The undercover operative chafed at how federal officials managed a news conference last summer about the diggers, dealers and collectors he helped snare for trading in artifacts looted from graves and ruins on public lands.
Reporters were quick to question FBI Special Agent in Charge Timothy Fuhrman about the civilian operative, identified only as "The Source" and described as an insider. Had the Feds flipped the informant? Was there a quid pro quo, a promise of leniency or immunity? Fuhrman wouldn't answer directly, but said the illegal trade was a multimillion-dollar industry.
"They are people who know what they are doing," Fuhrman said. "There's a network."
Ted Gardiner, the Source who volunteered his undercover service to the FBI, fretted the vague answer tarred him as much as the 24 accused felons he had helped bust.
Not just his reputation but also his personal redemption were at risk. He had white-knuckled his sobriety during a difficult and dangerous 21/2-year, 24/7 covert investigation that spanned Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona.
High-rolling antique and art dealers in a business that stretches across the Atlantic Ocean into the wealthiest homes in Europe could go down. Crooks who had violated sacred ceremonies of Puebloan ancestors could be brought to heel in court if not through spiritual retribution. Why was suspicion falling on what he might have done wrong or some deal he had cut in exchange for some nonexistent violation?
That wasn't how Gardiner, who died Monday, wanted the story told. That's why he picked up the phone and asked an intermediary to help him find a reporter who would listen.
--
The night of June 9, a tribal elder from a Southwestern pueblo blessed more than 100 U.S. Bureau of Land Management law enforcement officers and archaeologists who the next day would mount a dawn raid on Blanding, Moab and Monticello residents indicted for looting graves and trading in relics taken from tribal, BLM and Forest Service land.
Gardiner described how the same elder cleansed and blessed a sacred Hopi kachina dance mask, a ritual Gardiner said he was allowed to witness, a profound experience for him. He said he was a recovering alcoholic and atheistic. But since he stopped drinking in winter 2006 -- and volunteered himself to the FBI the very next day -- he had felt drawn to the peaceful, mysterious ways of Buddhism and the Hopi.
He clung to spirituality as he captured surreptitious sound and video recordings of people who possessed or traded an astonishing number of artifacts they never should have touched, much less thought to own or display: baby sandals (hundreds of years old), blankets, jewelry, human teeth (one with a root attached), finger bones and other human remains, sacred tribal ceremonial objects stolen from ancient graves and ruins.
--
"I don't want people to believe I was coerced," he told The Salt Lake Tribune on June 11, the day after Fuhrman, U.S. Attorney for Utah Brett Tolman, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Bureau of Indian Affairs leader Larry EchoHawk lined up in Salt Lake City to announce 115 felony charges and a handful of misdemeanors against the suspects: 16 from Blanding, two from Monticello, one from Moab, two from New Mexico and three from Colorado.
A self-described outdoors guy and backpacker who despised the immorality of the plunderers, Gardiner wanted to control the story.
During the next eight months, he would call with tips, mostly referring to court documents on suspects in other states available for public view that were rich in detail about the risks he took, the suspects he caught in his complex dragnet.
When rattled, as he was when two defendants committed suicide, or when railing at The Tribune for, like other news outlets, publishing his name in October, his voice tightened to rough near-incoherence.
When he relaxed, sometimes he half-sketched tales impossible to verify, with the promise that, when he was ready, he would sit down and spill the details for the record, for the exclusive Big Story. His story.
That day was always in a few days, maybe next week. Or maybe right now, since he was sick of having to bend to prosecutors, the FBI and BLM law enforcement authorities who briefed him daily. Often the calls sounded as if he had pulled over while driving, a turn indicator or flasher ticking in the cellular background.
"I came forward and did this," he said during that first telephone conversation, "because of a problem I perceived."
"I did it because these things are important to me. ... I was hired on by the FBI. My employment was with the FBI," he said, emphasizing the "was." But now, he said, strangling his words, "I'm not going to ask them for permission to talk to people."
He did, though. Permission denied. He had been paid more than $160,000 by July 2009 and had signed an agreement not to reveal or disclose anything, a stricture Gardiner insisted was in effect only while he was actually working for the FBI as an agent, and he no longer was.
Prosecutors, with dozens of cases still in the courts, nevertheless ordered him to stop talking to anyone, especially the reporters he had been tantalizing with incomplete anecdotes, promises to tell all and furious vows to defy the Feds he had come to view as taking him for granted while failing to provide him enough protection.
The U.S. Attorney's Office repeatedly has declined to comment about the Source.
--
Hopi elders cried, Gardiner said, when agents showed them sacred masks recovered during the probe.
The Hopi consider the masks to be spiritual entities that are intermediaries with the gods who watch over their people. No one is allowed to own the masks; the very notion of possession, much less theft, is alien.
The elders wept because the agents said the masks couldn't yet be returned to the Arizona mesas where they lived.
--
Gardiner kept his own name for the investigation because he was after people who already knew him or had heard of him as an antiquities dealer and an authenticator who, he insisted, took pains to trade only in legal artifacts.
He was a successful business executive from the noted Utah family who established Dan's Foods. Good citizens. His name held trust. But he worried his name also exposed him and said he had collected a network of below-the-radar helpers who watched his back.
Those he had helped bust in San Juan County knew he was the Source. San Juan Sheriff Mike Lacy said so during a television interview.
Gardiner's confidentiality already was blown, it was only a matter of time, he said, before everyone knew who he was and anyone could find him, or worse, his family.
"A lot of these people are felons," he said.
Gardiner grew increasingly fearful, especially after Charles Denton Armstrong, a Blanding white-supremacist thug, threatened to tie him to a tree and beat him with a baseball bat. Federal authorities took Armstrong down hard, sent him to prison.
Gardiner slept with a gun.
When a reporter last summer rode his scooter up to the curb as Gardiner was mowing his lawn at his Holladay rental home, he lashed out and demanded the journalist's notebook, though they eventually sat down for a forbidden chat.
Trouble ensued. Prosecutors and agents reminded Gardiner he still was under grand jury seal as the prime witness in a big, expensive case that was costing taxpayers to keep him secure. But online commenters and others, who alleged he had been a heroin addict and criminal bought off by the Feds, still rankled. Gardiner at last persuaded agents to tell a Tribune reporter, on the record, that he had come to their service voluntarily.
Soon, court documents spelled out the whole of Gardiner's criminal history: a 2005 arrest for driving while intoxicated, reduced to a lesser plea of reckless driving.
The court papers said he had used drugs and abused alcohol. Gardiner said he was a recovering alcoholic but didn't want to be described in a news story as having a drinking problem. From the time his undercover work began to the time it ended, he had stayed sober.
He started drinking again after he returned to what passed for normal life. He had a job (at Market Street Grill in Cottonwood Heights), he loved his children (two sons and a daughter). In January, he spent nearly a week in a hospital with what he said was life-threatening pancreatitis.
But he sounded fine on the phone.
--
Gardiner loved adrenaline. The undercover op was a rush. A short time after the busts, he sky-dived for the first time. He loved that, too.
A grainy copy of a photograph attached to the search warrant affidavit served on James and Jeanne Redd shows Jeanne holding out a mug to a man's hand, passing it to him. The picture appears taken from a camera on the man's chest. The arm is thick; some kind of bracelet looks tied to the wrist.
Gardiner agreed that was his arm, but said since then he had changed his appearance with a haircut, weight loss and plastic surgery around his chin.
The Ted Gardiner eating sushi last summer looked like a man in his late 30s, though he was 51. Wiry, graceful, tanned and clear-eyed, he wore a silver bracelet on his left wrist. He showed off a turquoise, coral and shell Zuni necklace, explaining why the artist strung asymmetries in the beading. Calm, or straining for it, Gardiner spoke deliberately with many long pauses.
He described preparing the San Juan County site, on BLM land, where Durango, Colo., antiquities dealer Vern Crites and Durango resident Richard Bourret wanted to dig Sept. 14, 2008, an event carefully detailed in court papers that accompanied the two men's indictments.
During the day, Gardiner said, he taught law enforcement agents in desert camouflage how to walk from rock to rock to avoid leaving prints in the soil. In "blacks" and night-vision goggles, Gardiner showed the agents how to move invisibly in the dark. They cleaned the site with leaf blowers and brooms, sweeping the desert floor clean of tire tracks and footprints.
The agents would be nearby with rifles during the morning grave-dig, during which Bourret and Crites, court papers say, uncovered a skull.
"I didn't know this Bourret from anyone," Gardiner said. "He could have hit me in the head with a shovel."
After the plastic surgery, Gardiner went to a Blanding service station, and in full view of anyone who cared to look his way, filled his gas tank.
"Nobody recognized me," he said, laughing. Another rush.
--
A few weeks ago, soul-sick amid a divorce, a failed new relationship, the pressure of responding to defense attorneys' demands for evidence they could use against him and a growing sense of dread from handling sacred artifacts and remains of the dead, Gardiner received a tribal elder's blessing for himself and his young daughter.
After that, he called The Tribune a few more times, sounding healthy and relaxed. He was planning a trip in late March or early April to the San Juan County desert realm of the Puebloan ancestors his father taught him to love, and offered to be a tour guide. He had started writing a book about his covert experiences, had a chapter he was ready to share. He agreed to meet Sunday afternoon at the Salt Lake City downtown library, said he would call that morning to nail down the time.
But Saturday night, Gardiner spiraled away from this world and threatened to kill himself. Officials took Gardiner's gun and led him from his house in handcuffs.
Apparently the demons prevailed. Around 6 p.m. Monday, after telling one of his roommates goodbye, police say he shot himself to death in a confrontation with officers .
The rest of Gardiner's story will have to come out in court, from the thousands of hours of taped evidence against the looters and heritage thieves he wanted stopped. The evidence, the legacy of his decency.
