Stolen, Smuggled, Sold

by Nancy Moses

  “We can’t know what happened, but we can imagine,” she told me. “Les Waffen took the ethics of his profession seriously. He said in his open letter that he wouldn’t dream of taking materials that were important to the National Archives. But he believed the discs he took were not important: they were duplicates, or duplicates of duplicates. He might have thought, the Archives is going to get rid of these discs, so why don’t I take them? He loved listening to them; they gave him joy.

  “Les Waffen’s note is powerful,” she continued. ”There are not a lot of spots where he is justifying his actions. The Waffen that everyone knew is still there. That man is relieved that it’s over.”

  This made a lot of sense. Waffen was someone without a clear moral compass. I imagined him as a young archivist in 1976 when Dave Goldin pulled a truck up to the National Archives and unloaded thousands of audio discs. Later, Waffen and a couple of his fellow archivists must have looked over the list of recordings. A number fit the National Archive’s mission, but many didn’t. The archivists might have added these candidates for deaccessioning to the growing backlog of material that needed to be processed. None of them was inventoried, none assigned numbers, and, because there was nothing that documented the location of these recording discs, they could easily walk out the door.

  Of course, Les Waffen knew this. He knew there were many alluring radio broadcasts among the rejects on Goldin’s list, since Waffen himself signed for them. About thirty-five years later, in 2001, he might have remembered them. Because he loved old radio shows, he must have decided to take one of the discs home, just to listen to it. He smuggled it out of the Archives in something large enough to hold a sixteen-inch record, nodding to the guards just as he always did. Perhaps he planned to return it, and maybe he did. Soon he took another, then another.

  Over time the discs must have piled up, and it might have become much too risky to smuggle them back into the Archives. Soon, big boxes filled with recording discs might have cluttered the family’s basement. Maybe Waffen and his wife needed some money, maybe they didn’t; but in either case, these piles of recording discs had become a big problem. Maybe the Waffens decided that the best way to rid themselves of the problem was by selling the discs on eBay. But that presented another problem: how to avoid getting caught? If the discs were sold at full value, they could attract attention; so Waffen and his wife might have set the prices low in order to remain under the radar. I can imagine Waffen having these private conversations with himself; maybe he became a little obsessed. I can imagine he felt some relief when his crime was discovered.

  I spent a long time mulling over Les Waffen’s predicament. Something continued to trouble me: the jolt of recognition I felt when I read his story in the newspaper. What was it that drew me in?

  And then I knew: I knew how Les Waffen felt because I had felt that way, too.

  I think Les Waffen was motivated by the feeling that sits at the heart of every archivist, librarian, registrar, and curator in every country in the world. All of them love the material. They are passionate about things that are old and rare. And so am I.

  There is something magical about these treasures—how they feel to the touch, their texture, their smell. With only the smallest of imaginative leaps, you find yourself transported to another time and place. You sense the spirit of those who made or wrote them, who handled them, who owned them. The very act of touching something old and rare connects you to a mesmerizing alternative reality.

  Archivists and curators are some of the most contented people I know, because they can indulge their craving for the old and rare every day. But it’s a thin line between love and obsession. While a passion for collections is an occupational requirement, it can also become an occupational hazard. That is why the profession frowns on those who amass private collections of the same material they oversee at their institutions. According to the official report on Waffen, there were over 6,000 sound recordings in his basement, only 4,800 of which were owned by the National Archives. This suggests that he had acquired 1,200 recordings on his own. By the time Waffen was caught, he had moved from curator to collector.

  Collections caretakers are not alone in their peculiar predilection for the stuff; private collectors also feel its allure. While some acquire art, antiquities, documents, and specimens as an investment, most collectors are motivated more by passion than by profit. They love to admire the beauty of these items, sense their faint aroma of times long past, fondle them, show them off. The difference between collections professionals and private collectors is that the latter can indulge their appetites to the extent of their resources without the strictures of mission or ethics that constrain their institutional counterparts. David Goldin is the quintessential collector: he and his wife actually live inside his collection. The one thousand radios, one hundred fifty thousand audio recordings, and many other communications artifacts are his passion, and while he tends them with the loving care of the most conscientious of curators, he is free to sell, buy, or even destroy items whenever he wants.

  So, what do we make of poor Leslie Waffen? As a leader within the archival profession, he was uniquely positioned to know the rules; as a division head in the National Archives, he was uniquely positioned to break them. His story shows us what can happen to those who find themselves sliding down a slope where one ethical lapse leads to another and another. His crime did not come into play when he stole the 4,800th disc or even the 400th. It happened when he took the first one.

  While Waffen may be an anomaly among insider criminals, many within and outside of collecting institutions share the passion that drove him to his crime. But while every private collector has a bit of David Goldin in him, very few professional archivists have a bit of Les Waffen.

  Notes

  Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer 1

  (Courtesy of Bridgeman Art Library)

  Pearl Buck's Typewriter

  (Courtesy of Donna Carcaci Rhodes)

  Lakota Sioux Ghost Dance Shirt

  (Courtesy of the South Dakota State Historical Society, Pierre, SD)

  Babe Ruth Audio Disc: Quail Hunt at Forked River, New Jersey

  (Courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration)

  Ramesses I?

  (© Robin Davis)

  Bill Of Rights

  (Courtesy of the State Archives of North Carolina)

  Sumerian Vessel 3rd Millennium, BCE

  (Courtesy of Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum, Michael Müller-Karpe)

  1. Elahe Izadi,“Leslie Waffen: ex-National Archives Director’s Home Raided,” TBD October 28, 2010, accessed February 2014.http://www.tbd.com/articles/2010/10/leslie-waffen-ex-national-archives-directors-home-raided-profile—26689.html.

  2. Eric W. Morris, “Leslie Waffen, Ex-Archives Worker Sentenced for Stealing Recordings,” Washington Post, May 3, 2012, accessed February, 2014. http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/leslie-waffen-ex-archives-worker-sentenced-for-stealing-selling-recordings/2012/05/03/gIQAX0f7zT_story.html.

  3. Izadi, “Leslie Waffen.”

  4. National Archives and Records Administration, Theft of Historical Audio Recordings Investigation Number 11-0002I (2013), 20.

  5. Interview with David Goldin (David Goldin’s home), in discussion with the author, July 5, 2013.

  6. Anne-Catherine Fallen and Kevin Osborn, Records of Our National Life: American History and The National Archives (London: GILES, 2009), 22.

  7. Interview with David Ferriero (Archivist of the United States, National Archives and Records Administration), in discussion with the author, August 19, 2013.

  8. Fallen and Osborn, Records, 12.

  9. Ibid., 14.

  10. Ibid., 18.

  11. Todd Samuelson, Laura Sare, and Catherine Coker, “Unusual Suspects: The Case of Insider Theft in Research Libraries and Special Collections,” College & Research Libraries 73, no. 6 (2012), 556–68.

  12. Samuelson et al., 8.

  13. Ibid., 8.

&
nbsp; 14. Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List, Sunday, 16 October 2011 17:26:50, Leslie Waffen, Listerve.LOC.GOV.

  15. Ibid.

  Chapter 5

  The Only Pharaoh Outside of Egypt

  What is so fascinating about ancient Egypt? Why do we crowd into museums, tune into television documentaries, compose waltzes, paint paintings, devour books, swoon over knockoffs of the jewels painted around the neck of the bust of Nefertiti, and cherish plastic miniatures of the Sphinx? What is it about these ancient people that spark such Egyptomania?

  I’ve been asking this question a lot recently and have received many answers: The massive scale of the monuments. The otherworldly beauty of the antiquities. The mystery of the tombs. The exotic figures with their faces in profile. Cleopatra. The Pharaohs. The Pyramids. The Rosetta Stone. There is certainly a lot of ancient Egypt to love.

  Whatever the reason for the public’s passion for all things Egypt, it’s a passion that has been around for a long, long time, since well before Herodotus the Greek wrote about it after his visit in 450 BCE. And, since the early 1800s, Westerners have endured backbreaking work and dangerous conditions to dig for treasures in Egypt’s sands, hills, and cliffs. In 1887, Gaston Maspero, director of Egyptian Antiquities, described the passion that motivated him and other Egyptologists:

  The Valley of the Nile is, in short, one great museum, of which the contents are perhaps one-third or one-fourth part only above ground. . . . Exploration in such a land as this is a kind of chase. You think that you have discovered a scent. You follow it; you lose it; you find it again. You go through every phase of suspense, excitement, hope, disappointment, exultation. The explorer has need of all his wits, and he learns to use them with the keenness of a North American Indian.[1]

  All of this goes far in explaining the allure of ancient Egypt to both layman and specialist. I believe that mummies are a big part of it, too. When ancient Egyptians have been especially well preserved, their faces and bodies, though shriveled and black, are unmistakably human. We sense their spirit and can imagine them thousands of years ago walking the same earth that we traverse today. Much can be learned about a lost civilization from painted walls and inscribed pots, but a mummy can step out of the past and drag you back in.

  I thought about this when I read about the repatriation of an Egyptian mummy from the Michael C. Carlos Museum in 2003. Part of Emory University, the Carlos collects and presents art and artifacts from antiquity to the present. The big news about this particular event was that there was significant evidence to suggest that this was a very special mummy, a royal mummy that may actually have been Ramesses I, the founder of the illustrious Nineteenth Dynasty, 1292–1190 BCE. None other than Dr. Zahi Hawass, director general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities of the Arab Republic of Egypt and the country’s most celebrated Egyptologist, had declared the mummy a royal and helped orchestrate its return to Egypt. The fact that the royal mummy had lost his coffin and almost all of his bindings and was naked except for his wrapped genitalia and a bit of fine linen around his neck made this identification especially significant. If Hawass was convinced this naked mummy was the real deal, so was I.

  Unfortunately, there was no way to ask Hawass about his verdict in person, because he had not left Egypt since he relinquished his post in the summer of 2011. It would be impossible to write about this royal mummy without interviewing the man who had helped bring him home, so I filed the idea away. That’s where matters rested until early 2014, when an email appeared in my computer announcing that Dr. Hawass was going to lecture at the Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology—where, as it happened, he had earned his Ph.D. in Egyptology. I quickly contacted Pam Kosty, the museum’s public relations director, who in turn contacted Hawass. A couple of days later, I was on my feet clapping along with the rest of the audience as the regal gentleman took the stage.

  A striking, square-built man with penetrating black eyes and a high-energy charisma, Hawass is one of those rare combinations of scholarship and showmanship. He is as close to a superstar as archaeologists get, with his own television documentary series and even a line of Indiana Jones-style clothing. In his day, Hawass chaired the committee that decided who could excavate in Egypt and under what conditions. He capitalized on the world’s Egyptomania for his country’s benefit, instituting admission fees at ancient sites and using the millions generated from the blockbuster exhibits he helped curate to preserve and protect ancient monuments. Hawass’s website features a gallery of celebrity photos, all of which include him, as well as his impressive and extensive bibliography: scientific articles, books, encyclopedia entries, picture books, guide books, newspaper and magazine articles in Arabic and English. One wonders when he has time to sleep.

  “I am proud I put the pharaohs in the hearts of people all over the world,” he told me when we met after his lecture.

  “So, how did you get into this line of work?” I asked.

  “When I was a kid in Egypt, people didn’t know about archaeologists,” he said. “I originally wanted to be a diplomat, but I failed the exam. Archaeologists were government employees. The government sent me to excavate, and it became my passion. When I began, our antiquities were in the hands of foreigners. I trained Egyptian archaeologists to be the best.”

  We quickly got onto the topic of the repatriation of the royal mummy, and I could see that Hawass was very proud of this, too. He had gone to Atlanta to lecture at the Carlos Museum. There, he met the museum’s director, Bonnie Speed, and a curator, Peter Lacovara, and learned that the museum had recently acquired a cache of Egyptian mummies, coffins, and other funeral material from a museum in Niagara Falls, Canada, that was called the Niagara Falls Museum and Daredevil Hall of Fame. One of the mummies might have been taken from a cache of royal mummies and funeral objects discovered in the mid-1800s near Luxor.

  “It had been stolen by the Abd el-Rassul grave-robbing family, which operated in Luxor,” he said. “It came from a cache that was filled with other mummies and funeral objects.”

  That struck me as odd. “Why did the Abed el-Rassul family want to steal a mummy?” I asked.

  “Someone in Luxor may have said, ‘I want a mummy,’” he responded.

  Aha, I thought. Perhaps some tourist wanted a scary Egyptian souvenir.

  “At the time there was no royal mummy outside the Cairo Museum,” Hawass continued. “I said I want to see the mummy on display in the museum before giving the lecture. I took a look. The mummy’s nose looked like the nose on Seti I and the nose on Ramesses II. The mummy’s arms were crossed in the position reserved for royals. I took one sniff, and I knew it was a royal.”

  After our meeting, I reviewed my notes and realized that each of Hawass’s statements sparked many more questions. He had mentioned a grave-robbing family in Egypt, the Abed el-Rassuls. How did Hawass know their name? Wasn’t notoriety bad for the grave-robbing business? Hawass said this royal mummy was discovered in a tomb with a number of other mummies. But, weren’t pharaohs buried one per tomb? Why did the mummy’s nose mean that this might be a royal, maybe even Ramesses I? What was this about Hawass being able to sniff out kings? How exactly did that work?

  So, after Hawass’s brief introduction, I set off to discover Ramesses I’s roots and search for the connection between the ancient pharaoh and the naked mummy from Niagara Falls. Along the way, I found a host of very colorful characters. Egypt seems to attract colorful characters.

  The first thing I learned was that the truth is a moving target in Egyptian archaeology. This has nothing to do with a lack of material. There are sizable Egyptian collections in the national museums in Cairo and Luxor, the British Museum, the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Neuse Museum in Berlin, the Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and many others around the world. There are countless antiquities owned by the heirs of explorers and travelers and the entities connected to them. There are reams of scientific papers and periodicals and thousands of bo
oks and reports in multiple languages by both professional Egyptologists and amateurs, some of whom imagine themselves as professional Egyptologists. Nevertheless, researching ancient Egypt can feel like staggering through a maze without a map.

  There are several reasons for this. Egyptology seems to attract consummate storytellers, and the Egyptians themselves sometimes embellish their own stories for effect. More to the point, the science of Egyptology is always evolving. New information turns up all the time as Egyptologists discover new sites, revisit old ones, and re-examine artifacts long out of the ground and stored in museums. Yesterday’s facts become today’s hypotheses, which may or may not lead to new questions for the future. That is why Egyptologists are careful about using absolutes; they are more prone to say something is likely, as opposed to true. They are not willing to say a naked royal mummy is Ramesses I unless the evidence is irrefutable.

  “In Egyptology, it’s never the case that everybody agrees,” Peter Lacovara told me when I went to see him in his home in Albany, New York, on a bright October day. He greeted me at the door of his stately Victorian house in a plaid shirt and blue jeans, and led me into the front parlor. Though he looked much too young to be a retiree, Lacovara had recently retired from his position as senior curator of Ancient Egyptian, Nubian, and Near Eastern Art at the Carlos Museum. He had just launched a new nonprofit, the Ancient Egyptian Archaeology Trust, and was preparing for an extended trip to Egypt to restore a palace that the Metropolitan Museum of Art excavated about a hundred years ago. “There’s certainly a need to work in Egypt these days,” he said. “All of these sites are threatened, so we’ve got to do what we can now.”