The secret undercover operative key to a federal crackdown on illegal artifact trafficking in the Four Corners area has deep roots in Utah with personal and professional ties to one of the state's iconic retailers.

Ted Gardiner, identified in court papers only as the "Source" but who federal officials have said was well-known among buyers and sellers of ancient relics from ancestral Puebloan ruins and graves, is the former president and CEO of Dan's Foods, a Utah institution founded by his grandfather, Dan Gardiner Sr., in the early 1900s.

Multiple residents of Blanding, home to 17 of the 26 people busted during the summer on federal felony charges, freely shared the operative's name even before James Redd, a prominent Blanding physician who killed himself a day after his June 10 arrest, was buried.

News reporters declined to publish Gardiner's name until August, when the Santa Fe New Mexican reported it in a news story about warrants served to upper-crust Santa Fe antiquities dealers. Since then, his name has appeared in hundreds of newspapers and Web publications in a story circulated by The Associated Press.

Federal officials declined to comment for this story, but in July told The Salt Lake Tribune that the Source, as he was called in search-warrant affidavits, came to them voluntarily and not under threat of prosecution. He spent 2½ years buying and selling artifacts while wired with an audiovisual recorder during his transactions, resulting in the seizure of such relics as human teeth, sacred masks, pottery stolen from burial sites and other antiquities taken from federal and tribal lands.

Gardiner's role puts him at the center of the cases that outgoing U.S. Attorney for Utah Brett Tolman and FBI Special Agent for Utah Timothy Fuhrman say spans the Four Corners.

Evidence of Gardiner's community standing pops up in the public record in connection with modern-day Dan's Foods, which his grandfather started planning in 1948 after running a smaller store he founded with his brother, Eli, in 1909. Dan Gardiner Sr. died before his first sleek supermarket opened in 1949. That's when Ted Gardiner's father, Dan S. Gardiner Jr., took over the company.

Ted Gardiner worked as the company vice president until his father retired in 1990, then took the helm as president and CEO. Associated Foods bought Dan's in 2000.

During Ted Gardiner's tenure with his family business, he was active in civic affairs. He served on the board of the Utah Food Industry Association and made charitable donations, including $10,000 to customer-selected local schools.

In a prepared statement at the time, Gardiner said schools "are perhaps our most important community resource and for that reason, we have always sought opportunities to support them and assist them in any way possible."

In 1998, the Utah Supreme Court upheld Gardiner's decision to fire a pharmacist who made trouble for customers trying to fill painkiller prescriptions.

The court ruling said that during a 1993 interview, the pharmacist said he had been let go after reporting an employee had been stealing drugs from his former company's pharmacy. "I'll never reprimand a pharmacist for following the law," Gardiner replied. "That's one thing I demand of all my pharmacists who work for me, that they do everything by the book."

According to court documents related to search warrants in New Mexico, Gardiner in 2005 was arrested for driving while intoxicated, which was reduced to a lesser plea of reckless driving. And that, court papers show, is the extent of any criminal record.

Bureau of Land Management special agent Dan Love says any suggestion that the "Source" -- whose identity he would not discuss -- was facing some kind of prosecution is "garbage."

Hundreds of pages of court documents detail a risky investigation while Gardiner was undercover. People knew him by his real name. He got into the Santa Fe antiquities scene through a chain of introductions from diggers, buyers and sellers who recognized him as a fellow traveler with money to spend.

But Gardiner wasn't just lounging around galleries. Court documents reveal many dangerous situations he willingly entered, sometimes accompanied by an undercover FBI agent.

Charles Denton Armstrong, who threatened to tie Gardiner to a tree and beat him with a baseball bat and who faces a felony for retaliating against an informant, was to argue today before U.S. District Judge Clark Waddoups that his statements made to Love allegedly admitting the threat should be suppressed.

Attorneys in court papers filed Wednesday said they were close to a settlement in the Armstrong case.