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  If I recovered the backflap and received a tepid reaction, it wouldn’t bode well for my fledgling career as an art crime sleuth.

  I also had another worry—that Garcia might be trying to sell me a fake. And I had good reason to be suspicious.

  Three years earlier, I knew, Garcia had offered to sell the backflap for $1 million to a New York art broker named Bob Smith. I also knew that Smith believed he was close to closing the deal. As a sign of good faith, Smith even made a preliminary deal, paying Garcia $175,000 cash for an ancient Peruvian headdress. But as the months passed, Garcia kept backing out of the backflap deal, coming up with lame excuses, irritating the already crusty dealer. Garcia tried to buy time, offering Smith a series of paintings and antiquities that the dealer rejected as insulting fakes. Smith shrugged it off for a while, but when Garcia tried to peddle a bogus Monet, Smith exploded, saying he’d run out of patience: Get the backflap or get lost. Garcia stopped calling.

  I knew all of this because “Bob Smith” was really Bob Bazin. Smith was the name my mentor used when he worked undercover.

  Bazin’s gruff art-broker shtick wasn’t my style, but it worked for him. When he retired with the backflap case still unresolved in early 1997, the FBI made two fortuitous decisions. First, supervisors decided not to charge Garcia with the illegal headdress sale; they thought it might spoil a related case, so they let him get away with it (along with the $175,000 the smuggler pocketed). As far as Garcia knew, Smith/Bazin was still looking to buy the backflap. Second, the bureau kept Bazin’s undercover phone number active, just in case.

  Then, late in the summer of 1997, out of the blue, Garcia called Smith’s undercover number. An FBI operator passed the message to me; I found Bazin at his condo on the Jersey Shore and asked him to call Garcia back. The retired FBI agent fell back into his ornery covert role and lit into Garcia. He called him a joker, a poseur, a liar—a guy who made outlandish promises, then vanished for years. Bazin screamed that he didn’t have time to deal with Garcia, that he was sick and about to undergo triple bypass surgery. Still, he added…

  “I don’t know why I should do this for you, but I’ll give your name to my associate, Bob Clay. Maybe he’ll call you.”

  Grateful and profusely apologetic, Garcia thanked Smith/Bazin.

  Within a week, Garcia and I were negotiating a sale by phone. He demanded $1.6 million, and though the price wasn’t too important—I never intended to pay—I needed to draw him out and collect as much evidence as possible. I asked for more information and he said he would mail me a package. Perfect, I thought. Use of the mails to commit a fraud is mail fraud, a serious federal crime. So even if the deal fell through, I’d have him on that charge.

  Garcia’s package arrived a few days later.

  August 14, 1997

  Dear Mr. Clay,

  Enclosed please find the information you requested on the backflap. The culture of the piece is Moche. The antiquity is approximately 2,000 years old. The weight is approximately 1300 grams, length 68 centimeters and width 50 centimeters. For your review, I also enclosed pictures and two National Geographic magazines that further explain the piece. Please do not hesitate if you need any further information.

  Sincerely,

  Denis Garcia

  I was grateful for the dog-eared magazines from 1988 and 1990. I’d been on the case only a week, and what little I knew about the backflap I’d learned in a brief conversation with Bazin, who’d warned me to be careful about approaching expert brokers and academics for more background information. The South American antiquities field was riddled with crooks, Bazin said. It was hard to know whom to trust. I put the National Geographics in my briefcase and headed home.

  After dinner with Donna and the kids, I put my feet up and settled into our comfortable old couch. Gently, I opened the first National Geographic and flipped to the page Garcia had thoughtfully marked with a yellow Post-it note. The story, written by one of Peru’s most prominent archaeologists, began with a call in the middle of the night.

  DISCOVERING THE NEW WORLD’S RICHEST UNLOOTED TOMB

  By Walter Alva

  Like many a drama, this one starts violently, with the death of a tomb robber in the first act.

  The chief of police rang me near midnight; his voice was urgent. “We have something you must see—right now.” Hurrying from where I live and work—the Brüning Archeological Museum in Lambayeque, Peru—I wondered which of the many ancient pyramids and ceremonial platforms that dot my country’s arid north coast had been sacked of its treasures this time!

  Alva wrote that he’d risen grudgingly, assuming that, as usual, the grave robbers would have already removed and sold the best artifacts, leaving only castoffs behind. But when the archaeologist arrived in the small village where they’d arrested the grave diggers, he was stunned to see what the police had seized from the looters’ homes. These were no cast-off antiquities, Alva wrote, but intricately carved pre-Columbian golden masterpieces—a broad-faced human head and a pair of feline monsters with fangs flaring. Huaqueros, or grave robbers, had picked over the Moche tombs for centuries, but such finds were rare. The police told Alva they were hearing whispers of huaqueros selling similar loot for ten times the standard amount.

  Intrigued, Alva returned to the looted site at daylight to poke around. His team began to dig, and soon they found a second, sealed chamber, one that held “perhaps the finest example of pre-Columbian jewelry ever found.” Alva’s team kept digging and discovered chamber after chamber of priceless and long-lost Moche artifacts, five levels all, each layered on top of the other. After centuries of excavations, the looters had inadvertently stumbled upon the most important archaeological discovery in the New World. It was a royal mausoleum, the final resting place of the Moche king, the Lord of Sipan.

  The find was supremely significant, Alva wrote, because so little is known about the Moche civilization, which apparently flourished from roughly A.D. 200 to A.D. 700, then mysteriously vanished. The tribe did not use a written language (leaders communicated by secret code painted on lima beans), and other Peruvian tribes from that era recorded few interactions. Much of what we know about Moche history and culture is derived from the local iconography—the sophisticated drawings, intricate jewelry, and dynamic ceramics.

  I became entranced by the history of this lost civilization. The Moche lived chiefly along the narrow river valleys of a two-hundred-mile stretch of Peru’s coastal desert. This tribe of weavers, metalsmiths, potters, farmers, and fishermen was perhaps fifty thousand strong. They fished in the Pacific, developed sophisticated irrigation systems linking mountain aqueducts to canals and ditches, and grew great fields of corn, melons, and peanuts. To appease the rain gods, they practiced ritual human sacrifices, elaborate ceremonies that climaxed with a quick slice to the throat. The Moche built giant, flat-topped pyramids of mud brick, man-made mountains that broke the desert horizon. The grandest, known as the Temple of the Sun, still stands, more than fifty million mud bricks piled over a twelve-acre foundation. No one knows why the Moche tribe disappeared between A.D. 600 and A.D. 700. Some blame invasions by the Huari mountain tribe; others point to a seventh-century El Niño–style weather system, believed to have triggered a three-decade drought in Peru, followed by a rebellion that shattered the sophisticated bureaucratic systems on which the giant desert civilization had come to rely. Perhaps the rebellion triggered chaos, civil war, and, ultimately, extinction.

  Ten pages into the magazine article, I saw that Garcia had inserted another yellow Post-it note, just below a photograph of two backflaps. The caption explained that the Moche backflap was designed to protect the royal behind—the warrior king would have hung it from the small of his back down to his thighs. Archaeologists are divided over whether the armor, made mostly of gold but also of copper, would have been worn in combat or merely used during ceremonies, including the human sacrifices. The upper portion of the backflap, the most intricate piece of the armor, is called a rattle, and
is surrounded by a spider web of gold. In the center of the web glares a winged Moche warrior known as the Decapitator. In one hand, the Decapitator wields a tumi knife. In the other, he grasps a severed head.

  According to National Geographic, the backflaps displayed in the magazine were two of a handful known to exist. They looked a lot like the photo of the backflap Garcia wanted to sell.

  I marveled at Garcia’s cojones. To entice me to buy a looted relic, he’d sent me magazine articles describing the rape of the most significant tomb in North or South America, stories that made it crystal clear the sale would be illegal. Still, if Garcia’s intention was to impress and excite me, to ignite a passion and lust for the backflap, it worked.

  BY ANY NAME—tombaroli in Italian, huaquero in Spanish, grave robber in English—those who loot and illegally sell antiquities rob us all.

  This was my first antiquity case, but as I would learn, looters are especially insidious art thieves. They not only invade the sanctuaries of our ancestors, plundering burial grounds and lost cities in a reckless dash for buried treasure, they also destroy our ability to learn about our past in ways other art thieves do not. When a painting is stolen from a museum, we usually know its provenance. We know where it came from, who painted it, when and perhaps even why. But once an antiquity is looted, the archaeologist loses the chance to study a piece in context, the chance to document history. Where, precisely, was it buried? What condition was it in? What was lying next to it? Can two objects be compared? Without such critical information, archaeologists are left to make educated guesses about a long-ago people and how they lived.

  Most pilfered antiquities follow the same path—discovered and dug up by poor, indigenous grave robbers from the Third World, smuggled to unscrupulous dealers in the First World.

  Except in rare cases, namely antiquity-rich Italy and Greece, the flow of stolen artifacts largely moves from poor to rich nations. Artifacts looted from Northern Africa and the Middle East are usually smuggled to Dubai and Abu Dhabi, from there to London, and ultimately to shops in Paris, Zurich, New York, and Tokyo, the cities where consumer demand is greatest. Artifacts pilfered from sites in Cambodia, Vietnam, and China are smuggled through Hong Kong to Australia, Western Europe, and the United States.

  This slippery, largely unregulated world is considered a “gray” market because the legal market is largely supplied by an illegal one. Unlike smuggled drugs or weapons, an antiquity’s legal status may change as it crosses international borders—and once “legalized,” a looted antiquity can be sold openly by the likes of Sotheby’s and Christie’s to the likes of the Getty and the Met. While the United Nations has designed international protocols to discourage looting, every nation has its own priorities, cultural interests, and laws. What’s forbidden in one country is perfectly legal in another. It is illegal in the United States, for example, to sell bald and golden eagle feathers; and I spent a chunk of my career trying to stem this illegal trade. Yet whenever I visit Paris and wander through its finest antique shops along the Seine, I marvel at the American Indian treasures displayed openly for sale. I’ve seen full headdresses with eagle feathers selling for $30,000 or more.

  The most visible criminals in the antiquity theft trade—the grave robbers doing the digging and the thieves swiping objects from religious shrines—fare poorly compared with the brokers at the other end of the smuggling chain. On average, looters earn only 1 or 2 percent of the ultimate sale price. The Sicilian men who illegally excavated a collection of Morgantina silver illegally sold it for $1,000; a collector subsequently bought it for $1 million, and resold it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for $2.7 million. Chinese grave robbers who came across a significant Song Dynasty sculpture sold it for $900; an American dealer later resold it for $125,000.

  The world’s finest museums have not escaped this distasteful cycle. The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles became ensnared in such a scandal after it purchased scores of looted antiquities from renowned Italian art dealer Giacomo Medici, including a statue of Aphrodite, purchased for $18 million in 1988. Senior curators at the Getty met with top officers from Italy’s Carabinieri and denied that they knew or should have known that the antiquities they’d purchased were looted. (Years after the backflap case, the Getty-Medici dispute would widen further and Italian officials would file criminal charges against an American curator and an art dealer.)

  Illicit antiquity trading is said to be on the rise, and there’s little doubt the technology revolution that sparked the global economy made it easier to loot, smuggle, and sell antiquities. Looters employ global tracking devices, smugglers bribe low-paid customs officials, and sellers post items on eBay and clandestine chat rooms. If a piece is valuable enough, an antiquity can be smuggled out of a country on a passenger plane in a matter of hours, arriving in London, New York, or Tokyo less than twenty-four hours after it was unearthed by looters.

  How big is the problem? It’s hard to say. Only a handful of countries collect reliable statistics on looting. The Greeks report 475 unauthorized digs in the past decade and say they’ve recovered 57,475 looted pieces, primarily in Peloponnese, Thessaly, and Macedonia. But Greece is an exception—the nation declared looting illegal as early as 1835, and its constitution specifically directs the government to protect cultural property. In most countries, looting is largely documented in unofficial ways, through anecdotes and extrapolation. Claims are made but unverified. Turkey says illegal looting is the fourth most lucrative (legal or illegal) job in the nation. Niger reports that 90 percent of its most significant archaeological sites have been stripped bare. A few criminologists have mingled these statistics and news accounts and drawn wild conclusions—for example, that organized crime figures and terrorists are major players in the illicit antiquities trade. I’m skeptical of such claims. Certainly mobsters have looted artifacts, and yes, there were reports that 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta tried to peddle Afghan antiquities in Germany. But a few isolated anecdotes do not a conspiracy make.

  One thing is clear. As with cocaine and heroin, the buyer’s market in developed nations drives supply. When demand soared for Southeast Asian artifacts after the Vietnam War, looters decapitated almost every statue at Angkor Wat. When pre-Columbian antiques became all the rage in American collecting circles in the 1980s, grave robbers targeted virgin sites in Peru.

  Generally, looters prefer small, relatively anonymous pieces. Coins are best—easy to smuggle, nearly impossible to trace. Antiquities, if smuggled in small quantities, can be disguised or mixed with souvenirs. Slap a cheap price tag on centuries-old flatware or jewelry and the average customs officer isn’t likely to catch on.

  To disguise larger, higher-profile pieces, black market brokers sometimes engage in antiquity laundering. It’s a scheme similar to money laundering—a broker uses the good name of an unwitting museum to help wash an illicit piece by creating misleading paperwork. In one scam, the shady broker uses a simple query letter to prey on the professionalism and politeness of reputable museum curators. The broker offers to loan artifacts that he expects a prestigious curator will not accept. What the broker really wants is a rejection letter on the stationery of the prestigious museum, with boilerplate language that appears to acknowledge the importance of the pieces offered, but regrets that for space, budgetary, or other reasons, the museum is not currently accessing new works. The rejection letter becomes part of the illicit piece’s provenance, one more document for the disreputable broker or dealer to display. For the buyer—dimwitted or not—such a letter adds an air of legitimacy. If a famous museum considered a piece, but rejected it for space reasons, it must be clean, no?

  But when an antiquity is as well known as the backflap, the black market is the only choice.

  MENDEZ CALLED ME a few days after we met on the Turnpike.

  He seemed suspicious and spoke slowly. “Bob, I checked and you’re not a lawyer.”

  He had me.

  I shouldn’t have blurted out the lawyer bi
t without arranging for a proper cover. I’d screwed up. All I could do was bluster, rely on the old adage that the best defense is a good offense.

  I jumped in strong, nearly shouting into the phone. “You’re checking up on me? You didn’t call the state bar, did you? Now they’re going to call me, ask me what I’m doing practicing law in Jersey. Shit. You’re screwing it all up—drawing attention to me!”

  “Bob, I—”

  “Jesus, you really, really—you wanna know why I’m not freakin’ listed? I’m disbarred, Orlando. Disbarred.” Before he could ask how or why, I said, “I got into a thing with my wife. Let’s just say there was violence. And boom! They took my license.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line. The new lie worked. It shut him down, backed him off. Mendez was like most guys: He was reluctant to press for personal details about another man’s marriage, especially anything related to domestic violence.

  There was nothing left to discuss. Mendez even apologized.

  Garcia called back two weeks later. His voice betrayed his excitement. “Bob, I’m in New York. We’ve got it.” The backflap was stored safely at the Panamanian consulate in Manhattan, he said, and Garcia wanted to make the exchange there. “It’s perfect. It’s good,” he said, because the consulate offered the same protections as an embassy. The building and grounds were the sovereign territory of Panama, outside U.S. jurisdiction and American laws. What’s more, Garcia revealed, the top man at the consulate was in on the deal. In fact, Garcia bragged, the consul was the mule. He’d used his diplomatic status to smuggle the backflap from Panama to New York.

  “It’s good, then,” Garcia reassured me. “When can you come up?”

  I stalled for time. “That’s great, great. Good news.”

  But it wasn’t. I couldn’t arrest anyone inside a foreign consulate, much less have backup agents tail me. I needed to draw Garcia out, and I knew I still held an ace: Garcia and his crew were already committed. They’d invested a great deal of time and money, made a down payment in Peru, and arranged to sneak the backflap into the United States. They might be cautious, but I knew they were also hungry.