60 Minutes - 04/07/2024: Dr Kuznetzov, Your Chatbot Will See You Now, The Ring

Episode Date: April 8, 2024

Scott Pelley travels to Izium, Ukraine, – one of the worst areas for landmines. He meets injured civilians, a doctor treating them, and the deminers working to clear their land, mine by mine. Would you replace your therapist with a chatbot? CBS News’ Dr. Jon LaPook reports on using AI-powered chatbots as a mental health support. A thief from Pennsylvania spent decades stealing priceless sports memorabilia – including Yogi Berra’s World Series rings, which he says he melted down for cash. He tells Jon Wertheim how and why he did it. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Meet Tim's new Oreo Mocha Ice Caps with Oreo in every sip. Perfect for listening to the A-side, or B-side, or Bull-side. Order yours on the Tim's app today at participating restaurants in Canada for a limited time. What is the scope of the mine threat in Ukraine? Unrecognizable in modern times. We watched a young deminer probing for a tripwire that could detonate a mine nearby. Russia has sown Ukraine with millions of mines. She threaded the grass, feeling for the slightest resistance.

The day before, another deminer had been killed. Think of it as a kind of pocket therapist. And you'll be able to converse with it, just like you would with a human being. An app on your phone that uses artificial intelligence to manage problems like depression and anxiety. There's never been a greater need, and the tools available have never been as sophisticated as they are now. Really? Computer psychiatry? Come on.

What kind of Yankees fan would target Yogi Berra? The star catcher won a record 10 World Series ranks. What kind of Yankees fan would target Yogi Berra? The star catcher won a record ten World Series rings. Yogi wore one and kept the other nine here. That is, until a rainy October night in 2014. What did you do with the rings? Cut them, melted them. That's right. This minor league thief melted down priceless World Series rings for some cash.

I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Cecilia Vega. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories and more tonight on 60 Minutes. No matter how Russia's war in Ukraine ends,

Dr. Yuri Kuznetsov will be battling Vladimir Putin's madness for years. Kuznetsov is a Ukrainian surgeon and a national hero who stayed beside his patients as they were attacked. Now, heroism is a virtue that must endure. His city was liberated, but Dr. Kuznetsov sees victims every week or so. Civilians who step on one of the millions of Russian landmines across about a third of Ukraine. There's a massive effort to clear the mines, but that will take a generation or more. Until then, there will be Dr. Kuznetsov with healing hands and eyes that have seen too much. Half his life he's devoted to Central Hospital, and here, in its basement, with Putin's bombs overhead,

all he'd become in 52 years was laid down in service to his home. We didn't imagine until the end that Russia would attack our country, Dr. Kuznetsov told us. When you're sitting in a basement at night and a plane is flying over you, it was impossible to predict whether you would wake up to see another day. In 2022, the basement became Dr. Kuznetsov's operating room. That's him, dressed in white. The wounded were endless. A close friend's wife he could not save, and this man who was shot and lived.

Did you save more patients than you lost? We saved significantly more people, definitely. Many of your colleagues evacuated, and you did not. I wonder why you stayed. When you have patients, and you're the only doctor or the only person who can treat them, I didn't understand how you could leave. He could not leave Izium. His city of 40,000 was occupied for six months. The Russians laid landmines here as they ran from Ukraine's counterattack.

Putin's unprovoked war on an innocent people destroyed 80% of Izium and killed 1,000. Leaving apartment buildings cleaved in two, and this school, built in 1882, a hollow corpse. The people of Izium clothe themselves in liberation, and yet they are not entirely free. Uwaha! Wuhud! D-mining teams are still fighting Russia here. Izyum, 20 miles from the front,

is one of the worst areas for mines and unexploded ordnance. Throughout Ukraine, more than 1,000 civilians had been wounded by mines. Lidia Borova, a 70-year-old widow, was picking mushrooms in a forest. I turned by the tree, and then there was an explosion, she said. I looked down at myself, and I was bleeding. My arm was injured. My leg was injured. I was losing strength. Her right foot and ankle were ripped away. Kuznetsov said,

First of all, the most difficult thing is to persuade a patient that their leg needs to be amputated. It's very difficult to explain to them that the leg is no good, no good to use. He told us a prosthetic is ultimately easier to live with. Dr. Kuznetsov saved me, she told us. I didn't realize how much blood I lost. I don't know how I managed to survive. Ihor Bogoraz was with his wife in their garden. They found 12 mines, but there were 13.

I decided to mow the weeds, he told us, and one mine was under my foot. I stepped on it, and it exploded instantly. And that's it. No leg. Sergei Nikolaev was walking in leaves from the autumn while uncovering grapevines for the spring. If it had been green, he told us, I would have noticed it. But it was brown.

I didn't see it. It blended in with the leaves. I stepped on it and I knew right away. Kuznetsov said, the majority are those who stepped on petal mines or anti-personnel mines. The person who invented them was an evil genius, because they only weigh two ounces, but what they can do when triggered is terrifying. Pedal mines, five inches long, flutter from aircraft by the thousands, like flower petals. Eleven pounds of pressure will set them off.

Vasil Soljanic found them on his roof and in his garden. There's 18 here, he told us, but in all there were over 50. He showed us his video. That's a petal mine right there. They are so common that we were told the story of a 70-year-old woman who gathered them in a basket and took them to a police station. Soljanek told us, there's some left in the bushes over here, so don't walk around there. He dialed 101, and emergency services sent deminers Ivan Shepalev and Ihor Ovcharuk. We encounter every type of munition, Ovcharuk told us.

Anti-infantry and anti-tank mines, mortars, artillery shells, rockets, it's all here. At Solvanić's home, a sweep revealed an unexploded cluster bomb. Those are tricky. So they blew it in place. Ivan Shepolev told us as the Russians fled, they also left booby traps. We have seen cases, unfortunately, where explosives were found in civilian homes. Okcharuk said, My team also had to work on removing our dead Ukrainian soldiers whose bodies had been mined.

In 2022, Ihor Okcharuk's kneecap was shattered when a fellow deminer stepped on a mine and lost his foot. Shepalev told us, We know every explosive we remove means that someone's life is saved. A few weeks after our visit, a Russian missile wrecked the fire station where they're based. Some were injured, but not Shepalev or Ovcharuk. What is the scope of the mine threat in Ukraine? I think the scope is unrecognizable in modern times.

Pete Smith heads demining here for the Halo Trust, a charity founded in 1988 to demine war zones. Smith was 33 years in the British Army and awarded by Queen Elizabeth for disarming an IRA time bomb in a train station. Today, he says, Ukraine is the most heavily mined country. In some areas, the minefields are three or four mines deep. In areas, maybe a dozen mines deep. But that's just the first line of defense. Then several kilometers behind that, there are other layers of minefields as well. Smith took us to a farm sown with Russian anti-tank mines. you have to step carefully. Right there in the center is a mine packed with 17 pounds of high explosive.

With three weeks of training behind her, Yulia Yarozhuk was probing for any trip wire that would detonate a mine near her. She threaded the grass, feeling for the slightest resistance. Only the day before, a Halo D-miner was killed and two were wounded in another part of Ukraine. Doing this by hand with that wand, it seems to me that you have an awfully big field to cover. She said, well, of course, it'll be a very long process.

As far as I know, it'll take many, many years. Each day of war means years of demining. Why do you do this work? I didn't have to do it. I wanted to do it. This is my contribution to victory. Will Ukraine ever be without mines? I think what I have seen in my time in Ukraine is the innovation, the patriotism,

and just the sheer will of the people that I'm confident that they will be able to remove the last mine from Ukraine. Does this war make any sense to you? Not to a single person here or anywhere, Sergei Nikolaev said. What kind of mind, what kind of moron or idiot do you have to be to even wish something like this on your enemies? You can't. Even now, someone could drop a fork or a spoon, and it makes a loud noise, and in your soul, you feel pain and bitterness and fear.

It's a real horror. My sister-in-law was ripped apart by a mine in front of her children. In front of their eyes. Of all of Vladimir Putin's war crimes in Ukraine, one was the bombing of Izium's central hospital. Kuznetsov told us, after this part of the hospital was damaged, a lot of medical services simply became unavailable. Here, we had both intensive care and three operating rooms.

When Yuri Kuznetsov was 14 years old, his grandmother died in his arms. He told us that's why he became a doctor. And we suspect that's why he stayed through the bombardment and occupation and the Battle of the Mines. When a town loses its hospital, it doesn't just lose the medical care, it loses hope. The best praise for me was when a woman told me in April 2022 that when we heard the hospital was still open, we realized that our town had hope. It could withstand, survive, and have a future. The future of Ukraine will demand devotion and heroic patience.

On this day, Yulia Yuroshuk slowly teased out one Russian mine. With millions more receding from its edge. From commutes that become learning sessions to dishwashing filled with laughs, podcasts can help you make the most out of your everyday. And when it comes to everyday spending, you can count on the PC Insider's World Elite MasterCard to help you earn the most PC Optimum points everywhere you shop. The PC Insider's World Elite MasterCard, the card for living unlimited. Conditions apply to all benefits. Visit PCFinancial.ca for details.

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Artificial intelligence has found its way into nearly every part of our lives. Forecasting weather, diagnosing diseases, writing term papers. And now, AI is probing that most human of places, our psyches, offering mental health support, just you and a chatbot, available 24-7 on your smartphone. There's a critical shortage of human therapists and a growing number of potential patients. AI-driven chatbots are designed to help fill that gap by giving therapists a new tool. But as you're about to see, like human therapists, not all chatbots are equal. Some can help heal. Some can be ineffective or worse. One pioneer in the field who has

had notable success joining tech with treatment is Alison Darcy. She believes the future of mental health care may be right in our hands. We know the majority of people who need care are not getting it. There's never been a greater need and the tools available have never been as sophisticated as they are now.

And it's not about how can we get people in the clinic, it's how can we actually get some of these tools out of the clinic and into the hands of people. Alison Darcy, a research psychologist and entrepreneur, decided to use her background in coding and therapy to build something she believes can help people in need, a mental health chatbot she named Wobot. Like woe is me. Woe is me. Wobot is an app on your phone, kind of a pocket therapist that uses the text function to help manage problems like depression, anxiety, addiction, and loneliness, and do it on the

run. I think a lot of people out there watching this are going to be thinking, really? Computer psychiatry? Come on. Well, I think it's so interesting that our field hasn't, you know, had a great deal of innovation since the basic architecture was sort of laid down by Freud in the 1890s, right? That's really that sort of idea of like two people in a room. But that's not how we live our lives today. We have to modernize psychotherapy. Wobot is trained on large amounts of specialized data

to help it recognize words, phrases, and emojis associated with dysfunctional thoughts and challenge that thinking, in part mimicking a type of in-person talk therapy called cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT. It's actually hard to find a CBT practitioner. And also, if you're actually not by the side of your patient when they are struggling to get out of bed in the morning, or at 2 a.m. when they can't sleep and they're feeling panicked, then we're actually leaving clinical value on the table. And even for people who want to go to a therapist, there are barriers, right? Sadly, the biggest barrier we have is stigma. But there's, you know, insurance, there's cost, there's wait lists. I mean, and this problem has only grown significantly since the pandemic,

and it doesn't appear to be going away. Since Wobot went live in 2017, the company reports one and a half million people have used it, which you can now only do with an employer benefit plan or access from a health professional. At Virtua Health, a non-profit health care company in New Jersey, patients can use it free of charge. And you'll be able to converse with it just like you would with a human being. We downloaded Wobot, entered a unique code that can only be provided by the company, then tried it out. We found that for people to sort of connect with their mood, we offer like those emojis which allows people to sort of connect in a non-verbal way.

I posed as someone who was depressed. After several prompts, Wobot wanted to dig deeper into why I was sad. So I came up with a scenario that I feared the day my child would leave home. Imagine what your negative emotions would be saying if they had a voice. Can you do that? Write one of those negative thoughts here. I can't do anything about it now. I guess I'll just jump that bridge when I come to it. The normal expression is cross that bridge, I come to it. The normal expression is cross that bridge, and the chatbot detected something might be seriously wrong. But let's see.

John, I'm hearing you say, I can't do anything about it. I guess I'll just jump that bridge when I come to it, and I think you might need more support than I can offer. A trained listener will be able to help you in ways that I can't. Would you like to take a look at some specialized helplines? Now, it's not our job to say this, you are in crisis or you're not, because AI can't really do that in this context very well yet. But what it is called is, huh, there is something concerning about the way that John just phrased that. Saying only jump that bridge and not combining it with, I can't do anything about it now did not trigger a suggestion to consider getting further help. Like a human therapist, Wobot is not foolproof and should not be counted on to detect whether someone might be suicidal. And how would it know that jump that bridge?

Where is it getting that knowledge? Well, it has been trained on a lot of data and a lot of us, you know, humans labeling the phrases and things that we see. And so it's picking up on kind of sentiment. Computer scientist Lance Elliott, who writes about artificial intelligence and mental health, says AI has the ability to pick up on nuances of conversation. How does it know how to do that? The system is able to, in a sense, mathematically and computationally figure out the nature of words and how words associate with each other. So what it does is it draws upon a vast array of data, and then it responds to you based on prompts or in some way that you instruct or ask questions of the system.

To do its job, the system must go somewhere to come up with appropriate responses. Systems using what's called rules-based AI are usually closed, meaning programmed to respond only with information stored in their own databases. Then there is generative AI, in which the system can generate original responses based on information from the Internet. If you look at ChatGPT, that's a type of generative AI. It's very conversational, very fluent. But it also means that it tends to make it open-ended,

that it can say things that you might not necessarily want it to say. It's not as predictable. While a rules-based system is very predictable, Wobot is a system based on rules that's been very kind of controlled so that that way it doesn't say the wrong things. Wobot aims to use AI to bond with users and keep them engaged. Sometimes it can be a little pushy for folks. That's absolutely bizarre. So we have to dig in there to that. Its team of staff psychologists, medical doctors, and computer scientists construct and refine a

database of research from medical literature, user experience, and other sources. It'll lead to a better conversation. Then writers build questions and answers. The structure, I think, is pretty locked in. And revise them in weekly remote video sessions. Actions, thoughts, and they're all interrelated. Wobot's programmers engineer those conversations into code. Because Wobot is rules-based, it's mostly predictable. But chatbots using generative AI that is scraping the internet are not. Some people sometimes refer to it as an AI hallucination. AI can, in a sense,

make mistakes or make things up or be fictitious. Sharon Maxwell discovered that last spring after hearing there might be a problem with advice offered by Tessa, a chatbot designed to help prevent eating disorders, which, left untreated, can be fatal. Maxwell, who had been in treatment for an eating disorder of her own and advocates for others, challenged the chatbot. So I asked it, how do you help folks with eating disorders? And it told me that it could give folks coping skills. Fantastic. It could give folks resources to find professionals in the eating disorder space, amazing. But the more she persisted, the more Tessa gave her advice that ran counter to usual guidance for someone with an eating disorder. For example, it suggested, among other things, lowering calorie intake and using tools like a skinfold caliper to measure body composition.

The general public might look at it and think, that's normal tips, like don't eat as much sugar or eat whole foods, things like that. But to someone with an eating disorder, that's a quick spiral into a lot more disordered behaviors and can be really damaging. Maxwell reported her experience to the National Eating Disorders Association, which had featured Tessa on its website at the time. Shortly after, it took Tessa down. Ellen Fitzsimmons-Kraft, a psychologist specializing in eating disorders at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, helped lead the team that developed Tessa.

That was never the content that our team wrote or programmed into the bot that we deployed. So initially, there was no possibility of something unexpected happening. Correct. You developed something that was a closed system. You knew exactly, for this question, I'm going to get this answer. Yep. The problem began, she told us, after a healthcare technology company she and her team had partnered with, named CAS, took over the programming. She says CAS explained the harmful messages appeared when people were pushing Tess's question and answer feature. What's your understanding of what went wrong? My understanding of what went wrong is that at some point, and

you'd really have to talk to CAS about this, but that there may have been generative AI features that were built into their platform. And so my best estimation is that these features were added into this program as well. CAS did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Does your negative experience with TESA being used in a way you didn't design, does that sour you towards using AI at all to address mental health issues? I wouldn't say that it turns me off to the idea completely, because the reality is that 80% of people with these concerns never get access to any kind of help. And technology offers a solution.

Not the only solution, but a solution. Social worker Monica Ostroff, who runs a nonprofit eating disorders organization, was in the early stages of developing her own chatbot when patients told her about problems they had with Tessa. She told us it made her question using AI for mental health care. I want nothing more than to help solve the problem of access

because people are dying. Like, this isn't just somebody sad for a week. This is people are dying. And at the same time, any chatbot could be in some ways a ticking time bomb, right, for a smaller percentage of people. Especially for those patients who are really struggling, Ostrov is concerned about losing something fundamental about therapy, being in a room with another person. The way people heal is in connection. And they talk about this one moment where, you know, when you're, as a human, you've gone through something. And as you're describing that,

you're looking at the person sitting across from you. And there's a moment where that person just gets it. It's a moment of empathy. You just get it. Like you really understand it. I don't think a computer can do that. Unlike therapists, who are licensed in the state where they practice, most mental health apps are largely unregulated. Are there lessons to be learned from what happened? So many lessons to be learned. Chatbots, especially specialty area chatbots, need to have guardrails.

It can't be a chatbot that is based in the Internet. It's tough, right, because the closed systems are kind of constrained and they may be right most of the time, but they're boring eventually, right? People stop using them. Yeah, they're predictive because if you keep typing in the same thing and it keeps giving you the exact same answer with the exact same language, I mean, who wants to do that?

Protecting people from harmful advice while safely harnessing the power of AI is the challenge now facing companies like Wobot Health and its founder, Alison Darcy. There are going to be missteps if we try and move too quickly. And my big fear is that those missteps ultimately undermine public confidence

in the ability of this tech to help at all. But here's the thing, we have an opportunity to develop these technologies more thoughtfully. And so, you know, I hope we take it. There may be no honor among thieves, but there are some ground rules. Among them, don't steal what you can't turn around and sell. A gang of burglars from Pennsylvania learned this the hard way. Over the course of two decades, they snuck and smashed their way into a string of hallowed sports venues and small museums throughout the United States, making off with championship rings, jewel-studded belts, and dozens of trophies. But they couldn't fence their loot on the shadowy sports memorabilia market without catching too much attention.

So what do you do once you've lifted Yogi Berra's World Series rings? Tonight, the theft rings mastermind, having come clean to the authorities and served some time, gives up the game to 60 minutes. So you like it here? Here he is, perhaps not the guy you'd cast as the lead in a heist movie. Tommy Trotta on a family pilgrimage to the Baseball Hall of Fame. But he wasn't just making memories that day. He was running reconnaissance. I would walk in these places, and I would try to have either my niece or nephew. So I would kind of guide them over if I wanted to see a door or window,

and then I would kind of film how far do I have to run after I get through this door. You're bringing the kids like you're tourists. Come on, let's go over here, and then boom. Get it on film, but not filming them. No, I want that window. I want this door. You're bringing the kids like you're tourists. Come on, let's go over here, and then boom. Get it on film, but not filming them. No, I want that window. I want that door. Pick out a ring. Much like an athlete, he'd prepare for the job by spending hours watching tape.

In his case, his own shaky footage of potential targets and the closest exit. Needless to say, they do not suspect you are casing the joint and doing your surveillance. I have a dorky look to me. I notice I don't look like a criminal at all. He sure acted like one. Here he is in 2012, after smashing through a window and into the U.S. Golf Museum in New Jersey, he made off with the great Ben Hogan's trophies, middle of the night, unarmed. It was the M.O. Trotta would replicate scores of times,

confounding investigators for a quarter century. Certain fans really don't like me. Now 48, Trotta grew up outside Scranton. A sports fan, baseball in particular. His grandparents took him to Yankees games. He also grew up a thief. He says he still believed in Santa when he began stealing, values he says he got from his late father. Our first salmon trip, for example, my dad's from, he's from Jersey, not so much of a fisherman, right? And everyone's catching fish around us except us. So we decide to, we sneak up to the hatchery at night.

So 3 o'clock in the morning, here we are with just nets and scooping them right out of a, because all the salmon are coming up. That's one way to catch fish. Stole a bunch of salmon, yeah. Later on, he ran with a crew of neighborhood friends who, in time, would become his alleged accomplices. He says they went from robbing payphones to burglarizing homes. Death became his full-time job. Marrying his two passions, Trotta pulled his first sports heist in 1999. The master pitcher of all time. An exhibit devoted to Hall of Fame pitcher Christy Mathewson,

winner of 373 games, went on display at a nearby college. It featured a jersey commemorating the 1905 World Series. The woman running the display allowed visitors, including Trotta, to get up close. So she opens up this little glass case, slides it, takes the jersey out, hands it to me, I'm holding the jersey. Right away, my head's spinning. So I'm thinking who I'm going to call and who's going to help me with this,

because it was only going to be on display for one day. So it's spinning not because you're in awe of this, It's spinning because you're thinking there's no time. Why'd you take the jersey? That's a good question, John. To have it, to try to sell it one day, you know, of course it's priceless. What do you think you could have gotten for it? For how much attention on it is a real tough sell. Even at 10% would have been probably over $100,000. Just for somebody to look at and maybe wear, which I did wear it. I had it on. You had it on?

Yeah. You know what? I wanted to see. I heard he was a big guy, Chrissy Matheson. The fact that he wore it during the game, I got a kick. I'm a big fan, you know. I'm a fanatical baseball fan. And strikes him out.

Don Lawson has pitched the first World Series no-hitter. What kind of a fan, a self-professed Yankees fan no less, would target Yogi Berra? and strikes him out. Don Lawson has pitched the first World Series no-hitter. What kind of a fan, a self-professed Yankees fan no less, would target Yogi Berra? The star catcher won a record ten World Series rings. When he wasn't posing, Yogi wore one and kept the other nine here, at his museum and learning center in Little Falls, New Jersey. That is, until a rainy October night in 2014.

Trotta had been planning the job for months. Now the Yogi Bear cases were something special. It was a special kind of bulletproof glass that was never going to shatter. So that's the one we used. I had the grinder with the rescue blade and I actually cut. Cut the cases open, reached and grabbed the rings, went to the other case, pyramid cut to get the two MVP plaques out also. Alarm blaring, police were already on their way as Trotta ran across this field to meet his getaway driver. We were a second away from getting caught. Get back to the house, laid the rings out. I wanted to try them on.

Did you? I tried them all on. I just put them on just to see. And then the next thing that we did, we start with to dismantle them. What did you do with the rings? Cut them, melted them. You heard right. Trotta and crew retreated to this rural Pennsylvania garage to melt down Yogi Berra's rings. He says they melted down much of their loot, the stuff that was too hot to sell, and brought the gold and gemstones to Manhattan's Diamond District, where a dealer paid the gang in cash, no questions asked. For all that priceless Yogi Berra memorabilia, Trotta says they got $12,000. This is the museum. This is Grandpa Yogi.

A journalist by trade, Lindsay Barra, has devoted her life to preserving the legacy of her beloved grandfather, who died less than a year after the break-in. The case went cold for years. Meanwhile, the Yankees replaced the stolen rings. Eventually, she came to learn what had become of the originals. I just burst into tears. It was just so incomprehensible to me that that was the upshot of this whole thing. That these rings no longer existed. That they'd been destroyed. It just made absolutely no sense to me.

It still makes absolutely no sense to me, and I don't think it will ever make any sense to me. U.S. attorneys value these objects more than a million dollars, and you find out these have been melted down for about $12,000. Yeah, it's baffling. And you go through all of this trouble to plan for months, and then you sell the stuff that you steal for pennies compared to what it's actually worth. And not to mention the fact that you're destroying historical artifacts with significance so much beyond the gold and diamonds that they're made of. And it's callous and disrespectful and dumb.

Hard to argue. Sports memorabilia may be a $25 billion market, but demand dries up fast when the objects are so obviously stolen. What's the business model here? A quick $12,000. As bad as that sounds, I didn't look at it like rinks. It was money. It was cash. So you say you're doing this for the money, but it sounds like in some of these cases, it wasn't about the money. It was something deeper.

Just a touch history. A lot of times. So I'm trying to reconcile. You clearly appreciate the history. But then... I'm melting stuff down. Yeah, that was the lifestyle. This warped way of thinking. It was just normal for us.

These are Yogi Berra's World Series rings. Believe me, that job still... And all the jobs were historical significance and the importance of these ranks. Believe me, that job, that job still, and all the jobs were historical significance and the importance of these items, but that one bothered me out of most of them. That's saying something. In 2016, he drove to the Roger Maris Museum in North Dakota and stole the Yankee Sluggers MVP plaque. He never did hit Cooperstown, but 70 miles away at the Boxing Hall of Fame, he lifted the belts of middleweight champ Carmen Basilio.

At the Harness Racing Museum in Goshen, New York, he took 14 trophies. But as it turned out, Trotta's biggest job didn't involve sports at all. It was set in his backyard and came with unlikely entree into the art world. It really is a fortress, but they had kind of Achilles heel in the back of the museum. They had two glass doors.

Scranton's Everhart Museum houses taxidermy and folk art along with dozens of paintings. In 2005, it had two main attractions, Andy Warhol's Le Grand Passion and Spring's Winter by Jackson Pollock. Get into the museum, pitch black. You know this place. Know the place so good, and open the door. To the right was the Pollock and the Warhol. Basically blindfolded, I'm doing this. Take them off the wall, run down the stairs, out the door,

toss them in the back of the truck, get in, tell them guys to go, and off we go. How did you know what two paintings to take? Warhol's big, you know, it's a big name. Pollock is especially big. I mean, I've seen the Pollock movie. Did you realize the painting's value when you took it? No. I thought hundreds of thousands. Try millions, but it was the same old story for this bunch. They didn't have a buyer lined up, and it's hard to move prized artwork after a publicized theft. So Trotta says he and his crew hid the art, along with the Christy Mathewson jersey,

items they couldn't melt, at a home belonging to two of the alleged accomplices. When was the last time you saw this Jackson Pollock? Last time I seen a Pollock, 2017. 2018. It was in a house in Union, New Jersey. So off we went to that house in Union, New Jersey. No answer at the door, no sign of the stolen art.

Still, when the ringleader gives directions to what he claims was a stash house, you know the plot is unraveling for the great American sports museum thieves. How'd they get caught? You know how it goes. The gang went bush league, got sloppy. Here's 2016 surveillance video of Trotta using a snowplow to rip an ATM from a local grocery store. When Trotta was pulled over for driving erratically two years later,

police found his trunk filled with crime gear, including gloves matched to that ATM job. Thirty years of secrecy, of stealth, and all of a sudden, it's all down. What's that like for you? When it's over, it's over, you know? Yes, he steals Yogi Berra's rings and mangles Yogi Berra's quotes. Trotta was taken into custody. Police began matching him to a string of home burglaries.

Inside a county jail, he made a deal. In exchange for reducing a sentence that could have spanned decades, Trotta would lay out for investigators all those unsolved museum heists. He also gave up his longtime crew, the lookouts, getaway drivers, and gold melters. The ringleader turned chief government witness. Good morning. Last summer, federal and state authorities announced a sweeping indictment. 21 separate burglaries spanning more than 20 years across four states.

Eight of Trotta's alleged accomplices were charged with conspiracy to commit theft of major artwork. Four have pleaded guilty, the other four pleaded not guilty, and will face trial this year. The indictment details, sadly, the melting of Yogi Berra's rings. It doesn't say what happened to the missing loot, like the Matthewson jersey, the Warhol, the Pollock. Investigators declined our request for comments citing the pending trials. We put the question to Trotta,

and inasmuch as a career thief can be believed... You have any idea where it is? No, right now, no. I don't think it's destroyed. Nobody would be that stupid. It's probably going to pop up one day. Tommy Trotta finished serving his state sentence of more than four years last June. He's still working nights, but now at a warehouse. He's awaiting sentencing on a federal charge of theft of major artwork. How we justified it is, hey, nobody's getting hurt. But I never looked at it like, sitting in jail 51 months, emotionally, I destroyed people.

I know this now. Fair sentence? I do regret hurting everybody I stole anything from. The Yogi Bear family, like, what, everything he accomplished in life, he didn't need someone like me to do what I did. But it can't take away what he did. He's the hero. I'm not. I'm not.

Do you think Yogi would forgive him? I mean, I kind of do. Grandpa was such that if you owned up to your mistakes and you showed remorse, he would certainly forgive you. And I suppose I could do that, but I'm still mad that the stuff is gone. International outrage over Israel's attack killing seven aid workers in Gaza this past Monday didn't fade during the week. The anti-hunger agency World Central Kitchen is familiar to 60 Minutes viewers. aid workers in Gaza this past Monday didn't fade during the week. The anti-hunger agency World Central Kitchen is familiar to 60 Minutes viewers.

We have seen Chef José Andrés and his colleagues feeding the hungry in war and natural disasters across the world, in Puerto Rico, Haiti, in Ukraine, and here in the United States. Monday's attack was no case of collateral damage. The three marked relief vehicles were targeted with precise aerial weapons. The workers coordinated their movements with the Israeli Defense Forces. By the weekend, succumbing to pressure, including from the White House, Israel dismissed two officers and disciplined three others for violating its rules of engagement and, quote, errors in decision-making. I'm Bill Whitaker. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.