Priceless (18 page)

That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy the thrill of going undercover. I do enjoy it, especially the challenge of outthinking a criminal, feeding him enough rope to hang himself with his own words.

It’s kind of weird. Sometimes, when I’ve slipped into a role, I really don’t want it to end. Which is why, when a case does end, I always feel a little deflated.

Almost everyone who goes undercover experiences this letdown. It’s normal to feel a sense of loss. After working so hard to ingratiate yourself with a target, thinking about a case day and night for weeks and months, it’s only natural to miss that high, to even feel a bit depressed. You invest a great deal—turn it on, turn it off, call your target, call your wife—and then suddenly, the case is over.

Sometimes, I feel slightly guilty about the betrayal. If I’ve done my
job correctly—built rapport with the target, befriended him—I’ll feel a gnawing in my stomach. It’s normal, I guess, but that doesn’t make it any less mind-bending. FBI agents are trained to uphold our motto—“Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity.” Working undercover, we violate every tenet of that creed: We are disloyal. We act cowardly. We lie.

Undercover FBI agents are trained to compartmentalize, to be careful not to get too close to their targets. In theory, it’s a nice thought, but you can’t work well undercover if you suppress your emotions or follow a rulebook. You have to follow your instincts. You have to be human. It’s hard, and it can eat you up at times. I don’t worry about the true criminals, but sometimes basically good people get into desperate situations and do dumb things. Sometimes, it can almost seem unfair.

Baer liked to talk about the influence of karma and mysticism, and in the world of stolen art and antiquities, I think there’s something to that. The Missouri man who sold me the Civil War battle flag died of cancer less than a year after we arrested him. The backflap seemed to haunt all who touched it. The grave robber who discovered the Moche tomb was later killed by police; the first wealthy Peruvian to obtain the backflap died mysteriously; the second went bankrupt; the son of the Miami smuggler Mendez was born prematurely and lived less than two months. As the infant lay dying in his arms, Mendez swore his son’s shriveled face resembled the Decapitator god engraved on the backflap.

I thought about all that as we moved to snap the trap shut on Baer with one final, orchestrated maneuver. His karma was about to take a turn for the worse.

M
Y JOB ON
January 19, 2000—the day Baer was arrested—was simply to do a little friendly hand-holding, ahead of the afternoon raid on his gallery and home.

In the hours before the bust, we wanted to keep in close contact with Baer to make sure nothing unexpected popped up. And I wanted
to cement the case. We met in his shop around noon and discussed final arrangements for the purchase of the headdress, a Corn Mother, and a few other items. He reminded me that we now each stood to earn about $32,000 on the $200,000 deal. I promised to meet him for dinner.

I did not join the team of federal agents on the raid.

Baer was charged with illegally selling or trying to sell seventeen artifacts, including the Navajo singer’s brush, the Jemez hair tie, a pair of Hopi wooden birds, the Cheyenne headdress, and a rare and most sacred Santo Domingo Corn Mother, a deity represented by a corncob with sixteen golden eagle feathers wrapped by cotton, buffalo hide, and string. The indictment set the total value of the illicit artifacts at $385,300.

I never expected to hear from Baer again. But two days after the bust, he e-mailed me. The subject line read, “Here’s to the Good Times.” I didn’t know what to make of that as I clicked open the message.

It was a classy note from a thoughtful guy, and it triggered a momentary pang of guilt. But his graceful e-mail couldn’t change
the fact that he had consciously and repeatedly violated the law and violated the trust of the Native American people he so professed to love.

I thought about it for a while and then wrote back the next day. “This was the hardest case I had because I really like you and your family. Call me anytime.”

I meant it.

Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, 2000
.

I
F THE CARDINAL RULE OF WORKING UNDERCOVER IS
Keep the lies to a minimum
, a close second is
Avoid working in your hometown
.

For me, “hometown” didn’t just mean Philadelphia. It meant the art and antique circles throughout the Northeast where I’d spent years learning, lecturing, and developing sources. Eleven years into the job, this began to pose a bit of a catch-22: The more people I met in the art world, the more people knew my face, and the more dangerous it became to work undercover.

Sure enough, in 2000 I found myself investigating three prominent Pennsylvania appraisers who specialized in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century arms and militaria, and visited the same Civil War shows I frequented. All three suspects knew me. The eldest was the respected former director of the Civil War Museum of Philadelphia, and we’d chatted several times. The two younger suspects knew me from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania museum case—following the arrests, they’d helped the FBI make a formal appraisal of the value of the works the janitor had stolen for George Csizmazia.

This investigation was also particularly sensitive because it involved a sensational allegation, the kind of accusation against
quasi-public figures that made my FBI supervisors nervous. The two younger suspects were star appraisers on the highest-rated program on PBS,
Antiques Roadshow
.

The integrity of the reality show hinged on the honesty of the on-the-spot appraisals of the items people brought—an heirloom Civil War sword, an Oriental vase discovered at a flea market, an old tea set gathering dust in Grandma’s attic. We’d heard rumors that the fix was in—that the two young suspects were faking the
Antiques Roadshow
appraisals to market their business.

Because I could not go undercover, and because the case involved a slog through tens of thousands of pages of bank, business, and court records, the
Antiques Roadshow
investigation became one of the longest of my career. The scandal singed the reputation of a PBS program beloved by million of viewers, disgraced the retired museum director, and left swindled victims, descendants of genuine war heroes, steaming that someone could act so cruelly.

T
HE CHIEF VILLAIN
was a classic con artist. Russell Albert Pritchard III, tanned face, blue BMW, George Will haircut, Brooks Brothers ties, presented himself to all the world as a man who had it made.

Thirty-five years old, the appraiser lived with his comely wife and four children in a five-bedroom stone house at the epicenter of Philadelphia’s rarefied Main Line, half a block from the leafy campus of Bryn Mawr College. The family home, which he’d purchased from his father for $1 a decade before, was worth at least $1 million. Pritchard had trained to be an insurance salesman, but soon joined his father, Russ Pritchard Jr., in the family business, selling eighteenth- and nineteenth-century military artifacts. The father was an established and respected authority in the field—the former director of the Civil War Museum in Philadelphia and author of several books on Civil War weapons, equipment, and tactics. Together, father and son owned two-thirds of a military antiquities and
memorabilia brokerage, which they gave the grand and somewhat misleading name American Ordnance Preservation Association, a moniker that suggested it was some sort of charity or nonprofit organization. The third partner was a gregarious thirty-seven-year-old appraiser from Allentown named George Juno.

Pritchard III and Juno scored their big break in 1996 when they won jobs as television appraisers for
Antiques Roadshow
. They traveled the country with the show for its first three seasons, performing instant, on-camera appraisals of guns, swords, uniforms, and other military artifacts. Pritchard and Juno were not paid for the work. But for such relatively young appraisers, the value of such national exposure—ten million households a week—was incalculable. Business for their brokerage boomed.

M
Y INVESTIGATION BEGAN
years later. In 2000, a subpoenaed VHS tape arrived in the mail from WGBH, the Boston PBS affiliate that produces
Antiques Roadshow
. I found a player and cued it up.

It was a raw tape from the first season and it began with a familiar scene: two people sitting before what looked like a TV anchor’s desk, a silver sword lying between them, and dozens of casually dressed bargain hunters shopping for antiques in the background. The video opened with a sound check. A man with a well-groomed brown mustache, a three-piece suit, and his hair held snug with hair spray looked into the camera and spoke his name: “George Juno, American Ordnance Preservation Association.” Juno nodded at his guest, a nerdy-looking man in a need of a haircut, perhaps forty years old with a rumpled blue oxford shirt and gold wide-rimmed glasses. The man said his name, “Steve Sadtler.”

The segment began as typically as any on
Antiques Roadshow
, with an understated, somewhat stilted conversation.

“Steve, thank you for coming in today.”

“My pleasure.”

“This is an interesting sword you brought in. What can you tell me about the background?”

“Well, it’s a sword that I found twenty-three years ago. My folks bought a house down in Virginia and my folks decided they were going to rebuild the house. My brothers and I got stuck with the job of taking down the chimney. That required going up into the attic, and I found this thing”—he paused to point to the sword—“hanging on a post. Pretty much for me, it became a plaything. For the last ten or fifteen years, it’s been stored away.”

“Well, Steve, it’s quite a sword.” As Juno began to describe the object, his name and the name of his company appeared at the bottom of the screen. “If we look on the back of the blade we see the maker’s mark. It says Thomas Griswold, New Orleans. They imported items from England. The blade is etched in the middle,
CS
, on both sides, for Confederate States. The castle you see etched in the guard is actually a fort, Fort Sumner…. This would have used a solid brass scabbard. They used this for their artillery sabers and their cavalry sabers. It would have been a very flashy sword, gold plated all over the hilt. This is definitely the highest-quality pattern.”

Juno handed Steve a set of white gloves. “It’s always good practice to use the white gloves,” the expert explained, “because your hands have salts in them and after you put the sword away, the salts will continue to rust the blade and cause problems with the brass.” He turned the blade over. “Notice the crossed cannons? And on this side, floral, finely etched.”

When Juno finished his brief lesson, he laid the sword on the table and he paused before the big
Antiques Roadshow
moment, the one where the appraiser teases, “Do you have any idea what it might be worth?”

Sadtler said, “I was going to tag it for a garage sale between fifty and two hundred dollars.”

“Well,” Juno said, “this sword could have bought you a new garage.”

The camera zoomed in on Sadtler as his eyebrows narrowed with anticipation.

“That’s right,” Juno said. “This sword is worth thirty-five thousand dollars. This happens to be one of the great rarities in Confederate swords.”

“Did you say”—he gulped—“thirty-five thousand dollars?”

“Thirty-five thousand. You’ve made a great find here.”

“Whoa!” Sadtler’s mouth dropped open, and he seemed to struggle to restrain his joy, as if to remind himself that while this was a reality show, it was buttoned-down PBS, not
The Price Is Right
. He shook his head several times and said, “Man, I was going to get rid of it.”

Juno said, “You made a smart move taking it to us to have a look at it.”

“As a kid, I used this to cut watermelon.”

Juno gave an aw-shucks grin. “You’re lucky you didn’t get too much moisture on it.”

“Wow, thank you very much.”

The segment was so good—an instant
Antiques Roadshow
classic—that PBS aired it over and over, and used it in a fund-raising video. Some viewers suspected it was too good. Rumors began to circulate in the collecting community about the “watermelon sword.”

I tracked Steve Sadtler through the phone number he provided to WGBH on the standard
Antiques Roadshow
release form. I reached him in Seattle.

I told him I was investigating Pritchard and Juno for fraud. Look, I said, just tell me the truth and you won’t get into trouble. But don’t lie, I warned. It’s a federal crime to lie to an FBI agent.

Sadtler confessed immediately. The segment was indeed a setup, he said. Pritchard and Sadtler were close; Sadtler was a groomsman at Pritchard’s wedding. The night before the PBS taping, the two met up with Juno in a hotel room, where Pritchard concocted the story about finding it in Sadtler’s Virginia home, and paid him $10,000 for his help.

And that sword?

It belonged to Pritchard and Juno.

“T
HIS IS THE
case we’ve been waiting for,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Bob Goldman said over lunch one summer afternoon, after I finished telling him about my conversation with Sadtler. “I’m telling you, this is it.”