Battle flags are particularly sought after by collectors. They “literally marked the battle lines, where soldiers from the North and South died by the tens of thousands,” Robert K. Wittman, who founded the F.B.I.’s art-crime team, writes in “Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World’s Stolen Treasures.” A particularly valuable flag was stolen in the nineteen-eighties from the Atlanta Historical Society—now the Atlanta History Center—where Erquitt worked as a curator. It had been handsewn in New Orleans in 1862; it was seized by a Union soldier during the occupation of Atlanta and carried on the Northern Army’s march to the sea. It ended up in a New Hampshire antique store, where it was bought, in 1938, by a couple from Georgia. “A Confederate Flag, Stolen in Atlanta During War Between the States, Comes Home,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. The couple donated it to the historical society. Decades later, Erquitt noted its disappearance in a letter to a historian. But the society, wishing to avoid embarrassment, never reported it missing.
Erquitt resigned from the job in 1992. Several months later, he starred in a three-part investigative series on local television, “The Lost Treasures of Atlanta,” which was billed as “one whistle-blower’s ten-year search down a disappearing paper trail.” In the series, Erquitt describes security at the society as “pitiful” and alleges a coverup of multiple thefts. “The trustees of our history are plunderers of the past,” he says, listing half a dozen missing relics. Society officials furnished explanations for every item but the flag. “To Bill Erquitt, it’s all still a mystery,” the host of the series says.
So it came as a surprise when the flag finally turned up, a few months after Erquitt’s death. “Lord knows I’d had my eyes open for it for a long time,” Gordon Jones, a senior military historian at the Atlanta History Center, told me. An artifact dealer from Gettsyburg had brought the flag to a relic show in Dalton, and someone spotted it there. The dealer had purchased the flag for thirty-six thousand dollars; it was probably worth four times that much, but neither he nor the seller knew anything about the flag’s provenance. It had been found, not long before, inside a glass cabinet hidden behind a mess of Civil War memorabilia in Bill Erquitt’s basement. The person who’d stolen it, all those years ago, was almost certainly Erquitt himself.