Priceless (10 page)

Mendez couldn’t argue with that, but I regretted the lie the moment it passed my lips. A lie like that trips you up. Claiming to be a lawyer was especially dumb—it was too easy for the criminals to check, and might cause trouble if the case ever went to trial.

Mendez shifted in his seat and moved to his next question. “Bob, look—I’m sure you understand, I’ve got to ask you.” He looked me in the eye, but I could tell he was nervous. I could guess what was coming. Mendez subscribed to an old wives’ tale—the mistaken belief that the law requires an undercover officer to tell the truth if directly confronted.

“Bob, are you a cop?”

I pivoted to put him on the defensive. “No, are you?”

“Of course not,” Mendez snapped. He moved to his next dumb question, the kind a veteran smuggler would never ask a fellow criminal. “Tell me more about your buyer.”

I moved to retake control of the conversation and caught his gaze. “The buyer is anonymous,” I said sternly. “That’s all you need to know.”

I turned to Garcia, the brains, and softened my tone. “Look, my buyer’s a collector. He likes gold. He buys anything made of gold. Let’s just call him the Gold Man.”

Garcia liked that. “Perhaps I can meet the Gold Man one day?”

“Maybe,” I said as we shook hands to leave. “Someday.”

I got to the van and dialed the Gold Man’s number.

A secretary came on the line. “U.S. Attorney’s Office. How can I help you?”

“Bob Goldman, please.”

A
SSISTANT
U.S. A
TTORNEY
Robert E. Goldman was unlike any other federal prosecutor I’d met.

He lived on a large working farm in Bucks County, north of Philadelphia, where he kept peacocks, horses, sheep, ducks, and dogs. Though Goldman came from a family of lawyers—and became one because it was expected of him—he liked to call himself a frustrated history professor. He wore a handlebar mustache in the style of his hero, Teddy Roosevelt, and at his home library, he stuffed his bookshelves with more than 150 Roosevelt titles. With his appreciation of history and culture, Goldman was precisely the kind of prosecutor I knew I needed if I wanted to pursue art crime. Without a kindred spirit at the U.S. Attorney’s Office to prosecute art crime cases, I knew I wouldn’t get very far. As an FBI agent, I could investigate almost any federal crime. But if I wanted to harness the full power of the U.S. Department of Justice—from subpoena to grand jury indictment to criminal prosecution—I’d need a like-minded Assistant U.S. Attorney as a partner, someone willing
to take on tough, esoteric cases, even if the unstated goal of an investigation was not an arrest, but the rescue of a stolen piece of art. Goldman understood the value of pursuing stolen pieces of history and really didn’t care if his bureaucratic supervisors shared his vision.

As important, Goldman treated FBI agents as partners, something that some of his prosecutor colleagues did not. Many young federal prosecutors are arrogant and insecure—paradoxically full of confidence and fear that they’ll screw up. These prosecutors often take it out on the agents, barking orders and making menial and abusive demands. Goldman was cool. He’d already worked as a county prosecutor for nearly a decade, following detectives to crime scenes, and he had earned a healthy respect for investigators, whether local cops or federal agents. I’d learned this when we worked our first case together back in 1989, a high-profile armored-car investigation, when I’d been a rookie. Since then, I’d kept returning to him with property theft cases, steadily creating a specialty. First came the jewelry store robberies, then an antique-show heist, and now, the Moche backflap.

T
HE
J
ERSEY
T
URNPIKE
meeting had gone well, but I didn’t get too excited. Start daydreaming about indictments and press conferences, you might get yourself killed.

Was I on the cusp of rescuing a South American treasure? And if so, would anyone notice? In the late 1990s, the FBI’s focus was squarely on another South American commodity, cocaine. While my supervisors and the public had certainly applauded when I arrested the thugs for robbing jewelry stores, I didn’t know how they’d react if we rescued a piece of stolen history, an antiquity that wasn’t even American. Would anyone care?

If I recovered the backflap and received a tepid reaction, it wouldn’t bode well for my fledgling career as an art crime sleuth.

I also had another worry—that Garcia might be trying to sell me a fake. And I had good reason to be suspicious.

Three years earlier, I knew, Garcia had offered to sell the backflap for $1 million to a New York art broker named Bob Smith. I also knew that Smith believed he was close to closing the deal. As a sign of good faith, Smith even made a preliminary deal, paying Garcia $175,000 cash for an ancient Peruvian headdress. But as the months passed, Garcia kept backing out of the backflap deal, coming up with lame excuses, irritating the already crusty dealer. Garcia tried to buy time, offering Smith a series of paintings and antiquities that the dealer rejected as insulting fakes. Smith shrugged it off for a while, but when Garcia tried to peddle a bogus Monet, Smith exploded, saying he’d run out of patience:
Get the backflap or get lost
. Garcia stopped calling.

I knew all of this because “Bob Smith” was really Bob Bazin. Smith was the name my mentor used when he worked undercover.

Bazin’s gruff art-broker shtick wasn’t my style, but it worked for him. When he retired with the backflap case still unresolved in early 1997, the FBI made two fortuitous decisions. First, supervisors decided not to charge Garcia with the illegal headdress sale; they thought it might spoil a related case, so they let him get away with it (along with the $175,000 the smuggler pocketed). As far as Garcia knew, Smith/Bazin was still looking to buy the backflap. Second, the bureau kept Bazin’s undercover phone number active, just in case.

Then, late in the summer of 1997, out of the blue, Garcia called Smith’s undercover number. An FBI operator passed the message to me; I found Bazin at his condo on the Jersey Shore and asked him to call Garcia back. The retired FBI agent fell back into his ornery covert role and lit into Garcia. He called him a joker, a poseur, a liar—a guy who made outlandish promises, then vanished for years. Bazin screamed that he didn’t have time to deal with Garcia, that he was sick and about to undergo triple bypass surgery. Still, he added…

“I don’t know why I should do this for you, but I’ll give your name to my associate, Bob Clay. Maybe he’ll call you.”

Grateful and profusely apologetic, Garcia thanked Smith/Bazin.

Within a week, Garcia and I were negotiating a sale by phone. He demanded $1.6 million, and though the price wasn’t too important—I never intended to pay—I needed to draw him out and collect as much evidence as possible. I asked for more information and he said he would mail me a package. Perfect, I thought. Use of the mails to commit a fraud is mail fraud, a serious federal crime. So even if the deal fell through, I’d have him on that charge.

Garcia’s package arrived a few days later.

I was grateful for the dog-eared magazines from 1988 and 1990. I’d been on the case only a week, and what little I knew about the backflap I’d learned in a brief conversation with Bazin, who’d warned me to be careful about approaching expert brokers and academics for more background information. The South American antiquities field was riddled with crooks, Bazin said. It was hard to know whom to trust. I put the
National Geographic
s in my briefcase and headed home.

After dinner with Donna and the kids, I put my feet up and settled into our comfortable old couch. Gently, I opened the first
National
Geographic
and flipped to the page Garcia had thoughtfully marked with a yellow Post-it note. The story, written by one of Peru’s most prominent archaeologists, began with a call in the middle of the night.

Alva wrote that he’d risen grudgingly, assuming that, as usual, the grave robbers would have already removed and sold the best artifacts, leaving only castoffs behind. But when the archaeologist arrived in the small village where they’d arrested the grave diggers, he was stunned to see what the police had seized from the looters’ homes. These were no cast-off antiquities, Alva wrote, but intricately carved pre-Columbian golden masterpieces—a broad-faced human head and a pair of feline monsters with fangs flaring.
Huaqueros
, or grave robbers, had picked over the Moche tombs for centuries, but such finds were rare. The police told Alva they were hearing whispers of
huaqueros
selling similar loot for ten times the standard amount.

Intrigued, Alva returned to the looted site at daylight to poke around. His team began to dig, and soon they found a second, sealed chamber, one that held “perhaps the finest example of pre-Columbian jewelry ever found.” Alva’s team kept digging and discovered chamber after chamber of priceless and long-lost Moche artifacts, five levels all, each layered on top of the other. After
centuries of excavations, the looters had inadvertently stumbled upon the most important archaeological discovery in the New World. It was a royal mausoleum, the final resting place of the Moche king, the Lord of Sipan.

The find was supremely significant, Alva wrote, because so little is known about the Moche civilization, which apparently flourished from roughly
A.D.
200 to
A.D.
700, then mysteriously vanished. The tribe did not use a written language (leaders communicated by secret code painted on lima beans), and other Peruvian tribes from that era recorded few interactions. Much of what we know about Moche history and culture is derived from the local iconography—the sophisticated drawings, intricate jewelry, and dynamic ceramics.

I became entranced by the history of this lost civilization. The Moche lived chiefly along the narrow river valleys of a two-hundred-mile stretch of Peru’s coastal desert. This tribe of weavers, metalsmiths, potters, farmers, and fishermen was perhaps fifty thousand strong. They fished in the Pacific, developed sophisticated irrigation systems linking mountain aqueducts to canals and ditches, and grew great fields of corn, melons, and peanuts. To appease the rain gods, they practiced ritual human sacrifices, elaborate ceremonies that climaxed with a quick slice to the throat. The Moche built giant, flat-topped pyramids of mud brick, man-made mountains that broke the desert horizon. The grandest, known as the Temple of the Sun, still stands, more than fifty million mud bricks piled over a twelve-acre foundation. No one knows why the Moche tribe disappeared between
A.D.
600 and
A.D.
700. Some blame invasions by the Huari mountain tribe; others point to a seventh-century El Niño–style weather system, believed to have triggered a three-decade drought in Peru, followed by a rebellion that shattered the sophisticated bureaucratic systems on which the giant desert civilization had come to rely. Perhaps the rebellion triggered chaos, civil war, and, ultimately, extinction.

Ten pages into the magazine article, I saw that Garcia had inserted another yellow Post-it note, just below a photograph of two
backflaps. The caption explained that the Moche backflap was designed to protect the royal behind—the warrior king would have hung it from the small of his back down to his thighs. Archaeologists are divided over whether the armor, made mostly of gold but also of copper, would have been worn in combat or merely used during ceremonies, including the human sacrifices. The upper portion of the backflap, the most intricate piece of the armor, is called a rattle, and is surrounded by a spider web of gold. In the center of the web glares a winged Moche warrior known as the Decapitator. In one hand, the Decapitator wields a tumi knife. In the other, he grasps a severed head.

According to
National Geographic
, the backflaps displayed in the magazine were two of a handful known to exist. They looked a lot like the photo of the backflap Garcia wanted to sell.

I marveled at Garcia’s cojones. To entice me to buy a looted relic, he’d sent me magazine articles describing the rape of the most significant tomb in North or South America, stories that made it crystal clear the sale would be illegal. Still, if Garcia’s intention was to impress and excite me, to ignite a passion and lust for the backflap, it worked.

B
Y ANY NAME
—
tombaroli
in Italian,
huaquero
in Spanish, grave robber in English—those who loot and illegally sell antiquities rob us all.

This was my first antiquity case, but as I would learn, looters are especially insidious art thieves. They not only invade the sanctuaries of our ancestors, plundering burial grounds and lost cities in a reckless dash for buried treasure, they also destroy our ability to learn about our past in ways other art thieves do not. When a painting is stolen from a museum, we usually know its provenance. We know where it came from, who painted it, when and perhaps even why. But once an antiquity is looted, the archaeologist loses the chance to study a piece in context, the chance to document history.
Where, precisely, was it buried? What condition was it in? What was lying next to it? Can two objects be compared? Without such critical information, archaeologists are left to make educated guesses about a long-ago people and how they lived.