From the Rez to the celebrity galleries of Santa Fe, the War on Looting surges

Early on the morning of June 10, an army of federal agents descended on the Four Corners region. In Blanding, Moab, Durango and Santa Fe, they rounded up, cuffed and jailed two dozen residents, ransacked homes, businesses, cars and Tuff Sheds, and seized computers and business records by the armload. In Santa Fe, agents raided the homes of prestigious artists, authors and collector/dealers. Within a week, two of those arrested were dead by apparent suicide, triggering an intense wave of public reaction and debate. The mystery was deepened by a report that federal agents have been implicated, and new fears were raised about “twiggers” — tweaker-diggers who trade pots for meth (see sidebar). As the Byzantine plot thickened, Harper- Collins was inspired to seize the moment and re-release Tony Hillerman’s 1988 archaeo-mystery, “A Thief of Time.”

Much of the public outcry has been over the death of the notorious Dr. James Redd, a prominent resident of Blanding. The other suicide was Steven Shrader, by comparison an obscure figure who had moved to Santa Fe from Scottsdale seven years ago. A friend called him “a good young man, a single man, a hardworking man” who most recently had worked as a salesman for a roofing company and had applied for a job at Home Depot. Characterized by his landlady as a “preppy, yuppie guy” who seemed “emotionally unavailable” and tended to avoid eye contact, Shrader displayed artifacts for sale in his home and on his web site. Although regarded a small player in the exotic and high-dollar Santa Fe art trade, he had developed extensive personal ties with other dealers and gallery owners.

Shrader’s undoing began when he sold a pair of sandals and a basket to a dealer from Blanding. (A friend would lament, “he must have needed some quick cash.”) Shrader didn’t know that the “dealer” was in fact “The Source,” known in New Mexico courts as “SU6129,” a wired federal agent. On June 10, Shrader learned he was indicted when two of his Durango art connections were arrested and four of his Santa Fe associates had their homes searched. Shrader voluntarily turned himself into the FBI in Santa Fe and was later rousted by the BLM and jailed for the weekend. A week after Dr. Redd’s suicide in Blanding, Shrader traveled to Shabbona, Illinois, said farewell to his mother and then went out on the street and shot himself. His court-appointed defender was “shocked and surprised” because Shrader believed he was innocent and “seemed prepared to vigorously defend himself.”

It would turn out that Shrader, smalltime or not, had extensive connections among the targets of the federal investigators, and surely knew that, however unknowingly, he had wreaked havoc and visited grief upon their lives. Shrader had been the entry to the feds’ search for the “shady dealers” of Santa Fe, and he had introduced The Source to icons and luminaries of the Santa Fe gallery world who would become targets of the Four Corners task force.

Shrader first introduced The Source to Thomas “Tommy” Cavaliere, an American Indian who affidavits and accounts allege “has the connections in the pueblos” and “just walked onto the rez and bought stuff.” Back in 2002, Cavaliere pleaded guilty to four counts of grave looting. In a solemn ceremony, $400,000 worth of artifacts — more than all the ones traded in the ’09 bust — were returned to six pueblos and the Navajo Nation. It was a major heist, but Cavaliere and his co-defendant, gallery owner Joshua Baer, got off with probation. Tribal representatives expressed their disappointment that they didn’t serve jail time. In 2005, Baer was convicted of embezzlement and spent six weekends in a downtown lockup. Baer had sold three Navajo rugs for Arthur Leavitt, Pres. Bill Clinton’s long-time SEC director, and neglected to pass on $260,000 in proceeds to Leavitt, a ten-year customer.

Shrader also introduced The Source to William “Billy” Schenck, a “self-confessed cowboy,” who told a Santa Fe Magazine profiler that he used to ride in small Wyoming rodeos and has collected arrowheads since age 10. A veteran of the 1970s/Andy Warhol loft scene, Schenck paints romanticized cowboys and Indians, which sell for up to $25,000 per canvas, and calls himself a “Contemporary Pop Realist.” In Santa Fe and on his web site, he markets “Antique Indian Art” and “prehistoric painted ceramics.” If you need a $25,000 Sikyakti parrot bowl, Schenck is your man.

Also in Schenck’s circle is dealer Christopher Selser, co-author of a 1999 book, “The Navajo Weaving Tradition,” which has been called “the definitive book on Navajo textile art.” Selser, a University of Arizona graduate, says he “specialized in anthropology of the Southwest Indian tribes” before setting up shop in Santa Fe as an antique tribal art dealer. Affidavits allege that while selling items to The Source, Selser bragged of selling artifacts at the Paris Trade Show and enthused that the Euros “love this kind of material.”

By far the most colorful, influential and accomplished character introduced to The Source was Forrest Fenn, 78-year-old “retired” gallery owner, amateur archaeologist and noted author/local celebrity, whose customers have reportedly included Jackie Onassis, Gerald Ford, Cher, Steve Martin, Robert Redford, Steven Spielberg, Ethel Kennedy and Suzanne Somers. A 20-year Air Force pilot and Vietnam vet, Fenn would reveal that, while still in the military, he scouted archaeological sites from the air in Air Force planes and then hunted through the sites on weekends. He remembers scoring his first arrowhead at age 9.

A growing infatuation with collecting drew Fenn to Santa Fe, where he became one of the most successful art dealers in town. By 1986, Fenn claimed he grossed $6 million a year. Considered a hustler by some of his rivals, in his heyday he was known for squiring his elite celebrity customers in his limo from the airport to his three guest houses adjacent his gallery. Fenn found time to author books illustrating his fervent passion for Native American culture, including “The Beat of the Drum and the Whoop of the Dance,” his most highly regarded work.

For years, Fenn has been employing a young army of volunteers to excavate his privately owned pueblo ruins in Galisteo Basin. Fenn bristled when, at a conference, archaeologists charged that he was “mining artifacts” at Galisteo, and in the early ’90s, he sued to keep a state archaeologist off his property. In a long manifesto on his web site, he passionately defends collectors, amateur archaeology and private property rights and scorns the government and the archeo-establishment:

“. . . they hate to see commercial traffic, but one must ask which is more important — the education of the public or the perceived ethics of the Society of American Archaeologists?”

Fenn argues in his manifesto that museums, not collectors, are the problem because museums often buy illegal artifacts and thus further stimulate the market. He maintains that amateurs often do a better job than the pros of “reporting” their finds, and he repeats often-heard stories from collector folklore alleging that artifacts are hidden away from the public, poorly stored and sometimes deliberately destroyed by federal authorities.

On the phone, Fenn doesn’t say much at all and refers media calls to his lawyer. I thought I heard age and resignation in his voice as he politely gave me the number. He would only add, “I’d like to sit down and have a talk with you when this is all over.” On June 11, armed federal agents showed up at his front door with a battering ram. His computers and business records were seized, along with artifacts that included ceremonial eagle feathers, a buffalo skull, a basket and most curiously, an item alleged to be “a mummified falcon from King Tut’s tomb” that was purportedly originally stolen by Anwar Sadat from the Cairo Museum.

For now, nobody has seen what Fenn, Cavaliere, Schenck and Selser were all caught doing or not doing on The Source’s videotapes, or why none have been charged. Prosecutors are saying the grand jury is still active, more charges are coming and the investigation is still “looking at all levels including high-end collectors.”

Dr. James Redd was a distinguished member of the Blanding establishment on numerous levels. As at times the county’s only physician, he had delivered well over a thousand local babies. He was a member of one of the oldest and most-pervasive local families and a devout Mormon — his wife Jeanne is a church organist. For more than a decade, both had been criminal defendants in looting cases, and only through protracted legal battles had they avoided jail time. In June, after the Doctor’s suicide, the feds showed up and seized two rental trucks full of artifacts. Among the treasures the Redds allegedly tried to sell: buttons from Dark Canyon, and mugs, necklaces and sandals from the Floating House Ruin in Chinle Wash, which was portrayed as “Many Ruins Canyon” in Hillerman’s “Thief of Time.”

The deaths of Redd and Shrader both remain enigmatic, but after more than a decade of open defiance, it seemed out of character that Dr. Redd would suddenly feel shame or remorse for his actions. All it took were a pair of cuffs and taunts from federal cops? Dr. Redd, like Forrest Fenn, seems to embody the image of the gentleman hobbyist who loots, not to put food on the table, but for the sheer and impulsive (society says perverse) pleasure of it. What all collectors, rich or poor, Indian or white, dumb or smart, seem to have in common is a deep obsession with the culture and/or objects, and a robust ideological defense of their activities. David Filfred, a Navajo medicine man from Aneth, conjectured that Redd and Shrader were both overcome by the Anasazi sickness — “You’ll get blacked out, just faint” from the spirits that relics can unleash, he told the Salt Lake Tribune.

On the 4th of July, there were enough reporters in Blanding to form their own parade float. A T-shirt with the words “legalize pot,” picturing ancient ceramic pots, sold out quickly. Even the actors’ lines in the street melodrama had been reworked with what seemed like strained attempts to find humor in archeological looting and grave robbing. In Southeast Utah, no one was surprised that Blanding was the epicenter of the sting, accounting for 16 of the 24 arrests.

In Utah, the reddest state, San Juan County, at the intersection of the Abajo Mountains and Canyonlands, has traditionally vied with Kanab for the title of Reddest County. Sometimes Blanding seems almost a caricature of itself, bringing to mind Rock Ridge, the violent, racist, but good-at-heart cowtown in “Blazing Saddles,” where the names of town council members on the wall read “H.K. Johnson, T.L. Johnson, M.A. Johnson . . . ” Home to two forlorn Mormon towns, Blanding and Monticello, San Juan County has been classic “Indian Country” for thousands of years. Then, in 1897, according to the “Online Utah Encyclopedia,” missionary Walter C. Lyman “looked out over the sea of sage . . . and had a vision that one day this isolated area would have an LDS temple and play an important role in serving Naïve Americans” (sic!).

That role began poorly with the infamous 1923 “Posey War,” an alleged Indian uprising wherein the last of local Utes were hunted down from Model-T Fords and placed in a barbed-wire stockade in the center of town. The Mormon settlers would not give up their search for Ute Chief Posey until they had twice dug up his body and posed for pictures with it, setting the tone for years to come for relations with the nearby Ute and Navajo Nations, which still make up half the county’s population.

During the Sagebrush Rebellion in 1979, commissioner Cal Black told a BLM agent, “ . . . you had better start going out in twos and threes because we’re going to take care of you BLMers.” In ’86, then-Blanding mayor Jim Shumway warned environmentalists at a public hearing that “those seeking the solitude of our beautiful lands shall now be expected to furnish themselves with armed guards.” The Canyon Country Zephyr reported that for a time after the June raids, “federal agencies in San Juan County banned their employees from driving government vehicles alone through Blanding and forbade them from stopping and getting out of their vehicles altogether.”

Local reputation notwithstanding, Utah’s U.S. senators came down hard on the feds for their dramatic show of force, which the New York Times decided “has become an embarrassing episode” for the Interior and Justice departments. Why did it take 300 armed, flak-jacketed agents? Why were the perps cuffed and treated like “rapists and dope fiends”? Why were one man’s toes allegedly crushed, and what about Sheriff Mike Lacy’s complaints that agents made “smartass remarks“ and pointed guns?

The next day, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar was on the offensive at a Salt Lake City press conference: “To those who would trample our nation’s cultural heritage, we will track you down and bring you to justice.” But U.S. attorneys were on the defensive, maintaining that “nearly all” of the 25 defendants (after they searched the Redd home, they charged the Redd daughter, who became the 25th person arrested) had guns, and they began leaking evidence that produced screaming headlines: Aubrey Patterson, 55, had vowed to shoot it out with federal agents; the still jailed Charles Denton Armstrong had repeatedly promised to tie the feds’ principal undercover agent to a tree and beat him/ her with a baseball bat, and was reportedly pumped on oxycontin and percocet during his interrogation.

Prosecutors say The Source spent ten years making connections as a Blanding dealer before being “developed” by federal enforcers in October of ’06. In short order, a joint FBI/BLM task force was formed and a Salt Lake City grand jury concluded that “there is a large network of individuals who regularly pillage archeological sites, many unknown to the scientific community, in the Four Corners area.” The FBI’s Timothy Fuhrman declared that these are career looters operating as a “very close-knit entity.” U.S. Attorney press agent Melodie Rydalch says The Source is prepared to personally testify and the agent’s identity will be revealed publicly in the first trial of a defendant who pleads innocent. (No trial dates have been set.)

In November ’06, the investigation was launched and in March ’07, the actual sting commenced that would lead to the largest single archaeological bust in the history of American law enforcement. According to the FBI’s Patrick Brosnan, undercover authority was granted “based largely on the development of The Source, and the chronic problem of ARPA and NAGPRA violations in the Intermountain West/Four Corners area.” ARPA is the 1979 Archaeological Protection Act, and NAGPRA is the 1990 Native American Graves Protection Act. The Source, literally a walking TV station, with backup agents watching and listening to video in real time, started making purchases from the diggers and collectors.

Historically, one of the biggest problems facing would-be ARPA enforcers, besides the remote likelihood of catching diggers in the act, is that the law does not apply to private lands. Native subsistence looters in the West are surrounded by a vast sea of federal and tribal lands, and looted artifacts are routinely sold with “letters of provenance” swearing the items were found on private property. Many looters even go out and dig dry holes to cover their tracks.

Also, many judges are still unfamiliar with or unsympathetic to ARPA and NAGPRA law. In much of the West, ignorance of antiquities laws can be a defense, thanks to a 9th Circuit Court ruling that says the government has to prove that defendants knew they were breaking the law (which is why signs don’t last long at archaeological sites). The agents almost literally have to catch thieves in the act.

And so many, if not most, of the hundreds of feds in the June 10 raid were not beat cops — they were archaeologists and office guys, there to execute detailed search warrants, catalog relics, seize financial records and look for trowels, brushes and shovels that can be matched to plaster casts made at crime sites.

Citizens of Blanding have remained largely unrepentant. Sheriff Mike Lacy, whose brother faces seven felony counts, has been widely accused in the blogosphere of turning a blind eye to local looting. Lacy brazenly announced his own investigation into the federal agents, and was backed up by Rep. Mike Noel, R-Kanab, who vowed to get a law barring the BLM from doing law enforcement. Blanding mayor Toni Turk has complained repeatedly, “If they’re going to come around every 23 years and make this kind of show, it’s not going to solve the problem.” (The last big “pot bust” in Blanding was in 1986, when 17 homes and trading posts were raided.)

What Turk may not realize is that, during those 23 years, ARPA enforcement has increased, steadily if not always dramatically. In 1986, there wasn’t a single school in the U.S. teaching cultural property law — now there are more than 100. Since the 1980s, FLETC, the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center has trained thousands of judges, lawyers and cops in archaeological law enforcement.

In the early years, meaningful penalties were unusual. In 1992, James “Horsetrader” Mortenson became the first ARPA convict in Nevada. He pled guilty to selling more than 2,000 artifacts and walked with an $1,800 fine and community service. Since then, penalties have steadily increased and, starting with the legendary Earl Shumway’s six-year sentence in 1995, a growing number have served real time in the big house. In 2005, twelve federal ARPA convicts received one- to two-year sentences. In the 2009 cases, many of the counts carry potential sentences of ten years each, which could add up pretty fast. The first sentencing will be Jeanne Redd’s on September 16. She faces a potential maximum of 37 years, but prosecutors, acknowledging her guilty plea, say they will ask for the “low side.”

For years, ARPA cops have worked to profile perpetrators socio-economically. There are the digger/excavators, the dealers, renegade cops, rogue archaeologists and “corporate” looters who simply pay landowners to search. U.S. attorneys in New Mexico say most of the theft on reservation lands is by tribal members. Enforcement efforts also face the growing use of significant new technology. The modern excavator is equipped with ATVs, GPS, metal detectors, infrared vision, densometer probes, scanners, cell phones and access to a growing internet information base, complete with maps and even coordinates.

Like the drug trade, the artifact market is entirely consumer driven. A pot might be worth $1,000 to the digger, $45,000 to an Albuquerque dealer, $95,000 to a New York exporter and $400,000 to a German collector. Many experts have come to believe this war can’t be won with military force, but the alternatives are disparate and untested. The hawks say the problem is all the gray area in the law. Gray Warriner, who makes films on Navajo culture and prehistory, argues that “our antiquities laws are doomed to fail. It is time to declare artifacts off-limits for private possession, period.” On the doves’ side, some experts have argued for demilitarization and amnesty, the idea being that the only way to reduce looting by the native population is to somehow engage that population in stewardship. That means, for starters, acknowledging that many locals regard archaeologists as little more than looters with a degree, and BLM agents as twisted vice cops.

In Blanding, there are hopeful signs. The Navajos and Utes, who are following the busts keenly, have backed up the feds but remained largely respectful to their white neighbors. Mayor Turk has announced that Blanding schools will add curriculum that teaches respect for cultural heritage and laws. The Boy Scouts have promised to quit teaching Scouts to scavenge artifacts for their archeology merit badges. But the narrative, reinforced by the tragic suicides, of a local populace besieged and misunderstood, a relic of the Old West (the Naïve Americans?) has not played well in the mainstream, where reaction remains emphatic and resounding: string the bums up. For weeks, letters to the Salt Lake Tribune, Denver Post and Albuquerque Journal have overwhelmingly endorsed the raids, with quite a few authors vowing to dig up white people in the Blanding cemetery.

The hawks have an easy mandate for now, but the debate over why we are there (and who “we” is) will continue.

Frequent contributor Jon Kovash lives in Moab.

TWIGGERS

The Four Corners bust came on the heels of widespread allegations that meth-heads are “fueling a new epidemic of looting.” It’s been noted that three of the Blanding defendants have drug priors that include one count of meth possession and one count of possession of meth with the intent to sell. An April/May story in Archaeological Magazine warned that “every archaeological site and collection is at greater risk” from twiggers (tweaker- diggers), who come from “impoverished communities with acute drug problems.” Offering thin evidence, the report concludes dramatically, “Over the past decade illegal antiquities trading in the Southwest has become inextricably linked with the trade in meth and guns.”

The meth connection was advanced officially in a 2008 BLM report. Inside observers fear it is the “third phase,” the pure commodification of artifacts, wherein a pot has no more regard than a stolen car stereo. This new category is regarded as subsistence diggers with a twist, a “recruited scrounging army” that is the “perfect, tireless looting workforce.” New Mexico archaeologist Glenna Dean says you can often tell a twigger looting site because “in their obsessive behavior it’s been Hoovered” — picked especially clean.

Advancing this theory, Archeology Magazine theorized that meth “fills their need for activity. They have the steam to wander sites and dig holes for hours, the focus to scan the ground closely, and the compulsive need to find more and more.”

Law enforcement has offered no statistical evidence to confirm there is a significant new threat from twiggers, but anecdotal reports, often convincing, have been accumulating for years:

• In 2006, an archaeological sting in Oregon called Operation Bring ’Em Back uncovered two meth labs.
• In 2005, Arkansas sheriff Pat Garrett (his real name) reported that “we find two things at every suspected meth lab: porn and arrowheads. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten calls from sheriff’s departments asking why they find what they call ‘Indian rocks’ when they bust meth labs.”
• A BLM archaeology cop in New Mexico testified that “all I’ve been dealing with is tweakers. Most of my cases come from the poverty-stricken trailer parks of Farmington, Bloomfield and Aztec.”
• In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Operation Silent Witness busted a “network of twiggers” linked by a single meth dealer.

With the explosive and pervasive presence of meth everywhere, it remains inconclusive whether the twiggers are a linked and organized force, and whether they are a meth story, a looting story, or a cop-conspiracy story. On the reservation and in Blanding trailers, some are bound to perceive racial and class overtones in the twigger theory. One archaeologist responded that “characterizing Farmington, Bloomfield and Aztec as crime-ridden slums is really a bit much.” But the specter has been raised, and most law-enforcement agents firmly believe that meth always brings more guns and a higher threat level. Ironically, cops say many looting defendants face far higher penalties for their drug and gun convictions than for their artifact thefts.