Priceless

the longest of my career. The scandal singed the reputation of a PBS program beloved by million of viewers, disgraced the retired museum director, and left swindled victims, descendants of genuine war heroes, steaming that someone could act so cruelly.

THE CHIEF VILLAIN was a classic con artist. Russell Albert Pritchard III, tanned face, blue BMW, George Will haircut, Brooks Brothers ties, presented himself to all the world as a man who had it made.

Thirty-five years old, the appraiser lived with his comely wife and four children in a five-bedroom stone house at the epicenter of Philadelphia’s rarefied Main Line, half a block from the leafy campus of Bryn Mawr College. The family home, which he’d purchased from his father for $1 a decade before, was worth at least $1 million. Pritchard had trained to be an insurance salesman, but soon joined his father, Russ Pritchard Jr., in the family business, selling eighteenth- and nineteenth-century military artifacts. The father was an established and respected authority in the field—the former director of the Civil War Museum in Philadelphia and author of several books on Civil War weapons, equipment, and tactics. Together, father and son owned two-thirds of a military antiquities and memorabilia brokerage, which they gave the grand and somewhat misleading name American Ordnance Preservation Association, a moniker that suggested it was some sort of charity or nonprofit organization. The third partner was a gregarious thirty-seven-year-old appraiser from Allentown named George Juno.

Pritchard III and Juno scored their big break in 1996 when they won jobs as television appraisers for Antiques Roadshow. They traveled the country with the show for its first three seasons, performing instant, on-camera appraisals of guns, swords, uniforms, and other military artifacts. Pritchard and Juno were not paid for the work. But for such relatively young appraisers, the value of such national exposure—ten million households a week—was incalculable. Business for their brokerage boomed.

MY INVESTIGATION BEGAN years later. In 2000, a subpoenaed VHS tape arrived in the mail from WGBH, the Boston PBS affiliate that produces Antiques Roadshow. I found a player and cued it up.

It was a raw tape from the first season and it began with a familiar scene: two people sitting before what looked like a TV anchor’s desk, a silver sword lying between them, and dozens of casually dressed bargain hunters shopping for antiques in the background. The video opened with a sound check. A man with a well-groomed brown mustache, a three-piece suit, and his hair held snug with hair spray looked into the camera and spoke his name: “George Juno, American Ordnance Preservation Association.” Juno nodded at his guest, a nerdy-looking man in a need of a haircut, perhaps forty years old with a rumpled blue oxford shirt and gold wide-rimmed glasses. The man said his name, “Steve Sadtler.”

The segment began as typically as any on Antiques Roadshow, with an understated, somewhat stilted conversation.

“Steve, thank you for coming in today.”

“My pleasure.”

“This is an interesting sword you brought in. What can you tell me about the background?”

“Well, it’s a sword that I found twenty-three years ago. My folks bought a house down in Virginia and my folks decided they were going to rebuild the house. My brothers and I got stuck with the job of taking down the chimney. That required going up into the attic, and I found this thing”—he paused to point to the sword—“hanging on a post. Pretty much for me, it became a plaything. For the last ten or fifteen years, it’s been stored away.”

“Well, Steve, it’s quite a sword.” As Juno began to describe the object, his name and the name of his company appeared at the bottom of the screen. “If we look on the back of the blade we see the maker’s mark. It says Thomas Griswold, New Orleans. They imported items from England. The blade is etched in the middle, CS, on both sides, for Confederate States. The castle you see etched in the guard is actually a fort, Fort Sumner…. This would have used a solid brass scabbard. They used this for their artillery sabers and their cavalry sabers. It would have been a very flashy sword, gold plated all over the hilt. This is definitely the highest-quality pattern.”

Juno handed Steve a set of white gloves. “It’s always good practice to use the white gloves,” the expert explained, “because your hands have salts in them and after you put the sword away, the salts will continue to rust the blade and cause problems with the brass.” He turned the blade over. “Notice the crossed cannons? And on this side, floral, finely etched.”

When Juno finished his brief lesson, he laid the sword on the table and he paused before the big Antiques Roadshow moment, the one where the appraiser teases, “Do you have any idea what it might be worth?”

Sadtler said, “I was going to tag it for a garage sale between fifty and two hundred dollars.”

“Well,” Juno said, “this sword could have bought you a new garage.”

The camera zoomed in on Sadtler as his eyebrows narrowed with anticipation.

“That’s right,” Juno said. “This sword is worth thirty-five thousand dollars. This happens to be one of the great rarities in Confederate swords.”

“Did you say”—he gulped—“thirty-five thousand dollars?”

“Thirty-five thousand. You’ve made a great find here.”

“Whoa!” Sadtler’s mouth dropped open, and he seemed to struggle to restrain his joy, as if to remind himself that while this was a reality show, it was buttoned-down PBS, not The Price Is Right. He shook his head several times and said, “Man, I was going to get rid of it.”

Juno said, “You made a smart move taking it to us to have a look at it.”

“As a kid, I used this to cut watermelon.”

Juno gave an aw-shucks grin. “You’re lucky you didn’t get too much moisture on it.”

“Wow, thank you very much.”

The segment was so good—an instant Antiques Roadshow classic—that PBS aired it over and over, and used it in a fund-raising video. Some viewers suspected it was too good. Rumors began to circulate in the collecting community about the “watermelon sword.”

I tracked Steve Sadtler through the phone number he provided to WGBH on the standard Antiques Roadshow release form. I reached him in Seattle.

I told him I was investigating Pritchard and Juno for fraud. Look, I said, just tell me the truth and you won’t get into trouble. But don’t lie, I warned. It’s a federal crime to lie to an FBI agent.

Sadtler confessed immediately. The segment was indeed a setup, he said. Pritchard and Sadtler were close; Sadtler was a groomsman at Pritchard’s wedding. The night before the PBS taping, the two met up with Juno in a hotel room, where Pritchard concocted the story about finding it in Sadtler’s Virginia home, and paid him $10,000 for his help.

And that sword?

It belonged to Pritchard and Juno.

“THIS IS THE case we’ve been waiting for,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Bob Goldman said over lunch one summer afternoon, after I finished telling him about my conversation with Sadtler. “I’m telling you, this is it.”

I nodded, and as Goldman spoke I scooped a spoonful of kung pao chicken onto my plate. We sat in the back of Szechuan China Royal, a popular Philadelphia law-enforcement haunt—reliable, reasonably priced specials with well-spaced tables in a discreet basement dining room, a joint generally ignored by the white-collar mob that swarms Walnut Street at lunchtime.

“This is the case where we’ll make a difference,” he said. “This is great.”

Goldman, historian, collector, federal prosecutor, was a huge Antiques Roadshow fan. He watched it nearly every week. But like others, he’d long suspected some segments might be staged. It was too smooth. People offered things they inherited or discovered—a chair, a sword, a watch, an armoire, whatever— and voila, an expert offered an off-the-cuff appraisal. How could the so-called experts make such quick appraisals? Didn’t they ever have to look anything up? Didn’t they ever make a mistake? Or simply get stumped?

“Bob,” I’d always tell him, “relax. It’s just TV, just entertainment.”

“Yeah,” the prosecutor would say, “but they’re passing themselves off as experts. Television has this way of deifying people. Viewers believe what these guys say.”

Faking a segment on a TV show isn’t, by itself, a federal crime. But faking a segment on TV to further a