The first working day of April, in 2014, dawned “gray, cold, rainy, ugly,” recollects Supervisory Distinctive Agent Tim Carpenter of the FBI’s Artwork Theft Plan in Washington, D.C. Early that morning, his staff knocked on the door of Don Miller’s farmhouse in Waldron, Indiana.
Element of that staff was cultural anthropologist Holly Cusack-McVeigh, who remembers becoming so nervous that she hadn’t slept the night time right before. Although she had expert many human cultures, regulation enforcement was new. “This was way further than my ease and comfort zone,” she claims.
A tip to the FBI had introduced Carpenter and Cusack-McVeigh to Miller’s door. In accordance to the tipster, Miller had an comprehensive trove of illegally looted cultural objects, together with some human stays. In planning for what Carpenter suspected would be a huge seizure of cultural property, he had questioned Cusack-McVeigh, centered at the nearby Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, to