Eric’s most recent tax return showed reported income of slightly more than $103,000. He and Amanda owed $450,000 in mortgage loans, well over $70,000 on credit cards—Home Depot, Tires Plus, Best Buy, Lowe’s—and more than $41,000 to the Black Hills Institute. They were behind on their taxes. Overall, they owed more than $11,000 a month. The seizure of the dinosaur was a setback no one had expected. “Like, America just got involved all of a sudden,” Amanda said. “I didn’t realize that could happen.”
Eric still had all these other Mongolian dinosaurs, and he intended to sell them. Instead of backing off, he went on prepping, partly because he thought he’d win his case and be cleared for business. Even with the federal crackdown—or maybe because of the federal crackdown, given that notoriety often fuels demand—other dealers were still openly selling Gobi bones on eBay and independent websites. One seller in France was offering a Protoceratops andrewsi, a Conchoraptor gracilis, an Oviraptor philoceratops, and a T. bataar, all outright labeled Mongolian. After Eric prepped out an Oviraptor that David Herskowitz had placed with a private client, that sale fell through, too, the client claiming that Eric had missed the deadline. The panic was now palpable, as was Eric’s tendency to cast blame. “This couldn’t come at a worse time for me and it is unacceptable for your client to back out,” he told Herskowitz, furious. “There is actually a good chance that this is what puts me over the edge and I will have to file bankruptcy.”
Eric’s civil lawyers soon referred him to a criminal defense attorney in New York, just in case. Eric took countermeasures. He put his passport in a Ziploc bag and hid it in a crawl space beneath the house. Leaving his cell phone at home, in case anyone was tracking him, he paid cash for a U-Haul and stored plastic crates filled with dinosaurs in a pole barn at the home of his old log-pulling buddy Joe. Eric figured the feds wouldn’t connect them; he hardly ever talked to Joe on the phone and they’d never exchanged a single email—as far as Eric knew, Joe didn’t even have email. Tyler, Eric’s assistant, rented a self-storage unit in her name and they stashed more bones there, then quickly thought better of it and moved the fossils elsewhere.
In Mongolia, police carried out their own investigation. The government wanted to know Eric Prokopi’s connection to Mongolia and whether he had ever been there. A search of customs records showed that he had visited the country three times. The first time, he had arrived by air on the night of October 23, 2008, departing four days later at around four in the afternoon. The second time, he arrived on the night of June 23, 2009, departing on July 8. The third time, he arrived late at night on July 22, 2011, departing five days later at six in the morning. A search of hotel records showed that on his last trip, he had shared a room with Chris Moore.
In each instance, customs had required him to list the purpose of his visit. “Tourism,” he had written on his second and third visits. But on his initial arrival he had written “private” and provided a local phone number that Tuvshin had told him to use. Investigators traced the number to a former Natural History Museum employee, which led them to the name Tuvshinjargal Maam, which led them to the mint-green building on Peace Avenue. The suspect was many months dead, but his computer still existed, and while it had been scrubbed of data, investigators were able to restore deleted material and discover emails and photos—photos of dinosaur skeletons and of Tuvshin posing with dinosaur skeletons, and emails to Eric and other dealers about the sale of dinosaur skeletons. Bobo, Tuvshin’s wife, was arrested on September 13 and held for at least nine days, but was never charged.
A draft letter also turned up on the computer. It appeared to have been written in the spring of 2008. This would have been just before Eric’s first trip to Mongolia and just before that summer’s deadly post-election riots; it was also the year Mongolia amended its criminal code to toughen punishments for illegally crossing the border with “restricted goods, rare animals… minerals and natural elements.” The letter began, “Dear Butts.” It read, “You told me that you would buy a head of tarbosaur, meat eating dinosaur of any size whether its [sic] small or big as long as it is whole for 40000USD while we were sitting in the coffee room on the first floor of the hotel Chichibi [sic].”
At the meeting, in Japan, on July 12, 2007, “Butts” supposedly had told the author he would buy “hand claw of tarbosaur” for $5,000, as well as three tarbosaur skulls, Gallimimus claws, and a Velociraptor skull. “Following my offer many expeditions went to countryside,” read the letter. They had talked prices: $65,000 for a Velociraptor skeleton, $70,000 for tarbosaur, plus another $20,000 for “ger (tent), custom problem, transportation, and container shipment charge.” When the payments from “Butts” slowed, the Mongolians wanted either the rest of their money or the return of a skull. The letter read, “They assaulted me several times and hurt.”
By now “Butts” owed Tuvshin $37,600, the letter went on. If he wanted to buy more dinosaurs, he would have to come to Mongolia in person and pay half up front. The diggers would bring “their goods from the gobi” only after getting paid. “I don’t have any money either to pay them in advance or to make shipment,” the letter said, adding that a shipping container alone costs $20,000. “I 100% guarantee this business to you. You will never lose,” the letter said. But “Butts” should hurry. “People are getting more and more cautions [sic] here. In Mongolia the price everything is rising.” A three-bedroom apartment now costs the equivalent of $200 a month. The global economic crisis of late 2008 and early 2009 had “savaged Mongolia’s currency, capital, and equity markets,” according to one U.S. embassy report. The tugrik fell some 40 percent against the dollar.
As investigators continued their inquiry into Tuvshin’s activities, Oyuna went on television and pleaded for more information. A key witness soon came forward.
Otgo, the chief fossil prepper at the national paleontology lab, sat in a chair at police headquarters wearing a beige-plaid shirt and a windbreaker, his hands crossed in his lap. It was September 20, four months to the day after the Heritage auction. Snapshots of four different white men lay in a row on a table. The first showed a sunburned man in a hoodie, with a Ferris wheel in the background. The second was a cell phone photo of Eric Prokopi that a member of the Mongolian delegation to New York had surreptitiously shot in the La Quinta Inn lobby on the day of the T. bataar inspection: it showed him sitting on a sofa in jeans and a brown knit shirt, talking on his cell phone. The third showed a mohawked guy perched on the stone wall of a restaurant patio. The fourth was a selfie of a buzz-cut young man in a Jack Wills T-shirt.
Otgo pointed right away to photo number two. That is Eric, he told the investigators. Eric came to Mongolia with “Vadim”—for some reason, that’s what he called Tony—in the summer of 2009. Otgo admitted that he had served as the paleontologist of the group, which had traveled by Land 80 and Land 260, following a road map highlighted in yellow. During the excursion, Otgo had understood only small parts of the conversation but recalled that one of the Americans introduced himself as Ukrainian. They had met a Gobi family that helped “collect dinosaurs.” They had found a dinosaur egg at Ergiin Tsav and “small bones” at Bugiin Tsav.
Among the photos investigators found on Tuvshin’s computer was one of Eric and Tony climbing a stony embankment; they had scaled the rock to look at a falcon’s nest, but within the context of black market fossils they looked every bit like poachers. Another photo showed Eric in the desert, holding what U.S. authorities would later call a clipboard; in fact, he was holding a roll of plastic wrap used for collecting bone scraps. Otgo was pictured in the second photo, a fact he now didn’t deny.
The cops soon brought Otgo in for a second interview. This time he revealed details about 2011, when Eric returned hastily to Mongolia after Tuvshin’s death. Tuvshin’s wife had called and said “Eric is here, come meet him,” Otgo said. “I went to the green building and Eric was there with a tall Englishman with gray hair, named Chris. Tuvshin’s children were there, too. I used my limited English. Bo
bo’s youngest son translated. We went to the Natural History Museum and to a Christian church. We went to Terelj for a picnic. Several young people joined us in eating and drinking. We recalled Tuvshinjargal fondly. Before they left, the two foreigners asked me to join them on their next expedition to the Gobi. They gave me their name cards and I gave them my son’s email address, but I lost the cards.”
This was the first admission that a Mongolian paleontologist was connected to the T. bataar case. The information wasn’t publicized widely, if at all. Despite Otgo’s acknowledgment that he had acted as the Gobi guide, the Mongolian public was assured that the T. bataar case had nothing to do with Mongolian scientists.
“Isn’t it because Mongolian paleontologists are involved in this that so many dinosaur skeletons are smuggled out of the country?” one reporter asked Oyuna.
“I also had the fear that recognized paleontologists of Mongolia may have participated in the smuggling,” Oyuna responded, adding, “Their participation would have influenced and reflected negatively [on] the reputation of the Mongolian paleontology sector.” The public should trust that Mongolia’s scientists were innocent, she said.
In fact, more paleontologists than Otgo had been involved.
In the 1990s, Tuvshin called himself the head of the Mongolian Private Museums Union, which, as his acquaintances understood it, was another of the NGOs that proliferated after the fall of Communism. Once the law allowed for the creation of antiques shops and private museums, Tuvshin started contracting with scientists and academics, hoping to start his own. In the spring of 1999, he signed a contract titled “Financing Geology, Paleontology, and Natural Science Study,” under which Tuvshin would finance paleontological expeditions for university students and researchers; in exchange, the museum association could keep or sell the findings, splitting the proceeds with the university. Three people signed the contract. One was Tuvshin. Another was Boldsukh, a vice president of the National University of Mongolia. The third was the paleontologist Altangerel Perle, who had participated in early joint expeditions with the American Museum of Natural History before moving on to other work.
Perle had died of a stroke. Boldsukh either had died or would soon die in what Western scientists later heard described as a fishing accident. At one point, Oyuna fleetingly mentioned their names to the Mongolian media in connection with Tuvshin, but shut her mouth after one of the men’s families threatened to sue her. In Mongolia, this was an unusually harsh threat: the country’s libel laws were among the worst in the world. Anyone found guilty could be fined and imprisoned for up to six months. For years, the American embassy had urged the Mongolian government to decriminalize libel because the law was so often used to intimidate people, and to stop them from telling the truth, but nothing changed. The flicker of information about Boldsukh and Perle—confirmation of a connection between scientists and commercial interests—quickly disappeared.
Whenever Tuvshin had talked about “permits” that authorized him to sell fossils, Eric had never really probed what he meant. His simple concern was losing money, “getting ripped off,” he said later. “Tuvshin wouldn’t sell in small quantities. You had to risk a lot of money to deal with him. He wanted to deal with only a few people and sell big loads. That deterred a lot of buyers.” All Eric knew was that there were supposedly fifty diggers in the Gobi and Tuvshin worked with two of them. If ever called upon to produce papers, Eric had figured he could ask Tuvshin to email documents. He had never counted on the guy dying.
As United States of America v. One Tyrannosaurus Bataar Skeleton proceeded in the United States, Homeland Security Investigations, working in tandem with the Southern District of New York, quietly built evidence for a different kind of case. The federal prosecutor, Martin Bell, and the lead HSI agent, Daniel Brazier, wanted to know how and where Eric did business, and with whom. Brazier obtained a search warrant for the AOL account Eric had been using since he was a teenager in Land O’ Lakes. The online service harvested emails for the period between April 2010 and August 2012, downloading them onto a searchable disk.
On the morning of Wednesday, October 17, Amanda got up early to get the kids ready for school. She’d slept downstairs on the couch; as she walked out of the guest bathroom and headed for the stairs, she was startled at the sight of a man looking through her front window. Opening the door, she didn’t bother asking the Homeland Security agents why they were there. One of the few details she would remember was that one asked, “Is Eric Koproki here?” and that she said, “Do you mean ‘Prokopi’?” and one of the agents said, “Oh. We’ve been saying his name wrong for months.”
Eric was asleep upstairs, sprawled out with the kids in the master suite’s big black Shaker-style bed. Amanda scooted the children to their rooms and got them ready for school, saying, “These nice men are here to see your Halloween costumes!” After she scrounged up some clothes for Eric to wear, the agents put him in handcuffs and leg chains and took him away. Amanda drove the kids to school, trying not to panic. The agents had taken her phone but they hadn’t said not to call anyone, so she borrowed another mom’s cell in the carpool lane and called Georges Lederman, Eric’s criminal defense attorney in New York. Stay calm and cooperate, Lederman told her.
But it was hard to think. The agents were taking stuff out of Serenola; Eric was going before a judge at noon; the kids would get out of school at like, two; friends were texting, asking, “Why are there TV news trucks lined up outside your house?”; she needed to find real estate documents, to “do a bail.”
The HSI agents gathered evidence by labeling each room with a letter of the alphabet for inventory. They packed up phones, fossils, casts, reproductions, the family iMac, two Gateway laptops, a MacBook Pro, two SanDisk storage drives, Eric’s passport (plucked from beneath the house), tax documents (which happened to be sitting beside the front door), and an empty shipping container with another dealer’s name on it. When Amanda started crying, an agent told her, “Don’t worry, it’s just stuff, you’ll get it all back.” Amanda could admit that none of this looked good, and that she and Eric hadn’t “always been angels,” but she wanted to scream, “It’s not just stuff—it’s my whole life.”
When it didn’t seem possible that the situation could get worse, a delivery truck entered the front gate. The 400-pound shipment was addressed to Eric and had come from I.M. Chait, the Beverly Hills auction house. One of the federal agents called Bell, the prosecutor in New York, and said, “You’re not gonna believe this.”
Georges Lederman told Amanda not to open the box, so the agents got another search warrant and opened it themselves, finding Lot 291 of a Chait auction from December 5, 2010: “Graveyard of the Oviraptors, Oviraptor philoceratops, Cretaceous, Central Asia.” Given the discovery of more Mongolian dinosaurs in Eric’s possession, Bell, the prosecutor, requested bail of $100,000, telling the magistrate, “This fresh conduct, in light of the known legal issues concerning the defendant’s business, is alarming.”
In Manhattan, the federal authorities announced the arrest. Whereas the civil action had been handled by the Southern District of New York’s anti–money laundering and asset forfeiture team, Bell would prosecute the criminal case within the Complex Frauds unit, on charges related to smuggling. James Hayes, special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations, declared to the press, presumably with a straight face, “We want to make this illegal business practice extinct in the U.S.” Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney, called the T. bataar “merely the tip of the iceberg” and said, “Our investigation uncovered a one-man black market in prehistoric fossils.”
It stunned Amanda to see Eric in handcuffs, “like he was some bad guy,” and wearing shackles, “like he’d done something wrong.” Florida’s laws were such that Eric, after being booked in the federal criminal justice system, was released on his own recognizance, placed under home arrest, and ordered to appear in court on Monday in Manhattan, where he would have to post bond in order to be free until trial
. This time he’d have to pay for his own travel.
That afternoon, Amanda picked Eric up from jail and drove him home, where the raid was ongoing. Each was panicked about a hundred different things: what to tell the kids; what their parents would think; what their friends would say; how to process the fact that Eric was now an accused felon and that they’d have to put up Serenola as collateral. How much money was in the bank? Would anyone ever do business with Florida Fossils again? Was Eric now “radioactive,” as his new attorney put it?
Eric had sat in jail that morning, frantic that the cops would tell Amanda the secret he’d been keeping. If investigators had been monitoring him, they knew that for months he had been having an affair with Tyler, the woman who’d been working as his assistant. The Prokopis had hired her in December and the affair had started in March. Eric and Tyler had found that they liked the same things—both were “treasure hunters by nature.” They could talk for hours. “He’s sometimes such a painful introvert but I can’t shut his ass up,” Tyler later said. “I can look at him and finish his sentences. There’s a wavelength with us. He likes that I’m independent, and I’m smart, and I’m as fearless as he is—we’ll sneak into quarries together. We’re both attracted to that fearless part of one another.” Tyler’s daughter, Hannah, lived in Virginia with her father; Eric’s children were small, and Tyler liked the thought of getting the chance to “mother again.” She later said, “This is going to sound terrible—I’m a very moral, guided, compassed kind of gal—but we couldn’t live without each other.”
The Dinosaur Artist Page 26