“But to draw the jury right to the edge of the railing,” I tell Quinn, “to produce evidence of blood-spattered paper and to argue in closing that this paper is the reason the victim was murdered without telling them what was written on it is to invite them to take out their disappointment on the defendant.”
“No, I like Mr. Madriani’s idea,” says Quinn. “Besides, his analysis on the law is right. There’s no legal basis to keep the letter out. If I let you convince me to do that, and you convict his client, it’s just going to get overturned on appeal. Waste of time and money. On top of that, whether the letter gets read here or someplace else, the problem is the same—fires all over. So as long as I still have the letter, why don’t we do something judicious with it?”
There’s a knock on the door. It opens, and the bailiff sticks his head in. “Your Honor, the governor’s on the phone.”
“The governor?”
“Yeah, they got a big problem up in South Central L.A. He wants to talk to you.”
“Man has a problem. And I have a solution. Good timing!” says Quinn. “Is my secretary out there?”
“No.” The bailiff is halfway down the hall. “She went home.”
He looks at me. “You any good at writing press releases? I have to take a phone call.”
TWENTY-NINE
We have rested our case. The trial of Carl Arnsberg is over, and so we await the verdict.
I’m home watching television. It’s nighttime, the courthouse is closed, but the sky is lit up. Two of the buses used to barricade the front of the building are burning, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People have been gathering since after the revelations of the letter, and now thousands of demonstrators have converged on the courthouse. They have smashed windows on storefronts and set fire to vehicles. There is talk of calling out the National Guard. Riots have broken out in Detroit and Chicago, and so far three people are dead.
There is now concern that when the rest of the world wakens to news of the Jefferson Letter and the pictures of violence in America, mayhem may spread and go international. There are preparations being made in some of the nations of Africa and on the island of Haiti, where martial law has already been declared.
All the best-laid plans went forth, Quinn’s press release went out to the world. The problem was, the world wasn’t listening, or at least the media world wasn’t. The release was nothing negative, nothing terrible. They treated it like a footnote to a nonstory. The impending reading of the Jefferson Letter was much more exciting, promising better ratings and better revenue. The governor went on the air and emphasized the points in the release. They ran fifteen-second clips between weather and sports. By then the rioters weren’t home watching television—they were out on the street burning cars.
Having Quinn’s courtroom go dark for twenty-four hours only served to delay the inevitable. Angry minds were already on the streets. The delay in releasing the letter, rather than quell the mob, seemed to fire their passions. When the letter was finally released, the revelations surpassed even their wildest suspicions.
To read the letter to the jury, Harry and I employed the talents of an antiquarian and historian, a professor from Stanford who was an expert on the colonial period. Rather than lending credence to the letter, the witness testified that he could not verify the authenticity of the writing based on the copy. He stated that while the handwriting certainly appeared genuine, he was guarded, in that certain stylistic features in the letter and word usage left him harboring doubt. At one point he went so far as to say he was dubious. Then he read and explained the contents of the letter to the jury.
First was the revelation that some of the Founding Fathers, most notably John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, while publicly excoriating the practice of slavery and rebuking the slave trade, were in fact profiting from it through secret investments with northern shipowners whose vessels regularly carried slaves. Together with Jefferson, who owned slaves all his life, the three men carefully choreographed a political theater for the public and for posterity that allowed them to posture during debates over independence. This dance included a vigorous fight to retain language in the Declaration of Independence that would have ended slavery in the new nation—a fight that of course the three revered founders lost.
But the worst part was reserved for the last three pages of the letter.
If true, this revelation so tarnishes the experiment in American liberty as to unmask it as a virtual fraud.
Based on its contents, the letter was written by Jefferson in 1787, in Paris, where he was serving as ambassador to France. Under instructions contained in the letter itself, it was carried by a private courier and personally delivered to Adams and Franklin, who at the time were heavily involved in the framing of the Constitution. Also according to instructions in the letter, neither Adams nor Franklin was allowed to retain the letter, only to read it. The original and only copy was then returned by the courier to Jefferson in Paris, where presumably it remained with his papers in his private library until he returned home to Virginia.
The letter was intended to press Adams and Franklin on the issue of slavery and to ensure that the practice would not be abolished in the Constitution. Jefferson reminded the two men of their earlier performance in Philadelphia in 1776 and the fact that Jefferson retained evidence of their former “investments in shipping enterprises” in New England.
But what makes the letter truly infamous is the revelation that the founders, including the three icons—Adams, Franklin, and Jefferson—had at the time of the debate on independence in 1776 entered into secret negotiations with powerful slaving interests in Britain to enlist their political support in convincing the Crown and the British government to let the American colonies go. The British slaving interests included shipowners and tycoons with highly profitable plantation holdings and investments in the West Indies. According to the letter, the secret deal that was offered to the British slaving interests was that if they could assist the colonies in securing their independence through political negotiations rather than war, the new government that was formed from the old colonies would agree to provide by treaty and by its “organic law”—what would first become the Articles of Confederation and later the Constitution—a perpetual safe haven for slave traffic and for the institution of slavery itself in every part of the new nation, even if Great Britain were to eventually abolish slavery in the British Empire.
When news of this last item in the letter hit the airwaves, it was as if someone had pushed a red button in Alamogordo. The nation erupted.
I look at the flickering images on my set.
Riots on the half screen, the news anchor in the foreground, talking over the swirling firestorm in Detroit, flipping to Chicago and then L.A., indistinguishable flames as the voice of the anchor intones:
“The ancient rust-colored ink, presumably in Jefferson’s own hand, revealing that the cornerstone of liberty, before it was pried from Britain with blood, had first been laid on the auction block in an attempted deal with the devil, is threatening to fracture the country’s confidence in its own national identity.”
I flip the channel and see another talking head.
“While the court tried to put distance between itself and the letter, it appears that the terrible proof may in fact be there, in God’s own hand, Jefferson’s words.
“The social experiment conceived in the Age of Reason by intellectual giants, men who labored against a flawed world, who struggled against all odds, and who in the end were forced by terrible circumstance to make an agonizing compromise that left slavery alive and crawling on American soil at its birth, may in fact be a myth.”
THIRTY
Because of the riots, Quinn has had to move the jury across town to a hotel where they deliberate in a conference room for two days while the police battle with rioters in the streets downtown.
Three days later they finally return to the courthouse where burned-out vehicles along Broadway are still smolder
ing. And they continue to deliberate.
It was that morning that Harry came into my office and reminded me that in our rush to the island, our search for Ginnis, and the forty-eight-hour forensic mayhem after the delivery of the Jefferson Letter, we had forgotten to follow up on one item. He had it in his hand.
It was a copy of the Post-it note on the inside of the jewel-case cover holding the DVD found by Jennifer in the police evidence locker, now nearly two months ago, the one with Ginnis’s name on it.
But it was the other name on the slip that Harry was talking about, the name Edgar Zobel. He hands me a stapled stack of pages, maybe twenty in all.
Edgar Zobel, a French émigré to the United States, came to Virginia with his parents as a young boy. Zobel had always had an interest in writing, not so much with an eye toward content as style. In his youth he had mastered the art of calligraphy. He actually held two U.S. copyrights for scripts that were later developed into type fonts first used on old Selectric typewriters and later incorporated in digitized type fonts for computers, but that would be later in life.
Growing up in Virginia, he was immersed in the Colonial history of the area. Museums in and around Washington often exhibited the private and public letters of historic figures. As a child Zobel marveled at the different colors of ink and the elegant flourishes of script, on paper yellowed by age, the edges of which were often frayed. He practiced the fine styles of penmanship employed by those composing letters that now rested under glass in the display cases of museums. By the time he was fifteen, he possessed his own collection of these in replica form. Several of them were mounted, framed, and hung on the walls of his room.
In an age before computers, when other kids were out playing baseball or swimming, Edgar was busy indulging his fetish, replicating more items for his collection of historic documents. He became adroit in the use of sealing wax and collected old metal stamps created to impress an image in the hot wax that sealed folded letters in the time before envelopes were invented.
By the time he was thirty, Zobel could copy the elegant freestyle script of more than eighteen of the early U.S. presidents so closely that even experienced handwriting experts would have difficulty identifying the replica from the real. Without a thorough analysis of the paper and ink, it would have been impossible to tell.
It was about that time that Zobel was approached by two men who owned a small shop in the historic district of Fredericksburg, Virginia. The shop dealt in antiquities, mostly Civil War memorabilia with an occasional item dating back to the Revolution. The men wanted Zobel to craft some elegant replicas of historic correspondence that they could sell to customers who either couldn’t afford to or didn’t want to pay the high prices of historic originals. To make a few bucks, Zobel was happy to do it.
The copied documents always carried a printed disclaimer, “Hand-Reproduced Replica,” on the back. Almost all of Zobel’s early copies were of well-known historic letters or documents, but they were different from the usual lithograph copy you might find in typical curio shops, much more authentic to the eye in terms of paper texture and ink. They had a kind of three-dimensional quality, including the folds in the paper and its frayed edges, that made them look astonishingly real. Each document was scripted on unique paper. For Colonial documents Zobel would use custom-made paper, large sheets similar to those used in the Colonial period, which were then either cut or torn into quarters to make traditional “quartos,” the quarter pages often used for writing. Sometimes he would employ a smaller “folio” size.
In time the owners of the shop where Zobel’s work was displayed came to realize that collectors of rare documents were traveling long distances, some from as far away as New York, Boston, and Chicago, to buy up everything that Zobel created, as fast as he could produce it. When the shop raised its prices for Zobel’s works, while the profits rose, the result was the same. Their inventory of his work was gone almost before it could be hung. Tony decorating salons in Georgetown and Manhattan began to call, asking if they could commission specific items. If the shop could have cloned Zobel, they would have made a fortune.
The problem was, there was a built-in economic ceiling for his work. The moment the prices started approaching the cost of an original, demand disappeared. It didn’t take long before it dawned on them that if people with money in New York and Boston were decorating the walls of their studies and libraries with Zobel’s elegant copies, how much more would they pay if they thought the article was real?
They didn’t have to argue long to convince Zobel. He had been working up calluses on his fingers, was running out of turkey quills, and had less than twelve hundred dollars to show for eighteen documents, all of which were sold nearly before they were written. Zobel was having visions of dying like van Gogh, broke, only to have collectors trading his works for millions years later, as pieces of art.
The first item they crafted was an original letter from Washington to one of his aides, an obscure two paragraphs about military stores for his troops. For provenance the shop owners claimed that the item was found pasted to the back of a drawer in an eighteenth-century dining set that came into their shop. The piece sold at auction in New York for eighteen thousand dollars. They did it again, a different letter, a different author, and this time they used a party not connected with the shop who said she found the item behind an old photo, a family heirloom. They netted twenty-three thousand dollars at auction.
Now they were in business. They kept the documents sufficiently obscure, with only one notable signature, so the price would stay in the realm of reason and the buyer would not be induced to have experts examine the paper and ink. In fourteen months they’d sold seventeen pieces, netting nearly half a million dollars. It was that last piece, the seventeenth item that brought the roof down. It seems they’d gone to the well once too often. One of the auction houses in New York got suspicious. Unless someone had found a chest of forgotten letters, a mother lode of historic grocery lists penned by the pantheon of American founders, there were simply too many new finds coming from one region all at one time. A quick check of the ink and paper and it didn’t take long for the FBI to trace everything back to the little shop in Fredericksburg.
It is from the statement of facts in the circuit court’s opinion that Harry gleaned all these details of Zobel’s early life.
Edgar Zobel did six and a half years in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta for interstate fraud, wire and mail fraud, and lost his house, paying a fine of a quarter of a million dollars. He sat in prison while his lawyers filed an appeal that was ultimately denied by the federal Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Virginia, an opinion written by the Honorable John R. Logan, circuit judge. It took Harry a few minutes longer to find the names of the other two judges on the three-judge panel: the Honorable Rufus James and Arthur J. Ginnis, both concurring. That was twenty-six years ago.
Immediately I called Quinn and told him. I gave him the citation so he could find the case.
He told me that it was interesting, he would look at it, but that it was outside the record of the trial and could not be given to the jury.
I told him I knew that, but that it was the first solid piece of evidence we had that the Jefferson Letter, more than likely, was a fraud.
It took Herman a little longer than Harry—and some shoe leather—to discover that Zobel was still alive and to find him. In nearly a quarter of a century, he hadn’t ventured far. Zobel was living in a small house that unless you looked closely you might swear was a barn, along a dried-up creek among scrub oaks twelve miles outside Charlottesville, Virginia. The inside walls of his house were literally pasted with historic documents, some of them framed, some not.
Since getting out of prison twenty years earlier, Zobel had gone back to his roots. For a price he would sell you a replicated piece of history, anything you wanted, signed by a historic figure. Most of his business was done over the Internet and via e-mail.
Replicated documents or whimsical o
riginals were sent out by UPS ground shipment, unless the buyer wanted to spring for overnight delivery.
According to what Zobel told Herman, he almost never saw the people who commissioned his work. He imposed only two requirements on his customers. First, they were required to sign and mail in a disclaimer, the form that was on Zobel’s Web site, verifying that they were commissioning the work and that there was no intent on their part to use the document for any fraudulent or unlawful purpose. Second, they had to agree that the document, when completed, would bear a discreet notation in indelible ink printed on the reverse side that the item was “a hand-replicated copy, and not an original.” That and payment, either by credit card to his site on the Internet or by check with return of the disclaimer, was all Zobel required.
When Herman showed Zobel a copy of the Jefferson Letter, the man nearly collapsed behind the counter. He had been waiting for the FBI to arrive for three weeks. When he saw the copy, he assumed that Herman was there to arrest him. Herman assured him that what he wanted was information and nothing more.
Zobel told him that from the start it was an unusual transaction, but that he’d done everything by the book. It had been ordered not over the Internet, but by phone. A price had been quoted, and a few days later an envelope arrived with typed memoranda of the contents to be penned in the letter, along with the signed disclaimer form, apparently printed off Zobel’s Web site. There were also fifteen crisp one-hundred-dollar bills, the price quoted.
All this made Zobel nervous. He was no longer on parole, but he didn’t want to go back to prison, so he did the right thing. He called his lawyer.
The lawyer assured him that as long as he had the signed disclaimer and he printed the notation on the back of the replicated document, he was in the clear. So he did it. According to Zobel’s records, the “original” of the J letter, written on four custom-made quarto-size sheets, was picked up by a private courier service two weeks later. Zobel didn’t note or write down the name of the courier service. When he pulled the disclaimer form from the file that included a copy of his work and the original envelope containing the money, the return address on the envelope read “T. Scarborough,” with Scarborough’s Georgetown address. And the disclaimer form bore the signature “T. Scarborough.” Herman used a subpoena to get the envelope and the original of the disclaimer form, leaving the subpoena and a copy of the form in Zobel’s files.
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