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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Appearances
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.
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.
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.
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.
Right. Yes.
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.
We always partner with these folks who do the legwork and sometimes the dangerous stuff.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Interestingly, the piece that arrived during our raid... Yeah, what was that? ...was a particularly special piece called the Graveyard of the Overraptors.
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Showing 421–440 of 474 · page 22 of 24
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