The Dinosaur Artist

by Paige Williams

  U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) asks several key questions about imports, and by law importers must answer truthfully: What’s in this shipment? Where did it come from? How much is it worth? Fossil dealers were known to wax philosophic with their answers. What is it? Technically, a crumbly pile of trash rock. Where did it come from? Technically, from its last known port. How much is it worth? The price paid—everyone knows it’s the work that goes into a restoration that gives a specimen its commercial value.

  This shipment, whose country of origin was listed as Japan, was described on customs forms as “fossil stone pieces,” with a declared value of $12,000. Once it cleared customs, Eric outsourced the prep work to a guy he knew through Tucson, because by now he was engrossed in another major project.

  CHAPTER 9

  HOLLYWOOD HEADHUNTERS

  ALONG THE SIX-MILE ROAD BETWEEN GAINESVILLE AND Micanopy lies Paynes Prairie, a sweeping freshwater marsh and savanna named for the son of an eighteenth-century Seminole chief named Ahaya, “the Cowkeeper.” Florida’s first state preserve is one of those places that, when you get out of the car, just sounds hot. Visitors may see a long-headed toothpick (grasshopper), a scarlet skimmer (dragonfly), pirate perch (fish), and a canopy so thick, snakes stretch between treetops. Brightly striped banana spiders the size of a human hand weave golden webs as big as badminton nets, their spindly legs working like the fingers of an elegant old woman tapping ashes from her French cigarette. The only un-wild features of Paynes Prairie are the man-made boardwalks and the posted alligator warnings, one of which shows an illustration of a rabbit, a raccoon, and a toddler and reads, “At dusk if it moves, it’s food.”

  Before Paynes became a state park, it abutted a plantation called Serenola. Eventually all that remained of the plantation was a two-story farmhouse, built in 1936. The man who inherited the estate decided to sell the land to developers in 2006 but hated to see the farmhouse destroyed, so he posted a sign that read FREE HOUSE and entertained offers. When Eric saw the sign, he talked Amanda into jumping the fence and having a look around. Serenola was white, with four front columns and an overall living space of 4,000 square feet. On one end was a side porch and on the other, a porte cochere. Renters had left the place so putrid with garbage and feces that Amanda had to step outside and vomit. To her, the house was too far gone, but Eric asked her to look beyond the superficials. Even despite the termites, the structure appeared sound and worth saving.

  Amanda gave in. The Prokopis won the house by describing their first renovation. They promised to relocate Serenola to the nine acres they had recently bought, just down the road, and transform it into something special, where they could raise a family. Secretly, Amanda thought of the project as a second flip, but once Serenola was stripped to its studs to lighten it for the move, she looked at the high ceilings, the original windows, the heart pine floors, and told Eric, “Yeah, we have to live here.”

  One April morning, the house was loaded onto flatbed trucks and hauled one mile down US 441 to the Prokopi land. Eric and Amanda began redoing the house from the foundation up, keeping as much of the original woodwork and architectural detail as possible. The side porch would become a family den. They would add a laundry room and a garage. The appliances would be Viking. Using pinkish bricks salvaged from a demolished Burrito Brothers restaurant, they would build a long driveway, front steps and porch, and a graceful privacy fence with an electronic gate. When Eric heard that the rock icon Tom Petty’s grandmother’s house was marked for demolition, he and Joe, his old log-pulling buddy, went inside and took a particularly nice mantel rather than see it destroyed. Eric installed it over the living room fireplace at Serenola.

  While the house was “free,” the move and renovation were not. Eric and Amanda used a private lender because it was getting harder to borrow money from banks. The interest rate was 13 percent, far higher than the national average, but the Prokopis told themselves they’d refinance at a lower rate—which turned out to be impossible. Then they told themselves they’d get solvent again by selling properties and by adding dinosaurs to Eric’s fossil inventory.

  Eric had never mounted a dinosaur skull, but he figured it out the way he had figured out Pleistocene armadillos and ground sloths, by studying other specimens alongside photos and scientific sketches. He welded a display stand using materials bought at a local ironworks, then mounted the skull with its jaws slightly open, showing off teeth that once tore through the flesh of other Cretaceous dinosaurs.

  He preferred dealing with Tom Lindgren as an auction broker because he considered him less finicky than David Herskowitz, but it was Herskowitz who took the T. bataar skull, even though he found Eric difficult to read. At this point, Herskowitz worked for I.M. Chait, an auction house and gallery in Beverly Hills. The company was founded by Isadore Chait, an antiques dealer and jazz singer in his seventies with voluminous eyebrows, a white mustache, and a ponytail. People called him “Izzy.” His signature look involved a fedora. Chait had been collecting Asian antiques and art since serving in Vietnam, as a cook in the marines. After the war he had studied anthropology and Buddhism at UCLA and supported himself by performing in nightclubs; he collected so much art that he had to sell some, later saying, “So I did gun shows, swap meets, the Rose Bowl, the Glendale antique fair—and people were buying.” By 1970 Chait had opened his first gallery, on Melrose Avenue, selling porcelains, enamels, jades, carvings. “As a committed supporter of Asian art at a time when few others shared my passion, I had to create a market and demand where there wasn’t one,” he said. Chinese art became popular in the West after President Richard Nixon’s diplomatic visit to China in 1972, Chait once told an interviewer: “Americans went crazy buying all this stuff from China and bringing it in. China was just getting over the trials of the Cultural Revolution and a lot of people were selling things.”

  The company eventually expanded into watches, jewelry, and “one of a kind fossils!” Chait’s first auction dedicated primarily to natural history was scheduled for Sunday, March 25, 2007, in New York City, with Herskowitz handling the inventory. The 345 items included an “Egyptian mummy’s hand; lion, hyena, and warthog skulls; a gold nugget weighing 62 troy ounces,” the New York Times reported. The T. bataar skull appeared in profile on the catalog cover: “Tyrannosaurus bataar, Late Cretaceous (67 million years), Nemegt Formation, Central Asia.” Chait declared the fossil “perfect for a New York City apartment.”

  Eric and Amanda headed to New York, taking a room at the Shelburne, a boutique hotel at Lexington Avenue and Thirty-Seventh Street, an easy walk to the Fifth Avenue auction venue. The night before the sale, they attended the preview party, where to Amanda’s embarrassment Eric accidentally dribbled wine down his shirt. The next afternoon, the Prokopis watched in amazement as the offers for the skull shot past $100,000. The two most aggressive bidders were at the other end of phone lines, anonymously battling for the win. The sale quickly landed at $276,000, with the buyer’s premium. Now $180,000 richer, the Prokopis went to dinner that night at China Grill, then returned to their hotel room to celebrate.

  Only a few people knew the identity of the skull’s buyer. The Times reported only that it went to a “private collector on the West Coast whom the gallery would not identify.” Eric and Amanda later learned, as did millions of other people, that the warring bidders were the movie stars Nicolas Cage and Leonardo DiCaprio, both prolific collectors, and that Cage had won.

  Right away, Eric fielded an order for another bataar skull, from a buyer whom the broker identified only as “my client.” Eric didn’t have a second skull, but he knew a dealer who did. This time, he did the prep work himself, working millimeter by millimeter until he had produced and mounted a piece much like the first. Satisfied with the results, he crated the fossil with its armature and shipped it to the broker in California. Then he and Amanda flew to Los Angeles, rented a minivan, fetched the skull, and headed to the address they had been given to assemble it.

&nbs
p; Eric kept hearing that the buyer was DiCaprio. In L.A., he matched the delivery address to the one listed for the actor on a map of stars’ homes. He and Amanda found the house in a showbiz enclave where the streets, known for “stunning views and extreme privacy,” were named for birds. On Oriole Way, the Prokopis drove through a gate and were shown into the foyer of a house once owned by Madonna.

  Eric assembled the skull in the entryway and then he and Amanda posed for a photo, and they were done. Before leaving, Eric couldn’t help noticing a side room filled with natural history—the skull of a Chinese saber-tooth cat, a Psittacosaurus skeleton, a narwhal tusk, a framed collection of flying lizards. So much for DiCaprio’s public image as an avid supporter of environmental and conservation causes, he thought. But then who was Eric to talk, as the guy taking the money.

  News of the Cage–DiCaprio bidding war had renewed scientists’ outcry against the sale of vertebrate fossils, but among collectors and auctioneers, the sale only generated more interest. Bonhams alone sold $3.5 million worth of natural history in three separate Los Angeles events that year, “up from none five years ago,” the Wall Street Journal reported. The article, headlined “The Oldest Crop,” heralded fossils as a new way of ranching, saying the going rate for a Triceratops skull was $250,000, “up from $25,000 a decade ago.”

  Eric had now sold two T. bataar skulls, unencumbered, to two of the world’s biggest movie stars, for roughly half a million dollars. He and Amanda used the proceeds from the first skull sale to buy another flip house, across the street from the first, bringing their property purchase count to three. Whatever else Hollis Butts had in inventory, Eric wanted it.

  Twice, he visited Butts in Japan. In Tokyo, he boarded a train to Chichibu, arriving to find that another American dealer had already claimed a large batch of Gobi dinosaur parts. Eric chose a block containing two Tarbosaurus jaws and various bones, intending to make another skull, ultimately giving Butts all the cash he had on him, five grand, and agreeing to wire another thousand. Then he rushed home for Amanda’s thirtieth birthday. They flew to the Bahamas, treating a small group of friends to the vacation. One afternoon at the pool, Amanda ordered a virgin piña colada, thereby announcing her first pregnancy. She told everyone the baby was conceived in New York on the night Nic Cage helped launch Eric’s future in Mongolian dinosaurs.

  As Eric waited for the bones to arrive from Japan, he got word from Butts that their deal was off. Without explanation, Butts said he simply no longer wanted to sell unprepped fossils.

  The Prokopis now had house renovations and mortgages to pay for, and a baby on the way—Eric had been counting on the Butts materials as income. He questioned the older dealer by email, argued with him, got angry with him, but Butts refused to sell him another bone. When Eric demanded to be reimbursed for the expense of traveling to Japan, Butts demanded to be reimbursed for the dinners he had treated Eric to in Chichibu. Eric got his money back, but Butts had made an enemy.

  By December, Amanda was enormous with a boy, to be named Greyson. As her due date approached, she centered a giant “GP” in fresh garland on the front door at their house on Southwest Second Avenue. In the nursery, above the diaper-changing table, she hung a framed print of a Victorian curiosity cabinet filled with seashells, stingrays, and starfish. She washed the car and got a pedicure, and on December 14, she went to the hospital and had the baby.

  Greyson Prokopi had his mother’s bright blond hair, his father’s wide mouth. His first Christmas fell on his eleventh day of life. He came home to a house that smelled like stargazer lilies and fresh-cut pine. Packets of Nestlé hot chocolate filled a crystal bowl on the kitchen counter. The many toys beneath the perfectly trimmed tree included a large, plush dinosaur.

  Two months later, in late January 2008, Eric and Amanda loaded up truck, trailer, and newborn, and drove to Tucson. One day a wealthy woman came into their showroom and sat for a while as her husband shopped for fossils.

  “What do you do?” she asked Amanda.

  “This is what we do,” Amanda told her.

  “For a living? You pay your bills with bones?”

  “No,” Amanda said cheerily. “You pay my bills with bones!”

  Eric hadn’t forgotten that Hollis Butts had cut him off. One day, still pissed and baffled about the behavior, he asked Tom Lindgren the identity of Butts’s Mongolian supplier so he could buy from him directly. Lindgren, who had his own reasons for doing what he was about to do, gave Eric an email address and a name: Tuvshin.

  With that, Eric stepped into something he in no way foresaw, and hand to God it started with Genghis Khan.

  CHAPTER 10

  THE WARRIOR AND THE EXPLORER

  LONG BEFORE MONGOLIA HAD A NAME, IT HAD HUMAN inhabitants. Stone Age people left behind their tools. Bronze and Iron Age clans formed alliances and fought. A great wall went up, belting the broad land. The tribal kingdoms warred until, in the late thirteenth century, a leader united them in one of the most legendary military campaigns in history.

  Genghis Khan—or Chinggis Khaan, as he is known at home—and his immediate successors conquered half the world, on horseback. They rode out of a vast swath of a landlocked territory to Germany, to the Adriatic, and almost to Vienna. In The Mongols, David Morgan wrote, “There was no reason to suppose that armies which had defeated the best that China and the Islamic world could throw against them would meet their match in Europe.” And they didn’t. For centuries, the Mongol Empire ruled Russia, ruled Iraq and China—ruled damn near everything, all the way to Hungary—in the largest contiguous empire ever created. As Morgan put it, the “empire was so huge that although its centre was in the Far East, it constituted for a century or more Europe’s most formidable and dangerous eastern neighbour.”

  The empire eventually fractured, as empires do. China and Russia, meanwhile, grew stronger, and the power dynamic flipped. Outer Mongolia, as Mongolia was then known, came to be seen by its two enveloping neighbors not as a fearsome superpower but as a convenient buffer zone. (Inner Mongolia, meanwhile, was, and is, an autonomous region of northern China.) After Mongolia fell under the rule of China’s Qing dynasty in 1691, Russia more or less waited for its chance.

  Westerners started arriving in the 1800s as “adventurers, missionaries, or merchants,” former ambassador Jonathan Addleton wrote in Mongolia and the United States: A Diplomatic History. The first American to receive a Mongolian passport to travel from China to Siberia did so in 1862. A young mining engineer named Herbert Hoover, twenty-eight years away from the U.S. presidency, would soon visit the capital, then known as Urga, while working in China. One American visitor declared the Mongolian steppe similar to “the rolling prairies of Kansas and Nebraska” but most found it “exotic” and “wild,” despite the utilitarian food (mutton with a side of mutton).

  In 1911, at the end of the Qing dynasty, Mongolia declared independence from China in what anthropologists have characterized as a crucial step toward survival. The long, extremely cold winters made it hard for humans (and some livestock) to live in Mongolia, as did the overwhelming lack of arable land and access to fresh water and grass. There, in one of “the world’s most perilous environments,” herder families’ pastoral lives “centered on the drive to feed and water their animals,” Morris Rossabi wrote in The Mongols: A Very Short Introduction. A Buddhist theocracy was established, with the Bogd Khan, or “Living Buddha,” as the new head of government. Hoping to establish diplomatic ties beyond Russia and China, Mongolia contacted a host of distant countries, including the United States, to request “friendly cooperation.” One Mongolian press secretary later said, “I don’t think this country can be compared to any other. We are nomads, and our psychology is different from that of other people. Other countries can afford to play cards—China cards and Russia cards—and some of us would like to play those cards, too, but we don’t have the trumps.”

  Washington declined to establish diplomatic relations. Mongolians’ desire for independen
ce only grew, along with an awareness of their own history. A scholar translated The Secret History of the Mongols—a “semi-mythical and semi-accurate work” believed to be the only surviving account of the life of Genghis Khan—from ancient to modern Mongolian. The text dates to sometime after 1227, the year Genghis died, and has been called “one of the great literary monuments of the world.” The Secret History presented a legend that inspired Mongolians to decide for themselves whether to think of the founding father as a democratic hero or a genocidal terror, or both: Genghis Khan was born Temüjin, around 1162, near what is now Ulaanbaatar, the ultimate product of a “bluish wolf” that mated with a “fallow doe.” He exited the womb clutching a blood clot, signifying his destiny to rule. Promised in marriage at age eight or nine, he wed at sixteen. After his father, Yesügei, a nomad chieftain, was poisoned by Tatars, his mother, Höelün, taught him about tribal warfare and politics, impressing upon him the importance of alliances. As a leader, he favored meritocracy and rewarded the loyal. He advocated religious tolerance and protection of the environment; created Mongolia’s first written laws; and encouraged development of the Silk Road, fostering trade between Northeast Asia, Muslim Southeast Asia, and Christian Europe. “Splendid Iranian histories, beautiful Chinese textiles and porcelains, and exquisite Roman gold vessels were some of the products of such cultural interrelationships,” Rossabi wrote. As a military strategist, Genghis enjoyed analyzing the psychology of his enemies. He didn’t boil his captives alive in giant cauldrons, as one leader was said to have done, but his tactics were horrific enough that Europeans tended to think of Mongolian warriors as “fantastic monsters” or “a punishment sent by God.” By 1215, Genghis had invaded, captured, and ravaged the settlement that became Peking, now Beijing. Within twelve years he was dead and buried in an unmarked grave in a secret location that archaeologists attempt to find to this day.