Robert Wittman - Priceless

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.

I beamed. “I’d like to start up a working relationship.”

Husby and Baer discussed customs hassles for a few minutes. When they finished, I said, “One of the things Ivar was interested in was a war bonnet.”

Baer perked up but didn’t say anything.

“Can you get that?” I asked.

“It would take some time,” Baer said carefully. “It is possible but it’s very, very difficult. It’s not the kind of thing that we can call up and order.”

“No, I understand,” I said.

Husby jumped in. “We have looked on many days and have seen none.”

“I’ll find you one,” Baer said. “But it will take some time.”

I needed time too. I had to get back to Philadelphia.

On the day after Baer promised to find me a headdress, Hurricane Floyd, which had already caused so much flooding and misery in North Carolina, arrived in southeastern Pennsylvania, bringing a foot of water and seventy-mile-an-hour gusts to my neighborhood. Our new home was particularly vulnerable because the builder was still struggling to fix punch-list problems, even two years after we’d moved in. When the storm reached Pennsylvania, Donna called me in Santa Fe to gave me a damage report. The carpets were soaked. Water was flowing down the walls on the inside of the house. The ceilings were bulging with water, leaking everywhere. I imagined the looming bills, new construction headaches—new drywall, stucco, landscaping, gutters, and windows. The Baer case would have to wait. I hustled back to my room and arranged for a flight home.