seasoned advocate and a fun traveling companion, a friend. He and Goldman were the two prosecutors in Philadelphia who shared art crime cases—the three of us met at least once a week for lunch to strategize. Goldman had been busy with a drug trial and so Hall had drawn the Rockwell case. A bald, soft-spoken Yale grad of subtle intellect, Hall was also a commander in the Navy Reserves and held a black belt in karate. By nature and military and legal training, Hall needed rules of engagement and a clear strategy. He liked to enter a mission well armed, with a plan.

I turned to him as he fiddled with his coconut. “Stop worrying,” I said. “This is going to be fun.” I surveyed the beach scene again, my confidence building. “What we’ll have to do is treat this like a UC case, except we won’t be working undercover. We find out what the guy wants and see if we can give it to him. React to whatever he throws at us. Whatever we need to get it done, we’ll do. It’ll be great.”

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