really can t do anything in any kind of a business without money. what monetary transactions happened during the time that this epts prize had that fossil and what they did with that money, fossil, and what happened to that money and how we can assemble the evidence around that fossil to see whether there s something there that s wrong, chargeable, what more needs doing investigated. fbi agents arrived and committed a court order. that order demanded the release of more information. but people at the institute have another name for it. they call it harassment. ? should not be allowed to happen. this is the united states of america. so far, no criminal charges have been filed in the case. members of the institute say they re innocent and they re hoping that a new administration will put an end to their legal
it totally blew me apart. i m used to fixing things, and this was unfixable. it was so stupid. once you start to understand indictment, 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 minute 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 whoever was out there would step over the fence, wrongly 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 have conducted an illegal act, which is the international transportation of stolen property. they would say we found the thing that you were looking for.
last phase of getting sue out of the ground, we used basically egyptian techniques to get this large block. i mean, we had one of the blocks weighed probably something close to 10,000 pounds. there was probably about ten ton of material, total, that we had to load up. once we had the skull and pelvic block and the tail vertebrae and everything else, we knew we could haul a lot of the stuff on our bobcat trailer. we had no idea how we were going to be able to get all these other things. well, my brother john had built a tandem-axle trailer earlier that year. with that and the other pickup truck that we had there, we were able to load the fossil up. after we had built pallets underneath the fossil, we were able to scooch some plywood underneath them so that we could
while i was in prison, sue was also still in prison. and there were rumors that sue was going to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. it really was obvious to me by that time that the only way to get her away from morris williams was through sotheby s. all of us were aware that the auction was taking place. it would probably sell for a million or $2 million. the big fear was that it was going to be sold to some private individual. i know there were a lot of people concerned that it might be bought by an institution in a foreign country. ? that was a big concern with the media was that it was going to be sold and lost to science and sold and put in a private room someplace. we always felt an extraordinary obligation to get this fossil to the right home. clearly there were a lot of really interested parties that were hoping and praying they had a shot. we had dreams, after the auction started developing, that
in trust for him without permission of the federal government to begin with. so that s what ended it. fossils are land. judge batty said, actually in his filing that the sale was null and void. he took the position that he had no authority himself to enter into agreement with the black hills institute. peter realized he could not have this fossil back. he was devastated. the judge decided that sue was real estate, sue, the fossil, was real estate.