Investigative Classics is a weekly feature on noteworthy past examples of the reporting craft.
It started as an elaborate sting operation aimed at the illegal trade of Indian artifacts. It ended with three suicides – of a beloved Utah doctor, a salesman from Albuquerque and the government’s main informant, a troubled man who couldn’t forgive himself for lying to his friends.
Joe Mozingo tells the story of this tragic effort – involving the Bureau of Land Management, the FBI and the National Forest Service and code named Operation Cerberus Action – in a beautifully written and illustrated piece (photos and video by Katie Falkenberg) that ran in the Los Angeles Times in 2014.
That story really began before the birth of Jesus, when the Anasazi people first settled in the caves and mesas of the Colorado Plateau. “At the end of the 1200s,” he writes, “they disappeared, leaving behind elegant ceramic pots, effigy dolls, turkey-feather blankets, spears and arrows. Settlers who discovered the Anasazi ruins in the 19th century started collecting and selling the artifacts. By the 1950s and 1960s, ‘pot hunting’ was deeply ingrained among Blanding's 1,800 or so residents.”
As these pot hunters became more aggressive and sensitivity toward Native American culture increased during the 1970s, “Congress made it a felony to take ancient items worth more than $500 from public or Indian land.”
A low-end but active black market trade arose - including many longtime residents who felt the government was trampling on their heritage.
Monzigo’s story focuses on the work of one informant, Ted Gardiner, a former collector whose entwined mental and financial problems made the government’s offer of $7,500 a month enticing. His job was to get targets to say on tape that they knew the artifacts they were buying or selling were from public or Indian land. Monzigo reports:
At the home of Loran St. Claire, whose wife had died recently, leaving him to raise their two children, Gardiner asked St. Claire whether he was “doing all right.” Then he persuaded him to sell two seed jars, one of which his mother had bought many years ago from a Navajo woman.
Gardiner's shirt-button camera recorded it all.
As St. Claire was helping his 4-year-old daughter into her pajamas, Gardiner told her she looked “gorgeous” and, as he left, he called out, “You take care, bro. Holler if you need anything.”
Driving away, he took a call from Agent Wilson.
“Yep, that's two felonies,” Gardiner said, noting that he and Agent Cleverly had a bet for dinner at an upscale French restaurant. “So keep track.”
Gardiner – who would eventually spend $335,685 buying 256 artifacts in an operation that led to charges against 28 people - would also cultivated Jeannie Redd, whose husband Jim was the main family doctor in Utah's largest county. After several failed attempts, he finally convinced her to make a deal for some sandals and turquoise pendant. A year later, early on the morning of June 10, 2009, she saw movement on her front walk:
“Holy cow,” she said. “What is this?”
Men in flak jackets moved up the steps, weapons drawn.
“Federal agents!” they yelled.
She unlatched the door, and the officers shouldered in.
“Where's the white bird?” one shouted.
Officers handcuffed Jeannie and kept asking about the white bird.
Jim Redd arrived home from his morning rounds 15 minutes later to find half a dozen SUVs in the driveway and agents crouching in the junipers. They hauled him out of his car at gunpoint, handcuffed him and took him to the garage.
A BLM special agent interrogated Redd for the next four hours, according to family members. The agent taunted him, pointing to garden tools and asking, “Which shovel do you like to dig bodies with?”
He told Redd he would lose his medical license for illegally removing an ancient artifact from the Navajo reservation.
