The Best American Crime Reporting 2010 (27 page)

Although Boomer agreed to testify against Johnny Decker in any future criminal proceedings related to the Sacred Buffalo caper, there weren’t any future criminal proceedings. According to Mr. Acadia, lawyers once involved in the case, law enforcement in Ohio, and Boomer, it just so happened that this Decker fellow was in business with the FBI. The way Boomer puts it, Decker was a “federal informant.” The way the now-retired Detective Andy Kindred puts it, Decker “did a lot of work for the FBI” knocking around Ohio and Indiana and associating with motorcycle gangs as a tipster, and the Feds determined that wherever Decker was or wasn’t, and regardless of whatever role he did or did not play in the Sacred Buffalo job, he was too valuable to get caught up in it. In other words, whoever planned the Sacred Buffalo caper and hired Decker to be the middleman was either dumb lucky or a master of the scam.

A
PPARENTLY UNCONCERNED ABOUT
Boomer and Kinney, in 2002 Big Jim filed suit against Lund and Rippberger, arguing that he should have received a third of the insurance settlement. He claimed that, according to the LLC agreement, any profit from the Sacred Buffalo was to be equally divided three ways. Lund and Rippberger countered successfully by claiming their agreement established that all profits would be split three ways, provided the two financiers first recouped their investment plus a 100 percent return on their investment, which was equal to the $193,000 each took out of the Acadia payment. In memos to a Buffalo LLC lawyer on the matter, Lund instructed the attorney to fight Big Jim’s suit because it was “ridiculous.” On principle, as Lund put it, he told his attorney not to settle. The case dragged on into March 2004, when Lund’s attorney deposed Durham. Well into the hours-long deposition, Durham took it upon himself to solicit a settlement.

“I want two cows, 40 blankets,” he said. In the flow of the transcript, the opposing counsel is clearly stunned and attempting to collect his thoughts when he says, “Let me write this down.” Durham’s own lawyer then asks his client, “Are you serious about this?” To which Durham replies: “You’re damn right I’m serious…. Two cows, breeding cows. That means breeding stock, male, female. Two cows, 40 Pendleton blankets. Good ones…. Two chain saws for Sun Dance to cut our arbor down so we can dance, and half the money they took over what they had coming. Forty blankets, 65,000 bucks, two chain saws, and two cows. Any thief would take that. I ain’t paying your attorney’s fees. I will go to hell first…. I’ll walk away. You can make fun of us forever.” Lund and Rippberger’s attorney rejected the offer, and shortly thereafter the case withered away.

Rick Rippberger no longer has anything to do with the Art Mart in Boulder. He’s divorced from his wife and thereby divorced from the business. After he got his piece of the Acadia payment, he deferred to Lund on the business of the lawsuit Durham had filed against them; nor did Rippberger closely follow the news of Boomer and Kinney. Until we spoke in a Denver coffee shop last fall, he says, he’d never even heard the name Johnny Decker. “I didn’t even know who he was,” Rippberger said. He had on aviator-style glasses with lenses tinted a rose color, which seemed uniquely suited for his worldview. Visibly frustrated, he took off the glasses. “You know what this did for me? I mean, I’m that type of guy that trusts everybody, all right? And with this whole thing, and as far as Native Americans, I have the worst taste of Native Americans in my mouth.”

In the
Buffalo
book, Durham wrote “There’s another old saying. ‘It’s not for sale.’ I wish that were true of religion. People without any real spiritual knowledge try to run a sweat lodge—or a vision quest—for a fee. They learn to sing a couple of songs and to go through the motions and then they offer to run sweats for people who will pay the price. The people who pay have no idea how much preparation and prayer goes into running a real sweat lodge ceremony, or that the adviser for a vision quest must be spiritually responsible for them. At best, the people who pay to go to a sweat lodge just waste their time and money; at worst, they can be hurt bad. Unlike religion, true spirituality isn’t for sale.” But as far as Durham was concerned, the Sacred Buffalo was for sale.

Big Jim restored the Sacred Buffalo, or, hell, who knows, maybe he had the Sacred Buffalo restored. In any case, the buffalo was put into exhibitable form. And in January 2002, while Boggs and Kinney were coming as clean as they could to authorities, and Rippberger and Lund were fending off Durham’s suit, Big Jim sold the Sacred Buffalo. An acquisitions director for an international museum chain, Edward Meyer, bought the piece. When I spoke with Meyer on the phone this fall, he wouldn’t disclose how much he’d paid for it, but he said it was the third most expensive purchase he’d ever made in the 30 years he’s been in the business. He would say that the priciest piece he’s ever bought, which was a matter of public record, was a makeup case once owned by Marilyn Monroe, which Meyer purchased for $265,000.

Before we hung up, Meyer mentioned that the buffalo wasn’t the only thing he bought from Durham. He also purchased a human skeleton nailed to a crucifix. What makes the human skeleton piece even more interesting, and controversial, and therefore attractive to Meyer, is that on the bones, every inch of the bones, Durham had scrimshawed scenes from the Bible. “To this day,” Meyer says, “I would say it’s the most controversial piece in our collection. And we have some 25,000 items. His work is spectacular. The crucifix is beautifully woodworked, and the scrimshaw is incredible. He has told the New Testament and Acts of the Apostles, but from an Indian viewpoint based on his religious upbringing, I guess, in missionary schools. Visually, it is disturbing. People don’t see skeletons hanging on crosses. It’s a one-of-a-kind.” Meyer says the human skeleton exhibit is on display at his venue in London, England, and that as of just last year the Sacred Buffalo could be seen at his museum in San Antonio, Texas. Oh, of course, the name of the international exhibition and museum operation Meyer oversees: It is Ripley’s Believe It or Not!

As the executive editor of Denver’s city magazine,
5280, M
AXIMILLIAN
P
OTTER
writes or edits many of that monthly’s narrative and investigative features. His bylined work has earned honors including two National Magazine Award nominations for Public Interest and Reporting; the American Bar Association’s top prize for legal reporting, the Silver Gavel; and a prestigious Michael Kelly Award selection, recognizing “the fearless pursuit and expression of truth.” Since he has been executive editor,
5280
has earned four National Magazine Award nominations. Potter, thirty-eight, lives in Denver with his (patient) wife and two sons. He has been a staff writer at
Premiere, Philadelphia,
and
GQ
magazines. This is the second time Potter’s work has been anthologized in
The Best American Crime Reporting.

Coda

“Evergreen” is one of those journalistic terms used to describe a topic believed to have enduring relevance. The circumstances that became “The Great Buffalo Caper” presented as such. Which is why when a former magazine editor and good pal, Christopher Connelly, tipped me to the mystery some six years ago, I figured I had time to get to it. Sure, enough, the characters and crime at the heart of the darkly comedic saga were still very much
animated
. As my editor for this story, Geoff Van Dyke, put it, the whole thing was like something straight out of a Coen Brothers film. And so it remains: Nearly a year after the story was published in
5280
, a man contacted me wanting to know if the “Caper” was, in fact, true. I assured him it was and inquired as to why. The man explained that “Big Jim” was the organizer behind a cross-country motorcycle race. He explained that Big Jim was billing the thing as the “Hoka Hey,” a
Cannonball Run
–style contest that would begin in Key West, Florida, and end some 7,000 miles later in Homer, Alaska. There, the winner, according to the race’s promotional materials, will receive a “HALF MILLION DOLLARS in ALASKAN GOLD.” (The caps, it should be noted, are
not
mine.) The gentleman on the phone said he’d read the rules of entry; it appeared the $1,000 registration fee was nonrefundable; and, the man said, he doubted the legitimacy of the race. Making clear I had no knowledge of the intriguing competition I could only offer my opinion that the man’s suspicions seemed well founded to me. For what it’s worth, the Hoka Hey was originally scheduled for August 2009, but it was “delayed” and rescheduled for Summer 2010, if you want in.

FROM
The American Scholar

O
NE MORNING IN
S
EPTEMBER,
1878, a tired traveler, five feet four inches tall, with a wispy beard, arrived at the office of the daily
Pittsburgh Leader.
His vest and coat were a faded purple, and his previously black pants were gray with age and wear. As he stepped inside, he lifted a once fashionable silk hat to disclose brown hair parted down the middle like a woman’s. Despite the mileage that showed in his face and clothes, he was well-kept, and spoke with clarity. He handed the editor a note from an agent at the Pittsburgh rail depot, which said: “This will introduce to you Mr. Boston Corbett, of Camden, N.J., the avenger of Abraham Lincoln. Mr. Corbett is rather bashful, but at my solicitation he concluded to call on the
Leader
editor as an old soldier.”

The newspaperman realized that this was no joke. He remembered the photographs of this man, spread across the North after he shot the assassin John Wilkes Booth thirteen years earlier, in April 1865. He invited him to sit and talk. Corbett told him that he was homeless, almost penniless, and headed to Kansas to stake a claim. The railroad agent had suggested that he come to the newspaper to tell his story, on the chance that someone would help him on his way.

Asked what had happened since he entered history by shooting Booth that early morning in Virginia, Corbett said that despite his fame, he had nothing. The photographer Mathew Brady had taken his portrait, and published it by the thousands, but all the hero got in return was a few copies. He had worked at his trade of hat finisher in New York, then lived in Camden while employed in Philadelphia. He showed the editor his credentials as a guard at the great Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876. Now his luck had run out. He lost his job in Philadelphia and could not find work, so decided to head for wide-open Kansas, determined to get there if he had to walk. So far he had paid $4.21 for rail fare, but come on foot much of the way to Pittsburgh. That morning he had sought out the local manager of the Pennsylvania Railroad, without success. He was going back that afternoon.

The editor of the
Leader
did not say how long they talked, or record how much Corbett told him about his earlier life. But Corbett was always willing to tell how he got his name:

Born in London in 1832, he came to America with his family when he was seven. They settled in Troy, New York, where he learned the hat trade, soon becoming a journeyman and taking his skills to other cities around the East. The beaver hats then so much in style were made of animal furs matted and repeatedly washed in a solution containing mercury nitrate, a process called carroting because it turned the fur a distinct shade of orange. Hat finishers like Corbett labored in close quarters, inhaling vapors laden with mercury. A year after he married, his young wife died with their stillborn daughter. He was despondent, and began wandering, working by day and drinking by night. Adrift in Boston, he underwent a born-again experience inspired by a Salvation Army evangelist. He felt a calling. It shook his life so profoundly that he decided to change his name to honor the place where he first saw the light, as Christ had changed the names of Saul and Simon when he called them. Since then his first name had been not Thomas, but Boston.

There was much more to his story: In Boston, he let his hair grow long in imitation of Jesus, became a street-corner preacher, and harangued his fellow workers for cursing and wenching. But the streets were still full of sin, and he was young, only twenty-six, and lonesome. One night in July, two women mocked him and beckoned him down from his soapbox. He was tempted. Fearful that he could not resist such strumpets, he went to his room, took a pair of scissors and carefully castrated himself. Then he proceeded to a prayer meeting, had dinner and took a walk before seeking emergency aid at Massachusetts General Hospital.

In his own mind, he had done as the Bible said: he had made himself a eunuch for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He said years later that he felt divinely instructed; he wanted to “preach the gospel without being tormented by animal passions.” The grisly experience may have removed him from sexual temptation, but the rest of his life proves that it did not remove his manhood.

After weeks recovering, he moved to New York and became a loud and constant presence at the Fulton Street Meeting, a lunchtime prayer gathering in lower Manhattan, organized by the Young Men’s Christian Association. He was too fervent for his co-worshipers, who called him a fanatic. When he testified or led prayers, he added an emphatic “er” to his words, saying “Lord-er hear-er our prayer-er….” In his loud, shrill voice, he shouted “Amen” and “Glory to God!” to approve anything he liked. Those around him tried to shush him, but failed.

Corbett was living in this emotional fever when war came in 1861, and he enlisted in the Twelfth New York Volunteers two days before the regiment sailed for Washington. He was eager to get at the Rebels: “I will say to them, ‘God have mercy on your souls’—then pop them off.” Morning and night, he prayed in the corner of his tent, despite the jeers of rough fellow soldiers. His resistance to military authority, to any authority below that of Christ, got him into the guard-house, and sometimes had him marching back and forth with a knapsack full of bricks. Even then he kept his Bible in hand, ranting at his comrades for their sins.

He was not afraid of the highest brass; in parade formation in Washington’s Franklin Square, when colonel and future general Daniel Butterfield cursed the regiment for misbehavior, Corbett stepped forth and defied him to his face. He was punished, but not repressed. He announced that he would quit the army when his first hitch was up, no matter what. When the hour came, he was on picket duty, but laid down his weapon and marched off. A court martial fined him two months pay, yet he kept reenlisting. The Twelfth New York was among the 12,500 Union troops captured, then paroled by Stonewall Jackson’s Confederates at Harper’s Ferry just before the battle of Antietam in September 1862. The following year, Corbett switched to Company L of the Sixteenth New York Cavalry, a regiment that spent much of its time chasing John Mosby’s Confederate raiders on the outskirts of Washington.

By mid-1864, U.S. Grant had marched the great Federal army from its winter camps along the Rapidan River to the suburbs of Richmond, a hundred miles south of the Union capital. But behind the lines, Mosby’s partisan horsemen still harassed Federal outposts and communications, striking and then disappearing into the northern Virginia countryside, tying down many times their own numbers and keeping Washington on edge.

That June, Mosby’s riders surprised Corbett and a detachment of Company L who were looking for them near Centreville. Official records say the Union troopers were loafing about after a meal and unprepared when the Rebels struck; Corbett’s version was, “I faced and fought against a whole column of them, all alone, none but God being with me, to help me, my being in a large field and they being in the road….”
Harper’s Weekly
would make him a hero, reporting that the Yankee cavalrymen “were hemmed in…and nearly all compelled to surrender except Corbett, who stood out manfully, and fired his revolver and twelve shots from his breech-loading rifle before surrendering, which he did after firing his last round of ammunition. Mosby, in admiration of the bravery displayed by Corbett, ordered his men not to shoot him, and received his surrender with other expressions of admiration.”

But when Corbett was out of Mosby’s hands, he got what turned into a death sentence to thousands of other captives—he was sent first to Lynchburg, then to the pine woods of Georgia, into the hellhole of Andersonville prison. Soldiers of both sides suffered in prison camps North and South, but Andersonville was the worst of the horrible lot. Although it existed for barely a year, about 45,000 captured Union troops were sent there, and of these nearly 13,000 died of disease, malnutrition and exposure to the elements. Corbett endured, preaching, praying and comforting his fellow inmates. “Bless the Lord,” he said later, “a score of souls were converted, right on the spot where I lay for three months without any shelter.”

After the war, he would testify for the prosecution in the long-running trial of Captain Henry Wirz, commandant of the camp, the only Confederate soldier executed for war crimes. He told of seeing prisoners dragging ball and chain in the sun; he said the place “was in a horrible condition of filth” the swamp around the stream that flowed through the stockade “was so offensive and the stench so great that he wondered that every man there did not die; the maggots were a foot deep” prisoners dug roots and dried them to eat; men who carried the dead out to be buried were allowed to bring back firewood, only to hear taunts of “That’s right; sell off a dead man for wood!” from fellow sufferers. When Corbett himself was sent out to gather firewood, he managed to slip away, but within hours was tracked down by hounds and brought back.

Then, after he had been held for five months, General Grant allowed the resumption of prisoner exchanges. Because Corbett was suffering with scurvy, diarrhea and fever, he was among the emaciated but lucky hundreds sent back north, a skeleton on crutches. Of thirteen other Yankees captured with him, only one survived.

Corbett stayed in an Annapolis hospital three weeks, until he was strong enough to take thirty days leave. He had reason to be deeply vengeful as he rejoined his regiment at Vienna, Virginia, ten miles west of Washington. Writing to a woman who had tended soldiers returning from Andersonville, he said the thousands of their comrades lying under Georgia soil were “monuments of the cruelty and wickedness of this Rebellion—the head of all the rebellions of earth for blackness and horror. Those only can feel the extent of it who have seen their comrades, as I have, lying in the broiling sun, without shelter, with swollen feet and parched skin, in filth and dirt, suffering as I believe no people ever suffered before in the world.”

On April 15, the morning after John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln at Ford’s Theater, the Sixteenth New York deployed into a cordon thrown about Washington in hopes of snaring the attacker before he could escape to the South. The troopers did not realize the president had died until they approached the capital and saw flags at half mast. The regiment split into detachments that rode out to follow every rumor of Booth’s whereabouts. Between these sorties, Corbett was asked to lead prayer one night at Washington’s Wesley Chapel. “O Lord,” he intoned, “lay not innocent blood to our charge; but bring the guilty speedily to punishment.” The regiment had the honor of riding in the president’s funeral procession on April 19, a solemn parade along Pennsylvania Avenue between thousands of mourning citizens and buildings draped in black.

For another five days, Corbett and his detachment continued their vigil until a bugle sounded “Boots and Saddles” and brought them running to their stable. They mounted up, and with Lieutenant Edward Doherty leading, they clattered to the office of Lafayette C. Baker, chief of War Department detectives, across from Willard’s Hotel at Fourteenth and Pennsylvania. Doherty went in, emerged with two other detectives, and rushed with twenty-six cavalrymen to the Sixth Street wharf to board the steamer
John S. Ide
. They set out down the Potomac toward Fredericksburg in pursuit of the assassin.

Booth and David Herold, one of his accomplices, had escaped into southern Maryland, where they hid at Dr. Samuel Mudd’s house, then in swamps and barns until they borrowed a rowboat and slipped across the wide Potomac into Virginia. Following a tip, Doherty’s troopers came ashore at Belle Plain on Aquia Creek at about 10 o’clock that Monday evening and spread across country, rapping farmers out of bed for questioning. The next day they tracked Booth to the Rappahannock River, and shuttled across on a rude scow that carried eight men and horses at a time. That night they traced him to the Garrett farm, just west of Port Royal. After a detective threatened the reluctant Garrett with hanging, the farmer’s son pointed to the barn where the fugitives were hiding. That is where Corbett picked up the story three weeks later, when he testified before the military court trying the remaining conspirators.

He told how the soldiers surrounded the barn, and Lieutenant Doherty and the detectives carried on a long back-and-forth conversation with Booth, trying to persuade him to give up. “He positively declared he would not surrender, saying, ‘Well, my brave boys, you can prepare a stretcher for me…. make quick work of it; shoot me through the heart.’” But Booth said his accomplice wanted to come out, so Herold emerged and was quickly searched and tied up. Immediately after that, detective Everton J. Conger set fire to hay in the barn.

Corbett said, “The position in which I stood left me in front of a large crack—you might put your hand through it, and I knew that Booth could distinguish me and others through these cracks in the barn, and could pick us off if he chose to do so.” He could have shot Booth easily, but “as long as he was there, making no demonstration to hurt any one, I did not shoot him, but kept my eye on him steadily.” Then he saw Booth “taking aim with the carbine, but at whom I could not say. My mind was upon him attentively to see that he did no harm, and when I became impressed that it was time that I shot him, I took steady aim on my arm, and shot him through a large crack in the barn.”

When Booth’s body arrived at the Washington Navy Yard, Corbett was immediately proclaimed a hero by the public. He sat for photographer Brady, in several poses alone and in one standing with Doherty. The newly promoted captain towers over him, but Corbett stands at ease with forage cap tilted over his eyes, his pistol holster huge on one hip, his other hand grasping his saber, his boots tall and polished—the strange little sergeant whose cavalry brothers found him “cheerful and heroic under circumstances of intense suffering and great provocation.”