Priceless Page 11

  So I breathed a sigh of relief when Wilhite pulled from his bag a neatly folded red, white, and blue cloth—a nineteenth-century American flag in fine condition.

  He unfolded the flag roughly and draped it over a small round table, the edges spilling over the side, the frayed fringes dangling inches from the ground. My eyes fixed smartly on the thirty-five gold stars in the blue corner square, and I shuddered inwardly as Wilhite manhandled this antiquity, knocking flecks of gold leaf from the stars to the hotel carpet. The stars were unusual, aligned like the night sky, haphazardly in loosely defined circles, set at different angles. At first glance, they seemed to be dancing.

  In the middle of one of the seven red stripes, in capital shadow-box letters, were the words 12th REG. INFANTRY CO’ A.

  It was precisely as my tipster at the U.S. Army Center of Military History had described. This was the battle flag of the Twelfth Regiment Infantry, Corps d’Afrique, a near-sacred artifact in African American history, one of only five such flags to survive the Civil War. The Army museum’s historical property tag—“HP 108.62”—was still affixed to the lower left edge of the banner.

  Wilhite caught my eye and smiled. “Beautiful, ain’t she?”

  “Looks good to me, Charlie.”

  A BATTLE FLAG is unlike any other antiquity.

  Flags hoisted by the soldiers at Fort McHenry, the marines at Iwo Jima, and the firefighters at the World Trade Center are symbols of American resolve. The legend of the Fort McHenry battle flag inspired our National Anthem. Today, the tattered Star-Spangled Banner is the most visited artifact displayed at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, viewed by some six million tourists annually. That flag, hand-stitched with forty-two-foot reams of wool, is the most valuable artifact in the entire Smithsonian collection—worth more than the Hope Diamond, Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of Saint Louis, or the Apollo 11 lunar module.

  As an amateur Civil War artifacts collector, I knew that regimental flags played a key role in battle—that they were not merely ceremonial. The soldiers who carried the flags served as beacons for troops to follow in the chaos and cacophony of battle. The regimental flags literally marked the battle lines, where soldiers from the North and South died by the tens of thousands. Each side tried to knock off the other’s flag-bearers, eager to cut off a unit’s chief means of communication. To carry a regiment’s colors into battle was considered a great honor, but also a great personal burden and incredible risk.

  The battle flag Wilhite brought to the hotel room was freighted with additional meaning. Missing from the Army archives for more than a decade, the Twelfth Regiment flag proudly stood for bravery, sacrifice, and racial history. After hanging for years in a place of honor at West Point, the flag was transferred to an Army museum in Washington. In the mid-1970s, the old records showed, it was loaned out as part of an exhibition in South Carolina, but never arrived at its destination.

  I first learned of its theft a month before I met Wilhite. Leslie Jensen, an Army historian in Washington, called to say that Army investigators were tracking a tip that someone was shopping the Twelfth Regiment flag on the black market.

  Could the FBI help? Jensen asked.

  Tell me more about the flag, I said.

  “At least five men died carrying it,” Jensen said. “That’s why they call it a blood cloth.”

  This Louisiana-based regiment, the expert explained, held a particularly significant place in the history of the War Between the States—and the U.S. military, generally. The Twelfth was among the first African American regiments to see major battle. Free blacks served in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 in limited numbers, and they also served in the Navy in the decades leading to the Civil War, but the notion of arming full regiment-sized units of black soldiers remained controversial. At the outset of war, the South used slaves in support roles for the Confederate Army, but President Lincoln initially declined to enlist black soldiers. After the Union lost several early battles, Lincoln ordered that tens of thousands of black men be used in support positions, but barred them from carrying weapons. His Union commanders fretted that these untested soldiers might cut and run in the heat of battle. Yet faced with the realities and horrors of war, Union generals gradually changed their minds. By the fall of 1862, when Lincoln declared that all slaves would be emancipated on January 1, 1863, self-formed black units were beginning to fight alongside Union whites in Massachusetts, South Carolina, and Louisiana. One of them was the Twelfth near New Orleans.

  In May of 1863, when Union troops attacked Port Hudson, the final Southern stronghold on the Mississippi River, black regiments like the Twelfth won the chance to prove their mettle in battle. In his 1887 book The Black Phalanx, Joseph T. Wilson, one of the African American soldiers who fought at Port Hudson, memorialized the battle in patriotic prose:

  Louder than the thunder of Heaven was the artillery rending the air shaking the earth itself; cannons, mortars and musketry alike opened in a fiery storm upon the advancing regiments, an iron shower of grape and round shot, shells and rockets with a perfect tempest of rifle bullets fell upon them. On they went and down, scores falling on right and left.

  When a Confederate mortar felled the sergeant carrying the Twelfth Regiment’s flag, Wilson wrote, another scooped it up.

  “The flag, the flag!” shouted the black soldiers as the standard-bearer’s body was scattered by a shell. They fell faster and faster; shrieks, prayers and curses came up from the fallen and ascended to Heaven. “Steady men, steady,” cried bold Captain Cailloux, his sword uplifted, his face the color of sulphurous smoke that enveloped him and his followers, as they felt the deadly hail which came apparently from all sides.

  Captain Cailloux was killed with the colors in his hands; the column seemed to melt away like snow in sunshine, before the enemy’s murderous fire; the pride, the flower of the Phalanx had fallen. Then, with a daring that veterans only can exhibit, the blacks rushed forward and up to the brink with a shout. The defenders emptied their rifles, cannons and mortars.

  The battle won, white and black Union soldiers, having fought side by side for the first time, found themselves openly bonding, a remarkable sight during that time:

  Nature seems to have selected the place and appointed time for the negro to prove his manhood and to disarm prejudice…. It was all forgotten and they mingled together on terms of perfect equality. The whites were only too glad to take a drink from a negro soldier’s canteen.

  A white Union officer wrote to his family: “You have no idea how my prejudices with regard to Negro troops have been dispelled by the battle.” Even some Southerners were impressed. The Confederate general Henry McCulloch, describing one of his troops’ failed forays, wrote, “This charge was resisted by the Negro portion with considerable obstinance (while) the white or pure Yankee portion ran like whipped [dogs] almost as soon as the charge was made.”

  In strictly strategic military terms, the forty-eight-day battle at Port Hudson was critical. It cleared the final Confederate garrison along the Mississippi, a milestone in the Civil War. But perhaps more important, Port Hudson marked a watershed for the U.S. military and race relations. Black enlistment mushroomed following this early engagement. By the war’s end, more than 150,000 African Americans had served in the Union army and at least 27,000 died in battle. They mustered in 160 regiments and participated in thirty-nine major campaigns. Yet only five battle flags from black regiments survive.

  ALL OF THIS history reeled through my head as Wilhite and I held the blood cloth by its four corners in the hotel room.

  I could have arrested the bastard right then and there, signaled the SWAT team and hoped Wilhite resisted. But I wanted more. I wanted to crawl inside his mind. I wanted to know more about a man who could sell such a blood cloth, especially someone like Wilhite, who professed to be a Civil War buff. How could he be so callous, so eager to seek to profit from a piece of stolen history?

  Of course, I als
o wanted him to incriminate himself with the video surveillance tape running. To do that, I needed to prove intent—get him to admit on tape that he knew he was selling a stolen historical artifact. After the takedown, I didn’t want his lawyer to claim that this was all some sort of misunderstanding, that Wilhite had obtained the flag in good faith, not knowing it was stolen.

  Moving in for the kill, I eased back in my chair and sipped my Coke. “Did you ever find out where it came from?”

  From a museum in Colorado, he said, making it clear it was stolen. “I’m telling you this upfront. I don’t want to mislead you. Because if I could take this to a show, I know what it could bring. I didn’t want to take that chance.”

  This was going to be easy. Wilhite liked to hear himself talk and seemed eager for me to like him. I said, “You’re afraid someone will see it?” In other words, you know this is stolen property?

  “Yeah,” he said. “I was told—I don’t know if this is correct—that it came from the West Point museum and was on its way to Colorado.”

  I told him that I needed to know who else knew about the flag and our deal. This was important, I explained, because I needed to protect myself and my buyer. The fewer people who knew about the deal the better. This was a trick question, of course. Almost any answer would be incriminating. He might say “no one knows” because he didn’t trust anyone enough to join this illegal conspiracy. Or he might start naming names, vouching for them, not realizing he’d just outed them. He might even give up the name of a big fish, a dealer or broker not yet on the FBI’s radar. Either way, the question would get him talking.

  Wilhite unfolded a long tale about buying the flag from some guy on the side at a Civil War show in Chicago, a cash deal consummated in his car in a city parking garage. When he finished, I changed tactics, trying to get him to admit he knew he was peddling a piece of African American history, that men died carrying this flag in battle. “Charlie,” I said, “you know much about the flag?”

  “I’ve been told there are only five of these in existence, for colored troops.”

  “Colored troops? Is that the same as Corps d’Afrique?”

  “Yeah, they mustered in Louisiana and saw distinguished service in Tennessee. You can look it up.”

  I had. “Did they have a lot of losses?”

  “They had a lot of losses, yeah. They saw combat. They wasn’t just scrubbing pots, whatever, like the colored troop they made a movie on, the Massachusetts group. That’s what makes the piece for me.”

  Incredible. A lot of losses. That’s what makes the piece for me. I masked my anger with a laugh and a swig of Coke. How far would this guy go? Wilhite seemed content, one of those people soothed by the sound of his own voice. He was tipping back in the chair now, one boot on the table, hands clasped behind his head. I said, “When you heard the history, you didn’t have any problem keeping it, as far as that’s concerned?”

  “Me? No. I paid a lot of money for it. My buddy suggested maybe donating it to a museum and taking a tax write-off. I didn’t want to do that and thought about it for a while. This friend of mine said he had connections.” Wilhite pointed a bony finger at me. “Now, how you handle and market it is your business. But you want to be discreet. I don’t advise you to take it to a show. You may never have a problem, but I want to level with you.”

  “Right, because we could get in a lot of trouble.”

  “Right, we could.”

  I had more than enough on him now. “Twenty-eight thousand. Cash, OK?”

  “Yeah, if I had a cashier’s check, I’ve got to show that to Uncle Sam and I’d like to see if I can get around that.” I started to get up, thinking, I’ll be sure to let the IRS boys know.

  Wilhite said, “Isn’t it a great piece? I told you it was.”

  “It is,” I said, twisting my nose with my thumb and forefinger—the go-sign. “It could only come from a museum.”

  “Yes, sir—” Wilhite’s head snapped to the right as three agents in FBI raid gear opened the adjoining door and told him to put his hands on his head. Stupidly, he jumped up, ignoring the agents, and began yelling at me. “Who are you? Who are you?”

  He took an awkward step toward me, and the agents pinned him to the floor.

  I’VE FOUND THAT I can read up on a stolen artifact, talk to experts about it, even hold it in my hands as the bad guys explain its black market value. But I know I won’t truly appreciate an object’s deeper meaning until I’m finally able to return it to its rightful owner.

  And, as it was with Alva and the backflap, so it was with a group of black Civil War re-enactors and the Army’s chief historian.

  A few weeks after the Wilhite arrest and battle flag seizure, we convened in Washington for a remarkable ceremony in which the FBI formally returned the flag to the Army. It was February and so the return was hastily inserted into the bureau’s annual Black History Month program at headquarters.

  I rode to Washington with Vizi, the agent who handled the press, and the agent-in-charge of the Philadelphia office, Bob Conforti. Once inside the auditorium, they took seats of honor near the stage. Mindful of the cameras, I lingered in the back.

  The long-ago-invited keynote speaker, an African American space shuttle astronaut, wowed everyone with tales from outer space, but the flag, a last-minute addition, stole the show. Flanked by an honor guard of African American re-enactors from Philadelphia, the flag loomed over the seated dignitaries, the astronaut, FBI Director Louis Freeh, and a pair of Army generals.

  Joseph Lee, who leads the Philadelphia-based re-enactors group, took the podium in the Union blue full replica regalia of the United States Colored Troops, Third Regiment. He opened by describing his experience the previous month, when I had invited him to see the rescued battle flag in our Philadelphia office. “I was admonished not to touch it,” Lee recalled. “And having served in the United States Marines and Air Force, and being the sergeant major of our group, I knew how to follow an order.” He paused, wiping his lower lip with a white dress glove. “But that was one order I could not follow. Touching that flag sent chills through my body. Even thinking about it now, tears well in my eyes. They cause my heart to palpitate. Because this was true, living African American history. I had heard about it, read about it, dreamt about it, but now I was part of it.” Lee saluted the flag. “The dead still lie in shallow graves along the field of battle, where they fought and died. This flag honors them all.” Lee removed his hat and held it to his breast. “God have mercy for the deeds committed there, and the souls of those poor victims, sent to thee without a prayer. All hail, all honor, the gallant soldiers who fought for Uncle Sam.”

  Even the stone-faced Freeh seemed moved. I now realized our case had handed Freeh and the FBI a remarkable public relations coup—not only the rescue of a significant historical artifact, but an opportunity to help improve the bureau’s poor record on race relations. It certainly didn’t hurt my quiet aspirations to expand my art crime horizons beyond Philadelphia to the national and international stage.

  Before I got too carried away with such grandiose thoughts, the Army’s chief of military history, General John Brown, took to the microphone.

  Think of the stress of combat that was on the soldiers of the Twelfth. They could not see the faces of their loved ones; they couldn’t see the monuments that made this city great. They couldn’t see purple mountain majesties or fruited plain. But what they could see above the smoke and din of battle was the flag. And for soldiers always, the flag has captured the essence of everything that they are fighting for. It is all that is on the battlefield with them when they face death. I think it’s particularly fitting that this flag represents men who rose to fight against slavery for themselves and their families and in the course of contributing to the Union Army did in fact secure their freedom and all their descendants’ for all the generations to come. It was the first in many steps of trying to affirm the American dream that all people are equal.

  As he spoke, I
couldn’t help thinking about my parents, the soldier and the Japanese bride.

  CHAPTER 11

  BEFRIEND AND BETRAY

  Santa Fe, 1999.

  THE PALACE OF THE GOVERNORS ON THE SANTA FE Plaza is said to be the oldest continuously used public building in the United States, and it is a must-see stop for any visitor. Built by the Spaniards in 1610 as the northern seat of power for New Spain, the low-slung, block-long adobe and timber structure remains the gravitational center of Santa Fe culture. The Palace houses the popular Museum of New Mexico and, outside, along the balustrade that overlooks the Plaza, Native American craftsmen peddle handmade jewelry to tourists.

  Joshua Baer positioned his Indian art and antiquities gallery half a block away from the Palace, at 116 East Palace Avenue. A discreet wooden shingle read, GALLERY UPSTAIRS—OPEN. A poster at the entrance read, WHY TAKE RISKS? BUY AUTHENTIC ART.

  On an unseasonably cool summer afternoon in 1999, my undercover partner and I headed upstairs, fake identification and tape recorders stuffed in our pockets.

  The sale of counterfeit Indian art is a $1-billion-a-year problem, but it’s still dwarfed by the illegal trade of Native American religious objects, particularly those featuring eagle feathers. The crime had vexed law enforcement and tribal leaders for years, and it didn’t help that many in New Mexico, including some judges, Indian leaders, and state officials, openly criticized the federal law protecting eagle feathers. It was easy for law enforcement to target the low-level “pickers,” the scavengers who scoured reservations, acquired religious objects from dirt-poor Indians, and sold them to Santa Fe dealers. But it was a lot tougher to target the dealers. Dogged federal agents from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had launched a major investigation six months earlier, and now suspected that Baer and four other dealers were illegally selling Indian religious objects, including eagle feathers. But they couldn’t prove it. They knew the only way to snare the dealers was to set up a sting, yet the tight-knit and suspicious nature of the Santa Fe arts community made it almost impossible to use local agents undercover.