Panamanian Artifacts Found in Oregon
Klamath Falls is a city in Oregon, from the photos it looks like a charming place with a quaint downtown and beautiful scenery. However, it held a darker secret because for years a man was hiding priceless artefacts that didn’t belong to him.
The Shaws
The man in question here is John Shaw, an American teacher who worked at a U.S. military base in Panama in the 1980s. It was while he was in Panama that he met his wife, Fatima. It was ALSO while in Panama that he got a great idea for a very cool and above-board way to make a lot of money when he got home.
The way they did this was by digging up graves and digging in places where they weren’t allowed to for the priceless artifacts and goods hidden below. I wasn’t able to find it but apparently, there’s a photo of John standing in a dug-up grave holding a golden tree frog. There’s another of Fatima and their son sitting in a boat so laden with artifacts that the vessel's sides are almost underwater. They removed these precious artifacts, over 100 individual pieces in total ranging from pottery to gold items, and smuggled them back to the U.S. with them and no one really noticed anything was missing because Panama was being invaded by the U.S. at the time so I guess they had bigger fish to fry.
When they got back the family settled in Klamath Falls, Oregon and opened The Pelican Pawn Shop. They had so many items that even after selling a large number of them both through their pawn shop and at other markets and online, they still had over 100 pieces in their personal collection. When people would come into the pawn shop and ask about some of these artifacts, John liked to brag that he was a modern-day Indiana Jones treasure hunter and would tell crazy stories about how they came into his possession (funnily enough none of these stories involved the desecration of burial sites or smuggling).
The Shaws were able to fly under the radar with these artifacts for a long time. So long that John actually died from natural causes in 2004 without ever being questioned or punished for any of this.
The Investigation
After John’s death, in 2009, Fatima started dating another man but was falling on difficult times financially so she asked her new boyfriend for a loan. What do you think she used as collateral? Yup, the remaining collection of artifacts. The couple ended up splitting and the now ex-boyfriend of Fatima immediately tipped off the cops. It wasn’t a long investigation, as soon as the FBI art crimes division saw the artifacts in the ex-boyfriend’s trailer (where he had been storing them as collateral) they knew they had something big on their hands.
The more they looked into Fatima and the Shaw household and history the more artifacts they found. The remaining collection, after selling pieces over the years, was still valued at more than $5,000. Investigators found that most of the pieces originated in the pre-Columbian period between 1100 and 1500 AD.
An important piece of information to note here is that in 1982 a Panamanian law was passed making owning any antiquities from the country illegal. Not only is stealing them against the law (shocker) but owning them is also against the law. If it’s an antique and it’s from Panama it belongs to the Panama government. Period.
Fatima did actually do the right (only?) thing in the end and gave all the artifacts back without a fight. However, all the sources I read were like yay so glad she gave everything back but she couldn’t give back all the pieces that they sold so I’m less yay about it. But regardless some of these looted artifacts did actually make their way back to Panama in a ceremony and the government was happy to have them back. Abey Saied, the Deputy Chief of Mission at the Embassy of Panama said, “the artifacts' national, historical and cultural significance is invaluable” (Terry, 2009).
Since Fatima handed over the remaining artifacts willingly, no charged were laid against her which is bonkers to me. Especially since, as Bonnie Magness-Gardiner (Manager of the FBI’s Art Theft Program) says, “Once you remove these things from their context it's impossible to reconstruct the history that deposited them there in the first place," Magness-Gardiner said, "Once they're removed there's no knowledge of where they came from or what they were doing there or how they got there or what their meaning was in the cultural sequence of Panama” (Terry, 2009). So some of Panama’s history is lost forever just because some guy wanted to brag about being like Indiana Jones. Pathetic.
Works Cited
Terry, Lynne. “Panamanian Artifacts Found in Klamath Falls Going Home”. The Origonian. 2009. https://www.oregonlive.com/news/2009/01/fbi_returns_100_artifacts_foun.html
“FBI Returns Pre-Colombian Artifacts to Panama”. The History Blog. 2009. https://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/1528#:~:text=In%20this%20case%2C%20the%20FBI,and%20around%20Klamath%20Falls%2C%20Oregon.