Pod Insights Pablo Torre Finds Out Jaw & Order: The Case of the Stolen Dinosaur Bones (and Nicolas Cage) About this episode How did a federal prosecutor named Martin Bell end up suing a 70-million-year-old tyrannosaurus, looted from the rocky sands of 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.
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Transcript 7,757 words · 17 speakers
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3:33 Pablo Torre? Martin Bell, hello.
3:35 Speaker 02 Hello.
3:35 Pablo Torre? I want to 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?
3:53 Speaker 02 That's true.
3:54 Pablo Torre? I did not, you did. How do you describe what you did before you became fancy private sector attorney?
4:01 Speaker 02 Oh, gosh. I did debate for the same high school program. I covered the baseball team in college that you would eventually cover.
4:10 Pablo Torre? Yes.
4:11 Speaker 02 For the school newspaper. I did the Sports Illustrated internship, I think, that you would eventually do.
4:17 Pablo Torre? You might have been sitting in this chair.
4:19 Speaker 02 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.
4:38 Pablo Torre? Yes.
4:38 Speaker 02 If I had your talent, which I don't, to be clear.
4:42 Pablo Torre? And vice versa.
4:43 Speaker 02 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.
4:55 Pablo 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.
5:38 Pablo Torre? Which is why it was an especially big deal when this recently happened.
5:43 Speaker 03 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.
5:57 Pablo Torre? But that's not the only thing that the Southern District has been dealing with lately.
6:02 Speaker 02 They are the folks who are prosecuting Diddy.
6:05 Speaker 04 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.
6:20 Speaker 02 Somebody's got to 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.
6:35 Pablo 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.
6:54 Pablo Torre? 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, 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 eight feet high. And was known, legally speaking, as
7:36 Speaker 02 One Tyrannosaurus Batar Skeleton.
7:38 Pablo Torre? Which is why this case name on the federal docket was insane. United States of America v. One Tyrannosaurus Batar Skeleton.
7:51 Speaker 05 What a bizarre international dispute. What's going on here?
7:54 Speaker 06 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.
8:11 Pablo 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?
8:21 Speaker 02 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
9:05 Speaker 02 worth millions and millions 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." Um, 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.
9:37 Pablo Torre? Admittedly, part of my curiosity here is of course because I grew up loving dinosaurs.
9:42 Speaker 02 Oh, sure. Good lord. Look, I don't want to 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.
10:02 Pablo Torre? Yes, if you're a kid who just happened to spend a big chunk of his childhood rewatching Jurassic Park. There it is.
10:17 Speaker 02 One of the most perfect movies ever made.
10:20 Pablo Torre? Every part of it, Marty.
10:21 Speaker 02 That, the, the, from the score to the casting.
10:25 Pablo Torre? The practical effects.
10:26 Speaker 02 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.
10:33 Pablo Torre? The sense of wonder that Alan Grant has as he removes his glasses.
10:38 Speaker 02 One of the greatest scenes in the history of cinema.
10:45 Speaker 02 As he grabs Ellie's head and points it toward where the dinosaur is.
10:52 Pablo 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.
11:03 Speaker 02 Yeah, it, it, it was wild stuff.
11:07 Speaker 02 There had been an attempted auction of a Tyrannosaurus batarus 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 batarus skeleton, was stolen.
11:43 Speaker 07 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."
11:55 Speaker 02 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.
12:13 Speaker 02 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.
12:35 Speaker 02 Sharon, my boss- Babe Ruth of forfeiture. 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 gotta be stolen property. How is a dinosaur fossil stolen property?
13:17 Speaker 02 Mongolia has very, very strict cultural patrimony laws. 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.
13:53 Pablo Torre? That way that governments were trying to protect these objects, these skeletons, these artifacts, had they done that with dinosaur skeletons previously?
14:05 Speaker 02 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 Tyrannosaurus batar thing before. We're used to the Tyrannosaurus Rex in sort of the popular imagination.
14:24 Pablo 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?
14:41 Speaker 02 So a Tyrannosaurus batar is a cousin of the Rex. If you imagine the Tyrannosaurus Rex from Jurassic Park.
14:52 Pablo Torre? The Babe Ruth of dinosaurs.
14:53 Speaker 02 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?
15:07 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
15:07 Speaker 02 And we had needed to establish this in order to get the information required for a seizure warrant.
15:12 Pablo Torre? Right.
15:13 Speaker 02 Because you can't just have the government running around stealing people's dinosaur fossils without justification.
15:18 Speaker 06 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.
15:32 Speaker 02 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. Clever girl. 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.
16:13 Speaker 02 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 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 batarus skeleton.
16:56 Speaker 02 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. Unsurprisingly, he was based in Florida, and the business was called Florida Fossils. Perfect.
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21:17 Pablo Torre? Can you just explain Eric Prokupi as a character visually? If you're casting the movie, what's his deal?
21:24 Speaker 02 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.
21:41 Pablo Torre? Justin Hartley.
21:42 Speaker 02 Yeah, I could imagine Justin Hartley playing Eric Prokofiev.
21:45 Pablo Torre? A square jaw.
21:46 Speaker 02 Square jaw, you know, but, but the, the Florida fossils business, which, you know, it's, it's a nice little shell here or a shell there.
21:55 Pablo Torre? These are non-dinosaur fossils.
21:56 Speaker 02 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.
22:39 Speaker 02 I imagine something not unlike, um, when OJ met those guys to talk about, you know, like his, his Trojans jersey. And his memorabilia that weren't necessarily frontline at the actual shows.
22:53 Pablo Torre? Right. Instead of the Heisman Trophy, it was perhaps a velociraptor.
22:57 Speaker 02 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.
23:10 Pablo Torre? Yes.
23:11 Speaker 02 But, you know, for like a reasonably intact Tyrannosaurus skull.
23:14 Pablo Torre? It's the number one thing I would buy.
23:17 Speaker 02 Right. Yes.
23:18 Pablo Torre? In the power rankings of stuff I would buy if I had the money to buy the thing. T-Rex skull.
23:26 Speaker 02 Dinosaur fossil one and like, you know, used astronaut suit like number two.
23:33 Speaker 02 This is how I imagine myself as a wealthier person.
23:36 Pablo Torre? Same.
23:37 Speaker 02 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.
23:54 Pablo Torre? Yeah, I'm getting a Law and Order dinosaur investigation.
23:58 Speaker 02 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.
24:09 Speaker 01 These are their stories.
24:11 Speaker 02 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.
24:23 Pablo Torre? Mongolian dinosaur policy being similar to Major League Baseball broadcasts.
24:29 Speaker 02 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.
24:40 Speaker 02 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 have been DHL, delivery truck with a big crate that all but says, 'Careful, treat with care, dinosaur fossils' inside it."
25:25 Speaker 02 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.
25:44 Pablo Torre? Right.
25:45 Speaker 02 Where while you're doing the search warrant, people show up with more contraband. Mr. Prokopie 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-
26:24 Pablo Torre? Yeah, what was that?
26:25 Speaker 02 Was a particularly special piece called "The Graveyard of the Overraptors."
26:32 Pablo Torre? What a **** great band name. We are-
26:37 Speaker 02 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 a 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. They steal other dinosaurs.
27:19 Pablo Torre? In this case, requesting free bird being particularly morbid and appropriate.
27:24 Speaker 02 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 in 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.
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31:28 Speaker 02 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.
32:11 Speaker 02 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, an Ankylosaurus, that one with the armor on its back.
32:27 Pablo Torre? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
32:28 Speaker 02 That kind of looks like the Barclay Center.
32:29 Pablo Torre? Yeah, with the club tail.
32:30 Speaker 02 Some Overraptors, some Gallimimuses, and some eggs here and there. Just, just an array. Of different types of fossils.
32:43 Speaker 06 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."
32:57 Speaker 02 We wind up having Mr. Prokopie 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.
33:10 Pablo Torre? Right.
33:10 Speaker 02 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.
33:27 Pablo Torre? Right.
33:27 Speaker 02 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.
33:45 Pablo 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.
34:05 Speaker 02 Right. So you don't have that same way.
34:07 Pablo Torre? Right, so what do you compare him?
34:08 Speaker 02 But it's not necessarily a victimless crime.
34:11 Pablo Torre? So in the case of United States versus Prokopie, which is a criminal case
34:15 Speaker 02 Right.
34:15 Pablo Torre? that is related to the case that we came here to discuss. United States of America versus, again, one Tyrannosaurus batar skeleton.
34:22 Speaker 02 Hmm.
34:23 Pablo Torre? The victim would be who?
34:27 Speaker 02 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. Yeah. What winds up happening is Mr. Prokopew winds up getting three months in jail.
35:02 Speaker 09 A fossil collector and US citizen, Eric Prokopew, 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 spatar from territory of Mongolia between 2010 and 2012.
35:25 Speaker 02 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. Hmm, and when you say ceremonies? Yeah. How ceremonial are these ceremonies? Uh, we had multiple repatriation ceremonies.
35:53 Speaker 10 Well, good morning. And sign by nu, 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 spatar, a large, two-footed predator and cousin of the Tyrannosaurus rex. The T. spatar skeleton we return today is a rare, nearly complete skeleton that is 24 feet long and 8 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.
36:37 Speaker 10 Yet, here it is before you.
36:40 Speaker 02 Mongolia sent pretty high-level Mongolian officials.
36:45 Speaker 11 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, and that 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 Qatar.
37:27 Speaker 02 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. 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.
38:04 Pablo Torre? This is the scene at the end of Star Wars.
38:06 Speaker 02 Yes.
38:07 Pablo Torre? But with dinosaur bones and Mongolia.
38:10 Speaker 02 Yes.
38:10 Pablo Torre? Your Chewbacca with the medal.
38:13 Speaker 02 Yes, yes, it's exactly that.
38:18 Speaker 02 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 Begidorg ran for reelection and apparently securing and obtaining the repatriation of these fossils was listed among the big accomplishments of the El Begidorg administration. And one of the bits of...
39:02 Speaker 02 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.
39:41 Pablo Torre? Yes, in their equivalent of the Brooklyn Public Library.
39:44 Speaker 02 Yes.
39:44 Pablo Torre? They would have this book.
39:46 Speaker 02 Yes. And there was one page of this story, our story, dedicated to the court proceedings in New York.
39:56 Pablo Torre? Mmm.
39:57 Speaker 02 Which depicted a sort of, you know, like fumbling, well-meaning, um, American prosecutor.
40:07 Speaker 02 And that prosecutor was white. Um, this is the time I will tell your audio, uh, 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, um, perhaps a real possibility of this because a writer for The New Yorker.
40:52 Speaker 02 Who had attended a number of these proceedings, wound up writing a very good piece.
40:57 Pablo Torre? Yeah, this is Paige Williams.
40:58 Speaker 02 Paige Williams of The New Yorker, a very good piece in The New Yorker about this case 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.
41:16 Pablo Torre? Same.
41:17 Speaker 02 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.
41:32 Pablo 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.
41:55 Speaker 02 The Mongolians cared immensely about this and were so clearly grateful. And I didn't complain about the children's book, the 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 in 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.
42:44 Pablo 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.
42:57 Speaker 02 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.
43:33 Pablo Torre? And originated in?
43:35 Speaker 02 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.
44:13 Pablo Torre? How Nicolas Cage was it?
44:15 Speaker 02 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.
44:26 Pablo Torre? I can see him as a geode guy, though.
44:27 Speaker 02 Yeah.
44:28 Pablo Torre? That does make sense.
44:29 Speaker 02 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.
44:44 Pablo 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.
44:54 Speaker 02 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.
45:12 Speaker 12 So we have a fourth repatriation coming soon. So this one, we have some number of Tiptar skulls being seized, including the one that was used to be owned by Nicolas Cage.
45:37 Speaker 02 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-
46:02 Pablo Torre? No, I was just gonna stop you there. 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.
46:17 Speaker 02 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. I think to myself, well, there it is, exactly as I'd 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.
46:52 Speaker 13 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.
47:07 Speaker 02 And I'm just grateful to have worked at a place that let me have what felt like actual adventures here and there.
47:17 Pablo 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?
47:36 Speaker 02 Ah, I have an answer. Mongolia ultimately repurposed an old Soviet-era office building in its capital, Ulaanbaatar, and the "vatar vatar" bit is real, and turned it into a dinosaur museum and a major tourist attraction in Mongolia, 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
48:13 Speaker 02 thing that exists halfway across the world now, 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 U.S. 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 Hauktua can do it, I've arguably earned it based on my contributions to science and Mongolia.
48:54 Pablo 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. You know, while also being a big fan of his movies.
49:36 Pablo Torre? And Mr. Cage's manager, in one of the most disappointing responses I've ever received hosting this show, or anything, 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.
49:57 Speaker 14 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.
50:15 Pablo 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, 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.
50:52 Speaker 02 I hope that if I do get that opportunity, if the movie is made, maybe they have the premiere in Ulan Bator. 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."
51:21 Pablo Torre? Marmel, my friend, and Mongolia's.
51:28 Pablo Torre? Thank you for coming into our studio.
51:29 Speaker 02 It's been an honor, man. Thanks for having me.
51:40 Pablo Torre? This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production.
51:46 Pablo Torre? And I'll talk to you next time.
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53:04 Speaker 16 Welcome to 215 Maple Drive. We just put this property on the market. Love the crown molding. Oh, wait until you see the walk-in closets and the bathroom tile. Does it have Verizon FiOS? You know, 100% fiber internet? No FiOS, but it looks like it's got cable. Let's check out the kitchen. No FiOS? Yeah, no, thank you. Don't you want to see the rest? Okay, bye-bye.
53:29 Speaker 03 Dip Verizon FiOS, because when you're moving, it's 100% or nothing.
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