it totally blew me apart. i m used to fixing things, and this was unfixable. it was so stupid. once you start to understand the indictments, basically this is what they said. pretend we re in wyoming and we re standing in the middle of the prairie and let s assume for a moment that the fence is in the right place. you re standing on this side of the fence, the government says, right over there, on the other side of the fence, is this fabulous fossil. and they re basically saying that pete and neil and bob and whoever was out there would go step over the fence, wrongly, knowingly pick up the fossil, that they re not supposed to pick up, carry it back over the fence, put it in their car. when they drive from wyoming to south dakota, they then have conducted an illegal act, which is called interstate transportation of stolen property. they get back to the institute, they would make a phone call, send a fax, maybe, to japan and say, we found the thing that we were looking for. do you w
junior year, we went to the tucson gem and mineral show and really saw how specimens are purchased by museums and purchased by private collectors. and by the time we graduated, we started this business called black hills minerals as this earth science supply house. eventually my younger brother neal, who was also a student at the school of mines, and bob farrar, one of his classmates, started working with us as well. with the three of us all going to the school of mines, we were problems there, because all of us chose not to go into industry. the first year was terrible, the second year was not so good but it was sort of turning into a business. as we kept going, we kept collecting more and more fossils
for the others. bob fa rahr, a third co-owner, convicted of two felonies, making false statements to customs officials. and the black hills institute as a corporation is convicted of two misdemeanor thefts, a felony theft, and twice making false statements to customs officials. they also found them guilty of bringing goods into the states by making a false statement. defendant eddie coals and terry wince were not convicted on any charges. as the verdict was announced, it was almost impossible to believe that the defense had scored a great victory. however, there were some fairly significant felony convictions. the expression, you could have knocked me over with a feather, you could have knocked me over with a feather. i talked to some jurors after the trial. some of them were near tears when i interviewed them about how they had hoped they could acquit on every single charge. i believe they had to have something to take this to trial, and i spent the whole trial waiting for tha
bob and i were downstairs. we were both in the prep lab. we had a buzzer on our door so that if anybody came in, it would buzz back in the prep lab, and we could go meet them in the front office. it was about 7:00 in the morning when the buzzer went off. we were met by two fbi agents with a search warrant to take sue and all records belonging to sue. they showed up expecting to seal off the building and keep anybody from going on. just wait here. we have to get pete. they sent me to get pete, and i was running. i lived in a trailer house behind the institute. the fbi s here. they re all over the place. they ve got yellow police tape around the main building. do not cross. police line. do not cross. it was hard to know what was really happening at that point. i go down to the office, and there s two fbi agents sitting there. you ve stolen this from federal land, and we re coming here to seize this.
felony counts of illegally transporting money in and out of a country. brother neil larson found guilty of one misdemeanor theft. the jury either acquitted neil or couldn t agree on a verdict for the others. bob fa rahr, a third co-owner, convicted of two felonies, making false statements to customs officials. and the black hills institute as a corporation is convicted of two misdemeanor thefts, a felony theft, and twice making false statements to customs officials. they also found them guilty of bringing goods into the states by making a false statement. defendant eddie coals and terry wince were not convicted on any charges. as the verdict was announced, it was almost impossible to believe that the defense had scored a great victory. however, there were some fairly significant felony convictions. the expression, you could have knocked me over with a feather, you could have knocked