I wanted someone to step forward and claim responsibility, to own up to their actions.
We walked around the Aker Brygge neighborhood, at the heart of which is the Thief Hotel. Even though he clearly hoped the interrogation was over, I couldn’t resist reopening the topic.
“What was so great about your friendship with Edwin that you decided to stand by him after everything? At such a huge cost to your reputation?” I asked, referencing the public allegations on Facebook.
He shot me a pained look. “I thought that’s what being a friend meant.”
At the same time, Long admitted he didn’t know Edwin all that well. When I asked why he would risk so much for someone he wasn’t even all that close to, he exclaimed, “I idolized Edwin! He was the best tier of our generation. So when he asked me to help with raising money for a new flute, I was proud.”
“You saw it as an honor,” I volunteered.
“Yes, very much.”
That night we went to a dinner party with four Norwegian fly-tiers, feasting on fresh-killed venison, clams, and aquavit. The more time I spent with Long, the sorrier I felt for him, and the angrier I grew toward Edwin, who must have sensed his friend’s vulnerability and exploited it. He had involved Long in a crime without his knowledge, asking him to handle stolen goods, to accept and forward payments for illegal materials, at a time when he knew that British law enforcement was searching for them. Even during our interview in Düsseldorf, long after he’d escaped the grip of the law, Edwin still seemed content to let clouds hover over his friend.
* * *
–
On my last day in Norway, though, I woke up in an ornery mood. Somehow the purpose of the weekend seemed to have slipped from my grasp. Over some twenty hours of interrogation, Long’s role had shrunk from mastermind of the Tring heist to unwitting victim, a vulnerable kid with abandonment issues whose ultimate crime had been to trust someone he shouldn’t have. But I hadn’t made any progress on the question of the missing skins. Even if Long had been naïve enough to believe Edwin’s various fictions about the origin of the skins, he seemed frustratingly forgetful about the precise number of birds and feathers that had passed through his hands.
Had I been played? Had he preyed upon my empathy, supplying me with another version of events that I was all too ready to believe? I liked him. I wanted him to succeed in life, to emerge from this mess a better person. I didn’t want to unleash Adele or Interpol agents on him. But I had a nagging feeling that something had gone unsaid, and I wouldn’t be content until I knew what it was.
He offered to meet me on the front steps of the National Gallery. Twenty-one years earlier, on the first day of the 1994 Winter Olympics, when the nation’s attention was on Lillehammer, thieves had leaned a ladder against the gallery, climbed through a window, and made off with Edvard Munch’s The Scream. In its place, they left a postcard with a handwritten note: “Thanks for the poor security!” For years, Pål Enger, the ringleader, hid the masterpiece in a secret compartment in his kitchen table.
Long was in a chipper mood and made small talk as we headed down the street in search of lunch. I listened halfheartedly but eventually lost patience and erupted: “I think you’ve been honest with me, Long, but it feels like you’re still holding something back. There were so many steps to this! He sent you the birds, skins, he sent you feathers already prepared in bags! He sent you the photos! He asked you to mail them! He asked you to take the payments and forward the money to him!”
I stole a glance at him. He was looking down at the pavement, hands in his coat pockets, as cars and strollers whizzed past.
“Even if you were a trusting person and looked up to Edwin,” I continued, “it seems like there were so many steps where a reasonable person would say ‘What is going on here?!’ And you’re not a dummy! You’re a very bright, talented person.”
After a pause as long as a city block, he spoke. “I feel like there shouldn’t be any reason to believe me, because it sounds too . . . too illogical.”
His voice was soft. “I feel like just being in that situation is so hopeless. I’m not holding anything back, but it feels like being trapped inside this cage. It doesn’t matter what I tell.”
“No!” I shot back. “Nothing’s hopeless. It does matter what you say. I’ve heard from two people in the last year, for example, that you’ve told them that you have tons of Indian Crow . . . and I don’t know what to make of that, whether to doubt what they’re saying or doubt you. I’m just trying to—”
“Extract the truth,” he offered quietly.
“So what am I supposed to do with that knowledge?” I asked.
“You do whatever you need—”
“But is it true?”
“Yeah.” He seemed to be shrinking before my eyes, his voice growing fainter, his pace slowing.
“You have a lot of Indian Crow?”
“I have . . . I still have some of the packages of the ones I was supposed to sell.”
He had opened the door a crack, and I came barging through.
“How many?”
“Um . . . a hundred and ten maybe?”
“Birds?!” I exclaimed.
“No, just feathers.”
“What are the species?” I asked, trying to keep my composure.
“Granadensis. Pyroderus scutatus scutatus. Pyroderus scutatus occidentalis. I think it’s around a hundred and ten. It could be around a hundred or a hundred and twenty.”
“But we’re in 2015 now. What did you have four years ago?”
He was clearly in agony. I knew he was hungry, but I kept flogging us forward, nixing his restaurant suggestions, unwilling to let anything interrupt the moment.
He sighed. “It’s really hard to just number because there’s a low number in each package. And I didn’t count those packages, like how many packages and how many feathers. . . . I don’t remember how many were sold. I think maybe I sold half of them, and then I had half the packages.” I knew he had a number in mind, and that he was fighting like hell not to mention it.
Finally, after much prodding, he estimated the total number of loose feathers at between six hundred and eight hundred.
We stepped into Arakataka, an upscale Nordic restaurant a mile or so from the gallery. Under any other circumstances, eating at a place like this would have been a special occasion: how many chances does one get to have fried cod tongue or cabbage and razor clam? But Long was in the process of admitting something he’d never told a soul. And the act of telling me meant letting go of a narrative he’d been embracing for years: that the community of fly-tiers had unfairly maligned his reputation by accusing him of involvement with Edwin. He was coming to acknowledge the uncomfortable truth of what they said at last.
The waiter was walking away with our order when I leaned forward and asked, for maybe the twelfth time that weekend, how many skins Edwin had sent him to sell. For the first two days, he’d held firm at only three or four, but in the wake of the admission, I had to ask: “How many skins, Long? Was it ten? Or was it fifty?”
“It was between ten and twenty,” his voice barely audible over the Norwegian pop music. “But definitely nothing like fifty skins.”
I leaned back in the booth. Depending on the species, the value of twenty skins could be anywhere between $20,000 and $125,000. If the feathers had been plucked and sold retail, the number would only climb. The value of eight hundred Indian Crow feathers, presumably part of his payment from Edwin, could top $7,000.
His eyes were worriedly searching mine for some kind of reaction.
“Long, you know you have to show me them, right?”
“Yes.” The weight of the admission pressed down upon us, dimming the world beyond our table. I looked up and saw tears streaking down his cheeks. Embarrassed, he excused himself and hurried off to the bathroom.
When he fi
nally returned to the table, our waiter cheerfully appeared with our feast, placing a large crab with a pitiful hole cracked into its shell before me. Long stared down blankly at a plate of monkfish and hake. Neither of us had much of an appetite.
I thought back to Edwin’s bravura performance in Düsseldorf, how he’d emphatically declared that Long was in no way involved but then grinned when he acknowledged that the case against his friend “looks bad.” I remembered that Edwin had reached out to Long immediately after our interview, suggesting that he speak with me.
“What did Edwin tell you to say to me?” I asked. “Did he tell you to lie to me?”
“He said that you’re not my friend, that we shouldn’t become friends. He said ‘We don’t owe him anything,’ and that I should get you to pay for all the food and everything.”
I laughed. “Where did you hide the feathers before I came?”
“I just had them in a box.”
We barely spoke on the train back out to Asker. While I was about to see what I’d spent years searching for, what I felt was not triumph but concern: what would happen to Long if I told Adele about his involvement? It was pitch-black when we got off at Bondivann station. He dragged his feet as we made our way through the woods, as if I might change my mind, or a meteor might strike and relieve him of the need to show me the feathers.
Halfway up the path, I asked him how he felt. He stopped to catch his breath. He was in good shape, but in this moment he was exhausted. “I feel empty.”
He emerged from his apartment with a small stamp album. It had a translucent gray cover with some Japanese writing on it. Our plan was to walk to a bar somewhere in Asker to look through it, but I couldn’t wait.
Under a streetlamp just outside town, I opened it up to find feathers arrayed like stamps, five rows per page, with plastic sleeves protecting the plumes, which glittered like tiny orange, sapphire, and turquoise gems against the black background. The first page alone held over fifty Indian Crow and Blue Chatterer feathers.
I tried to mask my exhilaration as I pulled out my phone and took photos of each page, keeping a rough tally of the feathers. As I turned the pages, I thought of the chain of events that had led to this moment: hundreds of years of specimen collecting, a youthful love of fly-tying that had mutated into something disastrous, the meticulous plot and heist itself, the chance encounter with Spencer on a river in New Mexico. At the same time, I realized that I was looking at a minute fraction of what was still missing from the Tring—all together, they might have amounted to only one bird’s worth of feathers.
I handed him the album.
As we headed off in search of a pint, I asked him how it felt to show them to me.
“I haven’t felt this bad since my mom died,” Long said after a lengthy silence. He said he didn’t even feel comfortable looking at them and wanted to get rid of them.
He asked if I could take them with me and return them to the Tring. I smiled. I had hoped to leave Norway with a suitcase full of bird skins, with tags attached. As much as I would’ve enjoyed sending the album to the museum, I declined, saying that the decision was his to make.
“What will the museum do with them?” he asked hopefully.
“Probably nothing, honestly. They’re going to put them in a drawer, and they’ll sit there until long after we’re gone.”
24
MICHELANGELO VANISHES
Months after my return, Long wrote to say that his grades had plummeted. Since the interview, he felt as though his “life source had drained away,” and he was ashamed that he had become so obsessed with something that had such a dark side. But when I asked if he’d sent the feathers back to the museum, he said he hadn’t yet found the time. I was beginning to worry that he wouldn’t break free from their pull. Even so, I wasn’t going to notify Adele about my discovery. Long had made his share of mistakes, but it bothered me that he seemed to be suffering the consequences of the Tring heist more than Edwin himself.
Edwin had used him, setting him up as a fence, so that anyone digging into the crime would find a great big X marking someone else. Why else have Long make posts to the forum on his behalf? Why send feathers and skins to Norway for Long to ship them to his own customers? Why ask Long to handle payments through his own PayPal account, if not to set him up as the fall guy? There was no other way to interpret Edwin’s actions than as creating a smokescreen, implicating a friend who idolized him while he took the money and ran.
What kind of person would do this? In the aftermath of my interview with Long, with Edwin’s actions seeming so transparently calculated, I was even more skeptical about the Asperger’s diagnosis. Could he really have faked it?
My first attempt to speak about it with Dr. Simon Baron-Cohen fizzled quickly: he told me that, for obvious ethical reasons, he could not discuss details of the case without Edwin’s permission. But when I asked him if, in theory, someone could fake Asperger’s, he replied that the diagnosis ultimately relied on clinical judgment.
“There is no biological test of autism,” he wrote. “This means, as with any psychiatric diagnosis, that in principle someone could fake it by providing false information in answer to a clinician’s interview questions, but even then clinical judgment and experience (is the person lying?) comes into play.”
Baron-Cohen was asking me to trust his judgment, but after reading a copy of his report to the court, which was leaked to me from someone close to Edwin, I found basic errors—that Edwin “had not been motivated by money” and that he didn’t think he had “done anything bad in taking the stuffed birds.” Baron-Cohen’s misreading was perhaps the unavoidable consequence of a single evaluation. I’d spent years building a timeline of the crime; the Cambridge psychopathologist had met him for a couple hours.
Or perhaps it was an unavoidable consequence of the squishiness of the diagnosis process itself. In his report to the court, Baron-Cohen buttressed his diagnosis by citing Edwin’s “scores” on the Adult Asperger’s Assessment, but there was ample reason to doubt the validity of answers to questions like “I find it easy to work out what someone is thinking or feeling just by looking at their face.” In a 2011 Nature article, Francesca Happé, a cognitive neuroscientist at King’s College London, voiced her skepticism of Baron-Cohen’s diagnostic tool: “Whether those self-perceptions, as with any of our self-perceptions, are accurate is questionable.” Baron-Cohen’s adviser, Uta Frith, echoed Happé: “Rigorous studies are still missing. . . . At the moment, he has people saying ‘yes, I’m a person interested in details,’ as opposed to actually observing them on tasks.”
Two years after the diagnosis spared Edwin from prison, the American Psychiatric Association expunged the disorder from the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The controversial shift—dropping Asperger’s as a stand-alone disorder only nineteen years after it was included in the previous edition—happened “in large part because studies revealed little consistency in how the diagnosis was being applied,” according to The Atlantic’s Hanna Rosin. After extensive review, the authors of an Archives of General Psychiatry report found that children with similar test scores were given different diagnoses: “Whether a child was labeled as having Asperger’s or diagnosed instead with autism, or some other developmental disorder, depended mostly on the clinician’s somewhat arbitrary interpretation.”
In an op-ed about the decision to drop Asperger’s from the DSM-V, Baron-Cohen wrote, “Psychiatric diagnoses are not set in stone. They are ‘manmade,’ and different generations of doctors sit around the committee table and change how we think about ‘mental disorders.’”
* * *
• • •
I sensed that I was coming to the end of the road. Edwin was no longer replying to my e-mails, and the truth about Long had been revealed. But as thrilled as I was to lay my eyes on Long’s album of feathers, I knew that I hadn’t ye
t solved the mystery, and that the bulk of the Tring’s missing birds were still out there. In a final search for clues, I combed through more than a thousand pages of transcripts of all the people I’d interviewed over the years, but I found that I couldn’t stop thinking about the one person close to the story who had so far eluded me.
The Tring’s curators told me their suspicions initially fell upon the Québécois tier Luc Couturier after discovering an e-mail from him, dated two years prior, asking whether the museum would be willing to sell a number of their Indian Crow skins. They declined, offering to sell a high-resolution photograph of the bird instead. It was an unusual enough request that they mentioned it to Adele in the early phase of her investigation, but she ruled him out as a suspect.
In Düsseldorf, Edwin had told me that his former mentor, whom he described as the Michelangelo of fly-tying, had not only been inside the Tring’s bird vault at some point in the nineties—which the museum disputes—but had first encouraged him to visit the museum. At one point in the interview, Edwin said he’d sent Long some skins because he thought his friend “deserved them” for his flies. I wondered: had he also sent some to Couturier?
My suspicion mounted as I trawled through Couturier’s inactive LinkedIn account and noticed that he was “connected” with Dr. Paul Sweet, the bird skins collection manager at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. I fired a note off to Sweet, who revealed that in April 2010, Couturier had asked to be granted access to the museum’s collection of Birds of Paradise, Cotingas, and Indian Crows. When the curators asked for a reason, Couturier’s response—“to refine my knowledge and test some of my hypotheses”—didn’t pass scientific muster. He was denied entry.
The Feather Thief Page 22