Informant in Utah Artifacts Case Kills Self
Ted Gardiner Commits Suicide in Holladay
UPDATE TO THIS POST DATED MARCH 15. On March 2 media outlets began to report the death by his own hand of federal informant Ted Gardiner, a former supermarket chain CEO whose son told the New York Times his father had had "a lot of demons." This article in Huffington Post ran with the headline that it could mean the end of artifacts prosecutions. Read my post of last summer below for a background that looks at more of the history around this case.
AUGUST 21. Yesterday the article on this subject appeared in the Santa Fe Reporter. It named the Santa Fe dealers whose houses were searched: Tom Cavaliere, Bill Schenck, and Christopher Selser, in addition to Forrest Fenn. The Reporter story also interviewed John Fryar, Navajo, and many representatives of the investigations side on this case. Allegations were made in the article that the suicide of Dr. Redd may have been related to a Ponzi scheme. The article also reported that several of the defendants had criminal records and were connected to potential drug felonies as well. The article in the Reporter reminded me things that readers of this post may not know which is that before I wrote this post I extensively reported this story in an earlier context related to NAGPRA prosecutions. NAGPRA does not appear to be the relevant statute in these latest prosecutions. The link to the Reporter article is here.
AUGUST 10. On August 18th two events with seemingly nothing - and everything - to do with one another, convene. The 31st annual Antique Indian Art Show opens in Santa Fe. And, in Utah, the first hearing in the FBI's latest art-crimes sting, involving 20, mostly elderly Mormon defendants charged with felony archeology offenses, occurs. The defendants were arrested June 10th after a two-year investigation co-run by the FBI and the BLM.
In a particularly noir twist, two among the 24 charged - Dr. James Redd of Blanding, and Steven L. Shrader of Santa Fe - committed suicide in June, after being charged; Redd's daughter and widow subsequently pleaded guilty to charges against them. Sources have said 150 agents with machine guns conducted narco-style arrests. And the suicides are putting prosecutors on the defensive. Critics say that the investigation stung a closeknit group of elderly Mormons holding little more than trinkets - old arrowheads, potsherds, and seed bags. The U.S. attorney's office in Salt Lake City claims that the 256 objects seized have a market value of $335,000, and are not just "junk." Antiquities dealers - speculating the Mormons may have been offered high prices as enticements to sell artifacts - say no way does the market value of these goods even come close to that figure. And others without an evident dog in the race are citing motives from ongoing federal restraint of trade in antiquities, to persecution of Mormons, as the backstory behind the front story that has not been revealed yet in court.(Below: the cover story I wrote in 2002 about Joshua Baer's case. Right: An object at issue in Hawaii, that a tribe "borrowed" from a museum and then buried.)
Steven L. Shrader of Santa Fe, who shot himself fatally in the chest June 20th in Illinois, was charged for trafficking in a pair of sandals and a basket - charges that also implicate a Durango couple, Carl "Vern" Crites and Marie Crites, who have shown at the Whitehawk Shows, and appear to be the only professional art dealers among those indicted. According to Shrader's obituary, he had been hired to sell advertising for The New Mexican newspaper shortly before his arrest.
Meanwhile, uncharged in connection with this case - but investigated in the days before June 10th - are three Santa Fe art dealers, who had their houses searched and objects seized, days prior to the Blanding arrests. Forrest Fenn, 78, retired, is the only one who has been publicly identified.
As to the impact this large-scale Blanding sting might have on this week's ethnographic fair, and next week's antiquities show, both run by Whitehawk? Dealers interviewed all said that it is sure to put a damper on business, and underscores federal dislike of American Indian antiquities business overall. August in Santa Fe is the month not only of antiquities trading, but of Indian Market, which draws visitors the world over to the 2-day event of new Native art, made entirely by hand. (Below: a photograph, from the George Frison Institute bulletin, of the kiva at San Lazaro, on land owned by Forrest Fenn.)
What finds dealers buzzing about this latest Blanding case is not only the question of: What happened, and why? But whether the investigation will reach farther into actual allegations against any of the dealers.
Right now the tale of the raid on Fenn's house is anecdote. Fenn, who is retired as an art dealer, owns the site of an ancient pueblo, San Lazaro, in the Galisteo Basin. Private land is outside the jurisdiction of FBI-BLM investigations of alleged archeology crimes. According to a 2005 George Frison Institute (University of Wyoming) bulletin: "The pueblo sits safely many miles off the paved road behind a series of gates. The public does not have access to it..The site of San Lazaro Pueblo straddles a stream south of Santa Fe. Mr. Fenn and a group of colleagues have been excavating the site for a number of years and have uncovered beautiful earthenware
vessels, a tunnel and underground chamber used for ritual practices, a kiva, and countless artifacts from the daily life of the people who occupied the site both before Europeans arrived and afterward. Many foundations and walls remain exposed above ground, pottery
sherds lie everywhere, and evidence of much more that remains
buried is easy to recognize. Despite all the fascinating objects that have been uncovered, Mr. Fenn estimates that 99% of the site remains to be explored."
While some might be scratching their heads - for it is not a crime to dig on private land, such as Fenn's, only to offer certain prohibited objects for sale - it is precisely this gray area, say players in the antiquities business, that makes it hard to keep doing business. And one who argued loudest to that point was Santa Fe's art dealer-later-convicted felon, Joshua Baer. Baer in 1997 had taken a two-page ad in American Indian arts magazine, warning antiquities buyers that the feds were in the process of abridging civil liberties with searches and seizures. A couple of years later they successfully investigated him for wrongdealings.
In 2002 Joshua Baer pleaded guilty to violations of the 1990 Native American Graves Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) and feather laws, and was sentenced to probation. He had procured for sale, for a Rolex-wearing, pseudo-Norwegian fed, a chief's war bonnet, among other prohibited objects. Baer's dealing career ended for good, though, in 2005, when he pleaded guilty to bilking the former SEC chairman, Arthur Levitt, out of the proceeds of sales of three chiefs' blankets Levitt had consigned.
Most prosecutions of alleged American Indian art crimes, Baer's included, have taken place over violations of NAGPRA, the Native American Graves Repatriation Act. This law was enacted in 1990, to allow tribes to reclaim sacred objects and human remains for repatriation. Blanding, Utah was home to the first successful NAGPRA prosecution, in 1995, when the FBI captured a notorious pothunter, Earl K. Shumway, who had boasted of grave-robbing since he was 3, and of arriving at remote sites by helicopter - or with a bulldozer. DNA testing of saliva Shumway left on a cigarette butt saw him convicted for five years.
Next under NAGPRA, in Arizona, Richard Corrow, accused of befriending a Navajo medicine man's widow and gathering 22 Yei B'Chei masks he tried to sell for $120k, was convicted. With an amicus brief from the American Tribal Art Dealers Association Corrow tried take a NAGPRA appeal to the Supreme Court on a "fair notice" issue. But the Court declined to hear it.
However, the indictments in this Utah case fall exclusively under ARPA, the Archeological Resources Protection Act, a 1979 law updating the 1906 Antiquities Act. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act, otherwise called the feather laws, has precedents as recent as last year, when Kenneth Millette of Washington pleaded guilty to having a fully mounted golden eagle, and paid $17,000 in fines and probation. But for arrowheads and potsherds falling under ARPA, many dealers cite a lack of precedent and say they are truly perplexed why this elderly Utah group, find themselves facing felony charges. Likewise, the Mormon community have been up in arms over Dr. Redd's suicide - by accounts, a longtime medical professional who cared both for Anglo and Navajo patients.
Obama Adminstration Interior Secretary Ken Salazar was quoted shortly after the bust, in the New York Times, as calling this prosecution an example of overdue enforcement. But the enforcement began two years ago, during the Bush Administration. Which is leading many to question subtexts and subterfuges among the printed story that holds these people were "traffickers," akin to suspected drug-dealers, in the terms applied to their alleged crimes.
My first experience reporting about relationships between Native America and the feds began in the middle 1980s, when I strung for the Rapid City Journal (SD) from Washington, DC.
It was shocking to realize that Superfund and environmental protection legislation had never been extended onto Indian lands, some of which were sites of illegal dumping. NAGPRA's passage in 1990 was a necessary corrective to decades of blatancy around plunder. But in the case of the Blanding arrests, on is forced to wonder, whether this isn't some type of frontier-style feud carried way farther than it should have been? We'll be paying attention to the cases. And to the fairs.
Here is Craig Childs story on the general subject, from High Country News. And another, from NPR.
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