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
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.
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.
But I do think that everything in my body English was suggesting that this guy shouldn't get time.
So you don't have that same way. Right. So what do you compare him? But it's not necessarily a victimless crime.
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.
What winds up happening is Mr. Prokopi winds up getting three months in jail.
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.
Mongolia sent pretty high-level Mongolian officials.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
to this sort of extraordinary happening.
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.
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.
Showing 441–460 of 474 · page 23 of 24
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