Priceless Page 12

  So Fish and Wildlife had enlisted two outsiders, an FBI agent from Philadelphia and a Norwegian police detective, to try to make a bust big enough to frighten nefarious dealers and put them on notice. They chose me because of my background in art crime and the Norwegian because Native American religious artifacts—eagle-feather headdress, Zuni corn mothers, Hopi ceremonial masks—are popular in Europe, where their sale is perfectly legal. Wealthy Europeans often travel to Santa Fe to buy Native American artifacts, and they often bring expert American brokers along for advice. Here, I’d play broker to my undercover rich Norwegian friend Ivar Husby, with his Nordic good looks, borrowed Rolex, and Hugo Boss suits.

  Husby and I bounded up the brown-carpeted steps to the second-floor gallery. An affable-looking man, six foot three, 220 pounds, stood in the center of the gallery, beside a bureau filled with a collection of Hopi kachina dolls. High-end Navajo rugs covered two walls opposite windows looking out onto Palace Avenue. The man gave us a minute to take it all in. Then he stuck out his right hand.

  “Josh Baer. Welcome.”

  “Hey Josh. Bob Clay, from Philadelphia.” I nodded at the rugs. “These are amazing.”

  The Norwegian stepped forward. “Ivar Husby,” he said, shaking Baer’s hand. “I am living in Oslo in Norway.”

  “Ivar’s a collector,” I said, slapping the Norwegian on the back. “I’m helping him out a bit because his English isn’t very good. He’s a good client of mine.”

  Baer turned to Husby. “What business are you in?”

  Husby was fluent in four languages, but he spoke to Baer in broken English. “Family business is oil. I own Internet company.”

  Baer’s brown eyes widened. “Let me know if I can help you.” He showed us a few Navajo rugs, but I soon let him know that we were more interested in ceremonial pieces. “Ivar collects religious artifacts of the Laplander tribes in Scandinavia,” I said. “They’re similar to the Native American. That’s why we’re here.”

  I handed him my card: ROBERT CLAY, ACQUISITIONS CONSULTANT.

  Baer dipped into a back room. He brought out a Mimbres ceremonial bowl that dated to A.D. 900 (price: $6,000), a four-inch-high Acoma wooden kachina doll ($5,500), and a Kiowa Ghost Dance shield ($24,000). We spent about forty minutes with him but didn’t buy anything. As we began to leave, Baer invited us to an antique postcard show at his gallery that evening. We dropped by the reception later that night for a few minutes and spoke with him briefly. “Swing by tomorrow,” he said, with a tantalizing hint of promise. “I’ve got a few things to show you.”

  “I look forward to it, Josh,” I said.

  UNDERCOVER WORK IS like chess.

  You need to master your subject and stay one or two moves ahead of your opponent.

  I’ve taught hundreds of federal agents. Forget what you’ve seen on television, I always tell them. That’s not real life. The FBI’s training is fine, but the best undercover operative relies on his own instincts. I learned more from my years selling advertising for the Farmer newspapers than from any FBI manual.

  These aren’t skills that can be learned in a class—an agent who doesn’t possess the natural instincts and traits to work undercover probably shouldn’t. You either have the innate sales and social skills to do the job—to befriend and betray—or you don’t.

  You start with a name. Every undercover agent needs a false identity. Unless your first name is unusual—say Ulrich or Paris—it’s best to use your real first name. This adheres to my cardinal rule of working undercover: Tell as few lies as possible, because the more you tell, the more you have to remember. The less you have to remember, the more comfortable, natural you’ll be. Using your first name can also protect you if you happen to run into a friend or colleague who doesn’t know you’re working undercover. In the opening minutes of the battle flag case—when I met Wilhite at the airport—I unexpectedly ran into a neighbor. “Hi, Bob,” he said. I nodded, quickly said hello, and kept moving with Wilhite. If that neighbor had called me by any other name, it might have blown the case.

  The last name you use should be bland and fairly common, something hard to pin down with a simple Internet search.

  Once you’ve picked a name, you’ll need a paper trail. The FBI calls this backstopping—the false-identity paperwork you need to do your job. To help an undercover agent create a second identity and backstop his persona, the FBI employs teams of agents, analysts, and support staff in Washington.

  Because the FBI’s undercover rules tend to be tedious and bureaucratic, I did a lot of my own backstopping. I filled my undercover wallet with secondary identification—a Philadelphia library card, a U.S. Airways frequent-flyer card, discount cards from Barnes & Noble and Borders, a family membership card for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a random gallery receipt with my false name. I also created a few undercover Hotmail e-mail accounts. I suppose I should have filled out paperwork for those, too. But if I’d followed every FBI undercover rule to the letter, I’d never have gotten anything done. Most supervisors understood this. Usually, they looked the other way.

  The next step is to create your bona fides—professional but understated business cards, phone numbers, and, if possible, a public-records history. For my small one-man operation, I didn’t need much. Mostly I simply used my cell phone and e-mail. That’s all it took. If necessary, I knew I could always rely on the bureau. In special situations, I might even approach a private corporation or university. Sometimes, real companies help undercover FBI agents establish false identities, loaning a company’s good name, stationery, and identification badges.

  Backstopping is relatively easy. It’s largely a game of paperwork and patience. Almost anyone can do it. The next steps take guts and a special set of personal skills.

  What follows is my personal approach to working undercover.

  Going undercover is a lot like sales. It’s all about understanding human nature—winning a person’s trust and then taking advantage of it. You befriend, then betray.

  Every undercover case is different. But I think most can be boiled down to five steps: You assess your target. You introduce yourself. You build rapport with the target. You betray. You go home.

  Step One: Assess the Target. Who’s your target? What’s he peddling? A sure-thing investment? A tax scheme? Bribes to a city councilman? Drugs? Whatever it is, you’ve got to master that realm.

  Let’s say your target is selling cocaine. You’ve got to master the drug as it’s used today, forgetting what you’ve seen on television or witnessed in college. You need to know how to handle cocaine, how to cut it, how much the average person might snort. You’d better know the current street prices in your hometown—from a kilo to a gram. You need to master the lingo: With cocaine, you should know that an eight-ball equals three and a half grams; soft means cocaine powder; hard means crack; a hammer is a gun. And while you can still call cocaine blow, yeyo, or powder, you’d better not use dated terms like nose candy or snow—or worse yet, use law-enforcement-only terms like user—as in, “He’s a user” or “She uses cocaine.”

  This translates to any genre. When I began selling the ads for the Farmer, I quickly learned that this city boy had better know the difference between a Holstein and an Angus cow. One is a dairy cow, the other a beef cow. One you milk, one you eat. One is a valued member of a farmer’s family, the other dinner.

  In most situations, once you master a realm, you can use this knowledge in case after case, targeting the same kind of criminal. Skills learned for a Ponzi-scheme sting can be transferred to the next undercover financial crimes case. Drug and corruption cases tend to follow a predictable pattern—and there are a limited number of drugs or bribery schemes to master. Art crimes are different, some would say harder, because there are so many genres. For virtually each case you need to shift gears and research the market, learn the lingo.

  Step Two: The Introduction. There are two ways to meet a target. I call them the bump and the vouch.

  The bu
mp is tough to pull off. It takes a lot of preparation and a little bit of luck. The bump is exactly what it sounds like: You find a way to bump into the target in a way that appears perfectly natural. You bump into him at a bar or a club or a gallery. Sometimes, you’ve got to spend weeks, perhaps months, creating your bona fides in your target’s world. If he’s an outlaw biker, you’ll have to find a way to hang out with biker gangs, waiting for the right chance to bump into him.

  Much faster is the vouch, in which someone verifies that you’re the real deal. The vouch is usually made by a confidential informant or cooperating witness. In the backflap case, Bazin was my vouch, and one of his informants was his vouch. The vouch doesn’t always have to come from a person. It can be anything that convinces the target that you are who you say you are—in my case, an expert in a particular area of art. You can create the virtual vouch by demonstrating your expertise. In the battle flag case, I lured the Kansas City man to Philadelphia after multiple phone conversations in which I made it clear I was well traveled on the Civil War collectors’ circuit.

  Step Three: Build Rapport. You need to win a target’s trust, and the best way to do that is to infatuate and ingratiate. You can do this with drinks and dinner, chauffeuring him in your shiny car, but subtler techniques are more effective. Psychological tricks work best.

  First impressions are critical. From the outset, you want to create a friendly aura. Facial expressions are the most important, because that’s how we most visibly communicate as social creatures. When I meet someone who smiles, makes soft eye contact, and shakes my hand reasonably, I’m apt to think he’s a nice guy. When I meet someone who grimaces, glares, and bear-grips my hand, I’m immediately on guard, thinking, this guy’s either an enemy or a competitor. It’s far more nuanced than the fight-or-flight reflex—I work the margins of a target’s personality. (If I encounter a competitor, I let him excel at his thing, but insist he let me excel at mine. If he’s a thief, I let him call the shots when it’s time to steal, so long as he lets me call the shots when it’s time to deal.)

  Don’t underestimate the importance of a friendly smile. If you smile, odds are good the target will smile too. It’s human nature for people to mirror what they see. It’s a primal psychological reaction, a trait learned during infancy. When you smile at a baby and she smiles back, it’s not because she likes you. It’s because the baby is mirroring you. Scowl and the baby will cry. It’s a survival technique every infant learns in her first few months. We retain it our whole lives.

  The mirroring technique works in other ways. It’s gratifying when you make a point and someone says, “Hey, that’s a good idea.” People let their guard down when they’re hanging out with people just like them. A good undercover operative uses this to his advantage. If a target sits close to the table, you sit close. If he puts on his sunglasses, you do too. If he smiles, you smile. Whatever he says, find a way to validate it. If he says it’s hot out, you agree. If he criticizes a politician’s position or character, agree that the politician is vulnerable on many issues. If he orders iced tea, you do the same.

  Once the two of you start talking, share. Tell the target about yourself; ask him about himself. Exchanging personal information is a great way to develop a rapport, build that critical trust.

  But tread carefully. Make sure that whatever you say can be verified, or is so personal that it can’t be verified. Stay as close to the truth as possible—don’t say you have six kids if you only have two, because somewhere along the line you’re likely to screw up.

  How do you befriend someone who repels you? You try harder. You look for the good inside that person and focus on that. No one is completely evil. Does the target care about his family? Does he care about injustice? Do you share the same taste in music? Women? Food? Football? Politics? Cars? Art? If you focus on a person’s criminal and immoral traits, you’ll never find genuine common ground.

  A critical point: To keep yourself out of tricky situations down the road, drop hints early about your views on marriage and drinking. If you are married, be married and say you are deeply in love with your wife. If you are “deeply in love with your wife,” that means you don’t mess around. If you don’t want to drink, tell the target that you don’t drink because you’re an alcoholic prone to bizarre blackouts. Never say you don’t drink or fool around because it’s morally wrong. It will sound like bullshit (you’re supposed to be a criminal, for God’s sake!). If you drop these early hints, it makes it a lot easier when a target tries to test you later. You can say, Look, I’m not a player. I’m a businessman. I’m here to do a deal, not to party.

  It’s important to get into a role, but be careful, stay sharp. When you work undercover, it’s easy to lose touch with reality and let the lies and deception take over.

  Step Four: Betray. Get the target to bring the contraband to you in a controlled situation—a hotel room adjacent to a SWAT team, if possible. Get him to incriminate himself on tape.

  Step Five: Go home. Finish safely, and return home to your wife and family. Never let your undercover life subsume your real life. It’s not—repeat, not—more important. If something comes up during a case that makes you feel uncomfortable, don’t do it. If a bad guy asks you to get in his car, and this makes you nervous, come up with an excuse. If a supervisor or the FBI agent handling your undercover work asks you to bluff expertise you don’t have, don’t do it. Above all, you’ve got to be comfortable in your role. It’s got to come from within. Remember, I tell the agents I teach: You’ve got to be yourself. Don’t try to be an actor. You can’t do it. No one can. Actors have scripts and get multiple takes. You only get one. They flub their lines and they get another chance. You make a mistake and you can end up dead—or worse, get others killed too.

  IN THE BAER case, we used the bump—a direct frontal assault—because there was no quick, easy way to work a vouch. We didn’t know anyone on the inside.

  But that didn’t mean we didn’t have decent intelligence. Our friends from the Fish and Wildlife Service had busted enough low-level players—so-called traders and pickers who scour reservations for religious artifacts and sell them to the shady gallery dealers—that we knew how the illegal sales worked. To circumvent the eagle feather law, dealers like Baer would speak in code. They always referred to eagle plumes as “turkey” feathers. And they never actually sold artifacts with eagle feathers—they gifted them to customers who also bought legal Native American artifacts at obscenely inflated prices. Such a customer might knowingly pay $21,000 for a legal artifact worth $1,000 and receive an illegal artifact worth $20,000 as a gift.

  The afternoon after our brief exchange at the wine-and-cheese reception, we returned to Baer’s gallery and he greeted us warmly.

  “C’mon in the back,” Baer said as he opened a door off the gallery floor to a private room. He brought out a set of wooden parrots, and explained that they were used as part of a Jemez Pueblo corn dance. He showed us a Navajo singer’s brush, a sacred artifact used by a medicine man to wipe away evil spirits; and a pair of Jemez hair ornaments, consisting of four foot-long feathers tied to an inch-wide wood shaft. The hair sticks were perhaps one hundred years old, constructed of cotton string, two red-tailed hawk feathers, a golden eagle feather, and a macaw feather.

  “It would be hard to imagine something more ceremonial,” Baer said.

  Or, I thought, something more illegal. I offered the code phrase. “These are what, turkey?”

  “Yep,” Baer said, smiling. “Turkey feathers.”

  He quickly made clear he’d received them as a gift from a broker with whom he did a great deal of business. “You know,” he said, “it was a thing like where I purchased something from him and he gave me these.”

  “Just like if you had something you could give to Ivar as a gift?”

  “Right,” he said. “It’s not the kind of thing that should be sold to somebody. Somebody’s in your life and they’re helping you.”

  I smiled. “That’s
very commendable.”

  Baer laughed.

  I turned to Husby. “You’re interested?”

  He nodded. “May I take a photograph of this?”

  Baer shook his head. “Sorry, can’t allow it.”

  “Oh, OK.”

  “After I give them to you, then you can take a photograph.” We all laughed again. We were all friends now, conspirators, and Baer began to open up. “I have to be frank with you. It’s really no fun dealing with the federal government in terms of the legality of these things.”

  “What’s the problem?” I said.

  “They are interested in harassing people who buy and sell American Indian material,” he said. Baer launched into a long justification about how illegally trading sacred Native American artifacts is a victimless crime, one encouraged and manipulated by tribal leaders to reward friends and punish enemies. “It’s a political thing.”

  “I had no idea,” Husby said.

  “So I’m not going to sit here and ask for identification or be a jerk about this,” Baer said. “I mean, obviously, you guys are serious people. But my concern is that this is not the kind of thing that should be discussed.”

  “No, right, right,” I said. I turned to Husby. “I’ve got to find a way to get this to you.”

  Baer said, “I understand what he’s looking for. If we have some kind of working relationship, everything will be fine.”

  “So, between you and I,” I whispered, acting if such words ought to be said just out of Husby’s earshot, “we’ll just tack on the price?”

  “Yes,” Baer said.