Quality service providers that strive to exceed client expectations and meet the highest industry standards need to carefully evaluate how to continuously improve and keep pace with changing needs. This is critical in the security industry where needs and priorities evolve rapidly. To be successful, security providers need to recognize and honor this critical priority: understand what is important, commit to excellence and deliver.

To do so requires a carefully developed program designed to gather, measure and implement feedback on a continuous basis. This must be much more than a passing question or the sharing of anecdotal comments. A true listening program creates opportunities for your voice to be heard and is supported by formal processes, measurements and assessments that transform feedback into results.

Ongoing communication and evaluation can take your security program to the next level. Some questions to consider when assessing if your security provider is truly listening to you include:

• Does your security provider utilize a well-known and respected evaluation process?
• Do they ask for feedback in both formal and informal ways?
• Does your security provider act on the feedback provided?
• Is the feedback utilized to improve service and processes?
• Do they conduct regular business reviews?
• Do they measure success using defined criteria?
• Does security management visit your site regularly or as outlined in your contract?

Open conversation and structured check points enable you and the contracted security firm to respond to the changing security landscape quickly. Define when you will meet to assess changing risk situations, and schedule status meetings and business reviews.

At the end of the day, quality security providers want to create opportunities to get beyond the basics and deliver exceptional, value-added solutions. A value-driven approach which ensures that your and your security team’s feedback is actively listened to and acted on is a win-win for everyone.

Use this evaluation guide - Is Your Security Provider Listening to You? - to help gauge if your security provider is taking every opportunity to listen to your concerns and assess your satisfaction.

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Active Shooter incidents are statistically rare, but devastating events (low probability-high consequence). They can be the end point of a long progression along the workplace violence continuum and should be integrated into the organization’s overall violence prevention posture.

OSHA historically classifies workplace violence into one of four categories which include:

• Type I: Criminal Intent, wherein the violence is incidental to another crime such as robbery
• Type II: Customer/Client/Patient where the violent person has a relationship with the business such as being a customer or client
• Type III: Worker-on-Worker where the perpetrator of the violence is an employee or past employee of the business attacking current or past employees and
• Type IV: Intimate Partner, where the perpetrator has no relationship with the business but has a personal relationship with the intended victim.

 
I believe, however, that current events suggest there is clearly a fifth type, ideological violence, in which terrorism comes to the workplace. Type V violence is directed at an organization, its people and/or property for ideological, religious or political reasons. Violence perpetrated by extremist environmental, animal rights and other value-driven groups may also fall within this category.

Type V violence may take the form of Hybrid Targeted Violence (HTV) defined as the use of violence, targeting a specific population, using multiple and multifaceted convention and unconventional weapons and tactics. The massacre at the Charlie Hebdo news outlet in Paris, France, is a powerful example of this intersection of terrorism and workplace violence as was the attack at the Armed Forces Recruiting offices in Chattanooga, Tenn.

How do these attacks differ from the more common active shooter incidents? These attacks feature well-trained, tactically competent perpetrators who are willing to die. They include multiple attackers working in small tactical units.

What are the benefits of this expanded typology that identifies Type V? By recognizing that there is an important intersection between workplace violence and terrorism, we understand that extremist-driven violence may be directed at a workplace. This allows for more inclusive training that includes specialized training to understand the warning signs of workplace violence including specific signs of terrorism and the various warning behaviors. The recognition of the role that ideology plays in workplace violence promotes a “force-multiplier” effect with more eyes and ears on the ground monitoring potential threats.

Employers need to align their workplace violence training with their overall emergency preparedness posture. Read more about the evolution of the active shooter.

For more info on active shooters, read the Allied Universal Fire Life Safety Training blog.

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At  the outset, our mission was clear: Allied Universal provides unparalleled service, systems and solutions to serve, secure and care for the people and businesses of our communities. We put our relationships with our employees and clients at the heart of everything we
do each and every day.

It has been one year since Allied Universal was formed from the merger of Universal Services of America and AlliedBarton Security Services to face a new security era together.

So on our birthday, Aug. 1, 2017, we thought it fitting to reflect on some of the achievements of the past year and lessons learned. For some insights on the process and how it unfolded, I invite you to read recent Security Management article “The Meaning of a Merger.”

Here are some achievements we’re very proud of:

• We grew another $600 million in revenue within one year by adding new accounts and acquiring five additional companies, making us the unequivocal leader in guarding services throughout all of North America. Our security professionals and our company play a major role in keeping America, parts of Canada and other service areas safe and secure.
• In North America, we serve over half of the fortune 500 companies and nearly every major retail mall in the U.S. From healthcare facilities, commercial office buildings, manufacturing and industrial plants, residential communities, transportation facilities and government services, Allied Universal has a significant security presence.
• Our local teams all across North America managed the integration of 150,000 security professionals, combined locations of both legacy companies, updated the uniforms and rebranded all of the offices and operational material we depend on to perform our jobs and serve our customers daily.
• Our training and development teams did an amazing job integrating the company’s training programs to create a world-class AU Institute that contains a library of training material for both field and office employees.
• We’ve introduced several technological innovations to help improve the security industry in a positive way and offer our clients enhanced solutions for protecting their properties and assets.

We have accomplished so much in such a short time span, and yet, still have more to achieve to become the company we aspire to be in the future—one that is not only the clear leader, but, one that is fast, nimble and is easy to do business with internally and externally. In short, we aim to be the company that is the best place to work for security professionals and service employees in our industry.

That said, we have many initiatives in place for the remainder of this year to help us get to our goal of being that company of the future. Thank you to our employees and clients on whom the success of Allied Universal depends. Congratulations on a fantastic first year. I look forward to all of our future shared success as we continue to grow.

Happy anniversary Allied Universal—here’s to many happy returns!

Steve Jones, CEO
Allied Universal

Reposted from The Army Times

The Army announced Wednesday plans to release a mobile application that would allow soldiers and civilians to rapidly alert first responders during an active shooter incident.

Army Training and Doctrine Command and TRADOC Capability Manager-Mobile (TCM Mobile) announced that a team of civilian employees from the Aviation Center of Excellence, Fort Rucker, Alabama, submitted the winning entry for a competition TRADOC held to develop an active shooter response mobile app.

Once the app is formally ready for release, it will be available in Google Play, the Apple App Store and other online app stores, according to the Army.

"If adrenaline kicks in and they forget what to do in the moment, all of that information is right there in front of them," said Matt MacLaughlin, a civilian employee at TRADOC Senior Mobile Training Development. "It should help everybody respond to that situation in the fastest manner possible."

The winning entry — which has yet to be officially named — allows users to walk through various steps for how to respond to an active shooter situation, and what to do and not do when law enforcement arrives on scene.

"We're going to try to think for you," MacLaughlin said in an Army release. "Because there's situations where you won't have time to think."

In an emergency situation, users can tap open the app and tap another button to reach an emergency dialer to get in touch with law enforcement. There will also be a Spanish translation feature. The Army Provost Marshal’s office is still reviewing final features of the application, according to MacLaughlin.

It is unclear if the app will feature any means of alerting law enforcement without having to speak on the phone. In an active shooter situation, it is sometimes dangerous to make an emergency call when in hiding.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s " Active Shooter: How to Respond" booklet says to remain quiet and silence your phone if the shooter is near. The booklet advises to try and call emergency responders and let dispatchers listen if it is unsafe to talk.

But because vital, timely information can be impossible to relay over the phone in these scenarios, many law enforcement agencies are implementing what are known as Text-to-911 services to allow for texting dispatchers. There are currently more than 1,000 law enforcement agencies nationwide that offer or are implementing Text-to-911 services, according to the Federal Communications Commission. The Army could not immediately confirm whether the app would feature a service similar to texting for communicating with emergency dispatchers.

In addition to instances of on-post shootings, there have been several attacks at military recruiting centers. It is unclear if the app will allow for service members off-post at recruiting centers to use the app to contact local authorities.

While the app has yet to be released, there is significant value in increasing access to first responders for Army personnel in the event of an active shooter. Since 2009, 32 people have been killed in mass shooting attacks on military installations and at recruiting centers, according to The Washington Post. An additional 52 have been wounded.

The Army is rapidly expanding its use of mobile apps as a means of keeping soldiers informed and safe.

"We have people all the time that want to have mobile applications created and they want it … as soon as possible," said Lt. Col. Joe Harris, TRADOC Capability Manager-Mobile. "Now that they have this capability down at the school level … decentralized creation lessens the work on this end to have the mobile application (available for use)."

The new active shooter app follows the development of the "We Care" mobile apps created for sexual harassment and suicide prevention. TCM Mobile has produced about 80 mobile apps for other purposes, according to the Army. These include apps for combat training.

TCM hopes to establish a pipeline of emergency mobile apps, according to MacLaughlin. It also hopes to establish servicewide infrastructure to oversee development and training of mobile apps.

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Reposted from CGN.com

Some of the hardest parts of a security professional’s job are identifying which elements in an enterprise infrastructure pose the greatest risk and keeping that infrastructure secure going forward. The underlying constraint in these considerations is how to do this with a less-than-infinite budget.

In many organizations, and certainly for most of government, that comes down to keeping systems up and running when at least some part of that infrastructure depends on legacy systems. Agencies can’t replace all of the aging machines and applications, so where should they invest scarce dollars to boost security, while at the same time making sure they don’t introduce problems that prevent that infrastructure from functioning properly?

That’s what the National Institute of Standards and Technology most recent guidance on risk assessment aims to address. Unlike other cybersecurity guidance NIST has published, however, this document includes a step-by-step process that agencies can use to identify the most critical parts of an infrastructure so they can better choose what to upgrade and where to spend their (usually scarce) dollars.

NIST itself said the new guidance builds on previous publications, such as SP 800-53 Rev. 4, SP 800-160 and SP 800-161, all of which also emphasized picking out critical parts of an infrastructure, but didn’t say how to do that.

The relevant publication, the NIST Cybersecurity Framework -- an answer to the President Barack Obama’s 2013 Executive Order 13636 on “Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity” -- includes a detailed mechanism that organizations can use to better understand how to managing security risks.

The framework has become a standard document for both public- and private-sector organizations in establishing their approach to cybersecurity. In May, the Trump White House issued an executive order on strengthening federal cybersecurity that effectively made use of the NIST framework government policy.

The new NIST guide described what it calls a “high level criticality analysis process model,” which steps users through the various components needed to get to the end point of a detailed analysis of the criticality levels for all of the programs, systems, subsystems, components and subcomponents needed in a particular enterprise.

This kind of approach will give agencies more certainty in what they buy, and it won’t upset the business logic that supports an agency and its mission. After all, even though cybersecurity has certainly risen in the list of agency priorities, the main question most IT managers ask security product vendors is how any new tool will affect the normal running of current networks and systems.

The authors of NIST's new guidance believe their approach could eliminate the debate over return on investment of security solutions versus the long term resilience of systems. That’s something to be hoped for, but it may be a while before agency bosses shunt aside the well-established ROI for something that’s still so nebulous -- for now, anyway -- as resilience.

The new NIST publication does hint at the need for more active outcomes for all of the guidance -- from NIST and others -- that’s been published over the last few years. The House, for example, recently tried to push measurable metrics onto the NIST Framework through the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, Assessment and Auditing Act of 2017, which was introduced in February.

It would be a real advance if that effort produced actual metrics that could be used because it’s been notoriously hard to do that with any kind of specific security guidance. Each organization has very different needs when it comes to the application of security, so getting a general set of metrics to measure effectiveness may not be possible.

Still, the current draft of the NIST criticality guidance, which is open for comment until Aug. 18, gets halfway there. It at least promises to give users a better idea of what they have and how best to insert new security solutions and systems. That should make for a more certain and more effective acquisition process. And, who knows, it might eventually take its place alongside the NIST Cybersecurity Framework as a solid basis for government cybersecurity efforts.

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Reposted from Government Accountability Office 

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has released a public version of a sensitive report on how federal agencies on the National Mall are addressing physical security risks to icons, museums, and galleries. The report evaluates how the Department of the Interior, the Smithsonian, and the National Gallery assess physical security risks and the extent to which they use goals, measures, and testing to assess their physical security programs. The Interagency Security Committee and GAO have reported that it is necessary to establish goals linked to performance measures to assess progress, which the agencies have not yet done. Ensuring that plans include goals linked to performance measures and timelines for completion could help the agencies prioritize needs and develop a more strategic view of physical security. While the entities have reached out to others to improve their overall programs, they did not focus on testing. GAO recommended that the National Gallery document its risk management decisions and that all three agencies link performance measures with security goals and seek input to improve testing programs. The Department of the Interior, the Smithsonian, and the National Gallery agreed with GAO's recommendations and indicated they will begin addressing them.

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Reposted from Bloomberg

Insurance against terror attacks must adapt to face up to the threats posed by so-called lone-wolf militants and the rise of cyber crime.

That’s the view of Julian Enoizi of Pool Reinsurance Co., the U.K. government-linked body that backstops insurers against terror-related payouts. The spate of recent attacks in the nation’s capital and the suicide bombing of a Manchester pop concert in May highlighted shortcomings in coverage that need to be addressed, he said.

“We need to close gaps such as business interruption that’s not the result of physical damage and coverage of cyber terror as well the low take-up among businesses outside of London,” the Pool Re chief executive officer said in a phone interview.

Vehicle attacks on Westminster Bridge in March and London Bridge three months later highlighted how the industry “should address the issue that motor insurance provides unlimited cover,” potentially leaving insurers liable for massive payouts, he said.

Pool Re was formed as a venture between the industry and government in 1993 after the violence of the Provisional Irish Republican Army prompted insurers to withdraw cover for terror-related damage. The company has met more than 600 million pounds ($780 million) of claims, the largest being its 262 million-pound payout for the IRA bombing of Bishopsgate in the City of London financial district that same year.

Lost Earnings

Two-and-a-half decades later, the attacks of 2017 have shown the need for Pool Re to start covering so-called non-damage business interruption, so that firms could claim for lost earnings even if property was left intact, Enoizi said. Broadening cover would mean higher reinsurance premiums for Pool Re’s members, which include the local units of every major non-life insurer from Allianz SE and Aviva Plc to Zurich Insurance Group AG.

He expects the largest claims this year to result from damage to the Manchester concert hall and interrupted business due to the closing of the nearby train station. In the capital, a man drove a car into crowds on Westminster Bridge in March before attempting to storm parliament, while in June, attackers in a van rammed pedestrians on London Bridge, before going on a stabbing rampage in a nearby entertainment hub.

“The Westminster, Manchester and London Bridge attacks all resulted in claims for Pool Re,” Enoizi said. “It’s still too early to tell how large these will be. We are still receiving claims.”

How Insurance Is Morphing With the Terror Threat: QuickTake Q&A

Pool Re’s support means it would take a catastrophic terror attack with damages exceeding 10 billion pounds before the capacity of the U.K. insurance industry was exhausted, according to Enoizi. Still, that’s less than a third of the $43.6 billion insured loss from the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks -- the costliest terror-insurance claim in history.

“After 24 years and 16 separate terror events” Pool Re works well, “but we need to evolve the model in line with changing threats,” he said.

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Reposted from ekathimerini.com

Among the many buildings on Kos that sustained damage during last week’s 6.6 magnitude earthquake was the Dodecanese island’s archaeological museum. Thankfully, the historical structure built in 1936 survived the temblor but some of its ancient exhibits were less fortunate.

According to a report issued on Monday by the Ministry of Culture, out of the 43 sculptures showcased on pedestals, three headless statues and one bust fell over and sustained minor chips and cracks, especially to parts that has been restored with plaster.

In its initial statement after the earthquake, the ministry had only mentioned “shifts and minor deteriorations, mainly on ceramic vases.”

Nevertheless, the damage was limited.

Curator and archaeologist Toula Marketou was put in charge of drawing up a new exhibition plan after the museum underwent extensive renovation work last year. She told Kathimerini that the plan included earthquake provisions.

The movement of the statues during last week’s quake was precisely that which was anticipated in simulations that led to certain measures being implemented to prevent greater damage.

The aim should now obviously be the restoration of the damaged exhibits but additional steps so that the museum will be even better prepared in the future.

The local office of the Ephorate of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities is already moving in that direction as a crew of archaeologists, conservators and technicians have thrown themselves into the task of repairing the damaged exhibits and making sure the museum can reopen to the public as soon as possible. Meanwhile, a ministry delegation has traveled to the island to record and coordinate restoration work.

Thanks to its recent upgrade, the museum has become a top attraction for visitors to the island. Its location at the heart of the town, in combination with the introduction of a single ticket that grants holders admission to multiple sites, result in many more visitors taking in the island’s archaeological treasures than would otherwise be the case.

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Re-posted from L.A. Weekly

Art can be beautiful, thought-provoking and extremely valuable. In a city with as much art as Los Angeles, thefts aren't uncommon. From Picasso to Charles Schulz's Peanuts, art has been at the center of enough cases that the Los Angeles Police Department has a detail dedicated to finding and retrieving the stolen items.

Much like the art itself, these crimes are often spectacular. Below, we flash back to 10 L.A. art crimes, including scams, inside jobs and brazen heists.

10. The stolen trailer filled with valuable art
In November 2015, a trailer was stolen in Chatsworth. But this wasn't an ordinary trailer. It wasn't even a trailer loaded with some band's gear. This one was storing $250,000 worth of art. In the grand scheme of L.A. art heists, that's not a big dollar amount, but the names represented in the collection— Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse and Keith Haring among them — made it newsworthy. About six months after the story first hit the news, an arrest was made when the trailer was found stripped in a Canoga Park backyard. L.A. Times reported then that $120,000 worth of the art was recovered.

9. Stolen art found via Facebook
News travels fast now thanks to social media, and that can be helpful for tracking down stolen art. Last summer, a $10,000 painting by Neil Nagy was stolen from San Pedro's Warschaw Gallery during an art walk. On Aug. 2, KTLA reported about the theft and that security video footage showed the suspects in an alley. The following day, The Daily Breeze reported that the painting had been found. What happened was that a post about the incident also turned up on a community Facebook page and an unidentified woman who saw that post recognized the art as something that had been tossed over her fence. The painting was returned to the gallery.

8. The burglary that took Chagall and Rivera from an elderly couple's Encino home
In 2008, thieves broke into the Encino home of an elderly couple, probably through an unlocked door, and absconded with millions of dollars' worth of 20th-century art, including pieces by Marc Chagall and Diego Rivera. The couple were home but didn't hear anything; it was their housekeeper who noticed the crime after returning from the grocery store. Several years passed between the heist and its resolution, during which time the couple died and the family received the insurance payout. It wasn't until 2014 that a joint undercover effort between LAPD and the FBI led to an arrest. Someone in Europe by the name of "Darko" was trying to find buyers for the stolen paintings, which led law enforcement to a West L.A. hotel where Raul Espinosa tried to sell paintings valued at more than $10 million for $700,000. Espinosa pleaded no contest and ultimately was sentenced to four-plus years in prison. Meanwhile, authorities were able to recover nine of the 12 stolen pieces.

7. The Strange heist of two Maxfield Parrish paintings
At the time that two Maxfield Parrish oil paintings were stolen from a Melrose Avenue art gallery, the theft was a head-scratcher that was compared to fictional crime capers. More than a decade later, the 2002 heist is still baffling. The oil paintings were large — said to be 5 feet by 6 feet in size — and represented two panels of a six-panel mural commissioned by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and painted by Parrish between 1912 and 1916. The whole mural was on display at West Hollywood's Edenhurst Fine Art Gallery, which was trying to sell the work on behalf of two art investors. Then the works were stolen. The gallery was closed on the day of the crime; the thieves were believed to have entered through the roof and spent much of the day in the gallery, ultimately cutting out the two panels from their frames. What makes the crime stranger is that experts said the pieces would have been difficult to sell because they're only parts of a whole work, and recognizable parts at that. Still, this crime remains unsolved. In 2016, the heist appeared on a list of top art thefts that the FBI still needs to resolve and there continues to be information and a tip line on its website.

6. The Natural History Museum heist of 1973
If the theft of Native American artifacts from the Natural History Museum seems faded from the collective memory of Los Angeles, that might be because it didn't seem to get much ink in the first place. A ProQuest search of the Los Angeles Times' archives turned up a two-paragraph report from Nov. 5, 1973, that noted 53 items had been stolen from the museum a month earlier and 16 had been recovered in the ensuing weeks. But, LAPD's Art Theft Detail notes that most of the items are still missing. Moreover, the crime is now so old that a lot of the original reports were destroyed. Still, LAPD says that 28 years after the theft, two of the blankets were recovered via a museum exhibition in St. Louis, where they were on loan from an unnamed celebrity who'd purchased them years earlier.

5. The scheme to steal pieces from UCLA's art collection
In the late 1970s, there was an Arthur Wesley Dow painting, Frost Flowers, Ipswich 1889, inside UCLA's counseling department. The thing is, no one knew what the painting was. One staffer took the painting home and spent a decade researching it, ultimately learning of its identity and history. The staffer returned the painting and told his supervisor about it. Then the supervisor stole it. LAPD's Art Theft Detail highlights this unusual crime on its website, and the story is convoluted. The supervisor, Jane Crawford, found accomplices by lying to them and saying that the painting had been in her family and she wanted to sell it. They sold the piece to a gallery, who in turn sold it to a collector. But Crawford wanted more art, and when she used the same lies to attempt to steal and sell more paintings, the accomplices smelled something fishy. They didn't say anything, though, until Crawford accused them of stealing from her. In 1999, Crawford was tried for her misdeeds, at which point her attorney argued that what she did wasn't really all that bad since UCLA couldn't prove that it owned the painting and, besides, people were using it as a dartboard in the break room. The argument didn't fly, and Crawford was sentenced to 10 months behind bars, plus probation, community service and restitution.

4. The case of the missing Peanuts art
It took a while for the employees at Charles Schulz's animation studio to notice that Peanuts animation cels had been stolen. The culprit was a longtime handyman who had cautiously removed the works from the center of the boxes in which they'd been stored. Employees found 240 cels missing during an inventory, but it turned out that the culprit took much more than that. LAPD cites this as an example of internet searches helping to solve crimes. They started to recover the cels through an online sale and were able to trace those back to a dealer in the San Fernando Valley, which led them to the culprit. In all, more than 7,600 pieces of Peanuts animation art were stolen, worth a totel of $1.5 million.

3. The plan to retrieve Peruzzi Madonna
In 1970, a Hollywood man went out to dinner and returned home to find that his house had been robbed of a painting known as the Peruzzi Madonna. The painting of the Madonna and child was quite valuable; some believed it was the work of Raphael, while others argued that it was work from the same period. Either way, it was worth a lot and two years passed before Los Angeles detectives were able to retrieve it. The sting operation was elaborate and detailed in a Los Angeles Times story from 1973. Working on a tip from an employee at a financial firm, who caught wind of the painting through a job applicant, the detectives went undercover. One played a Russian art dealer interested in the work, the other his interpreter. In the end, it worked. The suspects were apprehended and the painting was taken as evidence.

2. A stolen Rodin and the quest to retrieve it
Rodins have been stolen a lot, but there's one local instance that almost has a happy ending. Back in the early 1990s, a Beverly Hills couple returned from vacation to find that their home had been burglarized and $1 million worth of possessions were stolen. Among them were three works by the French sculptor Auguste Rodin. Six months after the crime, police found the couple's housekeeper, who had apparently sold a set of keys to the thieves, and later were able to recover a few items. It took just about 20 years, though, to find one Rodin, a bronze limited-edition cast of "Young Girl With Serpent." That happened almost by chance, when a French expert was at Christie's in London and recognized the statue from a database of stolen art. Christie's halted the auction and alerted authorities, but it took another few years to successfully get the statue back from the then-owner, the son of a deceased West Hollywood gallerist. Ultimately, the statue went to the insurance company, who had long since paid out the original owner, and the sculpture went back on the auction block.

1. The Picasso and Monet "stolen" from a Brentwood home
Even when Brentwood ophthalmologist Steven G. Cooperman reported that his Picasso (Nude Before a Mirror, 1932) and Monet (Customs Officer Cabin at Pourville, 1882) were stolen while he was on vacation in New Jersey, the story was suspicious. LAPD had noticed that the alarm wasn't triggered and nothing inside the house was awry. It was just those two paintings that were missing — two paintings that had recently been insured for $12.5 million. Plus, there was something strange about Dr. Cooperman, or rather, the former doctor Cooperman. There was debate over whether his license had been revoked or he'd willingly surrendered it but, needless to say, he was in trouble with the medical board. On top of that, he was being sued for insurance fraud. That was in 1992, but it wasn't until 1996 when all the pieces fell together somewhere outside of Cleveland. It was a domestic violence call that tipped off police to the stolen art. In June 1997, the paintings were found unscathed inside a storage locker in suburban Cleveland. During the trial, all was revealed. One attorney, James P. Tierney, had plotted the fake heist with Cooperman to get the insurance money. He turned on Cooperman and admitted to the plot. Another attorney, James J. Little, had moved to Ohio and hid the paintings there. Cooperman was convicted on 18 counts and ultimately sent to federal prison for 37 months.

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Reposted from Atlas Obscura

In 1933, a group of employees from the U.S. National Park Service found themselves in a bit of a pickle. The NPS was working hard to put together a display for the upcoming Chicago World’s Fair, a massive exhibition that promised to draw tens of millions of visitors. They already had a scale model of the Grand Canyon, wood samples from Petrified Forest, and a 12-foot-tall “miniature Mt. Rainer” that experienced a blizzard whenever visitors pushed a button.

But the director wanted to make sure they had something else—a fossilized cycad plant from the end of the Cretaceous period. Thousands had been preserved in the silt beds of South Dakota, and the best specimens were both familiar-looking and clearly ancient. If you were showing off the country’s wonders, a cycad was a good thing to include.

The staffers figured they knew where to find one: at Fossil Cycad National Monument, a 320-acre patch of land in South Dakota’s Black Hills, just south of Minnekahta. After all, it had been set aside for protection because it was littered with the things. But when they returned, they were empty-handed: not only did they fail to bring back a suitable specimen, they couldn’t even suss out where to look for one. “They came back and said they couldn’t find the site,” says Vince Santucci. “There were no resources left at the location.”

Santucci, a senior paleontologist with the National Park Service, is used to digging up and piecing together lost creatures. He’s spent the past few decades reconstructing a different kind of extinct thing: the lost saga of Fossil Cycad. One of only a few national monuments in U.S. history to be completely stripped of its status, the site—which started out as a trove of ancient treasures—eventually became the center of political skirmishes, dramatic staged excavations, everyday pilfering, and scientific self-sabotage. “An incredible story emerged,” says Santucci.

The tale of Fossil Cycad really starts in the late Cretaceous, when a large clump of prehistoric plants in what would eventually become the Black Hills was buried by a landslide. Over the next 70 million years, the plants slowly solidified, as their organic matter was replaced with built-up molecules of silica and other minerals. In the 1890s, South Dakota ranchers began discovering the resulting fossils in great numbers, nicknaming them “petrified pineapples” and selling them as curios.

Soon, scientists from the University of Iowa, the Smithsonian, and other institutions came out to investigate, and to buy specimens. The fossils were preserved to a unique degree, enabling researchers to dissect and study them almost as they would a living plant. (As Santucci explains, they were also actually cycadeoids, which have different reproductive structures than cycads—but this distinction was not made until later.) By the end of the 19th century, the land around Minnekahta was recognized as a unique and significant paleontological site.

One of these scientists was a young man named George Reber Wieland. A paleontology student at Yale University, Wieland had spent the beginning of his career chasing down dead animals, gaining a certain amount of renown for his discovery of Archelon ischyros, a Cretaceous-era sea turtle that remains the largest known to man.

In 1898, the year after he dug up the turtle, Wieland went to the Black Hills and found something that interested him even more: a fossil cycad, with what he later described as “the most perfectly silicified prefoliate fronds of any yet obtained.” He changed his focus to paleobotany, and embarked on a mission to achieve “a complete elaboration” of the structures of various cycad types.

“He became the world’s leading expert on fossil cycads,” says Santucci, who describes Wieland as “sort of an eccentric, crazy professor.” He wrote two books on the subject, American Fossil Cycads and American Fossil Cycads, Volume 2, in which he wrote rapturously of the “superb beauty” of particular cycads while laying out their anatomy and natural history. He even decorated his backyard with some of his specimens, arranged alongside living plants.

All this time, Wieland was also working on a related side project: trying to protect the fossil-rich area in South Dakota from which so many of his beloved specimens came. There were layers upon layers of the so-called petrified pineapples hidden in the dirt, but thanks to the attentions of collectors, tourists, and scientists like himself, they tended to disappear nearly as fast as erosion revealed them. This was, Wieland had written, “the most important of all the American cycad horizons.” Was there some way to keep it intact?

In 1906, Theodore Roosevelt gave him a possible way forward by passing the Antiquities Act, which granted presidents the power to designate federal lands as national monuments. Roosevelt quickly began using it, setting aside spaces including Devil’s Tower, Montezuma Castle, and the Muir Woods. “Wieland strongly felt that the site that he was working on was worthy of similar preservation,” and began lobbying the government to turn it into a national monument, says Santucci. “He invested a lot of energy.” During his research, Santucci found copies of dozens of letters the professor wrote to senators and Congressmen, asking for their support.

When that proved ineffective, Wieland dreamed up a different strategy. In 1920, under the auspices of the Homesteading Act—which was more meant to encourage people to move West, not to enable paleobotany—“he actually acquired 160 acres of land in which the fossils were situated,” says Santucci. “So he was using that as leverage, convincing the federal government that he would donate it back.”

This worked. On October 21, 1922, President Warren G. Harding officially deemed the area protected, placing it under the jurisdiction of the U.S. National Park Service. The paleobotanic deposits at the newly declared Fossil Cycad National Monument were “of great scientific interest and value,” Harding wrote in the corresponding Presidental Proclamation. “Warning is hereby expressly given to all unauthorized persons not to appropriate, injure, destroy, or remove any of the fossils of this monument.”

Unfortunately for Fossil Cycad, its official recognition as an American landmark came at a difficult time for the country overall. “It was a period of economic hardship,” says Santucci. “Fossil Cycad wasn’t really developed like other national parks and monuments were.” That meant no one was hired to watch over the land. While the superintendent of nearby Wind Cave National Park was put in charge of its overall management, “day-to-day surveillance was entrusted to local ranchers,” writes Santucci. The site’s only sign—a 15-inch carved wooden plank—abbreviated both “National” and “Monument,” but made sure to spell out “NO PROSPECTING.”

Despite this lack of amenities, tourists continued to swing by, and to take pieces of the monument home with them. “People reading in newspapers about the monument in the Black Hills would come,” says Santucci. Natural erosion meant that new layers of fossils were gradually exposed, creating more buzz and more foot traffic. Such was the Fossil Cycad catch-22: when there weren’t any visible fossils, it wasn’t much of a monument. But whenever there were enough to attract visitors, those same visitors meant they were quick to disappear.

This cycle happened repeatedly. When the National Park Service sent the superintendent of Yellowstone to check on Fossil Cycad in 1929, he didn’t mince words. “There is nothing left that is of interest to visitors,” he wrote in his report. Pointing out that the NPS had a reputation to uphold, he continued, “It is a liability, not an asset, to the rest of the system… it would seem to be desirable to discontinue it as a national monument.”

For years, government authorities argued back and forth about whether to keep Fossil Cycad on the payroll. Meanwhile, Wieland wasn’t one to sit on his hands. In 1935, after the World’s Fair debacle, he brought a crew from the Civilian Conservation Corps to Fossil Cycad. As scientists and NPS representatives looked on, the workers dug a half dozen pits, revealing piles upon piles of previously unexposed fossils, over one ton of material.

Wieland had the fossils stored in Wind Park for safekeeping, but when the NPS asked him to write a report detailing the site’s precise value, he said he wouldn’t do any more work until they had committed to building some infrastructure. Specifically, he wanted a black granite museum where he could display his most interesting specimens.

The NPS called his bluff, suggesting that Wieland seek his own funding, and sending him once again into what Santucci calls “a frenzy of letter-writing” to various politicians. He began agitating for a visitor’s center as well, asking students at the Yale School of Architecture to draft design proposals, and trying to convince his own senator to earmark the cost into the Connecticut state budget. (He said no.

In the meantime, others related to the endeavor began to call Wieland’s integrity into question. In 1938, the superintendent of Wind Cave National Park, E.D. Freeland, told the South Dakota Argus-Leader that on several occasions, Wieland had had “carloads” of fossil cycads shipped to New Haven, both from the site itself and from the “protected” stash stored at Wind Cave.

“There is not one specimen at the Wind Cave national park, where every day interested visitors inquire about them,” Freeland said at the time. (As Santucci writes, National Park Service geologist Carrol Wegemann corroborated the claim, and Wieland later admitted to having stolen at least 1,000 specimens right before the monument was designated.)

Facing these accusations—and, one suspects, the prospect of having doomed his own monument—Wieland became more and more agitated. He responded to a proposal to build a cycad-related visitor’s center at Wind Cave instead as full of “bat dung,” arguing somewhat ironically that the fossils must be viewed “in situ,” or the site would “mean but little.” He called Freeland a “hill billy,” and referred to his park as “Windy Cave.” “You have stood my good plans off for fifteen years,” he wrote desperately to the NPS.

It was all for naught. Wieland died in 1953, and four years later, the monument—which by now just looked like grass, rocks and dirt—was officially abolished.

It has left one legacy, though. Fossil theft is still a big problem in national parks. “Over the past ten years, we have had more than 700 documented instances,” Santucci says.

Having pieced together this story, in which such transgressions were taken to extremes, he’s since been working its lessons into educational programs. “People are incensed to think that an area that was set aside as a National Park is no longer there,” he says. “The circumstances upon which that decision was made, to abolish it—I think it does help us to present the idea that fossils are non-renewable resources.” We’ve already learned that the hard way.

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