Stolen, Smuggled, Sold

by Nancy Moses

  Now it was 2002, and Bowling was looking at pictures of the front and back of the same Bill of Rights. He recognized the handwriting of George Washington’s clerk who had penned the document. The docketing on the reverse side read, “1789 Proposed Amendments to the Constitution of the United States,” and Bowling didn’t recognize the handwriting. He called in Helen Veit, the project’s handwriting expert, who not only immediately identified North Carolina as the original owner of the document, but the name of the person who had docketed it: Pleasant Henderson, a clerk to the General Assembly. Henderson had also docketed two letters from George Washington to North Carolina Governor Samuel Johnson, and copies of these were sitting in their files. Veit and Bowling pulled them out, compared the handwriting on the reverse sides of all three documents, and authenticated North Carolina’s long-lost copy of the Bill of Rights.

  Bowling wrote to Kaller who then wrote to Bill Reese, who sent the results to Tillou, who called Pratt, who was not pleased. “There are no existing challenges to ownership of the item that I am aware of,” Pratt wrote in a follow-up letter.[13]

  Bowling also contacted Harmelin and Torsella, who were both shocked to learn that the Bill of Rights they hoped to own had belonged to North Carolina. But they were not prepared to lose the opportunity for the National Constitution Center to acquire such an iconic document. Perhaps North Carolina would want to share ownership? Before exploring this option, they needed to know whether Pratt knew it had been stolen.

  On a cold day in February of 2003, Harmelin, Torsella, Pratt, Reese, Richardson, and Keller met at the Yale Club in Manhattan. After some pleasantries, Harmelin announced that there was strong reason to believe the Bill of Rights had come from North Carolina.

  The room fell silent. Then Richardson countered: “North Carolina had a chance to buy back the document and declined.”

  Harmelin countered. “Maybe North Carolina didn’t want to pay for its own property.”

  Richardson was asking five million dollars for the Bill of Rights, but that was before its North Carolina provenance was revealed. Now, it was worth less, only two million dollars, the National Constitution Center argued, since North Carolina might dispute its ownership.

  This was not good news for Pratt, for the $2 million valuation left him in a bind: he owed Richardson $450,000 in legal fees plus thirty percent of the profit, Tillou and Reese together another twenty percent, and Leslie Hindman, Pratt’s auctioneer friend, a finder’s fee of $200,000. Pratt and Matthews were due reimbursement for their costs. If the Bill of Rights sold for only two million dollars, that left very little in profit for years of work. Moreover, North Carolina would undoubtedly make a claim that would result in more legal fees. Within thirty minutes, Pratt and Richardson walked away from the table and the meeting ended.

  A few days later, Steve Harmelin received a call from Joe Torsella: two FBI agents were standing in his office, and they wanted the Bill of Rights.

  “We had called Governor Rendell—Joe worked for him, so he made the call—and asked the governor to find out from North Carolina whether or not they want the Bill of Rights back,” Harmelin recalled. Rendell called North Carolina Governor Michael Easley, and Easley’s aide contacted both the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina and North Carolina’s attorney general, Roy Cooper. The U.S. attorney immediately contacted the FBI, and U.S. marshals secured a seizure warrant from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina.[14]

  Harmelin wanted to pass along Richardson’s and Pratt’s names to the FBI, but he soon learned that the agency had other plans. The FBI’s specialist in art recovery, Robert Wittman, told Harmelin and Torsella there was good reason to believe that the Bill of Rights might disappear forever. As proof, he handed them a copy of the letter from William Richardson to North Carolina threatening to sell the Bill of Rights to a Middle Eastern buyer. Wittman said the only one way to assure that the document would not disappear was to set up a sting. To trick Richardson into bringing the Bill of Rights to Philadelphia, the National Constitution Center needed to proceed with the negotiations, set up a settlement, and help the FBI seize the Bill of Rights.

  “I told Joe there are two ways of looking at this,” Harmelin remembered. “As your lawyer, I must remind you this is high risk for a fledging institution like the National Constitution Center to take on. The other way of looking at this is that we’re Americans. What else can we do?”

  On March 18, 2013, the stage was set. At Harmelin’s law firm, closing documents were set on a conference room table. Kaller was there to authenticate North Carolina’s copy of the Bill of Rights, along with Harmelin to handle the closing and deliver a four-million-dollar cashier’s check to Richardson once the document was in Harmelin’s hands. Wittman was there, too, posing as a dot.com millionaire. Pratt was in Colorado awaiting news.

  Richardson arrived alone and without the Bill of Rights to review the closing documents. When he was satisfied, he called a courier who entered the conference room carrying a large package. Everyone gathered around to see the iconic document: a large cream-colored vellum parchment with faded letters. Kaller pronounced it authentic.

  “I walked out of the conference room and knocked on the door to the room next door, where five FBI agents were waiting,” said Harmelin. “I knocked once—and the agents ran quickly into the conference room and pushed everyone against the wall. The messenger and Richardson were neutralized.”

  The FBI squad supervisor handed Richardson the seizure warrant. Richardson asked, “Am I under arrest?”

  “Oh no,” Wittman said. “We’re conducting a criminal investigation into an allegation of interstate transportation of stolen property. The document is now evidence.”

  It was left to the courier to call Pratt in Colorado with the bad news. Within a day, the story of the FBI sting was broadcast on CNN, and soon North Carolina’s copy of the Bill of Rights was flying back to North Carolina on the director of the FBI’s jet. The document carried a transmittal receipt that read, “Appraised value $30 million.”[15]

  As the plane flew south to Raleigh, the office of the North Carolina attorney general was planning its legal strategy for regaining possession of its own copy of the Bill of Rights. In order for that to happen, the claims of Wayne Pratt and his partner, David Matthews, had to be defeated.

  Karen Blum is a special deputy assistant attorney general for North Carolina, a bulldog of a lawyer who happily admits to loving legal research and hating to lose a case. She was interning at the attorney general’s office when she was asked to help prepare North Carolina’s case. Later, she served as second chair in the many ensuing trials of the matter.

  “This was the case of a lifetime, right out of law school,” she told me, her eyes glittering. “My job was to put that Bill of Rights right back in the Capitol, where it belongs.” Blum offered to send me some legal briefs, and when many long documents arrived via email, I forwarded them to Bruce Bellingham, my legal advisor for this book, along with a request: “According to Karen Blum and the archivists I met in North Carolina, repatriation of the Bill of Rights took years of litigation,” I told him. “Can you please help me figure out why?”

  A week later, I received a long email back from Bellingham with a concise summary of the many procedural steps it took for North Carolina to repatriate its own copy of the Bill of Rights: a trial in federal district court, proceedings in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, and another trial in federal district court where North Carolina was awarded possession. Even after that, the saga continued, since possession is not ownership. It took another trial, this time in state court in Wake County, North Carolina, for the state to legally reclaim ownership. The decision was based on the theory that the state can never lose title to its records without legislative intent.[16]

  The FBI sting took place in 2003; the matter was finally resolved in 2008. The Civil War took less time.

  Bruce Bellingham had spent conside
rable time studying the laws and had developed an opinion. He believed that the FBI overstepped its authority in seizing the Bill of Rights. “The way the government took possession and flew what was then still Pratt’s property off to North Carolina, a preferred venue, was thuggish,” he said. “This is a case where the FBI got away with abuse to achieve a good result that probably could have been achieved without the abuse.”

  Bellingham’s opinion made sense. But then again . . . was this an instance in which the ends justified the means? Would North Carolina have been able to secure its Bill of Rights if the case had been tried in any place other than North Carolina? I thought of all of the people involved in the effort: the governors of Pennsylvania and North Carolina, the FBI, the U.S. attorney, North Carolina’s attorney general, a district court, federal appeals court and state court judges, Steve Harmelin and Joe Torsella, Jeffrey Crow, Chris Meekins, and other archivists. All of these people fighting, as Karen Blum said, “to put that Bill of Rights right back in the Capitol, where it belongs.”

  Now that North Carolina’s Bill of Rights is safe in its chilled crypt, where are the four other missing copies? According to the experts, New York’s copy was likely destroyed in the 1911 fire that destroyed the top floors of the building in which the state library was housed. Georgia almost certainly lost its copy during the Civil War when General Sherman burned Atlanta. Maryland’s copy disappeared during a 1930 renovation of the Maryland State House but may have later resurfaced; some think it is the copy now in the Library of Congress. Pennsylvania’s copy has been missing since the late 1800s, when a thief carrying carpetbags filled with Pennsylvania government documents was seen selling them to manuscript dealers in New York City. Bill Reese thinks that Pennsylvania’s copy of the Bill of Rights was among these documents and is now at the New York Public Library.

  Steve Harmelin thinks so, too, and made it a personal quest to get it back. As the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s agent, he initiated an extended and delicate negotiation with the New York Public Library that resulted in an agreement to share stewardship for this mysterious Bill of Rights for the next one hundred years. In late 2014, the likely contender for Pennsylvania’s copy of the Bill of Rights returned home for an exhibit at the National Constitution Center, where Harmelin now serves on the Board.

  Wayne Pratt died in 2007 after having permanently tarnished his reputation and invested an estimated five hundred thousand dollars in a deal gone south. His fellow dealers, Peter Tillou, Bill Reese, and Seth Kaller, received nothing but aggravation for their time and trouble. We should not judge them harshly: none of them knew the Bill of Rights was stolen government property. And we should remember that even the most seasoned, ethical, and reputable dealers are free to sell history—unique and historically significant documents and other objects—to wealthy collectors, knowing that the public may never see them again. If you believe in market principles, you are hard-put to argue that selling history is not a legitimate line of work.

  Soon after North Carolina won possession of the Bill of Rights, the state sent the document on a statewide tour. Around twenty thousand people stood in line to see it, some with tears in their eyes. The state’s archivists continue to hunt for items stolen during the Union occupation of 1865 and over time have gained a reputation for tenacity. Clearly, North Carolinians loved their Bill of Rights in a way that may be hard for some Northerners to understand.

  Early on, I had wondered why North Carolinians had placed principle over pragmatism. Why didn’t they just buy the Bill of Rights when it surfaced? There is always money to be found for something this important, so cost could not have been the issue. After visiting Raleigh, I finally understood why. North Carolinians refused to buy back their Bill of Rights not because they lacked the desire or the dollars, but rather because they loved it too much to turn it into a commodity.

  Chris Meekins explained this to me. “It’s Southern honor. Honor makes sense,” he said. “For us, it didn’t make emotional sense to buy it back. Because we can’t get away from the material world, the Bill of Rights has a material value. You know this thing has been stolen; it has this purloined aspect to it. But beyond that, in and of itself, the Bill of Rights is an enormously important document. It’s the veins, capillaries to the thought of our government’s organization, the obligations and rights of citizenship.”

  Meekins stopped and thought for a moment. “It’s now two hundred years later and only seventeen additional amendments have been added. For more than two hundred years, the experiment has gone on, and by and large the men who wrote the Bill of Rights got it right.”

  Notes

  1. Kenrick Simpson, Liberty and Freedom (Raleigh, NC: North Carolina Office of Archives and History, 2009), 36.

  2. Ibid., 46.

  3. Burke Davis, Sherman’s March through the Carolinas (Raleigh, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 248.

  4. James A. Mowris, A History of the One Hundred and Seventeenth Regiment, New York Volunteers (New York: Edmonstrom Publishing, 1996), 210.

  5. Frances Lieber, Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field, Article 36, General Orders No. 100 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1863).

  6. E. D. Townsend, General Orders No.88, War Department (Washington, DC: Little, Brown and Co, 1865).

  7. “Infantry 54th Ohio,” Bowling Green State University, http://www2.bgsu.edu/colleges/library/cac//cwar/09ovi.html.

  8. Simpson, Liberty and Freedom, 55.

  9. Howard, Lost Rights, 73.

  10. Ibid., 102.

  11. Ibid., 139.

  12. Ibid., 59.

  13. Ibid., 154.

  14. Wittman, 209.

  15. Ibid., 199.

  16. Simpson, Liberty, 43.

  Chapter 7

  Sumerian Plunder

  Imagine for a moment, a tiny golden vessel no more than an inch tall lying in a silent tomb near the child who played with it some 4,500 years ago. Suddenly, the silence is shattered by the sound of a collapsing stone wall, followed by the shuffling of men’s feet. One of the men, a local farmer, carves a yellow arch with his flashlight. The beam falls on a cache of golden miniatures, the tiny vessel among them. He looks around furtively and, when he is sure none of the other grave robbers are watching, carefully scoops up the objects and hides them in his pocket. Back above ground, he examines the vessel closely. He sees that its rim, neck, and shoulder are intact; but the body of the vessel, instead of being a perfect sphere, is dented, as if it had been squeezed by tiny fingers.

  Now, let’s follow the farmer who actually found the vessel. He soon sold it and the other tiny treasures to a middleman working for organized crime who passed it along to another, then another. The cache of golden Sumerian treasures traveled through Beirut and Geneva to an antiquities dealer in Munich, Germany. The dealer put the golden miniature up for sale at a fraction of its value, planning on having an associate buy it—and later resell it for millions. Instead, a German authority on Sumerian antiquities spotted the scheme, rescued the vessel, and spent the following years engaged in a quest to return it to the Iraqi people.

  Trafficking in looted art and antiquities is—along with illegal drugs and weapons—among the world’s most lucrative crimes, generating billions of dollars a year. In fact, it is so lucrative that it has spawned a criminal network that reaches from the parched plains of the Middle East and the vine-wrapped ruins of Central Asia to the tony showrooms of Western antiquities dealers and, eventually, the pristine display cases of major museums and private collectors. While the illicit antiquities market may at first look like a victimless crime, it is anything but that. The proceeds of purloined cultural treasures frequently underwrite criminal activity, including terrorism. Experts tell us it is impossible to link a specific item, like the Sumerian vessel, to a specific terrorist attack. But sometimes there’s a break in the chain from ancient tomb to auction house that allows a brief glance of how the system works.

&n
bsp; I learned about the connection between stolen antiquities and terrorism by accident. I was visiting some friends in Mainz, Germany, a pleasant town of two hundred thousand on the Rhine River, when one of them, Professor Dr. Gunther Faust, excitedly announced that he had been able to secure a meeting for me with a curator at the Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum. I had visited the museum briefly before; there was nothing in its gallery of Roman dignitaries, friezes, and pottery and ancient German tools and armaments that struck me as relevant to my research, but I didn’t want to disappoint Faust. So, the next day we drove through the center of town and into a courtyard surrounded by elaborately festooned eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings. Behind them, in a more modest structure from the mid-twentieth century, we were greeted by Dr. Michael Müller-Karpe. My initial impression was of a slight man around fifty years old with a mustache, oversized glasses, and thinning hair, the type who spends his life peering through microscopes, instructing students, or reading from dusty texts. Müller-Karpe was all of this, but much more. I soon learned he was also a tenacious and fearless defender of cultural property.

  The museum where he worked is also more than its name or the nature of its exhibition galleries implies. From its founding in 1852, the Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum has conducted research into ancient times and served as a laboratory for preserving and reproducing delicate antiquities, many of which are broken or damaged when they are unearthed or later moved. Students from all over Europe come to Mainz for training in this exacting profession, and through the process of replication and reconstruction they deepen their knowledge of the techniques used by the original craftsmen. Müller-Karpe calls it “learning with your fingers.”