The Dinosaur Artist

by Paige Williams

  As Eric agonized over how to tell Amanda about the relationship, he acted so weird, she worried that he was either planning to kill himself or run. Finally she confronted him: Are you having an affair? Yes. Is it Tyler? Yes. Are you in love with her? Yes. Eric kept saying, “We didn’t mean for this to happen,” which to Amanda was like saying, “I didn’t mean to kill you, the gun just went off.” It infuriated her that Eric refused to give details. He kept living at Serenola, but after a while Amanda finally said, “I can’t go through my mourning if you’re here,” so Eric moved in with Tyler, everyone navigating the delicate task of how to explain all of this to the children.

  Now that Amanda knew the secret, Eric felt not especially unburdened. Guilt was wearing him down. The guy who once could handle everything now couldn’t handle anything. Every passing day zombified him more. To Amanda, he had become a different person almost overnight: paranoid, angry, immobilized. Their bank accounts were depleted. Friends and family stepped in to help without being asked. Amanda’s brother sent a $500 grocery card. Girlfriends tucked cash into her purse when she wasn’t looking. People cooked for them and offered to keep the kids, like you do when a loved one is sick. They had been eBaying certain items, to generate income, but now decided to sell everything they owned—cars, furniture, almost all of it. Serenola’s front parlor suddenly looked like one of Amanda’s Bizarre Bazaar booths: twinkly, earthy, For Sale. In a series of tag sales, they sold their possessions right out of the rooms, right off the walls, telling the children, “Don’t worry. These are just things.”

  On October 22, a cold, overcast Monday, Eric climbed the front steps of the federal courthouse in lower Manhattan and cleared security alongside Georges Lederman, his attorney. He wore a dark suit and a red-print tie, and was carrying a laptop bag as if it were a briefcase. At 3:07 p.m. his case was called.

  The criminal charges in United States of America v. Eric Prokopi were altogether unprecedented in American jurisprudence. Count 1 accused him of lying on customs forms in order to import that Chinese Microraptor in 2010. Count 2 alleged that he had imported “multiple containers of dinosaur bones of Mongolian origin, by way of Great Britain” between 2011 and 2012 by misrepresenting their contents and value. Count 3 accused him of importing the fossils knowing them to have been “taken from Mongolia by fraud or conversion.” This charge alone carried a maximum prison sentence of ten years.

  Not guilty, Eric pleaded.

  Should the defendant be jailed while awaiting trial?

  Well, he’s a flight risk, the prosecution argued: after all, Prokopi had international contacts and the means to make quick, off-the-books money.

  He’s got fifteen hundred dollars in the bank and seven hundred in cash, the judge responded, to which Martin Bell, the prosecutor, said, Yeah, but he’s sitting on “about half a million dollars’ worth of dinosaurs.”

  After Bell argued for a stricter bond agreement, the judge raised the amount to $250,000, and required that at least one financially responsible person of “moral suasion” cosign for it. Eric, who was using Serenola as security, chose his father, dreading the words “I told you so” but knowing that, if called upon, his parents would put up their house in Land O’ Lakes.

  As Eric left the courthouse that day, the commercial fossil world was talking about his rapidly worsening legal problems. Few people knew him well, but the dealers who considered him a friend tried to assure the rest of the trade that, no, really—good guy, bad mistake. The Heritage auction “was like rubbing the tarbo right into the American Museum’s face, and so they had to react,” Kirby Siber, a longtime hunter and natural history museum owner in Switzerland, told George Winters, then president of the Association of Applied Paleontological Sciences, the trade group for commercial fossil hunters. “The conflict had to erupt.” Commercial dealers already felt misunderstood and maligned because of “irreconceivable views (fossils are such pure cultural items/fossils are commercial items like other resources),” Siber said. He wondered if perhaps there wasn’t some other issue driving the tension. Maybe the American Museum of Natural History had protested the auction for fear of T. bataar overshadowing T. rex, America’s signature dinosaur. Or maybe AMNH scientists were protecting their Gobi turf. “I have seen this over and over again in many countries, that some official institution makes a claim to all the fossil resources and only uses them partially,” Siber said. “This is what really causes the ‘black market.’ Is an unfair monopoly of a cultural and commercial resource.”

  As the weeks passed, Eric began to realize the enormity of the odds against him in criminal court. If there was one place to avoid standing trial it was the Southern District of New York: those lawyers rarely lost. Also, juries are a notorious wild card—there’s no predicting what they’ll do. His best chance at getting back to his life rested with a plea.

  Two days after Christmas, Eric returned to federal court in New York. He wore his peacoat, no sunglasses, no gloves, and a bemused grimace. When the magistrate asked if he understood the counts against him and Eric said yes, the magistrate then said, “Tell me what you did.” This might’ve been a moment for revelation, but true to character Eric basically just repeated the charges as they’d been read to him, admitting he’d done what they accused him of but offering little more. The magistrate started to ask how Eric had obtained a permit to export Mongolian fossils in the first place but interrupted himself. The interrogatory turned, and the question went unanswered.

  Now that he had pleaded guilty, Eric faced a possible million dollars or more in fines and up to seventeen years in prison. If sentenced to the full ride, he’d be in his late fifties when he got out. His children would be in their twenties. In private, he wept at the thought of it.

  CHAPTER 19

  VERDICT

  AMANDA FILED FOR DIVORCE ON MAY 16, 2013, ALMOST A YEAR to the day that the dinosaur went to auction. By June 11, the Prokopis were done: twelve years of marriage, gone in twenty days.

  In the settlement, Eric got the johnboat and the flat-bottom boat, plus an old Toyota truck, and the box truck. Amanda got the 2011 Toyota Camry, which they’d bought after selling the Lexus. They hoped to sell Serenola for over a million dollars. Under the terms of the agreement, Amanda would receive 60 percent of the proceeds and Eric the rest after their legal expenses were paid; the house ultimately fetched $575,000; the court ordered Eric to pay $2,000 a month in child support and five hundred in alimony, plus 75 percent of the children’s medical expenses. Custody of the children would be shared.

  Now that the Prokopis’ time in Gainesville was coming to an end, their friend Jill Hennessy Shea assembled and bound a 240-page photo book called Never a Dull Moment, celebrating the Prokopis’ twelve years in town. “Never a dull moment” was another of Amanda’s mottos, deployed cheerfully whenever something went wrong. The book’s photos told an ongoing story of birthday parties, Easter egg hunts, home renovations, Junior League soirees, and T. bataar, including a shot of Eric and Amanda captioned, “Installing a dinosaur skull in Leonardo DiCaprio’s foyer.” Amanda hoped the next family would love Serenola as much as hers had, but then she put Gainesville behind her and pointed the car north toward Williamsburg. It took less than an hour to move herself and the kids back into her childhood home, beyond the guard gates of Kingsmill. For the first time since SeaWorld, Amanda started looking for a full-time job.

  Before long, Eric and Tyler found a house together, half an hour east of Williamsburg, in Hayes, on the other side of the George P. Coleman Memorial Bridge, where ospreys and peregrine falcons flew sorties to and from their nests with live fish clutched in their claws. At the end of a gravel lane stood a white house with red shutters and terrible pink carpet. Eric had found the property via Craigslist as a land barter, a sort of rent-to-own arrangement. There were three bedrooms and two baths downstairs, and two small bedrooms and one bath upstairs, plus a sunporch, a garage, and two outbuildings, the smaller one as red as a Vermont barn. The house’s previous own
ers had tacked an incongruous vaulted family room onto the kitchen—the place looked like a cottage that had sprouted a ski lodge. The sliding back door didn’t lock—Eric stuffed a rag where the handle used to be, to keep the mosquitoes out. The pitch of the staircase was such that you had to lean into it going up and lean back going down. The upstairs bath’s wallpaper (ducks) was peeling, as was the linoleum. There were holes in the kitchen wall and the ceiling of the master bedroom. The air vents were jacked, the floorboards soft. Someone told Eric it must be depressing to live this way. Eric, who was waiting to learn whether he was going to prison, replied, “This is the least of what’s depressing.”

  Even though he now faced a possible long sentence and crushing fines, he and Tyler hoped to renovate the house, whose chief attraction was its location on the York River, not far from where George Washington’s army and their French allies won the battle that secured America’s victory in the Revolutionary War. Beneath the back deck lived a woodchuck. A parabolic sloop of a clothesline hung between pines. Down past the tall grasses lay a white knuckle of beach where turtles hatched in the sand, leaving bits of shell in the seaweed. The property once had a boardwalk, but the planking had disintegrated somewhere around the third piling, disconnecting the pier from shore.

  To earn money, Eric prepped fossils for the dealers who still spoke to him, or sold leftover Pleistocene items from his early inventory, from back when he hunted in rivers. He and Tyler spent hours at low tide, searching the shoreline for shell and bone. A nice Chesapecten jeffersonius—the extinct scallop that is the state fossil of Virginia—alone could fetch up to twenty bucks. For steady pay, Tyler took a bartending job. Eric found a used van on Craigslist for next to nothing, with side panels that bore the peeling remnants of cartoonish decals that once advertised a preschool. On weekends, he and Tyler prowled country auctions, collecting inexpensive vintage objects that they could refurbish and sell at those same auctions or on eBay. They found that they could buy a load of scrap metal, take it directly to a scrapyard, and drive off with cash. Whenever they saw an obviously abandoned house, they ventured inside, “treasure hunting.”

  Amanda, meanwhile, found a full-time job at an interior design company, helping rich people redecorate their yachts. One day she worked up her nerve and went to the county welfare office to see about getting health insurance for herself and the kids, but was told that in order to qualify, she’d need to prosecute Eric for nonpayment of child support, which she wasn’t willing to do. His inflamed eye was getting worse, and they briefly worried that he had Crohn’s disease, a painful bowel condition. She didn’t want to add one more stress to her children’s father’s life, because he still seemed close to breaking.

  Eric’s best chance at avoiding lengthy incarceration rested with acting as a government “cooperator.” Cooperators help prosecutors understand an industry and in exchange may avoid a long prison term and high fines (think Frank Abagnale Jr., the prolific con artist, forger, and FBI dodger whose crimes inspired the movie Catch Me If You Can). Prosecutors could recommend a lenient sentence for a nonviolent cooperator, but ultimately, sentencing judges could do whatever they wanted, within the federal guidelines. The consensus among case lawyers was that as a cooperator Eric wouldn’t see time.

  To start the process, he’d had to make a proffer, which, within the context of criminal law, is a written understanding between the government and a defendant who volunteers information hoping the court will go lighter on him. A proffer is technically different from turning state’s evidence, in which a defendant flips after being guaranteed a certain outcome, such as immunity or witness protection. A major protection that’s built into a proffer is that prosecutors can’t use a defendant’s revelations against him unless he lies about something. The one outcome Eric could probably count on, if he didn’t cooperate, was prison. “Ultimately we’re the house,” one prosecutor later explained. “And the rules are set up in such a way that if you’re not candid with us in that setting, we’ve got ways to come back and bite you.”

  Eric’s enemies were fine with the thought of him heading to lockup. Others, including at least one somewhat remorseful scientist involved in the T. bataar case, felt probation was probably a fair enough punishment, even though they considered Eric reckless and a liar. One of the government officials thought of him as “one of the more sympathetic defendants,” saying he appeared “driven by the bottom line but also by a genuine fascination with fossils themselves and a joy and pride in having learned how to put them together into art in a way that other people can’t do.” Sharon Levin, the assistant U.S. attorney who had brought the civil asset forfeiture case, felt less sanguine about it: “In the scheme of things, in terms of crime, no one died; he didn’t defraud people of millions of dollars; he was no Osama bin Laden. That said, he participated in a conspiracy to steal from the people of Mongolia and to make money off of that. Maybe he thought this was a minor evil versus supporting his family, but at the end of the day the consequences of his actions are that he’s going to be punished. He took a risk and it didn’t work out for him. No one hated him, he wasn’t evil; but he was caught doing something illegal.”

  Prosecutors and federal agents were used to all kinds of defendant behavior—minimization to mania to emotional distress signals like anger, shame, and fear. But Prokopi, man—he was a sphinx. “It did take some work...speaking with him and understanding exactly the precise series of events,” Martin Bell, the assistant U.S. attorney on the criminal case, later told one judge in court. Talkers are exhausting, but at least they provide insights into why they do what they do, why they are the way they are. John Laroche, the Florida plant poacher Susan Orlean wrote about in The Orchid Thief, once said, “People look at what I did and think, Is that moral? Is that right? Well, isn’t every great thing the result of that kind of struggle? Look at something like atomic energy. It can be diabolic or it can be a blessing. Evil or good. Well, that’s where the give is—at the edge of ethics. And that’s exactly where I like to live.” You weren’t about to get that kind of sentiment out of Eric. The authorities realized it was simply in his nature to say little. It was a personality trait that probably would have worked against him at trial. “He’s such a difficult person for the average person to believe, just because of the way he communicates,” said someone close to the case.

  The heart of his proffer involved surrendering the T. bataar and acknowledging that there were more Mongolian dinosaurs in circulation. Eric wanted to cooperate without ratting anybody out, figuring that investigators already knew plenty from having read his emails, but the prosecutors walked away with what they wanted to know. Federal agents were soon knocking on doors in several states.

  When all this started, it simply never occurred to Eric that he might get caught, or that there were serious consequences to getting caught. To him, the first trip to Mongolia was equal parts income and adventure, not unlike the setup he had seen described in the GEO cover story about the German dealer Andreas Guhr. He had never been arrested and didn’t think to be afraid of it.

  If he had read up on Mongolia’s criminal justice system alone, he might have decided to stay home. Despite the nation’s impressive democratic strides, a Mongolian detention center was an awful place to be. One of the sights Roy Chapman Andrews never forgot, albeit in a much earlier and different era, was that of the prison at Urga. “There the unfortunate prisoners, some of the condemned on charges of petty larceny or the like, were placed in coffins and covered with earth except for the face,” he once said. Others were held in a position in which they could neither stand up nor sit down. “The most fiendish tortures were practiced on the inmates, tortures in which the savagery of the Russians was combined with the fiendish and refined cunning of the Chinese.”

  Mongolian detention centers and prisons were still so bad that the government had asked the United Nations for an independent assessment in order to meet international human rights standards, which partly dictated foreign aid. �
��Torture persists, particularly in police stations and pre-trial detention facilities,” Manfred Nowak, the UN’s special rapporteur on torture, found as recently as 2005. Two prisoners had been tortured to death. The torturers got away with it partly because while Mongolia’s constitution provided that “no one shall be subjected to torture, inhuman, cruel, or degrading treatment,” the criminal code failed to address torture at all—didn’t even define it. Even Mongolia’s legal and judicial community appeared fundamentally unaware of what constituted torture. Nowak was, however, able to document methods: needles under the fingernails; cigarette burns; beatings; “flying to space,” wherein a person stood on a stool and had it kicked out from under him; and electroshock via a lightbulb socket, wires, and a puddle of water. A suspect could be detained by an ever-changing confusion of government agencies. Pretrial confinement could range from fourteen days to thirty months. Suspects under eighteen could be held for up to a year and a half without being charged. Foreign citizens who hadn’t been charged with a crime could be denied exit visas and banned indefinitely from leaving the country, even for vague and unsubstantiated business disagreements. In one high-profile case, a U.S. businessman was prevented from leaving the country for two years. “Mere complaint by an aggrieved party is sufficient to deny exit,” the U.S. embassy reported.