Mono County Dr Pleads To Looting Indian Artifacts

One of his frequent hiking partners was John Dittli, and the two would often race each other up a mountain. One day they stumbled on a five-year-old plane crash. Bourne started digging through the wreckage, but Dittli wanted to move on. "It was early in the day, and I wanted to finish before dark," he says. But Bourne kept at it until he found a gold wedding band, which he pocketed.

It also seemed that Bourne was using some of his overseas humanitarian and adventure trips as a front to buy and hunt for other objects. "Bourne gave us extremely rare things that are not found in North America," says BLM archaeologist Greg Haverstock, who was tasked with taking inventory of the cache. In fact, when Haverstock saw a Mesoamerican prismatic obsidian core that was about 10,000 years old, he suspected that Bourne had procured the artifact during a 2011 medical mission to Chiapas, Mexico. (Bourne says he bought it at a museum gift shop.)

In 2006, Jon and Penny cleared some brush from the property and burned it in a pit. By law, they should have applied for a burn permit, but they hadn't. Embers from the fire ignited a blaze that spread into Inyo National Forest, raging for nine days and consuming 7,500 acres. The cost to fight it topped $1 million, and five years later, the Bournes paid a $1 million fine.

The case stems from a yearlong investigation by the U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers