The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (PTFO Vault)

How did a federal prosecutor end up suing a 70-million-year-old tyrannosaurus, looted from the Gobi Desert? By teaming up with The Babe Ruth of Forfeiture and a personal injury lawyer representing the president of Mongolia, naturally. What followed was a matter of international diplomacy and Florida men — of a narc at the museum and a conspicuous crate, all leading to Pablo's high school, The Graveyard of the Oviraptor... and, of course, Nicolas Cage. (This episode originally aired April 15, 2025.) • Subscribe to PTFO on YouTube for breaking news, greatest hits and live premieres with Pablo https://www.youtube.com/@PabloTorreFindsOut/ • Subscribe to Pablo's Substack for exclusive access, documents and invites https://pablo.show/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Pablo Torre?

  Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're gonna find out what this sound is. I just want people to understand how hard it's been for me to know that Nicolas Cage would show up and not just scream, "Nicolas Cage is gonna show up in this episode. Just hold up." Right after this ad.

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• 1:18Pablo Torre?

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• 2:02Pablo Torre?

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• 2:25Pablo Torre?

  Martin Bell, hello.

• 2:27Speaker 03

  Hello.

• 2:27Pablo Torre?

  I wanna explain that I have looked up to you in a very sincere way for decades now. Went to the same high school, followed you to college. You were a would-be advisor to me. Should I have gone to law school?

• 2:45Speaker 03

  That's true.

• 2:46Pablo Torre?

  I did not. You did. How do you describe what you did before you became fancy private sector attorney?

• 2:53Speaker 03

  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.

• 3:09Pablo Torre?

  You might have been sitting in this chair.

• 3:11Speaker 03

  I think about this all the time, honestly. 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.

• 3:30Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 3:30Speaker 03

  If I had your talent, which I don't, to be clear.

• 3:34Pablo Torre?

  And vice versa.

• 3:35Speaker 03

  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.

• 3:47Pablo Torre?

  And instead of imagining a world in which Martin Bell was the one who started his own podcast and commissioned a butter sculpture of his own head and also kissed it on camera, I wanted to tell you what he went on to do instead, which was graduate from Harvard Law School and then become a federal prosecutor, an assistant US Attorney for the Southern District of New York. And if you don't know what the Southern District is, if you've never seen an episode of Billions or watched any number of legal dramas, you should know that it is the nation's most prestigious US Attorney's Office. It is known, according to The New York Times, for handling, quote, "complex and challenging cases involving high finance, national security, and public corruption," end quote. Which is why it was an especially big deal

• 4:33Pablo Torre?

  when this recently happened.

• 4:35Speaker 04

  We're following more breaking news, and it's more fallout after the Justice Department's directive to drop the case against Mayor Eric Adams. Danielle Sassoon, the acting US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, has just resigned.

• 4:48Pablo Torre?

  But that's not the only thing that the Southern District has been dealing with lately.

• 4:54Speaker 03

  They are the folks who are prosecuting Diddy?

• 4:57Speaker 05

  The indictment alleges that those individuals facilitated the freak-offs. They booked the hotel rooms and stocked them with the supplies, including drugs, baby oil, personal lubricant, extra linens, and lighting.

• 5:12Speaker 03

  Somebody's gotta 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.

• 5:27Pablo Torre?

  Martin Bell worked with those people at his old workplace for roughly 11 years. And a lot of the time, he was prosecuting corruption cases, also doing some security stuff. But the case I wanted to bring him here to find out about, the case that Marty personally prosecuted, was a civil forfeiture case. And civil forfeiture, you should know, is a little strange. Because it's when the defendant is literally a piece of property. Like, in this case, the property's human owner is not the defendant. It's the thing itself. The thing that gets forfeited on account of that thing's alleged involvement in a crime. And in this case, a case that involves its own absurd celebrity, incidentally,

• 6:11Pablo Torre?

  and also the increasingly shaky promise of international diplomacy, which feels relevant to the news these days, it just so happens that the property in question was 24 feet long and 8 feet high. And was known, legally speaking, as

• 6:28Speaker 03

  One Tyrannosaurus Batar Skeleton.

• 6:30Pablo Torre?

  Which is why this case name on the federal docket was insane.

• 6:37Pablo Torre?

  "United States of America v. One Tyrannosaurus Batar Skeleton."

• 6:43Speaker 06

  What a bizarre international dispute. What's going on here?

• 6:46Speaker 07

  So bizarre, Wolf. You know, and it's not every day you have paleontologists, federal prosecutors, and the Department of Homeland Security all working on a case involving a fossil. But a dinosaur skeleton became their focus after questions were raised about where it really came from and who really owns it.

• 7:03Pablo Torre?

  Before we explain why that name specifically is the way that it is, do you remember when you first heard about the dinosaur skeleton in question?

• 7:13Speaker 03

  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. 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, forfeiting stolen Nazi-looted art

• 7:57Speaker 03

  worth millions and billions 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, and she said, "We've got the beginnings of something that I think you may like."

• 8:21Speaker 03

  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.

• 8:29Pablo Torre?

  Admittedly, part of my curiosity here is, of course, because I grew up loving dinosaurs.

• 8:34Speaker 03

  Oh, sure. Good lord. Look, I don't wanna 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.

• 8:54Pablo Torre?

  Yes. If you're a kid who just happened to spend a big chunk of his childhood re-watching Jurassic Park...

• 9:01Speaker 03

  There it is.

• 9:09Speaker 03

  One of the most perfect movies ever made.

• 9:12Pablo Torre?

  Every part of it, Marty.

• 9:13Speaker 03

  From the score to the casting.

• 9:17Pablo Torre?

  The practical effects.

• 9:18Speaker 03

  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.

• 9:25Pablo Torre?

  The sense of wonder that Alan Grant has as he removes his glasses.

• 9:30Speaker 03

  One of the greatest scenes in the history of cinema.

• 9:37Speaker 03

  As he grabs Ellie's head and points it toward where the dinosaur is.

• 9:43Pablo Torre?

  As the brontosaurus come into view, that is the feeling I had upon realizing that my old friend Barton Bell was suing a dinosaur skeleton.

• 9:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was wild stuff.

• 9:59Speaker 03

  There had been an attempted auction of a Tyrannosaurus batar 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 batar skeleton, was stolen.

• 10:35Speaker 03

  So as soon as they started the auction, I just stood up and I held up my phone and I said, "I'm sorry to interrupt, but I have the judge on the phone and I wanted to let you know that what you're doing is violating the court's order." 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.

• 11:05Speaker 03

  That lawyer 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.

• 11:27Speaker 03

  Sharon, my boss.

• 11:29Pablo Torre?

  Babe Ruth of forfeiture.

• 11:30Speaker 03

  The 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,

• 12:13Speaker 03

  those laws that protect items of cultural importance to a particular government. 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.

• 12:45Pablo Torre?

  That way that governments were trying to protect these objects, these skeletons, these artifacts, had they done that with dinosaur skeletons previously?

• 12:57Speaker 03

  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 batar skeleton. I should say, I've mentioned the Tyrannus batar thing before. We're used to the Tyrannosaurus Rex in sort of the popular imagination.

• 13:16Pablo Torre?

  Yes, so this is the part of the episode where I demand, as Jurassic Park fan and also a person who took the class Science B-57, I believe it was, dinosaurs and their relatives, as my science requirement in college, I should ask, what is a Tyrannosaurus batar?

• 13:33Speaker 03

  So a Tyrannosaurus batar is a cousin of the Rex. If you imagine the Tyrannosaurus Rex from Jurassic Park.

• 13:44Pablo Torre?

  The Babe Ruth of dinosaurs.

• 13:45Speaker 03

  The Babe Ruth of dinosaurs. The batar 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?

• 13:59Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 13:59Speaker 03

  And we had needed to establish this in order to get the information required for a seizure warrant.

• 14:04Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 14:05Speaker 03

  Because you can't just have the government running around stealing people's dinosaur fossils without justification.

• 14:10Speaker 07

  Painter believes the bones were looted from a desert in Mongolia, made their way through Japan to Great Britain, Florida, Texas, and finally ended up in New York, where they now sit inside this storage space in Queens.

• 14:24Speaker 03

  And they were able to adjudicate 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 Namet Basin in the Gobi Desert in Mongolia.

• 14:44Pablo Torre?

  Clever girl.

• 14:45Speaker 03

  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 a potential forfeiture action

• 15:31Speaker 03

  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 batar 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 Prokop, who had a regular business with an internet page that sold various types of organic matter as fossils.

• 16:14Speaker 03

  Unsurprisingly, he was based in Florida, and the business was called Florida Fossils. Perfect.

• 16:42Pablo Torre?

  Can you just explain Eric Prokop as a character visually? If you're casting the movie, what's his deal?

• 16:49Speaker 03

  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.

• 17:06Pablo Torre?

  Justin Hartley.

• 17:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, I could imagine Justin Hartley playing Eric Prokop.

• 17:10Pablo Torre?

  A square jaw, certainly all-American.

• 17:13Speaker 03

  But the Florida fossils business, which, you know, it's a nice little shell here or a shell there.

• 17:20Pablo Torre?

  These are non-dinosaur fossils.

• 17:21Speaker 03

  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

• 18:07Speaker 03

  when OJ met those guys to talk about, you know, like his Trojan jersey and his memorabilia that weren't necessarily frontline at the actual shows.

• 18:17Pablo Torre?

  Right, instead of the Heisman Trophy, it was perhaps Velociraptor.

• 18:22Speaker 03

  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.

• 18:35Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 18:35Speaker 03

  But, you know, for like a reasonably intact Tyrannosaurus skull.

• 18:39Pablo Torre?

  It's the number one thing I would buy.

• 18:42Speaker 03

  Right, yes.

• 18:43Pablo Torre?

  In the power rankings of stuff I would buy if I had the money to buy the thing, T-Rex skull.

• 18:50Speaker 03

  Dinosaur fossil one and like, you know, used astronaut suit, like number two. This is how I imagine myself as a wealthier person.

• 19:01Pablo Torre?

  Same.

• 19:02Speaker 03

  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.

• 19:19Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, I'm getting a Law & Order dinosaur investigation.

• 19:23Speaker 03

  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. Stories. Bang, bang. Given that Mongolia owns everything that comes out of the ground unless they give express written consent of the Mongolian Cultural Patrimony Organization.

• 19:48Pablo Torre?

  Mongolian dinosaur policy being similar to Major League Baseball broadcasts.

• 19:54Speaker 03

  So 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

• 20:38Speaker 03

  like a UPS or it might have 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.

• 21:09Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 21:10Speaker 03

  Where while you're doing the search warrant, people show up with more contraband. Mr. Prokopy 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.

• 21:49Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, what was that?

• 21:50Speaker 03

  Was a particularly special piece called "The Graveyard of the Overraptors."

• 21:57Pablo Torre?

  What a [bleep] great band name. We are.

• 22:01Speaker 03

  We are the graveyard of the overraptors. And 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 our reference, that one scene where there's a stampede and they hide behind a sort of like ossified tree. Overraptors are best known for, and named for, as I understand it, being sort of egg-stealing dinosaurs and steal other dinosaurs.

• 22:44Pablo Torre?

  In this case, requesting free bird being particularly morbid and appropriate.

• 22:49Speaker 03

  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.

• 23:32Pablo Torre?

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• 25:07Speaker 03

  Ultimately, we decided to plead Mr. Prokopy 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. Prokopy 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 on to dinosaur fossils for him.

• 25:50Speaker 03

  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 Tyrannosaurus's and an Kylosaurus, that one with the armor on its back.

• 26:05Pablo Torre?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 26:06Speaker 03

  That kind of looks like the Barclay Center.

• 26:08Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, with the club tail.

• 26:09Speaker 03

  Some overraptors, some Gallimimuses, and some eggs here and there. Just, just an array of different types of fossils.

• 26:21Speaker 07

  Heritage Auctions believes its consignor purchased the fossils in good faith and says, "We have cooperated in the investigation process for paleontologists to expeditiously examine the skeleton and we will continue to cooperate with authorities."

• 26:36Speaker 03

  We wind up having Mr. Prokopy 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.

• 26:48Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 26:49Speaker 03

  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.

• 27:06Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 27:07Speaker 03

  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.

• 27:24Pablo Torre?

  Well, I'm trying to imagine, like, if you want to triangulate, what does justice look like for this dude who was the guy making money off of this particular skeleton or skeletons? I'm trying to like, put him in some sort of moral hierarchy, like, okay, he's kind of like a poacher, but these animals are already dead.

• 27:44Speaker 03

  Right. So you don't have that same weight.

• 27:46Pablo Torre?

  Right. So what do you compare him?

• 27:48Speaker 03

  But it's not necessarily a victimless crime.

• 27:50Pablo Torre?

  So in the case of United States versus Prokopy, which is a criminal case.

• 27:53Speaker 03

  Right.

• 27:54Pablo Torre?

  That is related to the case that we came here to discuss. United States of America versus, again, one Tyrannosaurus Batar skeleton. The victim would be who?

• 28:06Speaker 03

  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, you know, 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.

• 28:33Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 28:35Speaker 03

  What winds up happening is Mr. Prokopy winds up getting three months in jail.

• 28:40Speaker 02

  A fossil collector and US citizen, Eric Prokopy, has been sentenced in federal court to three months in prison for smuggling dinosaur bones from Mongolia. He confessed to smuggling a number of skeletons of dinosaurs, including the skeleton of 70 million years old Tyrannosaurus Batar from Territory of Mongolia between 2010 and 2012.

• 29:04Speaker 03

  Sometime after that, we've, 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.

• 29:24Pablo Torre?

  And when you say ceremonies.

• 29:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:27Pablo Torre?

  How ceremonial are these ceremonies?

• 29:29Speaker 03

  We had multiple repatriation ceremonies.

• 29:32Pablo Torre?

  Well, good morning and sign bainu, as they say in Mongolian. I am John Morton, the Director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Today, we do something extraordinary. We return to the people of Mongolia, a 70 million year old dinosaur that was looted from the rocky sands of the Gobi Desert. It is a Tyrannosaurus Batar, a large two-footed predator and cousin of the Tyrannosaurus Rex. The T. Batar skeleton we return today is a rare, nearly complete skeleton that is 24 feet long and eight feet high. It was found in the Gobi Desert between 10 to 15 years ago and under Mongolian law, never should have left the country.

• 30:16Pablo Torre?

  Yet, here it is before you.

• 30:19Speaker 03

  Mongolia sent pretty high level Mongolian officials. I wish to extend our profound gratitude for your hard work and dedication. Our collective success has proven that united we can fight and win against the ills and evils on earth. In that sense.

• 30:41Speaker 06

  Friendship helps to build a just and secure world. I have absolutely no doubt that with the people like you, all my friends, our two countries, Mongolia and America, are destined to aspire and win minimal heights of cooperation and success. Thank you, friends, and welcome home to Batar.

• 31:05Speaker 03

  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 Bay Ruth of Forfeiture. And at that first repatriation ceremony, some up and coming teen musician star sang what I imagine rates pretty highly on the Mongolian Hit Parade over, you know, at one point in the ceremony. And it was the sort of thing that you never really forget.

• 31:42Pablo Torre?

  This is the scene at the end of Star Wars.

• 31:45Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 31:46Pablo Torre?

  But with dinosaur bones and Mongolia.

• 31:48Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 31:49Pablo Torre?

  Your Chewbacca with the medal.

• 31:52Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, it's exactly that.

• 31:57Speaker 03

  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 El Begdorj ran for reelection and apparently securing and obtaining the repatriation of these fossils was listed among the big accomplishments of the El Begdorj administration. And one of the bits of,

• 32:40Speaker 03

  I don't 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 and 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.

• 33:20Pablo Torre?

  Yes, in their equivalent of the Brooklyn Public Library.

• 33:22Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 33:23Pablo Torre?

  They would have this book.

• 33:25Speaker 03

  Yes. And there was one page of this story, our story, dedicated to the court proceedings in New York.

• 33:35Pablo Torre?

  Hmm.

• 33:36Speaker 03

  Which depicted a sort of, you know, like fumbling, well-meaning American prosecutor.

• 33:46Speaker 03

  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 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

• 34:31Speaker 03

  who had attended a number of these proceedings wound up writing a very good piece.

• 34:35Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, this is Paige Williams.

• 34:37Speaker 03

  Paige Williams of The New Yorker, a very good piece in The New Yorker about this case that took us up and 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.

• 34:55Pablo Torre?

  Same.

• 34:55Speaker 03

  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.

• 35:11Pablo Torre?

  It helps explain for those who are wondering how it is that Martin Bell, noted black attorney, became this character in a children's book and also an owner of, again, the Mongolian Medal of Friendship. This is how deeply felt these bones are. It is bone deep in the Mongolian character.

• 35:34Speaker 03

  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.

• 36:17Pablo Torre?

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• 37:01Pablo Torre?

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• 38:10Speaker 07

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• 38:40Pablo Torre?

  I just want people to understand how hard it's been for me to know that Nicolas Cage would show up and not just scream, Nicolas Cage is gonna show up in this episode. Just hold on.

• 38:52Speaker 03

  So there comes a point where we are tracking down the various trajectories of these dinosaurs. And we realize that a dinosaur that Nicolas Cage is known to have purchased in California for $200,000, that skull traced back to the Prokopoea dinosaurs. It was a Batar skull. And as such, was likewise forfeable because it was interstate transfer property that was stolen.

• 39:28Pablo Torre?

  And originated in?

• 39:30Speaker 03

  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 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.

• 40:08Pablo Torre?

  How Nicolas Cage was it?

• 40:11Speaker 03

  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.

• 40:21Pablo Torre?

  I can see him as a geode guy, though.

• 40:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:23Pablo Torre?

  That does make sense.

• 40:24Speaker 03

  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 palate, which is longer than it would be on a person.

• 40:39Pablo Torre?

  Just for the record here, for those only listening, Martin Bell in describing Nicolas Cage's T-Rex skull is describing the movie poster for the movie Face Off.

• 40:49Speaker 03

  Um, 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. So we have a fourth repatriation coming soon. So this one, we have some number of Batar skulls being seized.

• 41:21Speaker 03

  Including the one that was used to be owned by Nicolas Cage.

• 41:33Speaker 03

  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 I now-

• 41:58Pablo Torre?

  No, I'm just gonna stop you there.

• 41:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:59Pablo Torre?

  It's literally not one of those things. There is no episode we've done that is less like one of those things than the story that involves you repatriating Nicolas Cage's dinosaur bones.

• 42:12Speaker 03

  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.

• 42:26Speaker 03

  I think to myself, well, there it is, exactly as I 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. 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.

• 42:48Speaker 01

  Last December, actor Nicolas Cage agreed to return a stolen dinosaur skull he purchased in 2007 for $276,000 from a well-known gallery in Beverly Hills. He claims he didn't know it was stolen.

• 43:03Speaker 03

  And I'm just grateful to have worked at a place that let me have what felt like actual adventures here and there.

• 43:13Pablo Torre?

  Well, as somebody who grew up going on adventures to the Natural History Museum, to the Smithsonian, who takes his daughter now, Violet, to the museum to stand underneath these skeletons and marvel like Alan Grant did, I wonder, where are the bones now?

• 43:32Speaker 03

  Ah, I have an answer. Mongolia ultimately repurposed an old Soviet-era office building in its capital, Ulaanbaatar, and the "Batar Batar" bit is real, and turned it into a dinosaur museum and a major tourist attraction in Mongolia. I'm 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, they've got dramatic lighting, and it's just this thing that exists halfway across the world now,

• 44:13Speaker 03

  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 US 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. Although, I mean, if Hawk Tuwa can do it, I've arguably earned it based on my contributions to science and Mongolia.

• 44:50Pablo Torre?

  And so this is where it does feel appropriate for me to just jump in and observe that, yes, of course, we here at Pablo Torre Finds Out did reach out to Nicolas Cage and his team in order to ask if Nicolas Cage ever got paid back for the dinosaur skull or would perhaps like to visit it in the present, in Mongolia, even, maybe, with former federal prosecutor for the US Attorney's Office in the Southern District of New York, Martin Bell, whom Mr. Cage might remember from the time he prosecuted this case.

• 45:28Pablo Torre?

  You know, while also being a big fan of his movies. And Mr. Cage's manager, in one of the most disappointing responses I've ever received hosting this show or anything,

• 45:40Pablo Torre?

  had no comment. Which means that all we have to play for you right now is this video of Nicolas Cage sharing his perspective on this specific topic with GQ back in 2022.

• 45:52Speaker 02

  There's the skull I bought at an auction, and I bought it legally. Here's the MacGuffin. When the Mongolian government said that they needed it back, I gave it to them, but I never got my money back. So somebody at the auction house should be in jail.

• 46:10Pablo Torre?

  And so as for the recognition that Martin Bell was still hoping to receive back here at home from the world of sports, the world that he had abandoned memorably in favor of law school,

• 46:22Pablo Torre?

  yeah, I mean, I doubt he'll get to throw out a first pitch for his beloved New York Mets, unfortunately. But I am significantly more confident about something else. There will be a movie about this story, and all we need is for Nicolas Cage to break into that museum and re-repatriate his dinosaur skull.

• 46:47Speaker 03

  I hope that if I do get that opportunity, if the movie is made, maybe they have the premiere in Ulaanbaatar. And as, 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."

• 47:16Pablo Torre?

  Martin Bell, my friend and Mongolia's.

• 47:23Pablo Torre?

  Thank you for coming into our studio.

• 47:25Speaker 03

  It's been an honor, man. Thanks for having me.

• 47:35Pablo Torre?

  This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.

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