were looking at or what was being looked at, as far as potential criminal violations. there were so many bones, so many animals, so many invertebrates that were taken off of public lands, taken internationally, sold internationally. there was way more than we could have ever investigated. the case was never wanting for not having sue. because so much material had been seized, i think everybody thought that there would be a massive indictment. tell me a little bit about today s indictment. what alleged activity are we exactly talking about? this indictment charges the theft of fossils off of a number of different types of federal land. there are also charges in there that pertain to money laundering, structuring of currency transactions, false statements made to various government agencies.
preparing the fossil. that s about the only ones that we have. well, it s not the only one. almost. almost. and it s not. not completely. maurice williams never intended to sell that fossil. maurice williams knew exactly what he was doing. known you were on his ranch, we would have warned you. i had known people who knew maurice and sharky, and they were colorful and controversial figures in their own right on the cheyenne river reservation. there began to emerge some controversy about sue being collected from indian land and the ownership issue. you could not have discovered this rex in a worse and potentially legally complicated
pete wants it this way. he wants this specimen available to everybody. it was so beautiful. just the preservation was incredible. it was just, wow. everybody knew about sue. we hadn t made any secret of the fact that we d collected her. we had 2,000 visitors sign this little guest book that went way in the back in our warehouse to see the skull of sue. i was just totally flaber gasted when i saw the specimen. first of all, the size is just so imposing. but what i was more amazed by was what a great job they were doing preparing the specimen. i d heard inklings that the black hills institute boys had found something. one of the first things i saw was actually, you know, part of the skull of sue still encased in matrix. 65 million years later, this animal really had the power to give you goose bumps. to see the look on pete s face and neil s, those guys were just like proud papas. they would inform you. they would go do classes at school for the kids, so it was very education
history, and i think that s a kind of a cool way to reward those amateurs who make these discoveries. we were all experienced diggers. you know, it was just total focused effort. we would just work into the specimen, remove things that we could, protect the rest of it, and then take it out of the ground and get it back into the laboratory, where you can have a more controlled environment to take care of the specimen. the amount of new things that we found and the amount of scientific information that we discovered while finding sue was enormous. beautifully preserved. articulated skull, articulated vertebral column up to the pelvis with the tail and shoulder blade and all this stuff, and it s just like, holy cow. and wonderful preservation. just fantastic bones that were just beautiful surface on them.
that separation, that was probably the highest point of my life. how was that? champagne. hide it. hide it. there has to be a toast. who toasts? this whole i don t know. cheers. just, cheers. you ready? ready. sue. to old sue. sue. sue. sue. yeah. yeah. it s very good champagne. look at this. i know. we were riding on top of the world. we had everything going for us. less than a week after that, all hell broke loose. 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