Priceless (26 page)

The Bill of Rights, now a spoil of war, had begun a mysterious journey.

H
ISTORY IS LITTERED
with tales of art stolen during wartime.

The Roman Empire famously looted spoils of war, but also was among the first to implement rules to protect cultural heritage: Roman armies were ordered to loot only
spolia
, routine war booty, not
spoliatio
, cultural artifacts such as art and religious objects.

During the Thirty Years’ War that engulfed Germany and much of Europe in the 1600s, Protestant and Catholic armies voraciously looted vanquished foes. Protestant troops led by the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus raided Catholic churches and monasteries throughout Europe, cherry-picking the finest art to fill Stockholm’s castles and museums. Armies backed by the Catholic Church proudly brought trophies to Pope Gregory XV, including hundreds of books from the Protestants’ famed Palatine Library in Heidelberg. As Napoleon marched across Europe, and as Britain colonized portions of the Middle East and Asia, they took treasures to stock museums in Paris and London.

Adolf Hitler’s ferocious war machine ran protection for history’s most carefully plotted looting and destruction of Europe’s cultural heritage. When German forces began to march across Europe starting with the annexation of Austria in 1938, Hitler’s armies systematically confiscated the paintings and statues the Führer coveted and destroyed the art and cultural landmarks that celebrated the races he believed to be inferior. In Poland, Holland, Belgium, Italy, and Russia, Hitler’s armies seized tens of thousands of works,
including pieces by Rembrandt, da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo. The Nazis were not as successful in France. When they reached the Louvre, they found only empty frames. The French had evacuated thousands of pieces before the invasion; Mona Lisa was wrapped in red satin and secreted away in an ambulance to a remote château in the south of France. At the end of the war, Allied soldiers found forty tons of stolen works, stored in Alpine chalets or hidden deep inside Nazi salt mines.

Art suffered greatly during all of Europe’s post-colonial conflicts and civil wars. During the Khmer Rouge wars in the 1970s, thousands of Buddhist temples were destroyed and sculptures looted at Cambodia’s finest cultural institution, the Dépôt de la Conservation d’Angkor.

The plundering of cultural treasures in Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrates that the phenomenon continues well into this century. During the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, looters ransacked unguarded museums and hundreds of priceless treasures were lost, many dating to Babylonian times. In Afghanistan from 1979 to 2001, three hostile forces—the Russians, the mujahideen rebels, and the Taliban—pilfered most of the nation’s best art and antiquities.

Art may suffer during wartime, but looted spoils are not necessarily lost forever.

One of my favorite such legends is a Philadelphia story: When the British invaded the American capital city in 1777, pushing the Continental Army back to Valley Forge, redcoat officers occupied Benjamin Franklin’s vacant house for many months. When Franklin, who’d been in France, returned, he saw that the British had stolen most of his valuables, including a cherished Franklin portrait that had hung over the mantel of a fireplace.

The painting would not be rescued until the early twentieth century, and only by a stroke of luck. An American ambassador to England happened to visit the home of a descendant of a redcoat commander and noticed the Franklin portrait hanging in the library.
In 1906, after years of polite negotiation, the British presented the painting to President Teddy Roosevelt.

Today, the Franklin portrait hangs in the White House.

I
N
1897, N
ORTH
Carolina’s missing copy of the Bill of Rights surfaced in the most unlikely of places.

Incredibly, an inquisitive newspaper reporter noticed it hanging on an office wall at the Indianapolis Board of Trade building.

The parchment was displayed inside a frame in the office of Charles Albert Shotwell, a handsome and well-respected businessman who ran a grain, flour, and feed service. In May 1897 he welcomed a reporter from the
Indianapolis News
into his office for an interview. When the curious reporter asked about the Bill of Rights hanging on the wall, Shotwell told him an astounding story that began three decades earlier.

It was the year after the Civil War had ended, Shotwell explained, and he’d gone home to visit relatives in Ohio. He took time to visit boyhood friends in a neighboring town to see how they’d fared in battle.

“I went into one of the stores of the town that day, where I met one of the boys that I had known before the war,” Shotwell recalled. “He told me several of his experiences as a soldier, and one was of his being in Sherman’s army when it marched thru Georgia to the sea. He told me of that Army going into the City of Raleigh, North Carolina … and he was one of a company of soldiers that went thru the State House and helped themselves to whatever they pleased to take. They went into the Office of the Secretary of State and forcibly took … the parchment that is now in my possession. He told me he brought it with him as a Soldier out of the state, so it was contraband of war and lawfully his possession.”

Shotwell told the reporter he’d bought the Bill of Rights from
the soldier for five dollars, and the astute reporter knew he had a helluva story on his hands.

The Raleigh newspaper reprinted the
Indianapolis News
story in its entirety, playing it huge.
STOLEN HISTORICAL RELIC, TAKEN FROM THE CAPITOL HERE BY A YANKEE,
the headline screamed.

Walter Clark, a justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, became infuriated when he read the story. A Confederate veteran who fought at Antietam, Clark urged North Carolina officials to go after the purloined parchment. The state treasurer tried, approaching Indiana cabinet officers, but Shotwell refused to cooperate and he soon took the war trophy underground.

The Bill of Rights didn’t surface again for twenty-eight years.

In 1925, a friend of Shotwell’s son contacted North Carolina officials and proposed to sell the document back to the state. “The old gentleman who bought it off the soldier did so in the belief that it was contraband of war…” wrote the friend, Charles Reid of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. “The possessor is a very old man and has treasured this manuscript for the past fifty-nine years. I believe a need of money has prompted him to offer it for sale. I believe he would be disposed to consider and accept any reasonable honorarium…” The secretary of the state historical commission wrote back on behalf of the state. Essentially, he told Reid that the man holding the Bill of Rights hostage was a dishonorable possessor of stolen state history. “So long as it remains away from the official custody of North Carolina,” the official wrote in a high-minded tone, “it will serve as a memorial of individual theft.”

When his father died, Shotwell’s son inherited the framed Bill of Rights. He made no attempt to sell it; instead, he and his wife proudly but discreetly hung it in their living room in Indianapolis. When they died, their daughters, Anne Shotwell Bosworth and Sylvia Shotwell Long, secured the piece in an Indiana bank vault.

In 1995, more than a century after its long, strange exile from North Carolina’s state capitol, the two Shotwell women took their first steps toward selling the Bill of Rights.

Very quietly, they enlisted an Indianapolis attorney. He is said to have unsuccessfully approached several wealthy and famous collectors, including the likes of Michael Jordan, Steven Spielberg, and Oprah Winfrey. A prominent Connecticut art broker, Wayne Pratt, known for appearances on
Antiques Roadshow
, showed interest. Pratt hired a prominent and politically connected Washington, D.C., lawyer, John L. Richardson, who was a fund-raiser for President Clinton and whose wife was commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service. Pratt and Richardson did not immediately buy the Bill of Rights, but they began to work as discreetly as possible to try to broker it.

In October 1995, Richardson contacted senior North Carolina officials and proposed a complicated deal cloaked in mystery, refusing to identify his clients. He said the price would be $3 million to $10 million, depending upon a set of independent appraisals. In a long fax to the state secretary of cultural resources, Richardson warned of dire consequences if the deal failed or became public. “Please let me emphasize again how important it is that we proceed quickly and with maximum confidentiality. I have no direct relationship with the people who have the article, and there are at least three intermediaries between me and these people…. The people insist on anonymity. We are warned they are nervous, and if they believe their identity may be disclosed against their will, they may act in a manner which will not be in any of our interests.”

North Carolina officials debated the offer internally, and even quietly approached a private foundation about buying the document. Ultimately, they abandoned the idea, coming to the same conclusion as their predecessors had: The state would not pay ransom for stolen government property. Stymied, Richardson broke off contact with North Carolina officials.

Five years later, North Carolina’s Bill of Rights made a brief surprise appearance in Washington.

In February 2000, a woman who did not identify herself called one of the nation’s foremost authorities on documents from the era,
Charlene Bangs Bickford, the codirector of the First Federal Congress Project at George Washington University. The caller claimed to have a copy of the Bill of Rights and asked Bickford to take a look. The historian agreed and one afternoon a short while later the woman appeared at the university offices with three men and a large box. Bickford introduced herself and her staff, and found it odd when the four visitors refused to give their names. The visitors unveiled the package and within minutes the scholars concluded that it was likely genuine. But because the parchment was framed and behind glass—and the visitors refused to remove it—they could not view the back to scrutinize the telltale docket information that would reveal which state had received it in 1789.

Bickford asked the visitors about provenance. They remained silent.

“Well,” she said, “this document is priceless and at the same time worthless. You can’t legally sell it.”

Without a word, or even so much as a thank-you, the mysterious visitors packed up the parchment and hustled out, taking the Bill of Rights underground again.

T
HREE YEARS LATER
, in March 2003, I received an urgent call from my Philadelphia colleague, Special Agent Jay Heine.

It was a Thursday evening, an otherwise unremarkable day at work. I was driving home and he caught me on my cell phone.

“You’re not going to believe this,” Heine said.

“Believe what, buddy?”

Heine said he didn’t have all the details but summarized what he did know: The FBI office in Raleigh needed our help, urgently, and it was tied to our home turf in Philly. It concerned the new National Constitution Center, the state-of-the-art museum under construction opposite the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall. The museum, dedicated to celebrating the Constitution and the Amendments, was a
private, nonpartisan, and nonprofit venture, and anticipated to become one of Philadelphia’s largest tourist attractions. The Constitution Center was backed by powerful politicians, including Governor Ed Rendell and U.S. Senator Arlen Specter. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was scheduled to preside over the ribbon cutting in just a few months on July 4, and museum officials were still scrambling to make last-minute acquisitions. In recent weeks, Heine told me, the Constitution Center had come across an original copy of the Bill of Rights. The seller wanted $4 million.

I was confused. “Wait—how can you sell the Bill of Rights?”

“Exactly,” Heine said. “Look, you need to call this agent down in Raleigh, Paul Minella. He’s expecting your call.”

I dialed Minella.

He brought me up to date: A month before, a Washington lawyer named Richardson and a Connecticut dealer named Pratt had quietly offered to sell the Bill of Rights to the Constitution Center. Although I didn’t know it at the time, the two men were the same ones who’d tried to sell the parchment to North Carolina in 1995. The Constitution Center’s president and lawyer had hired an authenticator to examine the document, and this specialist had sent pictures of the front and back of the parchment to experts at George Washington University. These were the same experts who’d examined it three years earlier. The experts there concluded that a docket entry on the back proved this was North Carolina’s long-lost copy, looted during the Civil War. When the Constitution Center’s president learned that the document was a spoil of war—stolen property—he called the governor of Pennsylvania for advice. The Pennsylvania governor called the governor of North Carolina, who told him that the state would not pay to have it returned. An aide to the governor of North Carolina called the U.S. attorney and got the FBI involved. Moving swiftly—just that morning, the agent in Raleigh said—federal prosecutors in North Carolina had convinced a magistrate to sign a seizure warrant for the Bill of Rights.

Things were racing at light speed in North Carolina, the agent told me, with attention at the highest levels. “The U.S. attorney and the governor here are personally involved.”

“OK,” I said. “So where is the Bill of Rights now?”

“We don’t know.” Although the FBI suspected it might be in Pratt’s office or home in Connecticut, it was too risky to try a search, he said. I understood. If the agents on the raid didn’t find the Bill of Rights in either spot, the people holding it might get spooked and take the document underground again.

I dialed the president of the Constitution Center, Joe Torsella, and arranged to meet him the following morning in the office of the lawyer negotiating the deal for the museum.

That night, the FBI office in Raleigh faxed me eighty pages of documents forwarded by North Carolina state archivists, a century-long paper trail that included the newspaper article quoting Shotwell in 1897, the 1925 offer from Reid, and the 1995 offer from Richardson.