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Priceless Page 15


  Not me.

  I certainly subpoenaed records and used them as leads. But my skill was getting out and talking to people.

  Thankfully, in the Pritchard and Juno case, my FBI partner, Jay Heine, and I had a head start on the dreaded paper trail. The assist came courtesy of the great-great grandson of the Confederate general George E. Pickett. His lawyer had already collected a mountain of paper evidence against the appraisers.

  Months before we formally opened our investigation, the lawyer for George E. Pickett V sued Pritchard and Juno for fraud in federal court in Philadelphia. He alleged that Pritchard tricked him into selling significant Civil War artifacts his ancestor had carried during his calamitous charge at Gettysburg on July 3, 1863, the skirmish that is considered the high-water mark of the Confederacy because that is as far north as the rebels reached. The sale included the blue kepi hat and sword Pickett wore as he rode into the war’s bloodiest battle, as well as a map he sketched of Gettysburg hours before the famous charge. The Pickett family also sold the remnants of the general’s war souvenirs—his officer’s commissioning papers, a bloodstained sleeve ripped from his jacket after a bullet struck his arm, and a stack of letters. Pritchard appraised the artifacts for $87,000 and told Pickett’s descendants that they would have a better home in the new Harrisburg museum. This would be a great way to honor their ancestor’s legacy, Pritchard argued. The Picketts agreed to the sale at the appraised price, $87,000.

  Later, George E. Pickett V was stunned to learn that Pritchard had sold the collection to the Harrisburg museum for nearly ten times as much, $850,000. In his lawsuit, Pickett cried foul. More incriminating evidence emerged during the civil trial, and Pickett prevailed with an $800,000 judgment.

  Heine and I cherry-picked the best of the Pickett lawsuit records, but it was just the beginning. We pursued our own leads, subpoenaed our own documents, and interviewed our witnesses—not only in the Pickett case, but also in dozens of others that looked suspect. For each transaction, we tried to answer a simple set of questions: What pieces did Pritchard and Juno obtain? Was the price they paid fair? What promises did they make to the victims? Where did the pieces end up?

  What we found made me nauseous.

  LIKE A LOT of other Antiques Roadshow viewers, George K. Wilson of New York City became intrigued watching Juno and Pritchard appraise weapons.

  His family owned a Civil War dress sword presented to his great-great-grandfather, Union Army Major Samuel J. Wilson. George Wilson wondered if the sword held historical value. Was it worth selling?

  He went to the Antiques Roadshow website and found contact information for Pritchard and Juno. What happened next—according to the account Wilson gave me when I interviewed him—offers a window into Pritchard’s confidence game.

  After some quick preliminaries on the phone, Pritchard asked if the sword had ever been appraised.

  No, Wilson said.

  Well, I’ll have to see it in person to give you an appraisal, Pritchard said. I’ll do it free of charge, just like I would on Antiques Roadshow, if you FedEx it to me. I’ll even send you the packaging. We do this all the time.

  How can you afford to do this all the time at no charge?

  The museums and collectors pay us for the appraisals if we sell them. Are you interested in selling the sword?

  No, Wilson said. But I’ll be in touch.

  Wilson called his mother, explained the offer of a free appraisal, and they agreed to send it to Pritchard. What did they have to lose? When Pritchard received the sword via FedEx, he called Wilson.

  The sword is in pretty good shape, Pritchard said, but it needs some professional conservation. There may be some oxidation damage to the steel blade.

  OK, Wilson said, how much is it worth?

  Well, this sword is not uncommon, Pritchard said. It’s probably worth $7,000 to $8,000.

  Hmm, how much will it cost to get it professionally conserved?

  About $1,500. Maybe more. But there’s another option. I’m working with the City of Harrisburg, which is about to open a new Civil War Museum. This piece might make a nice addition. If you sell the sword to the museum, their conservators will restore it. They could feature the sword in the museum with a photograph of Major Wilson and a map showing the battles he fought in.

  Wilson called back the next day and the two men struck a deal. The museum would buy the sword and include it in its collection. A month later, Pritchard sent Wilson a check for $7,950 drawn from the Pritchard/Juno business account, not from the museum or City of Harrisburg. Confused, Wilson called Pritchard.

  Don’t worry, the broker said. We’re just the agent. You’ll be contacted by the museum soon enough.

  Wilson cashed the check. It bounced.

  Sorry about that, Pritchard said. Must have been an accounting error. I’ll send you a new check. By the way, the museum examined the sword and it’s in worse shape than I thought. You’re lucky the blade didn’t break off. They’ll have to do some heavy repairs before it can be displayed in the museum. But you know what? Good news! I’ll be touring with Antiques Roadshow at the Meadowlands in a few weeks. You should come!

  The second check cleared and Wilson showed up at the TV taping to ask Pritchard about the progress of the sword conservation. Soon, Pritchard promised, soon. Over the next two years, every month or so, Wilson continued to call with the same question. Each time, he got the same answer.

  When Wilson learned of Pickett’s lawsuit, he angrily confronted Juno and Pritchard. He demanded to know why the sword wasn’t displayed in the museum, as promised. Now Pritchard had a new answer: The museum ran out of money, so we sold it to a collector who’s thinking about starting a museum in the Poconos.

  Wilson was apoplectic. He demanded to see records proving this, and he offered a ruse of his own to get them, saying that he needed the document for tax purposes.

  OK, Pritchard said, but please understand. We have a lot going on and this was a small piece. I’m a good guy, really. Ask around. This Pickett lawsuit hassle is all a misunderstanding. After all, the Antiques Roadshow producers are sticking with us. That should tell you something. You know, it’s too bad we haven’t had time to become better friends.

  Just send the documents, Wilson said.

  As I later discovered, Pritchard never offered the sword to the Harrisburg museum. He let Juno use it as collateral for a $20,000 loan.

  Pritchard and Juno pulled similar scams. Pritchard approached the descendants of Union general George Meade and offered to appraise a presentation firearm Meade received after the Battle of Gettysburg. This was an astonishing weapon—a mahogany-cased, .44-caliber Remington pistol with engraved ivory grips, silver-plated frame, and gold-washed cylinder and hammer. Pritchard told the family it was worth $180,000 and promised to place it in the Harrisburg museum. Three months after the Meades sold him the firearm, Pritchard sold it to a private collector for twice the price.

  Once, while working with his father, Pritchard received from a Tennessee family an old Confederate uniform, one worn by their ancestor, Lieutenant Colonel William Hunt. The Pritchards falsely informed the family that the uniform was counterfeit and said that because it was worthless they’d donated it to a local charity. In reality, the Pritchards had sold it to a collector for $45,000.

  The market for Civil War uniforms was so dirty that even Pritchard himself was once burned. He bought what he thought was a rare Union Zouave jacket, worn by a soldier in a New York regiment. With its ornate chevrons and puffed shoulder pads and a design based on the classic French Legion dress uniform, the Zouave would have been worth $25,000, if it had been authentic. It was not. It was a Belgian infantry jacket, worth only a few hundred dollars. Furious, Pritchard pulled a scam of his own to fix the problem. Using contacts at the Harrisburg museum, he slipped inside, removed the museum’s authentic Zouave jacket, and put the cheap Belgian jacket in its place.

  The man was merciless. Pritchard once appeared unannounced at a nursing home
to target a ninety-year-old woman said to possess great Confederate treasures. When he realized the lady was too infirm to talk, he slipped a nurse $100 to get a look at her file, and a phone number for her next of kin.

  IT’S HARD TO quantify Pritchard’s individual acts of cruelty. But it would be difficult to top the emotional damage he inflicted on the Patterson family of Salisbury, Maryland.

  Donald Patterson, a local businessman and active re-enactor, spent a lifetime collecting Civil War memorabilia with his middle-class family—his wife, Elaine; stepson, Robert; and two daughters, Robynn and Lorena. The family helped maintain Don Patterson’s wide-ranging collection of swords, rifles, pistols, uniforms, and knickknacks in a bedroom everyone affectionately called “the Museum.” The holdings included a rare Confederate overcoat, worth at least $50,000 to $100,000.

  In a series of FBI interviews and letters to the government, family members described the role Don Patterson and the Museum played in their lives. “My whole life, since I was able to walk, I was with my father picking things out from old antique stores, things from the Civil War,” daughter Robynn wrote. “The Museum was just down the hall from my bedroom from fourth grade through high school,” stepson Robert recalled. “It was always there, always part of us. We didn’t fish, we didn’t play catch, we didn’t go camping—we collected irreplaceable pieces of history. In truth, almost my entire childhood was represented in the collection. My dreams, aspirations, my values came to be in large part because of my involvement with the collection.” The stepson made a career in the Army, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel.

  The Patterson family’s halcyon life shattered in late 1995, when Mr. Patterson killed himself, as well as his secret mistress. “As you can imagine, our whole family was absolutely devastated,” his widow said.

  Like a vulture, Pritchard visited Salisbury just months after the murder-suicide. The nice man charmed the widow, driving her to pick up her disabled daughters from school, eating meals at the Patterson kitchen table, and assuring them that the artifacts from the Museum would be in better hands in a real Civil War museum. He told her about the new one rising near Gettysburg and presented letters and brochures from the City of Harrisburg, including one that promised a “Donald Patterson Memorial Collection” room. In 1996, one year after Don Patterson’s death, the family agreed to Pritchard’s plan. The nice man gave them $5,000, packed away the best of the collection, and drove it north. Shortly after he left, the widow noticed, it became harder to get him to return her calls. The betrayal was under way.

  By the time I spoke with Mrs. Patterson in 1999, and after three years of Pritchard’s deceptions, she just wanted the truth. I’ve always found it’s just best to deliver bad news directly. So I told her what I’d learned from Pritchard’s records: Her husband’s collection wasn’t in any museum. Pritchard had sold it to two private Civil War dealers for $65,000. It was gone.

  “My whole being has been violated and I have been emotionally raped,” the widow recalled.

  Pritchard had to be stopped. He wasn’t just conning people out of money. He was stealing their heritage.

  IN MARCH 2001, based on the evidence we presented to the grand jury, Pritchard and Juno were indicted on various federal charges, including defrauding the Wilson family and the Pickett family. The men faced as much as ten years in prison.

  We were not finished. We had brought the initial indictment that March because the five-year statute of limitations was about to expire in the Wilson and Pickett cases. But we still had more time to bring a superseding indictment on charges related to the Zouave uniform, the Meade presentation pistol, and the Patterson family collection. We also weighed whether to charge Pritchard’s father for his role in the Hunt Confederate uniform scam. So far, I hadn’t interviewed the elder Pritchard.

  I dreaded the confrontation. I’d known the elder Pritchard for more than a decade and had long respected him as a top man in the museum field. I’d visited him a dozen times at the Civil War Museum in Philadelphia to research cases and learn more about collecting. A well-thumbed copy of his three-volume treatise on Civil War weapons and uniforms sat on my desk at home.

  Fortunately, I didn’t have to meet him face to face. The elder Pritchard was living in Memphis at the time, so I called him there. I made it clear that although he and I knew each other, this was an official FBI interview. I told him that we were going to charge his son with the Hunt uniform scam. I gave the father a choice: Cooperate on this one facet of the case or face a felony charge.

  “Look, Russ,” I said. “Just tell me the truth and everything will go away.” In other words, you won’t be indicted. If he told us the truth, Goldman planned to exercise his prosecutorial discretion and leave him out of the next indictment. If he lied, Goldman planned to charge him.

  “I’m sorry, Bob,” the elder Pritchard said. “I can’t help you.”

  He couldn’t admit to me that he’d conspired with his son to swindle the Hunt family. I doubt this was because he wanted to protect his son. He knew it was too late for that. I think he couldn’t admit what he did because he knew it would ruin his reputation in the field.

  I gave him one more chance. “Tell me what happened, Russ.”

  “Bob, I can’t.”

  “OK, but you’re going to go down.”

  “I know. But I just can’t do it.”

  Juno, on the other hand, played it smart. He knew we had a solid case against him, and he knew he could shave years off a prison term by pleading guilty and cooperating.

  Two days after my conversation with the father, we filed the superseding indictment against both Pritchards.

  Within a month, the Pritchard son and his attorney came to the FBI office in Philadelphia. He met with me, Goldman, and Heine to give a proffer statement, a private off-the-record confession, the prelude to a plea agreement.

  Over two hours, Pritchard confessed to everything, and even dimed out his dad. Proffer sessions and confessions are incredibly stressful for defendants. They have to look their accusers in the eye—the very prosecutor and agents who’ve been hounding them for years, dragging their name into the newspaper, embarrassing their families, scandalizing their friends—and admit that yes, indeed, they did it. They did it all. Proffers are rarely pleasant and sometimes contentious. I’ve seen defendants leave a proffer session looking as if they’ve aged a couple of years. Pritchard? He didn’t look mussed at all.

  When it was over, he walked over to shake Goldman’s hand, gripping the prosecutor’s elbow with his left hand, an old politician’s trick to keep the other man from pulling away.

  “Mr. Goldman,” he said, “I want to thank you for bringing my act to an end. This is good for me. I’m glad you’re bringing these charges against me.”

  Goldman raised his left eyebrow, broke away, and gave Pritchard a hard stare that said, “Don’t bullshit me.”

  IN 2001, THE year Pritchard and Juno pleaded guilty, Harrisburg’s redbrick $50 million, sixty-five-thousand-square-foot National Civil War Museum celebrated its grand opening. It featured state-of-the-art displays and dioramas with genuine artifacts of war, including the kepi hat that Pickett wore at Gettysburg.

  Like the Picketts, most families didn’t get their treasures back. The courts concluded that despite the frauds, the descendants no longer enjoyed legal title to the artifacts Pritchard had sold. The mayor of Harrisburg successfully argued that the city, too, was a victim of Pritchard and Juno, and that it was not required to return the items it acquired for its museum.

  The Pritchard father would go to trial on the single charge related to the uniform scam, lose, and be sentenced to six months in a halfway house. Juno also got a few months in a halfway house. The Pritchard son would get a year and a day in prison and be ordered to pay $830,000 in restitution.

  Despite the relatively light sentences, Goldman and I were thrilled with the outcome. The Antiques Roadshow investigation sent several important messages, and I couldn’t help but think
of my father and all the other honest antiques dealers down on Howard Street in Baltimore, working to make a living on small margins. To them, the case demonstrated that someone cared, that someone was watching this unregulated industry—and that unscrupulous dealers faced public shame and possible imprisonment.

  The public response was even greater than we’d hoped. In the collecting community, the Antiques Roadshow investigation represented such a watershed that one of the major trade publications printed the Pritchard indictment word for word. Surfing the wave of publicity the case brought, I received a torrent of tips that led to more important recoveries, including a Confederate regiment’s battle flag and a priceless sword presented to a Union hero of the great Monitor-Merrimack battle, missing since its theft from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1931. Goldman and I followed up the Antiques Roadshow prosecution with another indictment that shook the collectible world, charging two prominent Midwestern dealers with using fake appraisal documents to con a wealthy businessman into grossly overpaying for four antique firearms. One of the weapons in evidence was the world’s first Magnum revolver, a six-shot, .44-caliber Colt, the very handgun that Samuel Walker, the famed Texas Ranger, carried into his final, fatal battle against Mexican guerrillas.

  But long before the Antiques Roadshow scandal wound toward its conclusion and Pritchard reported to prison, I was already turning my attention to my next case, my first international art crime investigation. Within months, I hoped, I’d be stalking stolen art in South America.

  CHAPTER 13

  A HOT HAND

  Rio de Janeiro, 2001.

  IN A CABANA ON IPANEMA, ASSISTANT U.S. ATTORNEY David Hall and I sipped milk from coconut shells. Before us, Brazil’s trendiest beach buzzed under brilliant sunlight. Barefoot kids kicked up sand, playing volleyball with their feet. Rollerbladers in short shorts cruised the sidewalk. Bronzed hunks in Speedos preened, chatting up young ladies in thongs. The Latin pulse from a boom box dueled with the reggae beat from café speakers. At the opposite end of Guanabara Bay, a scarlet sun hovered over Sugar Loaf Mountain.