'Treasure Trader': The Final Legacy of an Antiquities Rock Star

To all who knew him, there was no one else quite like Billy Jamieson.

"I've been producing television shows for a long time and I can tell you that I've never met anybody like Billy Jamieson. I've met wild, crazy, capable and very experienced people out there in the world, whether they are mountain climbers, explorers, adventurers, wheeler-dealers, actors or interesting people from history. You name it. But I'll tell you, when Billy's mom had Billy she broke the mould. He truly was a unique and one of a kind character who did some fascinating things in the latter part of his life," says John LaRose, the writer and director of Treasure Trader, a show that many are calling Billy Jamieson's final legacy (airing tonight, Friday July 20 at 7 pm ET, on History channel).

This is because almost exactly a year ago, on July 3, 2011, his 57th birthday, he passed away of a heart attack -- three-quarters of the way through production on what was then called, Head Hunters.
"There was a mea culpa after he passed away, as to whether we would proceed," confirms LaRose. "But after everybody, including Jessica [Phillips] his fiancé, came to terms with his passing, there were enough stories that we could potentially put the series together. There was a serious forensic done on the stories, as far as what was useable. If a story didn't have a beginning, middle and an end, then, obviously, we couldn't use it. But, if there was almost all of that material together, then, with potentially fudging a little bit of interview material, or repurposing something, or, in the case of Jessica -- we shot new interviews with her and new interviews with a few other people -- we were able to glue the thing together."

In the end, the production team's cosmetic surgery resulted in eight useable episodes from the original 13 episode order. Why all this television magic for a man who use to run a waterproofing company? Because Jamieson was the leather jacketed, flower vested, tight panted and cowboy booted gothic rock star of the ethnographic antiquity world. In other words, he was a rarity in a business that deals in ancient rarities.

"This is a very elitist, small club and, Billy would've said this too, there's only about 50 truly great tribal art dealers around the world, whether they're based in New York, Toronto, Brussels, Paris, London, Chicago or LA. The epicenters of this business." says LaRose.

"A lot of them are Oxford educated with a master's degree or PhD and Billy was self-taught. He learned everything through wheeling and dealing and going places, whether it was spending time with head hunters in the Amazon or rubbing shoulders with people at museums around the world. He learned that over a 20-year period and became one of the best in the business. The tribal art world will never see the like of him again."

He broke into the scene through pure luck and a cult of personality, falling in as a tourist with The Shuar Tribe of Ecuador and Peru -- infamous for their shrunken head rituals. the tribe believed such rituals allowed them to control the souls of the victims and thus, gave them control of their own wives' and daughters' labour -- crucial to the Shuar social hierarchy.

"Billy got interested in the occult side of it," adds LaRose. "The tribes would sew the mouths and eyes shut, so they couldn't find their enemies in the afterlife."

With the help of his expeditions to Ecuador and Peru between 1995 and 2001, Jamieson began amassing one of the largest collections of shrunken heads and skulls in the world. He also collected spears, clubs, masks and other artifacts from other tribes in North America, South America, the Dayak of Borneo, Naga of the Highlands of India, and Batak of Sumatra.

However, the score that put him on the map was when he bought The Niagara Falls Museum in 1998 at a fire sale price, saving the majority of its contents from the dumpster. At first, nothing immediately signaled a winfall, but in a museum that had been open since 1827 that stasis wouldn't last long. In the basement he found nine Egyptian mummies that had been in the museum's possession since 1861. One of them ended up being the missing Pharaoh Ramses I, which Billy promptly sold for $2 million, along with the other eight mummies, to The Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University in Atlanta.

Though Ramses I was eventually repatriated back to Egypt, suddenly, Jameison had some cash flow, which opened the door to any macabre artifact that caught his fancy. His home in Toronto became a shrine to his eclectic interests and everyone was welcome.

"Toronto is Toronto and there's an old adage that everyone knew Billy Jamieson," says LaRose. "His Halloween parties were infamous and he did them for years. His house on Wellington Street was a magnet for people. All kinds of people went there and hung out there. His house was a living museum for God's sake, it was full of all of his stuff. He invited in school kids, university students doing a study on this or that, whether it was Egyptology, chainmail or Canadian history. He was quite open and he was quite happy, not to show off, but to offer his collection for insight. Anybody who was anybody knew Billy Jamieson."

With "the Gene Simmons of the tribal art world" in our midst, it's a wonder it took this long to get Jamieson his own show. "Producers and executives have probably been kicking themselves asking, 'Why didn't we think about this guy ten years ago?'" says LaRose.

It may have taken five years of Jamieson himself knocking on doors with this idea, but now that it's here for all to see, Treasure Trader has greatly distinguished itself from the glut of antique shows currently on the airwaves.

"What makes this show different in my opinion is the quality of the art that Billy's hunting for and the money that's being passed around," says LaRose. "I mean, he's dealing in hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars."

Actually, that brings up a great question: how do you even set a price for artifacts that pretty much every museum curator would call priceless? It's not like you can go to the No Frills and buy shrunken heads in bulk.

"The network knows what the value therein is, based on its originality, its age, the condition that it's in and how much restoration is going to be required," says LaRose. "The less restoration on this stuff, the better because you want it in its original state, as that gives it its value. You don't want a shrunken head that's falling apart and you have to spend thousands of dollars to basically make a new head. But, if it's something with a thread broken on it or needs some sort of solvent to clean something off of it that's one thing."

Meanwhile, finding artifacts to buy, and the people to buy them from has its own set of unique challenges that Jamieson knew intimately.

"This network is a fascinating thing," says LaRose. "It's global and Billy said it many times on the show, 'I'm the Indiana Jones of the internet.' It's all done by phone, it's all done by e-mail and it's all interconnected. You don't go wandering the jungles of Africa or South America looking for this stuff, it usually comes to you. If you get lucky, you stumble across it through your network of people, which happens on the show several times. You have to know what you're looking for."

Even if you do know what you're looking for, it can be difficult to recognize the fakes and those legitimate artifacts stolen by grave robbers and art thieves, something even someone as smart and as prolific as Jamieson wasn't always able to avoid, despite his over 20 years of experience.

"Billy had a cabinet in his house that he called his cabinet of mistakes," says LaRose. "He must've had about 100 artifacts in there from every culture in the world and they were knock-offs, fakes and things he thought were real that he bought and found out after the fact that they weren't."

At the same time though, Jamieson was very meticulous in his research and typically, before he decided to pull the trigger on an item, he had a network of experts and former curators advising him of the artifact's authenticity. In one episode of the show, he considers buying a still bloody guillotine that was supposedly from the 18th century and used during The French Revolution, but his network of experts saves him -- revealing it to be a 19th century knock-off. Jamieson was prepared to buy it for €20,000, but it ended up selling at auction for €190,000.

"I can't believe someone would be stupid enough to pay that much," he said as he walked from the auction in disgust. "It's not even worth enough for me to use in my kitchen to chop vegetables with!"

Jamieson was just as careful about potentially stolen items. He researched an item's background just as meticulously and often donated artifacts that were suspect, or he wasn't sure where they came from, particularly, when it came to Canadian aboriginal art, given the tumultuous history of mistreatment.

"He loved Inuit masks, for example," says LaRose. "But, he knew that a lot of those masks had been taken out of the arctic by prospectors or crooked cops and ended up here or there. So, he spent a lot of time buying these things and then donating them back to museums."

As for Jamieson's own collection, if all kept together, it could populate one hell of a museum -- the likes of which Canada and the world have never seen all in one public place. But, that call is up to Jessica, his pin-up bombshell fiancé and soulmate, to decide. Really, it's a daunting task that many believe only she can rightfully pull off.

"She's in the process of trying to figure that out," says LaRose. "Some of it I'm sure will be donated, some of it will be kept and some of it I'm sure she'll sell. I think her hope right now is that all of his collections are kept together for public display."

Whatever happens, there's solace in knowing every bit of it will have a little piece of William "Billy" Jamieson -- Canada's dark Dr. Livingstone.

Catch Billy Jamieson on the final episodes of 'Treasure Trader' back-to-back beginning Thursday, July 19 at 10:00 p.m. on History Television. Check local listings for rebroadcast times.