A Sting in the Desert
For generations, the people of the Four Corners region have battled the federal government over collecting and selling Native American artifacts. Then agents persuaded a local dealer to go undercover.
Operation Cerberus Action was supposed to expose a lucrative trade in stolen antiquities.
Instead, it tore a hole in a Utah town.
In the high country of the Navajo reservation, a family walked through the pinyon pines, combing the earth for the remnants of a vanished civilization.
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Their breath steamed in the morning air. Dr. James Redd wandered away from his wife and daughter for a few minutes, then called back: “Hey guys, come and look.”
He pointed to a white shell, smaller than a dime, lying partly exposed in the wind-scoured dirt. It had been carved in the shape of a bird, with a hole drilled through it.
Millions of such artifacts lay strewn across the region. The doctor's wife, Jeannie Redd, reveled in the way the pieces connected her to the ancient Anasazi culture.
Jim handed the shell to Jeannie, who hooked it on a safety pin and put it in her pocket, never imagining the trouble it would bring.
Two weeks later, a man named Ted Gardiner strode up the steps to the Redds’ home, high on a knoll south of Blanding, Utah.
Gardiner was 50, tall and leathery, with a mantis-like build that helped him move about the vertical world of Utah's canyons. He was a dealer in Anasazi antiquities, and he'd been visiting the Redds for about seven months, trying to buy and sell artifacts.
Watch: Undercover Recordings
Click the highlighted text to view footage collected by FBI informant Ted Gardiner, who wore a black shirt-button camera to his meetings with Jim and Jeannie Redd.
“How you been, sweetheart?” Gardiner asked as she opened the door.
Jeannie, 57, was the collector in the house, the one who scanned the ground with a raptor's eye. Jim, a year older, worked long hours as the main family doctor in Utah's largest county. He had little interest in collecting but enjoyed accompanying his wife and daughter Jericca as they hunted for artifacts.
“I went out to Butler Wash yesterday,” Jeannie told Gardiner. “We just went off the highway. And people had hit every mound. But I found a Bull Creek arrowhead, a nice one.”
Gardiner opened a cardboard box and pulled out items he had brought.
Admiring a pendant, Jeannie said, “Oh my God, that is not a small turquoise.”
Gardiner told her he had found it next to Comb Ridge — a great, toothed blade of sandstone that according to Indian lore is the Earth's very backbone.
In truth, he had bought it from meth addicts living in a trailer.
Jeannie traded some small broken pendants and bits of string and rope for the turquoise piece.
“What means a lot to me is that you found it,” she said.
“Well, cool,” he said, and packed up his boxes. “Jeannie, thank you, sweetheart. Take care.”
Jim Redd walked Gardiner to his white Jeep Cherokee.
“It's been a pleasure,” Jim said. “Drive safely.”
Gardiner pulled down the quarter-mile drive, listening to the Beatles' wistful “Here, There and Everywhere.” Then he turned up Highway 191 and turned off the music.
“SU 6129,” he said aloud in the empty SUV.
A tiny video device, disguised as a black shirt button, had been recording since he first pulled up to the home.
“Eighteen hundred hours,” Gardiner said. “Dr. Jim and Jeannie Redd.”
http://graphics.latimes.com/utah-sting/
