User:Oceanflynn/sandbox/Operation Cerberus (Utah)

Operation Cerberus Action was a multi-agency 30-month long investigation of cultural and archaeological artifact theft centered around Blanding, Utah in the Four Corner's regions' to "deal with the problem of people illegally taking and trafficking Native American artifacts from federal lands." From about 300 to 1300 Utah was the center of the ancestral Puebloan culture—referred to by archaeologists as Anasazi people and now called Ancestral Puebloans, which reflects their modern descendants. which had a population of 15,772 in 2015. It has thousands of archaeological sites that have attracted looters or pot-hunters since the 19th century. Operation Cerberus was the "largest undercover operation into the archaeological looting of public and tribal lands" in the United States. Agents searched twelve properties in and near three small towns on U.S. Route 191: Moab, Monticello, and Blanding. Moab, the nearest town to Arches National Park and Canyonlands National Park is 54 mi north of Monticello, Utah, which is near the Needles District in Canyonlands National Park. Blanding, Utah in San Juan County, Utah is 20 mi south of Monticello. Farther south on Route 191 is Bluff, Utah, with about 300 residents, near the Navajo Reservation and the state of Arizona. The 100-mile corridor running south from Moab to Bluff has been known for many years to be where the "bulk" of the looting took place. The operation began in 2006 and culminated in a June 10, 2009 dawn raid conducted by "150 agents from several state and federal law enforcement agencies" "wearing bulletproof vests and carrying side arms." The raid led to the arrest of 23 suspects including "excavators, dealers, and collectors" in violation of the Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979 and Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990) "for their alleged involvement in a network to illegally purchase 256 artifacts valued at $335,685." San Juan County is the "poorest county in Utah." The Salt Lake Tribune described those caught up in the sting as "southern Utahns who allegedly had turned a century-old pot-hunting hobby into a lucrative black market in American Indian artifacts." According to the Smithsonian, Operation Ceberus was one of the early catalysts for securing Bears Ears status as a National Monument.

During the June 9, 2009 raid agents seized about 40,000 objects that are now in stored in a 2,300-square-foot warehouse near Salt Lake City with some of the artifacts in the Natural History Museum of Utah. In one resident fifty agents over two days packed 5,000 artifacts into five trucks. Another house held "4,000 pieces". One residence had a hidden display room with a trick lever entrance. Of the 32 people from Utah, New Mexico and Colorado "pulled in" through Operation Ceberus, none were Native American. Defendants included a number of prominent Mormon families whose great grandfathers, with surnames such as Lyman, Shumway, and Redd, settled in the area in the 1880s as part of the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—(LDS) or Mormon—San Juan Expedition and—in some cases— founded small towns like Blanding, Monticello, Moab and Bluff. Sixteen were from Blanding and two from Monticello.

Native American artifacts in San Juan County


In August, 1986 Chicago Tribune reporter Jim Robbins described Blanding with its population of 3,118 as a town like any other small American town. However, "Blanding sits squarely on top of one of the richest archaeological areas in the United States."

The Four Corners region of the southwestern United States where the states of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah meet was the home of the Ancestral Puebloan people, whose numbers reached 100,000 at the height of their civilization. The Puebloans left behind countless artifacts in "buried pueblos, dry caves and cliff dwellings". The area, much of which is now Bears Ears National Monument, had been regularly looted and vandalized for decades. Much of the looted area was included in the Bears Ears National Monument partly in response to the work of the Bears Ears Intertribal Coalition (BEITC) a partnership of the Hopi, Navajo, Uintah and Ouray Ute Indian Tribe, Ute Mountain Ute and Zuni Governments. The Ancestral Pueblans began to occupy the Four Corners area at least 2,500 years ago. Clovis points left by the Clovis people, ancestors of most of the indigenous cultures of the Americas,   have also been found in Cedar Mesa, in the Bears Ears National Monument.

According to Bruce Louthan, a B.L.M archaeologist in Moab, Utah, by 1986, San Juan County archaeologists had recorded over 7,000 archaeological sites which represented about 5 percent of the sites there.

Culture of pot-hunting
Mormon "[s]ettlers who discovered the [Ancestral Puebloan] ruins in the 19th century started collecting and selling the artifacts.

In the 2010 Oxford University publication Enforcing International Cultural Heritage Law, a section entitled "The culture of antiquities looting in the American Four Corners Region", traces the culture of pot-hunting in the Four Corners region to the work of University of Utah's Professor Andrew Kerr who "made significant additions to the collection" to the Museum of Natural History at the University from 1922 to 1929. Craig Childs, in his 2010 book entitled Finders Keepers: A Tale of Archaeological Plunder and Obsession, described how A. Shumway and his family from Blanding, Utah were hired by Professor Kerr as his head diggers in the 1920s to collect artifacts for the Museum. Kerr hired many others from Blanding, paying $2 to $3 per vessel which kept food on the table for many families during the Depression. According to A. Shumway's son, Devar Shumway (b. 1919-), "For three summers during the Depression, pothunting was my father's only job." Devar and his ten siblings continued the pothunting tradition. Casey's father, Devar Shumway "speculated that practically every home in Blanding boasted a few artifacts obtained by pothunters." He claimed that after the 1986 raid, many Blanding residents took their artifacts to the town dump. By 1994, the Deseret News reported that Devar Shumway, Earl K. Shumway's uncle, had "one of the most exquisite Indian artifact collections in the Four Corners area." In 1980 Casey Shumway, son of Devar Shumway, was fined $700 and placed on probation making him the first to be prosecuted under ARPA. By 1986, Casey was still pot-hunting but on private land and displays his finds in his home. He claimed, "A really nice bowl might be worth $200, but it takes a month of searching and digging...It's like a buried city as if L.A. crumbled and was covered with sagebrush."

By the 1950s and 1960s, "pot-hunting" was deeply ingrained among Blanding's 1,800 or so residents. Families brought shovels and screens to picnics, and exchanged ancient bowls and seed jars as Christmas gifts. By the 1970s, commercial pot-hunters were digging with trenchers and backhoes, even flying to distant spots in helicopters."

The Atlantic published an article in June 2017, describing how the Antiquities Act of 1906 made pot-hunting illegal. The Act gave presidents the power "to create national monuments to protect threatened federal lands.

The Archaeological Resources Protection Act (ARPA) in 1979 added specific prison sentences but this did not end the plundering. Under ARPA, taking artifacts from sites on public land became a crime punishable by up to a year in jail and $10,000 in fines. However, by 1986 many people felt "that the full weight of the law is rarely brought down on those indicted. There are only a limited number of Government agents, who must patrol millions of acres of Federal lands. And once an artifact is removed, it is hard to prove that it came from public lands. Artifacts found on private property are fair game for legal trading."

By 1986, pot-hunters had already "damaged or destroyed perhaps 80%" of the archaeological sites around Blanding.

According to an article in The New York Times, by 1986 the looting problem had worsened, as unemployment in the region had increased with the uranium mining—the major industry—on the decline. Moeb and Bluff had uranium mines that shut down. Louthan, a Moeb-based BLM archaeologist, explained that, "It's hard economic times, and some people have taken to the canyons and to the hills in search of valuable artifacts. They have to eat, so in some respects, you can't really blame them."

A 1995 article in The New York Times described how looters in Utah had been "emboldened" by a "general anti-Government attitude in the West". At that time there were only 4 BLM agents and looting had increased. In Utah the federal government owns 65 percent of the land.

In 2009, in San Juan County, "unemployment stands at 10 percent and the per-capita income is $14,000, the taking of artifacts for commercial gain has continued and helped to fuel a thriving trade in artifacts, including on eBay."

San Juan County Commissioner Phil Lyman, from Blanding comes from a long line of Mormon settlers who founded towns across the state. Lyman, like many conservatives, resents restrictions imposed by federal institutions. Lyman organized the Recapture Canyon protest held on Saturday May 10, 2014 to protest the 2007 BLM ban of all-terrain vehicles and to call for the legalization of the all-terrain vehicle trail. ATVS were banned because of damage to the Ancient Pueblo peoples sites built between 1150 and 1300 AD.

Native American art and artifacts
From the 1960s to the 1980s, the demand, and therefore the the price of Native American art and artifacts had increased according to Roland Force, director of New York's Museum of the American Indian. This accelerated over the following decades.

First Major ARPA enforcement (1986)
The first major ARPA enforcement took place at dawn on May 8, 1986, coordinated by Brent D. Ward, the former U.S. attorney for Utah, who actively crusaded against "Anasazi looting". Ward called the raid "the most significant law-enforcement initiative" under ARPA. Federal agents "raided some of [San Juan County]'s most respectable homes and carted away boxfuls of Indian artifacts from bookshelves, basements and mantles." This included homes of "two of San Juan County's three commissioners" and the mayor's brother. The mayor "himself angrily threatened to have Blanding secede from the union." Over 300 artifacts were confiscated from "17 homes and trading posts in San Juan County, Utah, and nearby Grants County, Colorado". The federal agents who undertook the 1986 "raid on pothunters" in Blanding were described by Winston Hurst, curator of the Edge of the Cedars Museum in Blanding, as a "lot more gung ho". Reactions to the 1986 Government raids was "fierce". According to Hurst, the 1986 raids "rubbed a stick in the open sore of the cultural values of southern Utah. This is Sagebrush Rebellion country out here; people don't like it when the Government marches into their homes like cavalry."

In a 1986 Associated Press journalist described how "[m]ost pothunters are thought to be from the Four Corners, boasting a keen interest in archeology and impressive knowledge of regional history. It is unknown whether they loot primarily to build private collections, swap among fellow pothunters or sell to outsiders."

Hurst, who was curator of the Edge of the Cedars Museum in Blanding, compared pot-hunting in Blanding to a "big Easter-egg hunt."

In 1986, Pete Steele, a Bureau of Land Management ranger, was quoted as saying that a "few prominent Blanding families" "have been pillaging and sacking San Juan County for 100 years. They think it's their right."

Earl K. Shumway: rare custodial sentence under ARPA
""Around here, it’s not a crime. It’s a way of life.""

- Earl K. Shumway, Utah pot-hunter 1990s

Wayne Dance, who served as the Assistant United States Attorney (AUSA) for the Utah District from 1990 to 2007, targeted one of Blanding's most "notoriously defiant" pot-hunters, then-38-year-old Earl K. Shumway. Shumway, who was the nephew of Devar Shumway, was considered to be Utah's "most destructive looter ever". He had "bragged that he used a bulldozer to decimate an Indian ruin". Shumway claimed to have "ransacked" "thousands of sites, including graves, in southern Utah" in the 1980s and 1990s. Ward argued that pot-hunters were deterred following the raid. Ward was disappointed when U.S. District Judge J. Thomas Greene put Shumway on probation in March 1986. In November 1984, Shumway had been accused of "removing 34 ancient Indian baskets and assorted jewelry" worth $110,000 from "national forest land 15 miles northwest of Blanding". In his plea bargain Shumway agreed to "help federal prosecutors in other looting cases" He was released from prison and in August 1986, Shumway testified against the son of the "late San Juan County Commissioner Cal Black", Buddy Black, who was eventually acquitted. Shumway became Ward's "flagship case". He displayed "many of the baskets that Shumway pilfered from Anasazi sites."

In 1995 Dance used DNA evidence in an ARPA case for the first time. He connected Shumway to a "cigarette butt found at the Dop-Ki Cave site" and the jurors found Shumway guilty. U.S. District Judge David Winder handed Shumway the "largest prison term ever given" under ARPA. Shumway's custodial sentence for pot-hunting was is rare and it was largely because of the DNA evidence and because of the severity of his crime. Among other things, Shumway had dug up the remains of an infant in a 1991 helicopter-assisted theft from an Anasazi cliff dwelling, called Dop-Ki Cave, in Canyonlands National Park. In 1998, in National Parks, Wendy Mitman Clarke described how Shumway had "robbed the ancient grave of an Anasazi child, stealing the infant's burial blanket and scattering its remains to the wind." He served more than six years in prison without parole.

Logistics of Operation Cerberus
In 2006 BLM agents contacted Ted Gardiner who agreed to meet with two FBI agents regarding an "art crimes task force". FBI Special Agent Gibson Wilson requested the authority to put Ted Gardiner undercover as a a paid confidential informant. Wilson also "brought in a BLM Special Agent, Daniel P. (Dan) 2006 as lead BLM agent for the operation.

Ryan Cleverly was brought in as Utah state insurance-fraud agent. Gardiner, a member of a "prominent Mormon family" worked undercover for about thirty months before the raid. The FBI and BLM "arranged controlled sales of illegally taken artifacts" through Gardiner. By the end of the operation, Gardiner had purchased 250 artifacts for $336,000 from the defendants.

The operation was coordinated by the Department of Justice (DOJ) represented by David W. Ogden and the Interior Department (DOI) under then-U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and involved FBI and U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) agents as well as agents from "state and local jurisdictions".

Timothy J. Fuhrman, was the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI's Salt Lake City Field Office. "The indictments were announced by Secretary Salazar; Assistant Secretary EchoHawk; Deputy Attorney General David Ogden of the U.S. Department of Justice; Brett L. Tolman, U.S Attorney in Utah."

The agents "obtained many search and arrest warrants, including warrants to arrest Dr. and Mrs. Redd and to search their house." "Team members were concerned for their safety because some local citizens had previously acted hostilely toward federal officials." "Agent Love submitted several newspaper articles beginning in 2008 showing episodes involving hostility and violence directed at federal agents in southern Utah. In fact, one article mentions that a 1986 federal operation concerning archaeological items “strained relations with the federal government, which residents already regarded as arrogant and intrusive." "In a highly publicized and locally controversial criminal case in 1995, federal agents arrested Dr. Redd and Mrs. Redd for desecrating a dead body while they were digging for Native American artifacts. Finally, Dr. Redd’s status as a physician did not eliminate the federal agents’ concerns that arresting him and his wife might provoke a response." "Thus, even interpreting the facts most favorably to the Estate, we see no constitutional violation. Agent Love’s conduct—deploying twenty-two agents wearing soft body armor and carrying firearms in compliance with agency policy— was not objectively unreasonable under the circumstances. With this in mind, we of course also agree with the district court’s conclusion that the Fourth Amendment right at issue in this case wasn’t clearly established. Thus, we conclude that Agent Love was entitled to qualified immunity."

Agencies involved
From 2009 to 2012 Larry Echo Hawk served as U. S. Department of Interior (DOI) Assistant Secretary-Indian Affairs. While in office, the federal government increased the land held in trust for Native American tribes by 158,000 acres. Operation Ceberus took place under his tenure. He resigned his position at Interior on April 27, 2012.

""Looters robbing tribal communities of their cultural patrimony is a major law enforcement issue for federal agencies enforcing historic preservation laws in Indian Country. Today’s action should give American Indians and Alaska Natives assurance that the Obama Administration is serious about preserving and protecting their cultural property.""

- Interior Assistant Secretary-Indian Affairs Larry Echo Hawk]

Indictments
Twenty four people, most of them from San Juan County, Utah, faced felony indictments. While some pleaded guilty, none received prison sentences. They received probation. Some forfeited their personal collections of artifacts. Included among those arrested were a "math teacher", a "brother of the local sheriff" and a prominent physician and his wife. Two defendants, Steven Shrader, a salesman from Santa Fe, New Mexico, Dr. James Redd, a prominent physician and Ted Gardiner, the operative, committed suicide following the raid.

A federal grand jury in Salt Lake City indicted those who were arrested. "They faced more than 100 felony counts of theft of government and Indian property, and trafficking in protected artifacts." David Lacy, a 55-year-old high school math teacher and a brother of San Juan County Sheriff Mike Lacy—"was indicted on accusations that he sold a woman’s prehistoric loin cloth, a turkey feather blanket, a decorated digging stick, a set of knife points and other artifacts for more than $11,000."

Aftermath
Some questioned the lenient sentences given by the judges in 2009. "The judges let everyone off the hook," said Forrest Cuch, a Ute Indian and director of the Utah Division of Indian Affairs. John Scorup, who was a BLM archaeological ranger for 20 years argued that judges could have given 10 years in prison to repeat offenders. One family alone had forfeited "eight hundred and twelve Native American artifacts...reportedly requiring two trucks to remove them from their residence." Family members were granted 24 to 36 months probation. Scorup argued that the agents had "made the arrests [and] got the evidence. ..[A] lot of them worked themselves to death trying to catch these people." With the exception of Earl Shumway whose DNA tied him to a theft, very few pot-hunters face prison sentences.

Following the 2009 raid in Blanding, archaeologist Winston Hurst, a lifelong resident of Blanding, who advocates for the preservation of archaeological artifacts, acknowledged that his neighbours in Blanding have a "long tradition of pothunting" that will not be easily "eradicated by enforcement alone."

In a 2011 article in The Salt Lake Tribune Brandon Loomis noted that, "Illegal or not, Americans still clutch after the Southwest’s past by combing its canyons for ruins."

By 2011 The Salt Lake Tribune reported that "The laws, the arrests, the penalties — nothing has stopped the criminal trafficking, last year or last century." Jerry Spangler of the Colorado Plateau Archaeological Alliance explained that by 2011, most people have stopped vandalizing and pot-hunting, but the hard-core pothunters "just seek more remote ruins."

Blanding Mayor Toni Turk claimed that Gardiner had framed many of the accused by offering them money. Senators Orrin Hatch(R) and Bob Bennett (R) called the raid "overkill." ""I'm very concerned about it. It seems like overkill to me to do that with these people, one a doctor, a pillar of his community. I'd call for a (U.S. Senate) investigation. But I don't chair (and control) the Judiciary Committee.""

- Senator Orrin Hatch June 14, 2009

From May 2014 to April 2015 alone, over a "dozen serious looting cases were reported" including "small-scale theft to ancestral remains being tossed around when graves are plundered."

Senator Hatch co-sponsored the Restoring the 10th Amendment Act to strengthen state rights under the 10th Amendment. He is against federal designation of national monuments in states and he in 2010 he co-sponsored the National Monument Designation Transparency and Accountability Act of 2010 to increases the requirements for a designation as national monument.

The Operation Cerberus sting surprised and enraged many of the residents of the "predominately Mormon town of 3,600". Dr. James Redd, who had been the only physician in Blanding, a devout Mormon, and a father of five, had been caught in the sting by Gardiner. He committed suicide. With his death "Blanding erupted." Sixty-year-old Dr. Redd had served Mormon and American Indian families as physician for thirty years.

In January 1996, Dr. James Redd and his wife visited and collected Native American artifacts from Cottonwood Wash, a Hopi ancestral burial ground. They claimed that the BLM map they used showed the site as privately owned. They were arrested and charged with the desecration of a human body. Mrs. Redd entered an Alford Plea in which she admitted not criminal conduct but agreed to pay $10,000 to settle a civil suit related to the act. All charges were dropped against James Redd. A grand jury had indicted Dr. Redd on "one count of “receiv[ing], conceal[ing], and retain[ing] property belonging to an Indian tribal organization, with a value of more than $1,000 . . . knowing such property to have been embezzled, stolen, or converted . . . in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1163 and 2.” R. vol. 1 at 201. The property referenced in the indictment was an “effigy bird pendant.” Id. Mrs. Redd was indicted for several additional counts of receiving and selling tribal property."

In June 2009 Dr. Redd, his wife Jeannie and their daughter were on the Navajo reservation when Dr. Redd found a small white shell partly exposed "carved in the shape of a bird, with a hole drilled in it" on the Navajo reservation. Mrs. Redd pocketed it.

The grandson of the Walter C. Lyman (1863-1943), the founder of Blanding, 78-year-old Harold Lyman, who was inducted into the Utah Tourism Hall of Fame in June 2009, was among those caught. Three of Austin Lyman's brothers were among those arrested and Redd was his "lifelong friend and physician". Dale Lyman, who was 76 at the time, got five years’ probation for "trafficking a prehistoric Clovis spear point". Earl Shumway's widow, 40-year-old Tammy Shumway, was caught in Operation Cerberus when she "arranged the sale of "ceramic figurines and other artifacts taken from public lands" to a government informant for a 10 percent commission, and was sentenced to six months of home confinement and 2 1/2 years of supervised release but no fine.

Bears Ears National Monument
In December, 2016 President Obama designated much of the area as Bears Ears National Monument.

On January, 2017 Mike Michael Shumway Lee Floor Speech on Bears Ears National Monument On December 19, 2016, Rebecca M. Benally, County Commissioner for San Juan County joined Senator Lee in opposing Bears Ears and supporting the PLI.