now i saw somebody this happened to and everything started moving but i thought that was a great model to show. a lot of times they do not feel empowered. >> thank you all very much. [applause]

good afternoon i serve on the board of the boston books festival. thank you for coming out on a rainy day for the annual tradition of something that is beloved to everyone in the community. i want to thank you for being here and i want to support the festival. we rely on your participation and giving to keep this brief for the community. if you are having a wonderful time, and i know you are, please do okay in your book program and if so inclined make a gift and visit us at the members tend and if you feel very motivated, and i hope you do, you can make a commitment of $150 either of lovely tote bag commemorating the anniversary with lovely sw

swag. people ask why i'm involved in the festival and i think is becausadvocatesbecause i'm comme notion. it's not only a passion project but sometimes an obsession. it's one such extraordinary moment and i'm delighted to share the introduction. thank you again. [applause] i would start with panelist introductions. over a decade long career he has written about everything from

each room crying to the holocaust, quite a range and next to him kirk wallace johnson, the author of beauty, obsession and the heist of the century. he is a journalist and former refugee worker who founded the project to resettle the allies as a part of his continued work for the refugees and the author of the dinosaur artist. she's a staff writer at the new yorker and was a fellow at harvard and teachers journalism at columbia university. at the end i'm going to leave 15 minutes for audience questions. we have a microphone in the center aisle you can come to to ask questions and then the authors will all be signing their books at the back of the

church. we will start with a sort of obvious question here which is how did you discover your strange but true crimes didn't know they had the makings of a book there was enough for 300 or 400 pages we will start with peter. >> a rather dramatic moment that goes back 50 years since i was on the uss northampton and married a girl but i didn't know that yet. april 25, 2008 about 4:30 i get a call from a dealer you should go down to the auction at the restaurant that starts in an hour and a half. he said 22 lots of the

sought-after burgundy wine one of the greatest are going to be withdrawn in the fourth-generation proprietor flying in to make sure they are withdrawn because he knows pr counterfeit. i took a shower and got dressed and went to the auction and that is the greatest wine list. at the end, everybody knew they had complained of these wines and we asked the director at the

end it here and he said he is the little fellow over in the corner. i never met rudy and normally identify myself as a journalist. he is looking at me like do i know this guy and i see that he's thinking for an answer and finally says we try our best, but that's burgundy and shit happens. that is the last thing he said and now i will pass the buck. [laughter] >> eight years later i was still running and by then he was on a bigger sentence. i'm the only person in this room

that has ever been to california where there is a prison and it's out there where he is. they would be tthere would be tn each side of the door and put them on the first flight back to his hometown. >> your curiosity was sparked. >> my encounter with the story happened in november of 2011. i was waist high in a river in

new mexico that feeds into the rio grande and i was fly fishing for trout and i was at a point in my life where i was feeling somewhat trapped because i'd spent the better part of a decade fighting the government on behalf of the iraqis that worked for us during the war and we were trying to get them out. the only respite i could get was through flyfishing. the trout tend to live in the most beautiful parts of the country. they don't -- the only thing that matters is how deliberate and quiet and patient you are to what's happening. and i hired someone that they did teach me the ends and outs of the river and he was tying a fly on to my line and i caught this bright colored thing i had never seen before.

it had maybe a dozen species and he started telling me about this art form and said if you think that's strange, you should hear about this kid named edwin who had just broken into the museum of natural history to steal bird skins that were gathered over hundreds of years and he still a million dollars worth to sell to the underground community and made hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy a golden flute because he is a flautist. half of the birds were never recovered so i'm standing in the middle of this rive the river ak

this is the crazy sentence i've ever heard a flautist steals dead birds. [laughter] that grabbed a hold of me and as soon as i started digging around getting threats by the end of the story it emerged there are cocaine addicts that are selling off their strategic chabot and the leaders that have some of the missing birds refuse to give them back. it's a pretty wild story that was all born on the river that morning. >> perfect birthplace would say. do i sound extraordinarily loud to you or is that just me in my ear? eying atl are in my family because to be hurt you have to

be loud. so if i blow your eardrums out -- disconnects the story because growing up in the northern part of the state where we didn't have natural history museums or talk about evolution. we didn't talk about the earth's deep pass so this is a new world to me and i don't remember the hour, the date. i remember the year of the spark of inspiration it was 2009 in the summer and i was rating our hometown paper and came across a news brief about a dinosaur feet in montana about to be sentenced to prison for having taken stolen dinosaur bones of the property in montana i couldn't understand who that was and who

would do such a thing and why anyone would steal bones of any kind beyond what we understand now that the medical graverobbers in the past and that led to many years of rabbit holes looking for the right case to follow. that case didn't turn out to be the right one but they had a lot of steps and different threads i could follow and in the spring of 2012, the case came up an unprecedented federal case involving a 38-year-old bone hunter and married father of two who raised and support his family by seeking the remains of

ice age that exist in florida, different areas are rich in and different fossils and he was in a state overrun with water that harper's lots of huge beard gorgeous bone dance to he taught himself how to diet and how to restore prehistoric remains an d he studied scientific papers and museums to understand how to reconstruct these creatures and eventually i think i can say this without giving spoilers he got into the thick and needed a bigger payout which meant moving to a bigger animal city was supplied with the deserts of mentally of which led to this book and talking about threads and whether a single story can support a book links work the

initial story appeared in the new yorker in january of 2013 and it wasn't until the summer of 2014 i realized that there was a book there and i didn't develop it over that fear kind of forgot about it because i was interested in other things but it was the first international case where a smuggler had been imprisoned in his case for taking a large apex predator to auction and sold it for over a million dollars and this raised lots of questions about the industry and lots of questions about who owns the earth advocates to handle fossils and hunt for them and interact and own them and sell them at raised questions about the black market

of dinosaur bones in particular that is a global or those that are rich in dinosaur bones that raised questions how they get smuggled out of some countries and into ours to be sold at auctions and trade shows so there's the auctions, history, all kinds of things that felt deep enough to explore. >> i want to get to some of those but one of the stories that connects all three books is that you have these amazing while the central characters are characters at the center. you mentioned rudy and edwin i. just want to know what was it like getting inside o the mind f this characters because the kind of have to do that and what did you learn about human nature and

the nature of obsession because to me all three of them were in their own way motivated by obsession. he was an interesting guy. >> he attended the university of florida and left with a double major in engineering which is small accomplishment. all he wanted to do is treasure hunt and to be known for bringing things to the public view and of course selling them he was interested in making a living and in terms of how to get inside the mind, that was hard because he isn't a talker. somebody called him a dia dialte the other day on twitter.

he is very reserved and we all know that there are prolific talkers who will just talk you into the ground and something about his voice like a zipper he tends to take long pauses even in the middle of sentences and that tends to make -- i'm a very impatient person so it was hard for me to learn to sit and wait and listen and encourage and not talk over him and so it's hard getting inside his mind and it took years to do because of his term and not to go forward until i was able to get inside a little bit because it's not there just to take the superficial version of that. i wanted to know what drove him and i'm always interested in why criminals to the things they do and how it affects their families and communities and whatever world they are operating in the eight the bond

market or others or wine or whatever. >> the nature of obsession. >> there was an obvious obsession with fossils. they all told me once you find your first fossil your life is literally changed. you can't stop looking for them. usually you want to find more of the same kind but some people cross over and like this one started with shark teeth in florida and wound up with dinosaurs in the desert so he didn't go up the food chain but he went up in terms of land, sea, size and time. it was a challenge at the

beginning. i feel like they have a pretty good sense of empathy but i couldn't understand how someone who had everything going for them in life when he was studying music in london at one of the most prestigious institutions in the world for music. he was an alarmingly bright and gifted young man. what would possess him to spend the better part of a year planning this heist which culminated in him a finished concert in london that evening and said he boarded a train up to a little town about 40 minutes out of london and he had an empty suitcase, diamond cutter, latex gloves he'd stolen from his doctor during a routine checkup and wire cutters and a little led flashlight and he scaled a 7-foot wall, snapped

the strands away, tried to carve through the window that was hardebut it washarder to cut thn he anticipated that he made sure the guards were not there and matched it with a rock & climbed into the museum of history and still witis told that the direcr described as a catastrophic theft from humanity. we understand not only the evolution of natural selection did the study of these specimes that these have yielded answers for centuries. we have the pesticides by these collections have mercury levels are rising in the ocean because we have these collections so how do you get into the mind of somebody that could justify this? he had been one of these masters at a young age. he was kind of indoctrinated in

the community through forms online because a teenager she was always longing for the feathers he couldn't afford because they are described as historical fetishism you could type the same looking things with dyed feathers but only the authentic ones from the centuries when i heard about the story i send an interview request and i spent the next four years trying to get him to talk and he finally did. i just got married and i thought that it would be fun if my wife came with me. she was working as a recording equipment but the day before the interview i realized i know all about this crime and background but i don't know what kind of person he is.

and i just walked my wife into some unstable situation so i hired a bodyguard, this german guy who showed up in a track suit the entire interview ready to pounce if anyone tried to do anything but it was wasted money. [laughter] in this case over the course of an eight-hour interview with emerged as someone who's obsession had completely warped their moral compass into having a really compartmentalized rationalization for everything. he didn't steal from an individual and he felt if they were using these things liberal of thwhy wereall of the birds sg

off they must not be doing a good enough job. he had a million justifications thathat he'd appreciate these specimens and that's what was so outrageous to me they hold answers to questions scientists haven't even thought of yet. they've just been spared from findings from world war i and evacuated when the museum was hit. they survived hitler and into the being stolen. >> with a golden flute nevertheless. >> and then there's rudy. >> it's interesting in 2008 there was extraordinary dying of

old wine. people have too much surplus money in their pocket. they've already bought their condo, their maserati, fancy watch and then they say what else can i buy and they think what could i buy that would elevate me into some kind of an exclusive priesthood and ideally that is old wine from difficult french vintages 1945, 1898 and in fact they were before global warming and friends when grapes never write and then the special years, 45 especially great wines were made all of her friends and one reason is they didn't have the chemicals to fatten up the

grapes in those days. they were small and had thick skin. where the flavor was more and it made for very intense long-lasting wine. how did the domain know for sure be offered 1945 through 1971. she knew his father never had access until 1982. open and shut they couldn't exist with a label that said domain and before this people were looking at labels and the key in st. peter's and doesn't

looitdoesn't look like it is prd quite right. nobody knew for sure. the reason it is the ideal object to counterfeit unlike rolex or any luxury good you can think of, chenault handbags, the product is enclosed in a bottle. you cannot know for sure if it is real or fake until you pull the cork, pour the wine, tasted and frankly even when you do that does anybody really know what the 1945 wine tastes like maybe about this many people in the world o have had more than a few times and even then it becomes what you wanted to be. it's a very seductive product.

people are around the table, they are happy, they have great expectations it becomes what you want it to be. let's jump back to the day after i talked to him i was writing for the spectator and i said a crazy thing happened he withdrew these. i wrote a story the day after it came out marvin wants to see you at the clock. i said i can't come at 4:00. i could have but somehow i didn't want to jump to that so i cannot find:30 i think and we went in his office, could barely see him through the cigar smoke and he was so happy because more

hits have come on that story than any other. it just happened. i didn't know what was going on. i was late april, 2008. i never thought about writing a book but then they young sharp editor, now she's the wine critic for the san francisco chronicle said you should write a book and i said i've done all this journalism all these years, enough. she said that's journalism, this is a book. i needed a 24-year-old woman to tell me this. [laughter] i began to think about it and i came to the conclusion let me start writing this book and i didn't tell anybody for a long time. i called my former agent and i

said i would like you to read a manuscript i think it is going to jump off the page. i will read one chapter, she said. send me an outline how you are going to promote it on social media. >> will you read the whole thing i would like your opinion and she said no one chapter outline the rest. she said she would ge give me another agent if i wanted. we parted ways and luckily this small feisty publisher to go about and read the whole manuscript such as it was sakic became thsaidit became the bookt point. >> you mentioned how easy it is to commit wine broth. were you surprised his audacity and the scope of what he did

with the wine connoisseurs he fooled them all for a number of years. i'm curious what insight you h had. >> rudy came to the u.s. on a student visa, got an accounting degree, never touched wine until a birthday dinner for his father in 2000 or 1999. he knew nothing about wine but ordered the most expensive on the list, opens it, so-called california cabernet. at that time i would guess it was $250. it just flipped a switch in his brain and he went to.

he thought it was the greatest thing that ever happened to him. the next day she began to buy every bottle he can find in the los angeles area and then he went on to other cabernet is and from there it's the most subtle, most complex, most intricate. it turned out he had the equivalent of perfect pitch. he tasted with top-level people and answer the question what was he doing at the time of the birthday dinner he was working part-time at a doing nothing and suddenly he was buying all this line and the wealthy older

americans said he bought a bottle of wine. he was buying them like crazy online. the key term is money laundering but when you bring the grapevine he got invited and he went from being part-time worker to being invited with billionaires. one of the coke brothers at the age of 26 and then i will stop coming he was selling mine to thmy intothe chair and that theo chain and at one point he wrote about $1.6 million worth of wine. i'm glad i didn't know you earlier because if i did, my wife would have shocked me.

but here you see an artist who knew how to push the buttons and people. he had an excellent assist them about him born in jakarta, chinese ethnicity nobody could figure him out. >> you said something in your last answer some perceived as a catastrophic death. then there was the view nobody was murdered were injured or maimed. i want to know where you came down on that side of the debate and i say this knowing you made youit your personal mission to o out and find some of the missing bird skins and recruit the museum's losses.

>> there is a kind of diehard community they have a blind spot when it comes to these things they think they are sitting in dusty old boxes in a basement. after 100 years you can't extract dna from them. scientists just pulled 412000000-year-old dna from buffalo hide around the great lakes but though there were very clear camps and i couldn't even come close to maintaining neutrality when it came to this investigation it was clear to me that if the choice was between destroying these for an art form

most of them have no idea how to fish, they don't own any fishing gear and salmon are essentially colorblind and then not eating any more so they are striking out of aggression. there's no reason a cnn scotland should be attracted to taking bird of paradise. the two will never meet. so there is a kind of artifice to this whole thing as much as i try to give them the benefit of the doubt it's difficult because the more i dug into this the more i realized it wasn't an isolated crime. over the course of the investigations that have come out i've done a lot of events at the natural history museum and at ththat the walk-through for e

event they took me aside and said i've got to show you something. he took me to this case from central and south america and pointed to a bunch of crowbar marks somebody had stolen the same species that were taken from the british museum. to me i felt like there was something hopeful and beautiful in with the museum curators are doing and that they represent a centuries-old chain of custody was of the past. when he got back from this expedition he described the importance of maintaining the collections saying each one represents a letter that they got the words of the oems deep

history and if we lose it you can never go back and get another from the island so there was a stark choice when i was faced with the people who are doing this because they believe that humans and human knowledge will always present new ways of interrogating versus a kid who just spliced into them because a single pair of others of an endangered species now goes for $100 he stole 49 of them that have thousands of feathers. then it became a personal mission to try to track these things down because the topic they don't belong to them, they belong to the museum. i don't know if that answered your question. >> it did. there's interesting questions

like who do these dinosaur fossils belong to and one of the statistics in the book is how many are discovered by amateurs and not by professional scientists and purely intelligence. so who do they belong to and is it for the fossil hunters like this to sell them to hollywood stars or do they belong in educational institutions and are they natural treasures a place like mongolia? >> the answer is both a had the same is true of fossils. they are the only way we know about the history of life under and the only way of studying deep time and that scientists had any of us know about life forms that existed hundreds of millions of years ago so when the collectors complained that

these items are just stuck in collections and not being used by anyone therefore they should be sold and enjoyed by collectors that is simply not true. a lot of signs has been advanced based on items in collection mighthe collectionmight start te dna. ..

. >> whether it is yours to correct or not and on federal land it is illegal to collect. but my personal feeling? we are a little bit different that very much i want to not reveal my personal feelings. i don't think it is my business as a journalist to

come down on either side even though it is easy to feel rage and rightly so by any sort of poacher anybody who decides to circumvent the law. so don't destroy objects. when you try to extract them from the earth along with collating data and to tell us about the history of that place on earth and what kind of life form live there or trees or water so if you yank a fossil out of the ground to put in a collection or museum you don't know anything about that lifetime of that animal

so the story is the data a lot of people believe these are art objects and could be interesting to own and talk about as a novelty but they are important for that reason. >> this talk about the process this is an incredibly lengthy process. . >> almost ten years so what? the books are jampacked with historical knowledge that they are collecting whether dinosaur fossil hunting so where do you wrap your arms around that part of research

and then writing and organizing it? . >> i could talk about process all day long but it never stops feeling overwhelming because every new revelation it takes into another area that needed to be explored. i am a knowledge of excessive this is the beauty of being a journalist and organizationally trial and error to figure out the thread and the structure you never

know if you quite to get it right but in this case it spans millennia, continents and lifeforms because mongolia is a huge character in the book so it is its own theme in the book because if you know, that is situated between russia and china there is reasons the united states government got involved that turned out to be terribly important to me as a journalist with the state department's role to bring that case and to suggest it be brought forward. a lot trial and error that turned out to not be good for the home life so it all lives

in a storage unit now so it is out of my line of sight but all the reports every kind of document you want to get, you can get it so you know, what is out there and then i started a timeline because i needed to know it starts at four.6 billion years ago when earth formed because even then exactly the context and that timeline was 900 pages long but the interview transcript was like 600 pages so that alone is an overwhelming amount of material to keep track of in your mind so when you were talking in london and

just the guy who coined the term dinosaur. he lobbied britain for its own standalone natural history museum. so it does standalone in that way. >> yes. this is the irruption of the story the minute i started digging around i was back in the victorian era with this cast of contemporary characters. the simple answer is there were these things that my agent is here but i was

obsessed with one story 19th century to set up an operation and then going to debt for the whales and then to say maybe that's a magazine piece. >>'s you could just sneak all of that material into the notes. >> but i don't know how many revisions there were but i also had a timeline that is what finally led me to tackle

in detail the plotting of the heist of where i had gaps that ultimately it was a mountain of chaotic criminal activity. . >> you can come forward to ask your own question. >> but a danger in my case was to have a very big deal millionaires in this country and when he was finally tried things to us attorney in the seventh district who loved wine.

people said no. we have drug dealers we have terrorism wall street shenanigans. and then they can figure out what is real or not we will not spend the public's money on that. but this district attorney went crazy about the wine while he was debating in college to take on the case and it was very hard to prove it going endlessly their american express bills. okay. everybody buys office supplies but why $1300 of french wax burgundy colored?

is this to stamp letters with a steel? there had to be something going on. and how did he make his counterfeit? he was very respectful of vintages he knew how the wine should taste he remembered that so basically he bought commercial grade burgundy's which were old ones and had them shipped to his house in california when he opened the bottle of 1945 he knew what the character asserts - - characteristics that it was hot he would pour out half of the bottle and then a good quality california same grade and when the proportions were

just right when you tried it you would say this taste like old burgundy but underneath there is this useful it is amazing after 60 years it still taste young but it is funky that he made sure they were bottled like they were back then in the glass with heavy and there was a deposit. we all know there is a deposit at the bottom of the bottle but this one after lying flat it starts to get across to the neck of the bottle he always asked the dealers is that handled? doesn't have a crust? so he was very careful when you tested the wine big time critics were fooled. i don't blame that - - them

for that because it changes all the time but the best taster that i know told me if there is a couple at the table they were not on good terms the bottle of wine will not taste good if you put on the table with a lovey-dovey couple it will taste very good. i never try that experiment but i believe peter on that one. so he was very good at making the counterfeits. >> so this is interesting to hear the way your stories fit

together and with that cultural value so one of the closest that you got so it was a crime so there is a moment when you feel like you can see the criminal. and i'm curious how close you got. . >> i was never tempted to scaly museum all but to say i see why you did this. i type out ugly little things made to look like real insects

and i tried to tie these once. takes between eight and ten hours to tie a single one. i wanted to see if my brain could get past that. there are these absurd rules you can only do two turns here and two left parts there it is all bs. [laughter] so in the end i understand why they get the bug because there is that status to say they have done this. some of them acquired $2000 to tie a single fly this big. so i get the motivation of that lynn dick thrilled to do that but i could never tap

into that. so people who spent a lot of money on the wine the most expensive single bottle of 1971 paid $85000 at auction. so ask yourself what do you do with an 80000-dollar bottle of wine? who is on the triple a list? or is it $10000 bottle? like the gold bars they are put in temperature controlled sellers so usually with some strong moment that i will sell this and make a profit so

these precious winds passed from one millionaire or billionaire to another. but another one it will be too expensive. . >> and then to have the enormous tyrannosaurus bones nobody else had that. and then do you know, how to put a creature like that together? he is ambitious in his own way and the thought to being one of the few people to do that kind of work was interesting to him. he wanted to go to the museum where there was a specimen

that was part of the goal and some of that is survival how he provided for his family so at a certain point he had a choice to make. he had two roads to make to get into dinosaurs or not and by then he had to make a choice because he was in the corner. and then doing what others could do others could do when does this ever supportive to the victims or who committed a crim crime? . >> the crime itself? . >> or how you present the

story? . >> one of my author or mentor friends told me but in my case. and then to tell the story on the record and what i found out on my own for the people and to tell me his side of it. so that some of that is true and caused me to change some of my assumptions so to be

careful about that but then for the rest of the life. i wasn't out to ruin his life but there was a fundamental lack because he never spent a night behind bars and there is ongoing criminal activity. so i get that you have your own life. . >> i recall a great writer so any journalist that does not know is a hypocrite or an idiot.

then how we use those for our purposes to make money to tell a story and then to tell the story the because we have the power of the printed page. but to say he does not judge him and i said thank you. and for those who actually gave away real winds until he could not find them anymore. but that he said i cannot get them, they don't reproduce like the panda at the zoo you

cannot inject that. i cannot buy it anymore. but the people will not know the difference. . >> but i do have a question about that. but one element and what you are trying to do it could not have been more forthcoming that the night before he went to prison he said here it is, look through it here are my tax returns, here are photos and e-mails. i had access to everything. the whole chain of the

black-market event. >> why do you think he did that? . >> so to get someone to tell their story i always want to see what is on paper so can you show me that so i could confirm that you could tell me one thing and it could be a total lie. he is a smuggler but he didn't to explain the reporting process to feel more comfortable whatever you have on paper and he said take it. so he had to go to prison the next morning. it was a gigantic mess because homeland security had custody of that computer before hand

and everything was in disarray and it was hard and that made me feel good about the story as an active participant. . >>. >> you all seem to mention it in your own way with that process to going to identify with your subjects and the person that you write about that is contained that reminds me of a devious person so did you identify with your subjects?

. >> so having to know something or to complete something. i understood that intuitively. also what drove him was to be outdoors to interact with nature that we had no concept. i a understood that intuitively that. with that outdoor that is natural to me like gathering facts.

with the reporting in the stare --dash storytelling. >> so starting in the late eighties to be diminished with terrific magazines like life magazine so what crime would i commit? what about robin hood? i would take it from the rich people i don't know if i would give it to the poor people. [laughter] i would sell them wine.

and then across from my hotel i wouldn't feel bad. and those that they targeted they were millionaires. i had always thought if i met edwin under different circumstances we would become best friends as a very likable person and then other friends of mine. i can understand why he did what he did i'm not sympathetic but where it comes to me in this remote village in norway to confront someone that i suspected was an accomplice with over 30 hours of interviews i wore them

down. and then to admit the involvement and interval and to make the life very unpleasant so in that regard if you read the book i had a connection to this other kid as he was taken advantage of and then to be much more understanding that yes you mentioned we have this power on the written page because identified with this guy.

. >> thank you peter. [applause] you can get a book and have it signed at the back of the thing - - sanctuary. [inaudible conversations] . >> i post here and now. we are here at a very important time to grow up in havana illinois