The judge agreed.
“Should he come into more money at a later date,” Detective Sergeant Joe Quinlivan of the Hertfordshire Constabulary’s Economic Crime Unit told reporters, “police will be seeking this from him up to the total outstanding figure.”
“This is a very positive result for us and sends a strong message that making money through crime never pays,” he added.
Though Edwin had volunteered a number of his customers’ names during the interrogation, as far as the police were concerned, the case was closed. They didn’t have the resources to troll through forums and eBay and PayPal records in hope of recovering more of the skins, which would likely have been separated from their tags and therefore worthless to the Tring.
But the fallout continued to reverberate through the fly-tying community. Several of Edwin’s customers, including “Mortimer,” the American dentist, and Dave Carne, sent birds in varying degrees of degradation back to the museum. A number who had done so were now planning to bring personal lawsuits against Edwin, seeking restitution.
Jens Pilgaard, the Danish blacksmith, returned a number of birds that he’d bought from Edwin. He had already sold the Flame Bowerbird to another fly-tier, but when he discovered it was part of the Tring heist, he insisted on buying it back so that it could be sent to the museum. He asked Adele if the $4,500 Malayan Peacock Pheasant he’d traded Edwin might be returned to him, cc’ing Edwin’s father, Curtis, on his e-mail. Curtis had reached out to a number of the angriest buyers, seeking to make right by them. “If you can give me a full accounting, in dollars, I will send this off to you,” he wrote to Jens, at the same time making clear that he would not do so if Jens was planning to sue his son. “You cannot have it both ways, I am sure you understand.” He now found himself warding off potential fraud claims against Edwin. Jens returned the skins but was never compensated by Curtis.
Dave Carne, who had borrowed thousands of dollars from his mother in order to purchase an Indian Crow cape, first found out about Edwin’s arrest when Curtis e-mailed him “out of the blue” to see if he knew anyone who’d bought full skins from his son. Carne nearly cried at the disappointment of thinking he would lose a skin he’d been trying to get hold of for five years.
He recalls Curtis saying that if he didn’t return his patch to the Tring, he might “get raided by the police”—a terrifying prospect. “Having a load of local bobbies piling into the house would of course have been disastrous since they in ignorance would have just collected every feather in my tying and then I’d have had to spend months proving they hadn’t come from Edwin—and would probably STILL not have had them back now.”
Carne was angry. When he returned the Indian Crow cape to the museum, he was informed by authorities that he could make a claim against Edwin for extracting money under false pretenses. Months after being persuaded by Curtis not to press suit, Carne finally received compensation.
* * *
–
The spring 2011 issue of Fly Tyer magazine, which had previously heralded Edwin as the “future of fly tying,” featured a new section called “The Fly-Tying Crime Report.” In a brief account of the burglary, Dick Talleur, a longtime columnist for the magazine, told the reporter about the time he’d seen two men arrested at a fly-tying show in Massachusetts: “We haven’t had any problems with the legal people in some time. I’m now afraid that good people who are trying to do it properly are going to be under the gun.”
But at ClassicFlyTying.com, Bud Guidry assiduously enforced his policy of “No Discussion of the Tring Incident.” If a newcomer made the mistake of referencing the name Edwin Rist or the Tring heist, he promptly deleted it. Before long, the community returned to normal. Within a few months, members began to post Indian Crow and Blue Chatterer feathers again. Birds of Paradise and Resplendent Quetzal feathers made regular yet brief appearances on eBay—suggesting they were being scooped up quickly. Whether any of these feathers had been plucked from the Tring’s missing skins was unclear, but the community’s hunger for feathers only continued to grow.
* * *
–
Back in Tring, Adele had mixed feelings about how the case had turned out. She was proud that she’d arrested the burglar and recovered so many of the skins for the museum in the process but was frustrated that Edwin wasn’t going to serve any time. She kept faith in the system, though, knowing it was the judge’s decision to make and his alone.
Chrimes, the Crown prosecutor, believed Dr. Baron-Cohen’s diagnosis of Asperger’s had swung the whole case. “Had there not been such a report,” he said, “it is likely that Mr. Rist would have received an immediate custodial sentence of some length.”
At the Natural History Museum, Dr. Prys-Jones was still reeling from the events of the past year. “The whole thing was a complete kick in the guts,” he said. “It was desperately, deeply depressing.” Despite its staff members’ private dismay, the museum maintained a more neutral public posture. In a press release dated April 8, the day of Edwin’s sentencing, Richard Lane, the museum’s head of science, was quoted as saying: “We are pleased the matter has been resolved. We would like to thank the police, media, public and fly-tying community for their help in recovering many of these priceless specimens but there has still been a terrible impact on our national collections.”
There were still a lot of birds missing, though. Of the 299 stolen, only 102 intact birds had been recovered with their labels attached. Seventy-two more had been seized from Edwin’s apartment without any labels, and another nineteen skins—all missing their tags—had been mailed to the museum by customers who were either named by Edwin or were compelled by conscience to return them. And while the curators at the Tring had numerous Ziploc bags with individual feathers, 106 birds were still missing.
The value of the outstanding Indian Crow, Cotinga, King Bird of Paradise, and Resplendent Quetzal skins alone easily topped $400,000, and this didn’t account for the missing Crimson Fruitcrows, Flame Bowerbirds, Magnificent Riflebirds, Superb Birds of Paradise, and Blue Birds of Paradise, which hit the market so infrequently that determining their true worth was difficult.
All this presumes selling the birds in one piece, wholesale. If someone were to pluck the feathers and sell them individually, the value would climb even higher.
Had Edwin already sold the 106 skins and hidden his profits somewhere beyond the reach of British authorities?
Had he stashed the skins somewhere else?
Had he sent them to someone he trusted for safekeeping?
But at this point, no one was looking for them, and no one was asking these questions.
Except for one guy, wading up a river in New Mexico.
III.
TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES
18
THE 21ST INTERNATIONAL FLY TYING SYMPOSIUM
Two weeks after Spencer Seim told me about the Tring heist, and only four months after Edwin’s sentencing, I dialed into a meeting with the National Security Council from a writer’s retreat in Taos, New Mexico. A handful of refugee organizations, including the List Project, had been invited to speak to the president’s senior advisers. The call didn’t go well. I was combative and frustrated, tired of hearing the same official excuses for inaction. As soon as I hung up, I gathered up my fishing gear and sped off toward the snow-dusted Sangre de Cristo Mountains, anticipating the moment my phone lost its signal.
I parked my car on the eastern rim of the Rio Grande river valley and hiked down the Little Arsenic into the gorge. The sound of water breaking over truck-size boulders echoed against the canyon walls, drowning out my thoughts. After about an hour, I reached the river and assembled my fly rod. My waders clung tightly to my legs in the frigid water, and my breathing slowed as I started to cast.
The fly, a tuft of elk hair fashioned into the shape of a mothlike caddis fly, drifted quickly across the surface of the river. As I sloshed along in sol
itude, searching for trout, I wondered how I would ever put the war behind me. I had spent a year trying to rebuild a country whose citizens didn’t want us there, a year recovering from a near-death experience and post-traumatic stress, and the subsequent half decade struggling against my own government on behalf of refugees that nobody wanted here. I might have been depressed, were it not for the strange story of the feather thief.
In the short time since I’d heard about the incident, I had become consumed by the crimes of Edwin Rist. It was so bizarre as to be distracting. After Spencer mentioned the ClassicFlyTying.com forum, I signed up and searched for “Edwin,” finding two posts from November 2009, where he said he was selling Indian Crow feathers in order to buy a new flute. I printed them out, then copied down the names of everyone who had replied. I found Bud Guidry’s post, declaring that all subsequent Tring-related discussions would be removed, and I wondered what else had been deleted. I found customer reviews for “Fluteplayer 1988” on eBay and videos of Edwin on YouTube.
I didn’t have a strategy. I didn’t have any experience tracking thieves. I didn’t know anything about birds or salmon flies. In my free time, I clicked away, printing out the conversations of a strange subculture that had spawned this almost unbelievable crime.
I kept asking Spencer for help deciphering the jargon in the forum. Whenever we fished, I peppered him with questions about Victorian fly-tiers and the feathers they used. In an effort to understand the allure of the art form, I spent six hours at his home learning to tie the Red Rover, a yellow, orange, and red fly described in Kelson’s The Salmon Fly. While his tawny lab, Boomer, dozed at his feet and Townes Van Zandt warbled from an unseen radio, Spencer explained the arcane techniques required to tether plumes to a hook, patiently answering my barrage of questions.
I mentioned an article in the British press that suggested the Tring was still missing more than one hundred of its birds, allegedly worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and asked if he thought the fly-tying community still had them.
“If you really want to find out,” he said, with a glint in his eye, “get yourself to Somerset.”
Two weeks later, after discovering that I had been removed from the National Security Council’s invitation list for future meetings, I found myself searching for plane tickets to attend the 21st International Fly Tying Symposium at the DoubleTree Hotel in Somerset, New Jersey. I was aware that I was running from my problems, but I had the crazy thought that if I just showed up, I might stumble upon the missing birds of Tring.
* * *
–
Outside the DoubleTree, semis barreled down Interstate 287 over the Raritan River. In the late November chill, I cut across the parking lot and saw John McLain—immediately recognizable from photos I’d seen on the forum—burn a cigarette down in what seemed like three drags near a hotel side door. The proprietor of FeathersMc.com had a fresh gash running across his forehead and a “don’t ask” look on his face. I considered posing some questions about Edwin, but when he shot a steely glance at me, I nervously hurried past him.
Inside, hundreds of tiers milled about, their shopping bags glowing with brightly colored feathers as they wandered the grand hall. In a nearby booth, a customer held a lime-green dyed pelt of chicken neck feathers up to the light, squinting at it as if inspecting a diamond’s clarity. Behind him were hundreds of skins and patches and packets of feathers, piled in bins, hanging on racks. In aisle after aisle, vendors hawked hooks, books, tinsel, and fur. Small clusters of men with handlebar moustaches and Members Only jackets gathered quietly around the booths of celebrity fly-tiers, who bowed over their vises in monastic concentration, peering through visor magnifiers as they coaxed feathers onto the hook.
What the hell was I doing there?
Poking around an online forum was one thing, but traveling to their convention was a serious escalation. I suddenly felt ridiculous and unsure of myself. I had a small pile of printouts related to the Tring theft, but what did I really know? I couldn’t tell one subspecies from the next or which were protected by CITES; I barely knew anything about tying. Surrounded by these strange men and their dead birds, I felt wildly out of place.
I slinked over to a booth belonging to Roger Plourde, a man whose name I recognized from the forums. He was tying a salmon fly before a handful of spectators. During a particularly challenging step in the process, when the slightest twitch or loss of tension in the thread could cause the whole thing to unspool, a compact, bespectacled man of fifty held his breath and puffed his cheeks before blowing out a prolonged whistle of admiration that sounded like a bomb plummeting to earth. The others nodded and huddled closer.
Plourde had first caught my attention when I stumbled across a fly he had designed as a response to the attacks of 9/11. To commemorate the departed, the America fly used gold tinsel, red, white, and royal blue silk, and the feathers of seven birds, among them Kingfisher, Kenya Crested Guinea Fowl, and Blue and Gold Macaw. America went for $350 at auction, but I could tell from one look at Plourde’s booth that the real money wasn’t in selling flies; it was crammed into waist-high crates of bird parts—wings, tails, capes, breasts, necks—for sale in his booth. One bin was filled with Ziplocs of severed Parakeet heads, all frozen in midchirp.
“Got any Indian Crow or Chatterer?” I asked, trying to sound casual.
Plourde glanced up from his vise and sized me up with a stern look. After a moment, he produced a large binder from beneath the table and handed it to me. My heart raced as I flipped through page after page of iridescent blue and tiny black and orange feathers. Why had he hidden them under the table? Were these from the Tring’s birds? Was it even legal for him to sell these feathers? What if an agent from Fish and Wildlife saw us?
“How much for this set?” I asked, my voice quivering as I pointed to a sleeve of eight Indian Crow feathers.
“Those are ninety.”
“Wow, okay.”
Plourde saw in an instant that I wasn’t a serious customer and turned back to his fly. Impulsively, I said I was thinking of writing something about the theft of birds from the Tring. A flash of anger appeared on his face as he took the binder, returned it to its hiding place, and resumed tying. An uncomfortable silence hung, until he finally spoke, without looking up from his fly:
“I don’t think you want to write that story.”
“No? Why not?”
“Because we’re a tight-knit community, fly-tiers,” he replied, locking eyes with me, “and you do not want to piss us off.”
Taken aback, I looked around at the other spectators. The whistler was glaring at me.
Between Fallujah and battling the government, I was used to all manner of threats, but there was something exhilarating about receiving one from a man with a pinch of feathers in his hand. It felt as though I were onto something.
“Just so you know,” muttered Plourde, “I didn’t buy any of those birds.”
* * *
–
It didn’t take long for the rest of the symposium attendees to identify me as an outsider. I had come without a plan and had seemingly blown my chance, within a few minutes of arriving, to find out what happened to the rest of the Tring’s birds. I spent most of the day walking around with two hundred hefty men scowling at me. If I asked for Birds of Paradise or Indian Crow, all I’d get in return was a contemptuous smile and feigned look of surprise.
Not wanting to leave empty-handed, I screwed up my resolve and marched over to the booth of the man I’d seen outside, who had sold Edwin his first feathers.
John McLain wore a baggy black thermal shirt, his trousers hoisted up by suspenders. His white hair was close-cropped, and his eyes were weary. As I watched him interact with a customer in his FeathersMc.com booth, something about the former detective seemed out of place, as though he couldn’t believe where retirement had taken him. When I asked if he’d speak with me about the
Tring heist, he considered it for a moment before throwing on his winter coat. “What the hell, it’s time for my smoking break.” I followed him out the side door into the parking lot.
“Okay, so whaddya wanna know?” he asked, lighting a cigarette.
“Well, first off, how worried should I be?” I joked, telling him about Plourde’s comment.
“Yeah, Guido’s gonna come after you!” McLain chuckled, shaking his head. “They gonna shut you up. . . . East River’s calling!”
When I asked him about Edwin, he said he could never have imagined Edwin would do something so stupid as to break into a museum, but at the same time, he recognized the spell these birds cast over the community: “Everybody joneses after real Indian Crow! You look at these adult men that get weak in the knees, all over a handful of stupid little feathers! I mean, it is really bizarre when you think about it.” But he wasn’t too concerned about the legacy of the Edwin’s theft. “There’s no huge impact,” he said—except that “probably no fly-tier will ever be let into the back room of a museum again.
“I go back to my life as a career police officer. What did he steal? Feathers? Well yeah, but it’s still property crime.” He lit another cigarette. “To me, violent crime needs to be locked up.”
We sat for a moment in silence. Yes, Edwin hadn’t physically hurt anyone in the act of stealing the Tring’s birds, but it seemed more significant to me than property crime.
“But John,” I said, “he took two hundred and ninety-nine birds! And a lot of them are still missing! Where are they?”
The Feather Thief Page 15