Martin Bell
speaker
474 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 20 Aug
Martin Bell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
One of the most perfect movies ever made. Every part of it, Marty. From the score to the casting.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Dinosaurs and their relatives.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
But the Florida fossils business, which, you know, it's a nice little shell here or a shell there.
Showing 401–420 of 474 · page 21 of 24
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