Finders Keepers

by Craig Childs

  At one point, the informant bought a basket for $4,750 from a Blanding man. The seller was a fifty-five-year-old Shumway who explained that he got it out of a burial from Dark Canyon. During the transaction, the seller smelled the inside of the basket, which had been a grave offering. “Can you smell that?” he asked. “It’s still there. It makes me want to get back out there, but this is getting spooky, it’s all spooky.”

  The deal came down in June of 2009. This time, agents showed up with shackles and handcuffs, their guns drawn. Just like twenty-three years earlier, the bull’s-eye was Blanding, where hundreds of agents raided people’s homes. Now they were armed with better evidence. Some of those named in the 2009 indictments had been hit back in 1986, but this time they were shut down for good. Many of the indicted were from prominent local families: Redds, Shumways, Lymans. One was a seventy-eight-year-old member of the Utah Tourism Hall of Fame, a friendly face greeting you at the Blanding Visitor Center. Half were in their sixties and seventies, including husband-and-wife teams. Most were manhandled, dragged out of their houses with such force that locals were appalled. They said the show of force was uncalled for, with 150 agents hitting the Blanding area simultaneously.

  The operation was officially called Cerberus Action. Cerberus was a monstrous three-headed dog from Greek and Roman mythology that guards the gates of Hades to keep the dead from escaping. That is how the federal image was presented, as a cutthroat beast charged with keeping the dead in the ground. It was a stark warning to anyone still clinging to the belief that artifacts are anyone’s for the taking.

  The Blanding town physician, a cherished elder known as Dr. Redd, was one of those indicted. It was no secret around town that the sixty-year-old Redd and his wife, who was also targeted in the raid, were pothunters. They lived in a large house built on a prominent hill overlooking town; few ever got inside to peruse its contents. The couple had faced gravedigging charges in the 1990s, when they were caught shoveling at a prehistoric site south of Blanding. After a six-year legal battle, charges against Dr. Redd were dropped and his wife pleaded no contest for a reduced charge. In 2003 they paid $10,000 to the state, settling related charges. In the 2009 raid, Dr. Redd was released the next day with enough evidence against him that it was clear the charges would stick. His daughter was about to be dragged into it, too. The next morning, Dr. Redd was found dead, parked on his property in his Jeep. He had gassed himself. Community members gathered at the foot of the Redds’ driveway, some weeping, some deeply angered, saying agents had gone too far in a town where pothunting was once a respectable part of life. Just about everyone in the area knew Dr. Redd had been a pothunter and kept a fine collection of artifacts, so why did he kill himself when it went public? It might help to understand that in Mormon culture, public denouncement can be socially devastating. Dr. Redd’s case was not so much a matter of guilt but shame. His private affairs were now known to the world, perhaps enough to drive a leading figure to suicide.

  Dr. Redd’s death was followed a little over a week later by that of another defendant, a fifty-six-year-old from nearby Durango, Colorado, named Steven Shrader, who had already turned himself in. Not one of the big diggers, he was more peripheral, a sidekick. Instead of showing up for his arraignment in Salt Lake City, Shrader drove to Illinois, where his mother lived, and at 10:45 that night—his mother knew the time because she heard gunshots in the distance—he shot himself twice in the chest behind an elementary school.

  A war of editorials broke out as more people were indicted. In Blanding, one angry redneck was arrested for openly stating that he wanted to tie the informant to a tree and beat him with a baseball bat. A new T-shirt showed up in town reading “Kiss My Artifact.” Suddenly you could hardly find a privately held pre-Columbian artifact on display in the Four Corners region as items were pulled from motel lobbies and gas station windows. Every scrap of potential evidence was hidden. Durango’s historic Strater Hotel scuttled the tasteful display case of whole vessels that it had kept in a well-lit entry hall. In a strange way, it was like watching archaeology disappear all over again.

  Cerberus Action went beyond Blanding and the Four Corners to ensnare anyone the informant had been able to contact. An attorney living near Denver who collected stone artifacts as a hobby had been called ten times by the informant, who entreated him to come dig. Though the attorney ultimately declined, he admitted over the phone to picking up potsherds in Utah, which tangled him up in the raid.

  Vern and Marie Crites, who lived in Durango, had one of the largest collections, and the raid hit them with seven felony charges. Two felonies stemmed from an identical pair of burial sandals, one charge per sandal. Five moving vans showed up at their house while a busy crowd of agents and archaeologists removed thousands upon thousands of artifacts, stacking boxes on the lawn and flash-cataloguing everything they could pick up (their likely destination select museums and repatriations to tribes). While the Criteses voluntarily surrendered the collection, they pleaded that nearly all of it came from private land, from either their own local ranch or someone else’s property, which under U.S. law is legal (as long as it does not involve burial, a difficult distinction to prove beyond a doubt). The Criteses watched decades of their personal passion go out the door. According to the warrant, Vern was a dealer who had boasted of selling sets of pottery for up to $500,000 each, and according to other players caught in the sting, he was a key “price setter.” The collection removed from his house consisted of pieces gathered over fifty years, some of the finest ceramic specimens found in the Southwest: bulging globes of painted jars, mugs decorated with animal effigies, ornately decorated bowls. Many of these pieces he was not willing to sell. At one point during the confiscation, the lead investigator turned to seventy-four-year-old Vern and told him that in jail he wasn’t going to need any of this.

  Vern had not only been caught on tape admitting to illegal acts, he had been observed by a surveillance team of Bureau of Land Management agents as he dug a grave on federal land alongside the informant and another pothunter. Together they found a human skull on the third shovelful. They picked up the skull, then put it back in the ground and covered it over with dirt, deciding to end their dig there.

  Judy Seiler, the Criteses’ adult niece, who grew up in this digging culture, called me repeatedly to defend her uncle and aunt. “The feds didn’t catch the big sellers or buyers,” she said. “These are salt of the earth people who just can’t bear the humiliation of what’s happened. My uncle knew more about archaeology than just about anyone. He had a relationship with it. It was his life.”

  Judy’s voice over the phone was steady and intelligent, but brimming with anger. She had witnessed her uncle’s museumlike house being emptied, a major piece of her own childhood suddenly lost, a beloved elderly uncle exposed. “You’re watching the destruction of a human being,” Judy said. “Do you realize what this does to these people? My friend Steven Shrader shot himself over it. This is what it means to them. This is humiliation you cannot understand. These are simple, good people.”

  What are good people doing digging graves? “He should have stayed off federal land,” Judy said. “But the rest of that stuff is lawfully his. He was truly taking care of it. You have to understand, this is love. Farmers in the tens and twenties would use pots for target practice, potshots. There were millions of artifacts, for Christ’s sake, millions of them. The next generation, my uncle comes along and reveres these things. He puts them under lock and key. You sell them on the side, you move some along. It’s not the dollar amount—it’s where it goes, who appreciates it, who keeps it. Where do you draw the line? We are living on top of cultures. You have a ranch and you are not supposed to plow? Instead of plowing, he gathered. He couldn’t destroy these things. This is our passion. Why should we be assaulted for it? You tell me where the hypocrisy lies.”

  The last time Judy called—before she said the case attorneys finally advised her to stop—she was coolly livid as she named peo
ple all the way up the ranks, talking about a conspiracy she believed went from the Southern Ute tribe to the head of the Department of the Interior. She was pushing legal action, taking donations, saying she would not give up until she exonerated her uncle as well as her friend who had fired two bullets into his own chest.

  Some say that the damage to the artifact culture is irreparable, a unique knowledge of a landscape and its buried history crushed. Others say getting off with fines, losing their collections, and plea-bargaining their way out of jail time represents a mere slap on the wrist for people who have swiped pieces of the archaeological record. When Dr. Redd’s wife and thirty-seven-year-old daughter escaped jail time with probation, receiving fines of $2,000 and $300 respectively, an Archaeological Conservancy spokesman said, “I’m afraid it sends a message that this is not serious criminal activity.” But jackbooted federal raids and national press coverage certainly made it look serious.

  In the spring of 2010, just as some of the first trials were set to begin, police were called to the informant’s house outside Salt Lake City, where the fifty-two-year-old man who had acted as the sole undercover operative was threatening suicide. He had a gun and appeared dangerously belligerent. Police called in a SWAT team. By the time they found him, the informant had gone into his bedroom and, with one bullet, taken his own life.

  This third suicide raised serious legal doubt as to whether the cases could even be prosecuted, the star witness dead. When Bureau of Land Management agents arrived in Blanding to continue the investigation, the sheriff told them just to leave and never come back. The raids were meant to push pothunting farther from the realm of acceptability. What they created was a besieged, rancorously divided community and a string of deaths, making many locals even less willing to cooperate. Divisions have grown only deeper, the artifact underworld slipping farther out of range.

  Judy was right about the raids. Only the easiest targets were caught, mostly old-school diggers. Who they did not catch were aerial investors and those actively traveling from site to site with industrious efficiency, people far too savvy to let their names slip to locals. I’ve come close to some of these high-skill diggers, but only close enough for them to relay that they are not willing to talk. They do not have time for Indiana Jones antics or waxing rhapsodic about their endeavors. They’re too busy moving and hiding, supplying a distant market that seems to have no bottom.

  CHAPTER 6

  GOING TO MARKET

  Diggers who sell have one thing in common. They dig because there is demand. Antiquities are one of the top illegal trades in the world. The international sale of illicit artifacts is estimated somewhere between $4 billion and $8 billion a year. Once you get beyond the local mom-and-pop outfits, you have entered a global arena and a much more profitable market.

  On the world stage, artifacts from the American Southwest make up a dependable but relatively backwoods commerce. Meanwhile, diggers in Central America are trenching into monumental city-states rather than villages, and tombs instead of graves. The money is much bigger, and so is the scale of looting. In Guatemala, crews are employed to find Mayan artifacts for powerful dealers, gangs, and smuggling rings. Some diggers are leftover guerrillas roaming the jungle in military fatigues, weapons slung on their backs as they work in teams out of any number of base camps hidden in the jungle. They put the boisterous work of the late Earl Shumway to shame as they target certain architectural groupings and types of ruins where they know they will find quick money. In one day they can dig a formidable tunnel, prop it up with chopped-down hardwoods, empty a tomb, and be gone. Archaeologists and museums have hired guards to protect certain sites, but in one instance, two guards in the Petén region of eastern Guatemala were found eviscerated, their corpses hung from trees.

  Not all Central American looters are dangerous or belong to well-organized teams. Many are blue-collar locals dressed in T-shirts or sweaty button-downs. They dig trenches and tunnels, earning five to ten dollars a day at best, turning Mayan artifacts into bread, fuel, and new televisions. Contractors sometimes provide mules and supplies to a group of locals heading out for a two-week foray and pay them based on what they bring back. The contractors then move artifacts to middleman buyers who may or may not be the smugglers, taking the remaining profit for themselves (which is minimal compared to what the next set of hands makes). Rarely do the diggers ever see the client who buys the artifacts, and they never meet the end buyer who at auction is willing to pay $200,000 for a painted Mayan vessel or a foot-tall stone carving.

  Most of the grunt work happens within a Third World subsistence environment in which locals are accustomed to using the jungle’s resources—gum, timber, and temples alike. In villages or work camps throughout the Petén you see humble pre-Columbian bowls reused on eating tables or ancient ceramic jars employed as a water dippers. Intricately carved stones weighing tons have been found broken into slabs for village fire hearths. These are the ones that didn’t go to market, that are not good enough for sale.

  Sales out of Central America first really picked up in the 1960s, when Mayan artifacts started rising in popularity among museums and private collectors. Within a couple of decades the digging and smuggling industry in Central America had become entrenched. Richard Hansen, a lead archaeologist in the Petén, has been ambitious in his attempts to stop this looting, posting armed guards at his sites and trying to hire every able-bodied villager for fieldwork, sometimes 340 people at a time. He figures that if they are working for him they won’t be digging for the black market.

  In the 1990s Hansen witnessed the very peak: the illegal departure from the Petén of a thousand or more prized polychrome vessels every month, an export he estimated to be worth $120 million a year. That export, he says, has steadily declined. Is this a sign of success on the part of conservationists like himself? Hansen says no.

  “I believe the flow is less now for the simple fact that most of the sites in the Petén have been horribly desecrated and destroyed,” Hansen says. “Where I have guards, we still have intact architecture and cities, but, barring that, the devastation is horrendous.”

  The last fresh Mayan artifacts to land on the black market are now being sent mostly to the United States, along with a strong flow to Europe, particularly Belgium. They are packaged, concealed, and loaded on container ships or smuggled by hand across borders, seeding the globe with lost bits of Mesoamerica.

  William Saturno, another leading archaeologist in the Petén, once told me that when he and his colleagues enter sites being actively plundered, the looters have always been kind enough to back away. Saturno has been using satellite images to find undocumented ruins in the jungle, detecting them by tracking vegetative patterns (limestone architecture and lime plaster alter what grows there, rendering them visible even through the jungle canopy), and when he has gone to ground-truth, or verify, even remote ones (there are thousands) he says he invariably finds them already carved open by looters.

  When he talks about the people who dig illegal trenches, Saturno does not use invectives, speaking of them as you might describe neighbors you need to get along with. Saturno said most of the looters he has met would rather be doing other work, if there were enough other paying work to do. But the rainy season occupies a big chunk of the year, and it is a lean period when people take looting jobs even though they know the work is dangerous (tunnels frequently collapse). Many were trained on official archaeological projects going back to the 1970s, and some have even worked as guards. Saturno said the ones he has come to know take no pleasure in destroying Mayan archaeology. “It is about simple economy,” he said.

  The limestone here is soft enough that it can be cut with a chain saw, which reduces these cities to manageable dimensions. With this added level of portability, looters have taken not only tomb contents, but entire pieces of architecture. Prominent Mayan stelae weighing up to sixty-five tons have been unfaced by the thousands, their glyph-covered surfaces representing easy sales (some have ev
en been converted into coffee tables). Two stelae that received this chain-saw treatment can be seen at the Cleveland Art Museum and the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. Originally the two were beside each other in the once-great Mayan city of El Waka-Peru in the northern Petén. One is a depiction of King K’inch B’ahlam II, Sun-Faced Jaguar, and the other is his wife, Lady K’ab’el. It is believed they were taken in the 1960s by a Mexican logger who crossed the border into Guatemala with a chain saw, found these two stelae, cut them down, and hauled them out on mules. They were purchased by the museums around 1970, just before it was made illegal to do so. (In 2009, responding to demands from Guatemala to return these artifacts, the Kimbell actually made a replica of its stela and sent it to Guatemala to replace the original on-site. The Cleveland museum has so far remained silent.)

  International crackdowns at the buying end have slowed the illegal exportation of these large stone carvings in the past few decades, and in turn, the demand for more easily transported Mayan pottery and smaller artifacts has increased. Instead of cutting up architecture, looters have focused more on raiding tombs and buried sites.

  The end result is that Central America is just about gutted. It is not alone. Asia looks similar, as do Africa, the Middle East, the Mediterranean, parts of North America, and huge tracts of South America. In southern Iraq a recent survey of nearly two thousand sites found that every single one had been dug. Everyplace on earth where human generations have lived is being taken. The Petén in Guatemala was one of the first to go down, with other regions quickly following.

  How does it all work once artifacts leave the diggers? The black market that collects and disseminates these goods may seem impenetrable, but to see it, you need only peek behind the curtain.