The Best American Crime Reporting 2010 (26 page)

Meanwhile, Durham was growing exasperated himself, although with a different view of the LLC. Big Jim saw his Boulder partners as perpetuating the history of the White Man welching on deals made to Indians. Big Jim was of the opinion that his investors were shirking their end of the deal. As Durham would later say in the media and to attorneys, he’d call the guys in Boulder and tell them he was having to crash on couches and even sleep on the floor of a bar because Lund and Rippberger weren’t sending the checks they’d promised. Rippberger, for one, was tired of it all. “I know I was at a point where I didn’t care what happened to that buffalo,” he says. “I didn’t care if I ever saw it again. I just wanted to be done with Jim Durham.”

Lund clearly still cared. In May of 1997, just before the final two stops on the buffalo’s road trip—the University of Central Florida and the Fairbanks Museum in Vermont—he had the Sacred Buffalo appraised. He hired Bernard Ewell, at the time a Colorado Springs–based art appraiser, to provide the information the Buffalo LLC might need to make decisions about rental fees at museums, a possible sale price, and insurance. Ewell is a self-described Salvador Dalí expert, and he refers to himself as “the Dalí Detective.” Regardless of the assignment, however, he promises, “I’ll always be up-front and unflinching in my evaluations of the players and their actions.”

In his Sacred Buffalo appraisal report, Ewell noted that the task of determining a value was difficult because there were no comparables for a buffalo skeleton scrimshawed with Native American religion and history. A senior member of the American Society of Appraisers, Ewell stated that his methodology “is not based on a formula of calculation. It is simply the value which was given to me spiritually while I meditated before the Sacred Buffalo on March 12.” So inspired, Ewell put the fair market value of the piece at $770,000. However, provided with touring and revenue information as articulated by Lund, Ewell upped that assessment considerably. Lund informed Ewell that the LLC had been paid $15,000 and $20,000 in rental fees by at least two of the venues that had rented it. Based on those numbers, the Dalí Detective theorized that at “5 venues a year @ $25,000,” multiplied by 10 years, the piece might be worth an additional $1.25 million.

W
HEN
J
AMES
“B
OOMER THE
B
EAST
” Boggs finished casing the Fairbanks and returned to the minivan, pregnant Tish was bellied up to wheel. Boomer directed her to cruise around back, behind the museum, as close as she could get to that back door he’d seen from inside. Tish couldn’t get that close. Between the van and the door were a good-size parking lot and then a hillside of trees. Boomer announced plain and simple he wasn’t going to do it. More like he couldn’t do it. Never mind the challenges inside, Boomer said, “What’s gonna happen is, I’m going to have to run 250 yards. There’s no way I can do it and not get caught and [not] have a heart attack.” This didn’t sit well with Kinney. “Well, I didn’t fuckin’ come all this way for nothing,” he told Boomer. “I’ll do it.” Just like that, Kinney shouldered open the van door and the blond mullet was out of sight.

It was about 2 p.m. on that Tuesday, August 22, 2000, when Tish put the van in park. She and Boomer waited. Boomer anxiously pumped his leg. Truth of the matter is, Boomer’s an easily rattled guy. On at least one occasion, he described himself as “getting more nervous than a cat shitting razor blades.” Imagine how he’d have felt if he’d known the St. Johnsbury police department was only two tiny blocks from the museum. A few long minutes later, the museum back door swung open, and damned if that stickman Kinney didn’t come bounding out, running and stumbling through the trees, down the hill, and through the cars in the lot. He breathlessly yanked open the minivan door and jumped in. Tish and Boomer sat there, uncertain of what had happened or didn’t happen. They watched as Kinney slammed shut the door and immediately turned to puke out the open window, only the window wasn’t open. Dawg ended up vomiting all over the interior of Boomer’s Astro. Which, considering the circumstances, Boomer let slide.

Tish and Boomer sat there all catatonic-like until Kinney looked up with one of those well-what-in-the-hell-are-you-waiting-for expressions, and between pants and gags, shouted, “Go! Go! Go!!!!!” Tish punched the gas and then slowed to a meander, driving out through the center of St. Johnsbury like she and the boys were on their way to the local Ben & Jerry’s for some Chunky Monkey. No one said anything for about an hour, until they realized that they weren’t being followed. Boomer then made the call to the contact, told him it was done. The voice on the other end of the phone, said, “Are you kidding me? Man, you’re fucking crazy. That’s great.” The gang drove straight through the night back to Ohio, now joking, “We killed the great white buffalo,” high on adrenaline and the promise of big money.

Thus far, the contact had fronted Boggs only $500 for “traveling expenses”—most of that had gone to the dope and coke—and now they were expecting the agreed-upon payday of $25,000, which Boomer would split with Kinney. All the way home, Kinney kept nagging Boomer, “I want my cut right now.” And Boomer kept telling Kinney, “Look, dawg, I’m going to take care of you. We’re gonna get paid.” When the gang got home, as Boomer puts it, he went to meet with the contact to get paid and was more than a little disappointed: “He gave me four pounds of pot and $1,000. And I was like, ‘What the fuck is this? Where’s the rest of my money?’ And he was like, ‘Look Boomer, I just don’t have liquid cash that I can give you right now.’ He knew I’m a killer, that if you fuck with me you better bring your lunch, and so he’s like, ‘If you work with me—I mean this is a gift—just work with me and I’ll give you the twenty-five. But we gotta wait until insurance money comes through.’”

A
RMED WITH THE
D
ALÍ
D
ETECTIVE’S APPRAISAL
, Lund obtained an insurance policy for the Sacred Buffalo, covering the piece for up to $1.25 million. In addition, each venue that hosted the Sacred Buffalo provided its own insurance coverage for the piece while it was on display in their care. And because the hit on Durham’s creation occurred under the watch of the Fairbanks, it was that museum’s policy alone that would be on the hook for the damage. The Fairbanks’ insurance on the Buffalo was handled by a company called Acadia Insurance, which, in the weeks following the August 2000 hit, promptly put a claims adjuster on the case. The Acadia investigator was a seasoned professional with more than 15 years’ experience, and was primarily responsible for handling cases in the million-dollar range. Although the investigator has since left Acadia for a new insurance firm, he remembers the case well. He remembers it so well that when we recently spoke about the Sacred Buffalo he asked that his name not be used because, he said, “I have a wife and kids, and you’re talking about some serious bad guys involved here.”

So this “Mr. Acadia” was on the case, finding that the only information the police department could provide at the time, according to Police Chief Richard Leighton, was that a skinny guy covered in tattoos was seen running out of the museum. After all, the Fairbanks ain’t exactly the Louvre. And it turned out the intelligence Boomer had received from his evidently well-informed contact about the nonfunctional security cameras was dead-on. In the local press, Big Jim said his best guess as to who was responsible was zealous Christians who rejected American Indian spirituality. Durham didn’t have any more answers for the insurance investigator, but Mr. Acadia did receive a copy of Ewell’s appraisal report. In his talks with Mr. Acadia, Durham said that there was no point in discussing whether it was possible to repair the Sacred Buffalo because “its spirit had been broken.”

Mr. Acadia was suspicious of the values the Dalí Detective had placed on the piece while he had “meditated before the Sacred Buffalo.” Likewise, he didn’t buy the Christian theory, or, for that matter that the random act of vandalism was random. Mr. Acadia hired his own expert to give an appraisal of the broken buffalo, and meanwhile contracted a private investigator to see what he could find. The PI was Ken Springer of New York–based Corporate Resolutions Inc., which specializes in high-value insurance fraud matters. Based on Corporate Resolutions’ legwork, according to Mr. Acadia and Springer, they believed the Sacred Buffalo caper was a scam, and that if any of the Buffalo LLC players was involved in busting up the bison and hoping to collect on an insurance-policy payout, it was most likely Durham. In addition to the alleged back child-support payment situation Lund had described, Springer determined that Big Jim was in financial straits, the details of which the PI would not disclose to me. Nevertheless, Springer told Mr. Acadia, he didn’t have proof of a connection.

On November 12, 2000, the expert Acadia hired to examine the damaged bison skeleton and estimate what it would cost to repair the buffalo submitted her findings. Lisa Kronthal was no Dalí Detective, but she was a conservator at the American Museum of Natural History. She examined the buffalo on October 27, two months after the crime, near Columbus, Ohio, where Beemer and Durham had retreated with the damaged piece. She determined that the buffalo had suffered “significant damage,” and that even if repaired it would “never be as strong as it was originally.” Kronthal wrote, “It was found after speaking in depth with the artist that although he believes the buffalo has lost all spiritual value, he recognizes that it retains significant historical value. Mr. Durham feels the buffalo should be brought back to an exhibitable state.” In the detailed report, which reads like a medical autopsy and breaks down the bone-by-bone cost for repairs, Kronthal came up with a cost of roughly $210,000.

Provided with Kronthal’s findings, Mr. Acadia entered into a months-long series of settlement negotiations with the Buffalo LLC and with Durham personally, and, finally, sent the LLC a settlement check for $456,000. “As much as society likes to believe insurance companies like to get out of making payment,” Mr. Acadia says, “it’s actually a lot easier to make payments than it is to get out of them. That’s a fact. Unless you’ve got [concrete evidence of fraud] or you’re a really bad insurance company, you’re going to pay the claim and move on. That’s how it works. [Our investigator] was like, we know [Durham] did it, but we don’t have enough to give you to sink your teeth into. As soon as things started to develop that way, it was obvious that we felt that way. We let [Durham’s lawyer] know. Communications with Durham didn’t exist after the check was sent. The check was another issue.”

Indeed, the check was another issue. From that $456,000 settlement, Lund and Rippberger each took $193,000; they sent Durham the remaining $70,000 and told him he could keep the once Sacred and now broken Buffalo.

Fairborn, Ohio, detective Andy Kindred couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. It was March 2001, and a fat, freckled dude just busted with three pounds of pot was giving him some whack-a-doodle story about smashing up some buffalo bones in Vermont six months ago. “I was like, you’ve got to be shitting me,” Kindred told me recently. “So I picked up the phone and called the St. Johnsbury P.D., and got Chief Richard Leighton on the phone, and he goes, ‘No, that happened. You got the guy? I’ll be damned.’”

Boomer had found himself across the table from Detective Kindred that day because, thanks to an informant’s tip, the Fairborn police had raided Boomer’s home, where he was now living with his girlfriend, Angie. Behind the house, police found a plastic bag in a tree with three pounds of marijuana. “It’s not hers,” Boomer had blurted. “She don’t know nothing about it. It’s mine.” Possession of three pounds legally implied intent to distribute, and considering Boomer’s record, such a conviction would be enough to put him inside for a long time. And faced with the possibility of going away (again) for a long stint, Boomer figured he could strike a deal by providing Sacred Buffalo information.

See, Kinney was no longer Boomer’s dawg. First off, Kinney had insulted Boomer’s new girlfriend. “Angie had been with a colored man before me,” Boomer explained to me. “She had a mixed baby. And Roger was like a big-time racist. I mean, I don’t like colored kids either, but that baby didn’t have nothing to do with it. So me and him fell out about that.” What’s more, the contact for the buffalo job never did pay up. And so Boomer decided to tell Detective Kindred everything he knew about the buffalo and more in exchange for a lighter sentence. Boomer revealed the contact for the Sacred Buffalo hit: He swore up and down that it was a dude named Johnny Decker.

In a tape-recorded statement to Kindred, Boomer described himself and Kinney as “the Apple Dumpling Gang,” and stated that when this Decker hired him for the job, “he told me that the artist [was his] brother. He told me a couple of times that he’d been to South Dakota. He never told me why.” Kindred asked Boomer if he’d ever heard the artist’s name. Boomer said, “He showed me a picture of him that was in a book. I don’t know if he said his name or not…. All I know is [he said] the artist was his brother and that’s the one that made the buffalo…. Evidently the buffalo was on its last leg. It wasn’t a major attraction anymore. It went through the circuit and was about to be retired. There wasn’t going to be any money made on it. And supposedly this artist had a deal…some type of insurance deal that if anything would ever happen to the buffalo, all proceeds would go to some Indian kids on a reservation. Now this is the story he told me.”

Within a matter of weeks, Ohio police officers raided Kinney’s house. They found a bunch of gas grills that had been stolen and found the dawg hiding in a bedroom closet. Kinney confirmed Boomer’s version of events to law enforcement, to Acadia, and also to the court, as both men pleaded no contest to felony burglary for their roles in the Sacred Buffalo hit. Kinney served 12 months, with his four- to eight-year sentence suspended in exchange for his cooperation with the investigation. And because Boomer had agreed to provide information about the buffalo, along with other, unrelated criminal investigations, he did only 120 days in prison, with his sentence of four to eight years suspended. (According to Detective Kindred, information he received during the buffalo case helped solve a missing-person case.) When Boomer got out of the Vermont prison, with some assistance from Kindred, Boomer worked on getting straight. He and Angie had a baby of their own. But Boomer gave in to his drug addiction and got arrested trying to rob a gas station with a knife. When we spoke last fall, Boomer was on the front end of a three-year sentence in Ohio at the Warren Correctional Institution.