More lying, though this guy took himself out

Kirk Johnson has an article in The New York Times about apparently fraudulent behavior, this time in the Southwest, over Indian artifacts:

Every person’s life is a mix of the things revealed and unrevealed, secrets spilled or kept. Ted Gardiner, who committed suicide last week, was no exception. “He had a lot of demons,” said his son Dustin, 23. As an undercover federal source in a years-long investigation into the shadowy world of the excavation and trading of ancient American Indian art and artifacts in the Southwest, Mr. Gardiner, 52, was at the center of a sprawling criminal case unfolding in federal court here and in Colorado. On Monday, federal prosecutors said at a hearing that the cases would go on.
Twenty-four people were indicted last June on felony charges of stealing or plundering history on public or Indian tribal lands, largely based on secretly recorded conversations with Mr. Gardiner, and felony charges against 21 are still proceeding.
Mr. Gardiner’s suicide was the third in the case. Two of the 24 defendants killed themselves last year, and one pleaded guilty. A former executive of a grocery store chain, Mr. Gardiner was known to struggle at times with the abuse of alcohol and pain medications, according to court documents and his son. Those struggles intensified after the earlier suicides and as the first of the trials approached. Last week, Mr. Gardiner shot himself in the bedroom of his home in a Salt Lake suburb in the midst of a standoff with local police officers, who had been summoned for the second time in three days because of concerns about his state of mind and talk of suicide. His departure left not only a grieving family but also a ghostly legal presence and a host of questions in the artifact cases.
The death of the government’s “confidential source”, as Mr. Gardiner was always identified in court documents (he later gave interviews with reporters in Utah, using his name openly and talking about his role) will change how the evidence is presented, prosecutors said, and how the tapes of his conversations with defendants will be introduced. But the tapes themselves, they said, can still be played to juries. “We believe the cases can proceed,” said Carlie Christensen, the acting United States attorney for Utah. Some other prosecutors and defense lawyers were not as certain. After Mr. Gardiner’s death, one of the first trials, scheduled to begin this month in Federal District Court in Denver, was postponed at the request of prosecutors. “This gives us time to consider what options we have as we review our case in toto,” said Jeff Dorschner, a spokesman for the United States Attorney’s Office there.
Several defense lawyers at Monday’s hearing said they planned to file motions challenging the government’s use of Mr. Gardiner’s work— either because the defendants will lack an ability to confront a witness against them, a violation of the Sixth Amendment, or concerns over the possible violation of rules about hearsay evidence, when one witness quotes another.
“No one knows the answers,” Walter F. Bugden Jr., a lawyer in Salt Lake who represents one defendant, Vern Crites, said in an interview. “Everyone is going to have to step back and try to assess what legal impact this will have on the admissibility of evidence.”
Several criminal law experts said that, because Mr. Gardiner did not act alone— he often talked in interviews and to his family about how federal agents hid in the brush surrounding a dig for artifacts or helped him prepare the recording equipment he wore— prosecutors should have other witnesses who could lay a legal foundation for the tapes. “If they have an audiotape and somebody is to able to say, ‘I recognize the voices, the undercover agent and defendant’s voice,’ or someone who helped set up the tape, or authenticate the tape, it should be admissible,” said Sherry F. Colb, a law professor at Cornell who teaches evidence and criminal procedure. The real question, Professor Colb and others said, is how much prosecutors had intended to rely on Mr. Gardiner as a physical presence in the courtroom to help construct the government’s narrative of the case.
Dustin Gardiner said his father, who came of age in the 1970s in Utah and fell in love with the history and landscape of the desert badlands in the Four Corners area, where Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico meet, never expressed doubts about his role in the investigation. He told his family, Dustin Gardiner said, about the callous carelessness he had seen toward the land and the Indian sites. “He often talked about a moment where one of the diggers dug up a human skull and just kind of tossed it aside,” Mr. Gardiner said. “He saw a lot of things that disgusted him.”
But the suicides of the defendants, including that of a prominent doctor in Blanding, Utah, James Redd, came as a surprise, Mr. Gardiner said. He said his father, who at that time had been sober for about two years, started drinking again. “He always knew he was doing the right thing, but the fact that two other people killed themselves because of it weighed on him deeply,” Mr. Gardiner said. “He felt guilty. The stress of the cases, the investigation, it seemed to be extremely intense,” he added, “and as time went on and the trials got closer, it all seemed to be having a pretty big impact on him.” Ted Gardiner’s ashes were scattered in southern Utah this week, his son said, along a stretch of river in a grove of blue spruce where he loved to camp.
Magistrate Judge Samuel Alba said defense challenges about the evidence would be considered as they came in. Judge Alba set trial dates beginning in May for many defendants.