Martin Bell
Appearances
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
I imagine something not unlike when OJ met those guys to talk about, you know, like his Trojans jersey and his memorabilia that weren't necessarily frontline at the actual shows.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
Right. But there's an interest. And, you know, every once in a while, you hear about movie stars who have purchased dinosaurs or dinosaur parts. And we'll talk about one of those later on. Yes. But, you know, for like a reasonably intact Tyrannosaurus skull.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
Right. Yes.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
T-Rex skull. Dinosaur fossil one and like, you know, used astronaut suit like number two. This is how I imagine myself as a wealthier person. Same. So we started to investigate. I should note, we worked with Homeland Security Investigations. I worked with a very talented agent named Daniel Brazier. who was my partner in all of this.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
We always partner with these folks who do the legwork and sometimes the dangerous stuff.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
In the dinosaur criminal universe, there are really two sides. There are the agencies that do the legwork, track down the dinosaurs and execute the search warrants, and the lawyers who do the stuff I did.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
Bong bong. given that Mongolia owns everything that comes out of the ground unless they give express written consent of the Mongolian cultural patrimony organization.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
It wasn't that hard to put together search warrants and to eventually plan the execution of a search warrant at his home and workshop. It's one of those things where I went to work that day thinking I am going to run point from my office in New York on this raid of a dinosaur assembly and rehabilitation operation. This was something different. I'm sitting there in my office.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
I get a call from Special Agent Brazier and he says, yeah, you won't believe what just happened. And I'm like, okay. And he says, we're sitting there executing the search warrant and this truck rolls up like a UPS or it might've been DHL delivery truck with a big crate that all but says, careful, treat with care, dinosaur fossils inside it. And so do you think we can get a warrant for this?
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
I really think that, like, I've tried to describe my relationship with you, and somebody once sort of furrowed their brow and said, "'Protege?' And I'm like, "'No.'" Sort of just like an alternate sliding doors type scenario. If I had your talent, which I don't, to be clear.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
Yes, I think we can get a warrant for that, I said. And it's just one of those moments where you're just like, is this serious? Like you could do drug or money laundering or stolen property prosecutions forever and never have a moment quite like that. Right. Where while you're doing the search warrant, people show up with more contraband.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
Mr. Prokopi had an entire garage out back of his home in Gainesville, or just outside of Gainesville, where he was working on a good number of fossils that seemed to trace back to Mongolia, and in fact, had taken a number of pictures of what seemed to be him in the Gobi Desert with others extracting these fossils from the ground. and some of them had already been sold.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
Interestingly, the piece that arrived during our raid... Yeah, what was that? ...was a particularly special piece called the Graveyard of the Overraptors.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
We are the graveyard of the Overraptors. It's just, you know, do free bird. The graveyard of the Overraptors was a naturally made piece involving five or six Overraptors that had met some sort of common fate and were tangled up with each other. The Overraptors looked something like, and again with Jurassic Park as a reference, that one scene where there's a stampede
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
and they hide behind a sort of like ossified tree. Oviraptors are best known for and named for, as I understand it, being sort of egg-stealing dinosaurs. They steal other dinosaurs' eggs.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
Yes, yes, well done. So here's what we wind up learning. There are a handful of people who are the really key figures in this trade, who are known and of varying degrees of either innocence or the same sort of questionable nature. And I learned that this investigation is going to hit that trade generally like a thunderbolt because a lot of this had been happening in plain sight.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
It's an interesting sort of thing where we had the same trajectory for a while, and then one of us went through with law school and the other one didn't.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
Ultimately, we decided to plead Mr. Prokopi out on what's called a cooperation agreement. A cooperation agreement usually means that you are agreeing to testify against other people in exchange for lenience, or at least the hope of lenience. You can imagine with these cooperation agreements, we like to work our way up criminal organizations, not down. Mr. Prokopi didn't really have...
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
people to point upwards at. But he did have information that would help us secure a number of other dinosaur fossils, including information that a number of his sketchier friends in Florida were holding onto dinosaur fossils for him. We eventually recovered those fossils.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
And so at the end of the day, we had more than two dozen fossils or fossil pieces, including three Tyrannosauruses, an Ankylosaurus, that one with the armor on its back, that kind of looks like the Barclay Center. Some over-raptors, some gallimimuses, and some eggs here and there. Just an array of different types of fossils.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
We wind up having Mr. Prokopi plead guilty pursuant to a cooperation agreement, it's sort of an interesting thing because when you've got a first-time offender in a white-collar case, you usually expect that if that person pleads guilty to a cooperation agreement and has done what cooperation we ask of them, they're probably not going to go to jail.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
The sentence is supposed to, among other things, reflect the seriousness of the offense. There's no real blueprint for what a dinosaur cooperator gets. And our judge struggled mightily with what to do here. We were not arguing for any particular sentence that was in line with the office's policy at the time.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
But I do think that everything in my body English was suggesting that this guy shouldn't get time.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
So you don't have that same way. Right. So what do you compare him? But it's not necessarily a victimless crime.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
Mongolia. Mongolia is the victim. The Mongolia officials we dealt with from the lead paleontologists to folks involved with the Mongolian embassy, they felt this very, very strongly. Mongolia is not an incredibly wealthy country. And I think that there is a certain underdog mentality that attaches to that. And they're being kicked in a way that they saw as being worthy of meaningful punishment.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
What winds up happening is Mr. Prokopi winds up getting three months in jail.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
Sometime after that, we're now sitting on this big collection of fossils that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement has at a warehouse somewhere. And we commence the paperwork and the procedural stuff needed in order to do some repatriation ceremonies. And when you say ceremonies, how ceremonial are these ceremonies? We had multiple repatriation ceremonies. Wow.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
Mongolia sent pretty high-level Mongolian officials.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
They sent awards for us. I was one of a number of folks awarded the Mongolian Presidential Medal of Friendship and had it pinned to my lapel during this ceremony. So too did Robert Painter and Sharon, the Babe Ruth of Forfeiture.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
Yes, yes. It's exactly that. I will say the Mongolians obviously were incredibly grateful. And I'm not someone to nitpick when it comes to sincere displays of gratitude like that one. There was one thing that happened that made me shake my head ever so slightly. Because this had become a big story in Mongolia and apparently had been a big political issue during that year's Mongolian elections.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
President Elbigdorj ran for re-election and apparently securing and obtaining the repatriation of these fossils was listed among the big accomplishments of the Elbigdorj administration. And one of the bits of... want to call it propaganda.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
But materials that had been prepared in anticipation of this event was a children's book in which the first of the Batars was an actual living character, not in skeletal form, but in full flesh, was a character in the book discussing its return.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
The children's book sort of gave the story of how the Mongolian spirit wouldn't be crushed and how ultimately the dinosaur got to come back home, all sort of broken down in a way that young children could understand and presumably be read to in their yurts at night.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
Yes, yes. They would have this book. Yes. And there was one page... of this story, our story, dedicated to the court proceedings in New York, which depicted a sort of, you know, like fumbling, well-meaning American prosecutor. And that prosecutor was white. This is the time I will tell your audio listeners who may have been wondering, I am, in fact, quite black.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
Um, and I saw this and kind of shook my head a little bit because even if it's only for the Mongolian market, I don't want this story whitewashed. And God forbid, you know, Hollywood ever picks up with this. I don't want Matthew Broderick playing, you know, Prosecutor Bell. I think that like Don Cheadle or John David Washington or somebody ought to get a shot.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
And look, there was at one point perhaps a real possibility of this because a writer for The New Yorker who had attended a number of these proceedings wound up writing a very good piece. Yeah, this is Paige Williams. Paige Williams of The New Yorker, a very good piece of The New Yorker about this case that that took us up through the plea.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
And she later wrote a very dense but very good book about the case called The Dinosaur Artist, which I would recommend to anybody who finds this story remotely interesting. And it will tell you not only about the prosecution, but also more than you ever wanted to know about the fossil trade, about Mongolian history. It's this deep dive into all of these factors that led...
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
to this sort of extraordinary happening.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
It is bone deep in the Mongolian character. The Mongolians cared immensely about this and were so clearly grateful. And I didn't complain about the children's book depiction of me. And so we had a couple of other repatriation ceremonies because it took a little while for the cases to actually clear. For each of these clutches of dinosaurs, we had to file an action.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
And so some of those were actually more strangely titled than the one that you've alluded to. And at one point, I guess this takes us to the part of the story where Nicolas Cage gets involved.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
So, there comes a point where we are tracking down the various trajectories of these dinosaurs, and we realize that, um... a dinosaur that Nicolas Cage is known to have purchased in California for $200,000. That skull traced back to the Prokopi dinosaurs. It was a Bataar skull and as such was likewise forfeitable because it was interstate transfer property that was stolen.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
And originated in Mongolia. Originated in Mongolia, was stolen under Mongolian law. And so I reached out and contacted Nicolas Cage's attorneys. Right around this time, my wife had given birth to our first child, my daughter Zora. And I took a few weeks of paternity leave. And the event that brought me back from paternity was
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
was a business trip I had to take to Los Angeles in order to inspect with the agents Nicolas Cage's dinosaur skull in Nicolas Cage's storage depot. How Nicolas Cage was it? It wasn't as Nicolas Cage as one might expect it to be. There were some big and neat-looking geodes in there. I don't think he had a whole lot stored in there at the time.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
So we took a look at the skeleton, which existed in three parts at the time. It's sort of like each hemisphere of the head and then sort of like the lower, you know, sort of palette, which is longer than it would be on a person.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
And so we're like, all right, yep, this looks good. And that, too, was ultimately shipped east, received by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. We filed another action for that skull, so that had its own civil case.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
But that one, I think the last of the pieces involved in my case, was only repatriated I think it's within the past year and a half. There was a ceremony at the Library of Congress in which Immigrations and Customs Enforcement repatriated that skull along with several other pieces. And so it's just one of those things where... No, I'm just going to stop you there.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
I suppose that's right. I have my Mongolian Presidential Medal of Friendship hanging in my office on a little sort of custom frame that I got done at Michael's. I think to myself, well, there it is, exactly as I'd planned it. And I want to make a couple of things clear relatively early on rather than face the wrath of Nicolas Cage and his attorneys.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
One, Mr. Cage's attorneys could not have been nicer or more professional about the whole thing. Number two, Mr. Cage did the right thing.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
And I'm just grateful to have worked at a place that let me have what felt like actual adventures here and there.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
Somebody's got to have the tough job of separating the innocent rooms full of baby oil cases from the more suspect ones. And that's where the good people of my old workplace fit in.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
Ah, I have an answer. Mongolia ultimately repurposed an old Soviet-era office building in its capital, Ulaanbaatar, and the Baatar, Baatar bit is real, and turned it into a dinosaur museum and a major tourist attraction in Mongolia, largely based just on the haul that they got from this case. And it looks like a cool museum, honestly. Like it's a couple of stories high.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
They've got dramatic lighting. And it's just this thing that exists halfway across the world now, in part because of the work that I was lucky enough to be able to participate in with my agency partners and the folks who supervised me at the U.S. Attorney's Office. It's not the sort of thing that is going to get me a Times obituary or a first pitch at, you know, at Citi Field.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
Although, I mean, if Hawk Tua can do it, I've arguably earned it based on my contributions to science and Mongolia.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
I hope that if I do get that opportunity, if the movie is made, maybe they have the premiere in Ulaanbaatar. And as the room goes dark and the opening credits roll, I just imagine and hope that a number of the Mongolian audience will whisper to each other, I thought he was white.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
It's been an honor, man. Thanks for having me.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
I remember pretty vividly. Just a few weeks earlier, I walked into work and the chief of the forfeiture unit was sitting in my chair, a woman named Sharon Cohen-Levin. She looked up at me and smiled. I was not expecting a visit from her. And she's somebody who, by that time, had already come to be known as the Babe Ruth of forfeiture.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
So-called because I think at that point in her career, her unit was responsible for something like 95% of the forfeited assets in the federal system in the United States as measured by value. Billion-dollar judgments from banks, finance,
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
forfeiting stolen Nazi looted art worth millions and millions of dollars and doing things within the sort of art and craft of forfeiture that nobody else was doing. Sharon suggested that I give some thought to joining her unit. She knew I was into white collar stuff. She had already detected a little bit of whimsy in me.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
And she said, we've got the beginnings of something that I think you may like. And so this is how that story begins, I guess. And that made the news the next day because it's not the sort of thing that happens all the time.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
Good Lord. Look, I don't want to be gendered about this, but it's particularly true if you're a boy who grew up playing with plastic dinosaurs or who took, you know, the sort of field guide to dinosaurs out of the Brooklyn Public Library's central branch, as I did no fewer than 15 times as a kid.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
One of the most perfect movies ever made. Every part of it, Marty. From the score to the casting.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
The effects are still the best in the series, even though we've had 20 years of Jurassic Park movies since. It is a perfect movie. The sense of wonder that Alan Grant has as he removes his glasses. One of the greatest scenes in the history of cinema. As he grabs Ellie's head and points it toward where the dinosaur is.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
Yeah, it was wild stuff. there had been an attempted auction of a Tyrannosaurus Batara skeleton in midtown Manhattan. I say attempted because in a weird moment that I could only describe as cinematic, a man burst through the doors like the Kool-Aid man, and rather than saying, oh yeah, screamed, stop the bidding.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
He held a court order in his hand that the auction not proceed because of the suspicion that the item that the Tyrannosaurus Bataar skeleton was stolen.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
As I understand it, the reason why the lawyer, a lovely man named Robert Painter, was representing the Mongolian government is because he'd met the president of Mongolia at a party and given him his business card. And, you know, as one does, you just wait for the call at that point. That party,
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
wasn't somebody who was used to stopping dinosaur auctions, in part because no lawyer is used to stopping dinosaur auctions, but in part because he was a personal injury lawyer from Texas who was representing the Mongolian government in this case. Sharon, my boss, Babe Ruth of Forfeiture, reads about this and calls Robert
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
And Robert says, yeah, I stopped this auction from happening, which is great. I have no idea what to do next. And Sharon told him, and I could imagine her smiling on the phone as she does this, oh, I do. So we put together the beginnings of some court papers, a seizure warrant, and some other items that could make the claim that this was stolen property.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
In order to successfully seize something and ultimately forfeit it, it's got to be stolen property. How is a dinosaur fossil stolen property? Mongolia has very, very strict cultural patrimony laws, those laws that protect items of cultural importance to a particular government. And when you think cultural importance, you usually think it's a statue. or something that some ancient tribe made.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
The Temple of Dendur in the Met is an item of cultural importance. But increasingly, various sovereigns had considered natural things that once upon a time would have been looted by foreign governments to be protected items of cultural patrimony too.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
I think it's fair to say that this was one of the first really big cases, in part because it's rare that you get a near-complete Tyrannosaurus Batara skeleton. I should say, I've mentioned the Tyrannosaurus Batara thing before. We're used to the Tyrannosaurus Rex in sort of the popular imagination.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
Dinosaurs and their relatives.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
So a Tyrannosaurus Bataar is a cousin of the Rex. If you imagine the Tyrannosaurus Rex from Jurassic Park. The Babe Ruth of dinosaurs. The Babe Ruth of dinosaurs. The Bataar would be smaller, but still like 20 feet or so in length and native to Mongolia. And one of the interesting things, I say native to Mongolia, how do we know that? Yeah.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
And we had needed to establish this in order to get the information required for a seizure warrant. Right. Because you can't just have the government running around stealing people's dinosaur fossils without justification.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
And they were able to judge that it came from Mongolia, if only because in the entire history of paleontology, there's only one region that contains the soil composition that allows these particular fossils to be preserved. And that is the Nemect Basin in the Gobi Desert in Mongolia.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
Clever girl. And so with that probable cause having been established, we appeared before a judge in the Southern District of New York, and he was very enthusiastic about the case and its possibility, in large part because he too had once been an eight-year-old boy. And so he asked a number of questions that you don't get in most conferences, like, can it fit in my courtroom? Where can we put it?
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
What sort of assembly would be required? This was all happening on the civil side, but on the criminal side, we were trying to figure out whether a crime had been committed here. The same crime that sort of forms the basis for potential forfeiture action may also be prosecutable on its own.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
The crimes here were interstate transfer of stolen property, which is a federal statute, and false customs forms, because you can imagine the customs forms in this case had not actually said one Tyrannosaurus Batara skeleton. They'd been filled out somewhat misleadingly, and we were able to trace that.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
And so the guy who had consigned this to the auction house was a gentleman named Eric Prokopi, who had a regular business with an internet page that sold various types of organic matter as fossils. Unsurprisingly, he was based in Florida and the business was called Florida Fossils. Perfect.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
He was a fairly brawny guy. If he has the range for it, what is that guy who played the brother, the white brother in This Is Us and who now stars in that show Tracker? Sort of like an all-American seeming type. Justin Hartley. Yeah, I could imagine Justin Hartley playing Eric Prokofiev. A square jaw, certainly all-American.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
oh gosh, I did debate for the same high school program. I covered the baseball team in college that you would eventually cover for the school newspaper. I did the Sports Illustrated internship, I think, that you would eventually do. you might have been sitting in this chair. I think about this all the time, honestly.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
But the Florida fossils business, which, you know, it's a nice little shell here or a shell there.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
These are non-dinosaur fossils, or if they are dinosaur fossils, they are domestic dinosaur fossils that he enthusiastically dug up, but nothing of the sort of scale and splendor of a full-on Tyrannosaurus. But in addition to the auction houses, and it's only a handful of auction houses that do this stuff, you've also got a sort of informal to black market out there.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage)
that was much more flush with foreign dinosaurs that had been imported. And you would go to various known festivals for natural trades, and somebody might bring you, you know, sort of back into their hotel room to talk about the other stuff that they have.