Thread by @tonydokoupil

I don't believe that Forrest Fenn's treasure has really been found. And I'm certain that if it has been found, the finder has no idea what he or she is holding. I'll explain, but first here's the news today: cbsnews.com/news/treasure-…

I wrote the first big, national story on Fenn back in 2012. Remember when @TinaBrownLM supposedly lost $100M at @Newsweek, well, she might have spent it all on my hare-brained adventures and Fenn was one them. (Love you, Tina.)

But I didn't come to Fenn for the story everyone knows today, the tale of a twinkly-eyed gentleman who buried treasure so kids could fall in love with the outdoors. On the contrary. I learned about Fenn from the FBI. On a grave-robbing case.

In 2009, an undercover federal agent took a tour of Fenn's house in Santa Fe, posing as an artifact trader and wearing a recording device.

The FBI later raided Fenn's house as part of the biggest ever suspected case of grave-robbing—code named Cerberus Action (you know, after the mythical three-headed dog that guards the underworld). He was never charged.

But there had been questions for years about where Forrest had made his money. When I visited his compound in Santa Fe, I found a house that operates like a museum, but with no guards, better inventory, and a price list.

He had a mummified falcon from King Tut's tomb (not for sale), a jade mask older than Jesus ($12,500), and Sitting Bull's peace pipe, spiritual centerpiece of Custer's Last Stand (appraised at $1.1 million). And that was just one little room of the house.

When I asked Fenn about the FBI case, he told me that he couldn't discuss it because his lawyer told him, "if you talk about it, you could lose it." (Then later he told me he misspoke.)

So we get on to the subject of "The Thrill of the Chase," which is the book that he used to launch this whole treasure hunt. He wrote a poem that supposedly had all the clues. But again, there's a darker backstory.

Fenn told me he filled the treasure box with ancient figurines, a Spanish ring, turquoise beads, American eagle gold coins, gold nuggets, a vial of gold dust, two gold discs, and "a lot of jewelry," including rubies, sapphires, and diamonds. But Fenn wasn't done.

When the time comes, he told me, he wanted to shove one more element in with the bounty: his own dead body. "When people find the treasure, they'll find my bones," he said. In other words, an alleged tomb-raider was inviting the public to raid his own tomb.

Where would he get such an idea? Well, it turns out that Fenn's plans for death mirrored the way he lived. (And I promise this is all coming back around to why I don't believe the treasure has been found.)

For nearly two decades, Fenn ran one of the finest art galleries in Santa Fe, a job that got him written up in People and Forbes. But before that he was a straight up pot-hunter, as they're known, digging for artifacts on the edge of legality.

He was also a decorated fighter pilot and back in 1950 that means you could take jets out for fun. For Fenn, that meant going where the history is. "I was thrown out of Pompeii three times," he told me. "But I found amphora full of olive oil and full of wine."

Another weekend he flew to Libya and swam off the coast of Sabratha, pulling up more amphora. But Fenn's favorite place was the Sahara, where he told me "you could find 8,000-year-old spear points, made when the desert was wheat fields."

Then he landed a job teaching at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona, near America's "archeological mecca," a place with at least 500,000 ancient graves. Today most of those graves are believed to have been plundered, but in Fenn's day much of the area was still pristine.

Here's where Fenn clammed up. But I tracked down two children of Fenn's former digging buddy and another man who dug with Fenn who remembered what it was like.

"You can't dig out there without digging up some graves," one of the men told me (of his memories out with Fenn as a teenager). Fenn himself, in those conversations recorded by law enforcement, talked about digging in Arizona, removing a stone axe from the remains of an Indian.

Fenn wasn't just taking a treasure or two but returning to caves and stripping them clean, according to what the children of Fenn's former digging buddy recalled. As one put it to me on the record: "He saw something that he could cash in on, and he made his family fortune on it."

Fenn rejects this version of events. But have I mentioned that Fenn OWNS HIS OWN INDIAN RUIN?

Yeah, Fenn's ruin is San Lazaro Pueblo, the largest and most significant in the area, and, since 1964, a National Historic Landmark. I went out there with him. It's breathtaking and profoundly sad, as eerie to me as walking around a neighborhood destroyed yesterday by a storm.

San Lazaro contains all the artifacts that the area's Indians hastily jettisoned around the time of the area's first contact with a European army. Fenn uses it for fun. And does he every encounter any graves or human remains? Well, funny you should ask.

Some three decades ago, New Mexico accused him of disturbing graves on his pueblo, alleging "obvious human remains" that were "piled and scattered." Fenn got the complaint thrown out when he learned that the state had trespassed to collect its evidence.

But when I met him he didn't deny finding possible graves. "The key word [in the law] is 'discover'," Fenn told me. "We've found bones that might have been human, but we didn't 'discover' that they were, so we covered them up and moved someplace else."

Descendants of the San Lazaro pueblo pray for him, and the head of the National Congress of the American Indian told me he believes that collectors like Fenn are cursed.

So why don't I think that anyone really found Fenn's treasure? Because Fenn is a salesman first and always, a "hustler," as he told me. And this whole gambit is about Fenn's pursuit of immortality. Another thing he buries are bells with his bio in them.

And among the wonders he included in his treasure chest: a copy of his own autobiography, rolled and stuffed into an ancient olive jar. So, yeah, I think the treasure is totally real, not a hoax, but it's hidden to be found many lifetimes from now.