Priceless (16 page)

This translates to any genre. When I began selling the ads for the
Farmer
, I quickly learned that this city boy had better know the difference between a Holstein and an Angus cow. One is a dairy cow, the other a beef cow. One you milk, one you eat. One is a valued member of a farmer’s family, the other dinner.

In most situations, once you master a realm, you can use this knowledge in case after case, targeting the same kind of criminal. Skills learned for a Ponzi-scheme sting can be transferred to the next undercover financial crimes case. Drug and corruption cases tend to follow a predictable pattern—and there are a limited number of drugs or bribery schemes to master. Art crimes are different, some would say harder, because there are so many genres. For virtually each case you need to shift gears and research the market, learn the lingo.

Step Two: The Introduction. There are two ways to meet a target. I call them the bump and the vouch.

The
bump
is tough to pull off. It takes a lot of preparation and a little bit of luck. The bump is exactly what it sounds like: You find a way to bump into the target in a way that appears perfectly natural. You bump into him at a bar or a club or a gallery. Sometimes, you’ve got to spend weeks, perhaps months, creating your bona fides in your target’s world. If he’s an outlaw biker, you’ll have to find a way to hang out with biker gangs, waiting for the right chance to bump into him.

Much faster is the
vouch
, in which someone verifies that you’re the real deal. The vouch is usually made by a confidential informant or cooperating witness. In the backflap case, Bazin was my vouch, and one of his informants was his vouch. The vouch doesn’t always have to come from a person. It can be anything that convinces the target that you are who you say you are—in my case, an expert in a particular area of art. You can create the virtual vouch by demonstrating your expertise. In the battle flag case, I lured the Kansas City man
to Philadelphia after multiple phone conversations in which I made it clear I was well traveled on the Civil War collectors’ circuit.

Step Three: Build Rapport. You need to win a target’s trust, and the best way to do that is to infatuate and ingratiate. You can do this with drinks and dinner, chauffeuring him in your shiny car, but subtler techniques are more effective. Psychological tricks work best.

First impressions are critical. From the outset, you want to create a friendly aura. Facial expressions are the most important, because that’s how we most visibly communicate as social creatures. When I meet someone who smiles, makes soft eye contact, and shakes my hand reasonably, I’m apt to think he’s a nice guy. When I meet someone who grimaces, glares, and bear-grips my hand, I’m immediately on guard, thinking, this guy’s either an enemy or a competitor. It’s far more nuanced than the fight-or-flight reflex—I work the margins of a target’s personality. (If I encounter a competitor, I let him excel at his thing, but insist he let me excel at mine. If he’s a thief, I let him call the shots when it’s time to steal, so long as he lets me call the shots when it’s time to deal.)

Don’t underestimate the importance of a friendly smile. If you smile, odds are good the target will smile too. It’s human nature for people to mirror what they see. It’s a primal psychological reaction, a trait learned during infancy. When you smile at a baby and she smiles back, it’s not because she likes you. It’s because the baby is mirroring you. Scowl and the baby will cry. It’s a survival technique every infant learns in her first few months. We retain it our whole lives.

The mirroring technique works in other ways. It’s gratifying when you make a point and someone says, “Hey, that’s a good idea.” People let their guard down when they’re hanging out with people just like them. A good undercover operative uses this to his advantage. If a target sits close to the table, you sit close. If he puts on his sunglasses, you do too. If he smiles, you smile. Whatever he says, find a way to validate it. If he says it’s hot out, you agree. If he criticizes a politician’s position or character, agree that the politician is vulnerable on many issues. If he orders iced tea, you do the same.

Once the two of you start talking, share. Tell the target about yourself; ask him about himself. Exchanging personal information is a great way to develop a rapport, build that critical trust.

But tread carefully. Make sure that whatever you say can be verified, or is so personal that it can’t be verified. Stay as close to the truth as possible—don’t say you have six kids if you only have two, because somewhere along the line you’re likely to screw up.

How do you befriend someone who repels you? You try harder. You look for the good inside that person and focus on that. No one is completely evil. Does the target care about his family? Does he care about injustice? Do you share the same taste in music? Women? Food? Football? Politics? Cars? Art? If you focus on a person’s criminal and immoral traits, you’ll never find genuine common ground.

A critical point: To keep yourself out of tricky situations down the road, drop hints early about your views on marriage and drinking. If you are married, be married and say you are deeply in love with your wife. If you are “deeply in love with your wife,” that means you don’t mess around. If you don’t want to drink, tell the target that you don’t drink because you’re an alcoholic prone to bizarre blackouts. Never say you don’t drink or fool around because it’s morally wrong. It will sound like bullshit (you’re supposed to be a criminal, for God’s sake!). If you drop these early hints, it makes it a lot easier when a target tries to test you later. You can say, Look, I’m not a player. I’m a businessman. I’m here to do a deal, not to party.

It’s important to get into a role, but be careful, stay sharp. When you work undercover, it’s easy to lose touch with reality and let the lies and deception take over.

Step Four: Betray. Get the target to bring the contraband to you in a controlled situation—a hotel room adjacent to a SWAT team, if possible. Get him to incriminate himself on tape.

Step Five: Go home. Finish safely, and return home to your wife
and family. Never let your undercover life subsume your real life. It’s not—repeat, not—more important. If something comes up during a case that makes you feel uncomfortable, don’t do it. If a bad guy asks you to get in his car, and this makes you nervous, come up with an excuse. If a supervisor or the FBI agent handling your undercover work asks you to bluff expertise you don’t have, don’t do it. Above all, you’ve got to be comfortable in your role. It’s got to come from within. Remember, I tell the agents I teach: You’ve got to be yourself. Don’t try to be an actor. You can’t do it. No one can. Actors have scripts and get multiple takes. You only get one. They flub their lines and they get another chance. You make a mistake and you can end up dead—or worse, get others killed too.

I
N THE
B
AER
case, we used the bump—a direct frontal assault—because there was no quick, easy way to work a vouch. We didn’t know anyone on the inside.

But that didn’t mean we didn’t have decent intelligence. Our friends from the Fish and Wildlife Service had busted enough low-level players—so-called traders and pickers who scour reservations for religious artifacts and sell them to the shady gallery dealers—that we knew how the illegal sales worked. To circumvent the eagle feather law, dealers like Baer would speak in code. They always referred to eagle plumes as “turkey” feathers. And they never actually
sold
artifacts with eagle feathers—they
gifted
them to customers who also bought legal Native American artifacts at obscenely inflated prices. Such a customer might knowingly pay $21,000 for a legal artifact worth $1,000 and receive an illegal artifact worth $20,000 as a gift.

The afternoon after our brief exchange at the wine-and-cheese reception, we returned to Baer’s gallery and he greeted us warmly.

“C’mon in the back,” Baer said as he opened a door off the gallery floor to a private room. He brought out a set of wooden
parrots, and explained that they were used as part of a Jemez Pueblo corn dance. He showed us a Navajo singer’s brush, a sacred artifact used by a medicine man to wipe away evil spirits; and a pair of Jemez hair ornaments, consisting of four foot-long feathers tied to an inch-wide wood shaft. The hair sticks were perhaps one hundred years old, constructed of cotton string, two red-tailed hawk feathers, a golden eagle feather, and a macaw feather.

“It would be hard to imagine something more ceremonial,” Baer said.

Or, I thought, something more illegal. I offered the code phrase. “These are what, turkey?”

“Yep,” Baer said, smiling. “Turkey feathers.”

He quickly made clear he’d received them as a gift from a broker with whom he did a great deal of business. “You know,” he said, “it was a thing like where I purchased something from him and he gave me these.”

“Just like if you had something you could give to Ivar as a gift?”

“Right,” he said. “It’s not the kind of thing that should be sold to somebody. Somebody’s in your life and they’re helping you.”

I smiled. “That’s very commendable.”

Baer laughed.

I turned to Husby. “You’re interested?”

He nodded. “May I take a photograph of this?”

Baer shook his head. “Sorry, can’t allow it.”

“Oh, OK.”

“After I give them to you, then you can take a photograph.” We all laughed again. We were all friends now, conspirators, and Baer began to open up. “I have to be frank with you. It’s really no fun dealing with the federal government in terms of the legality of these things.”

“What’s the problem?” I said.

“They are interested in harassing people who buy and sell American Indian material,” he said. Baer launched into a long justification about how illegally trading sacred Native American artifacts is a
victimless crime, one encouraged and manipulated by tribal leaders to reward friends and punish enemies. “It’s a political thing.”

“I had no idea,” Husby said.

“So I’m not going to sit here and ask for identification or be a jerk about this,” Baer said. “I mean, obviously, you guys are serious people. But my concern is that this is not the kind of thing that should be discussed.”

“No, right, right,” I said. I turned to Husby. “I’ve got to find a way to get this to you.”

Baer said, “I understand what he’s looking for. If we have some kind of working relationship, everything will be fine.”

“So, between you and I,” I whispered, acting if such words ought to be said just out of Husby’s earshot, “we’ll just tack on the price?”

“Yes,” Baer said.

I beamed. “I’d like to start up a working relationship.”

Husby and Baer discussed customs hassles for a few minutes. When they finished, I said, “One of the things Ivar was interested in was a war bonnet.”

Baer perked up but didn’t say anything.

“Can you get that?” I asked.

“It would take some time,” Baer said carefully. “It is possible but it’s very, very difficult. It’s not the kind of thing that we can call up and order.”

“No, I understand,” I said.

Husby jumped in. “We have looked on many days and have seen none.”

“I’ll find you one,” Baer said. “But it will take some time.”

I needed time too. I had to get back to Philadelphia.

On the day after Baer promised to find me a headdress, Hurricane Floyd, which had already caused so much flooding and misery in North Carolina, arrived in southeastern Pennsylvania, bringing a foot of water and seventy-mile-an-hour gusts to my neighborhood. Our new home was particularly vulnerable because the builder was
still struggling to fix punch-list problems, even two years after we’d moved in. When the storm reached Pennsylvania, Donna called me in Santa Fe to gave me a damage report. The carpets were soaked. Water was flowing down the walls on the
inside
of the house. The ceilings were bulging with water, leaking everywhere. I imagined the looming bills, new construction headaches—new drywall, stucco, landscaping, gutters, and windows. The Baer case would have to wait. I hustled back to my room and arranged for a flight home.

G
OING UNDERCOVER CAN
be tough on the family.

You’re gone for long stretches of time. You leave your spouse home alone with the kids, with all their activities, homework assignments, trips to the doctor, housekeeping, and car problems. You can’t say precisely when you’ll leave or when you’ll be back—it might be a few days or it might be weeks. Your spouse knows where you’re going and has a general idea of what you’re doing—and that it might be dangerous—but for your own safety, you tell her she can’t discuss it with anyone.

I certainly leaned on Donna for support. She came from a line of strong women. Her upbringing—especially what she learned from her mother, Jerry—guided us through our toughest times. Jerry would frequently remind us to “slow down and smell the roses.” Whenever Donna’s parents visited, they would bring the boys a bushel of enormous Maryland steamed crabs. Jerry would bring for Kristin her sewing machine and quilting fabric. For Donna, she’d bring hand-sewn drapes to hang in our new home. Jerry lived by example, offering her unconditional love and support, beginning with my car accident and continuing through her long, valiant battle against breast cancer. Donna had the same focus and strength imparted to her by her mother. As a result my family thrived.

Which made it easier for me to go undercover with a clear mind.

*    *    *

U
NDER THE
FBI’s strict undercover rules, you’re only supposed to work one case at a time. I never followed that rule. It made no sense: Most opportunities in life don’t come along so conveniently, one neatly after the other. It seemed silly to ignore a chance to solve one case simply because another was still evolving. Besides, my supervisors certainly couldn’t complain when I worked multiple cases. They didn’t have an alternative. I was the FBI’s only undercover agent working the art crime beat.

When I returned home to inspect the hurricane damage, I received an e-mail from a Penn museum curator, a woman I’d met during the backflap case. Her tip was unrelated to the Baer investigation, but by coincidence involved the illegal sale of eagle feathers. Someone was offering a war bonnet once worn by the Apache warrior and medicine man Geronimo.