60 Minutes - Sunday, June 30, 2019

Episode Date: July 1, 2019

Lawyers are claiming the makers and distributors of opioids should be held responsible for the growing epidemic. Bill Whitaker reports. Ben Ferencz is the only living prosecutor of the Nuremberg Trials, which tried Nazi war crimes after World War II. Here's Lesley Stahl with his story. Anderson Cooper goes into the wild with photographer Thomas Mangelsen on this week's "60 Minutes." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices 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

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out billions. Now he's taking on opioid manufacturers and distributors. If we win a verdict against these manufacturers and distributors, it could bankrupt them. They'd put them out of business. Tonight, you'll hear evidence against the industry, which Moore calls damning. He believes a jury will, too. You know what those jurors are going to do? They're going to go in the back room, they're going to spend about 30 minutes thinking about it, they're going to come back out, and bam.

It's not often that you get the chance to meet a man who holds a place in history like Ben Ferencz. He's 99 years old, barely five feet tall, and he's the last surviving prosecutor of the Nuremberg trials. Tonight, you'll hear his remarkable story. And I start screaming. I said, Tonight, you'll hear his remarkable story. And I started screaming. I said, look, I got here, mass murder, mass murder on a parallel scale. And he said, can you do this in addition to your other work?

And I said, sure. He said, okay, so you do it. Whether it's a male grizzly bear with battle scars, a cheetah chasing down its prey in Tanzania, or butterflies sipping on the tears of a giant caiman in Brazil, each of Tom Mangelson's photographs tells a story. Over the course of your lifetime, the amount of time you've spent waiting is incalculable, I'm sure. Stupid.

Stupid? Yeah. Have you learned anything with all that waiting? You wait long enough, it does pay off. And at 73, he still travels to remote and inhospitable places. What he brings back are some of the most spectacular pictures of wild animals you'll ever see. I'm Steve Croft. I'm Leslie Stahl.

I'm Scott Pelley. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Bill Whitaker. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. and your financial solutions can too. Pacific Life has a variety of financial solutions that can help you complement your life goals and passions while managing the uncertainties. Backed by more than 150 years of experience, you can count on Pacific Life to be there so you can go out and keep living your best life. Pacific Life is one of the most dependable and experienced insurers in the industry and has been named one of the 2019 world's most ethical

companies by the ethosphere institute the freedom to go after whatever is next for you that's the power of pacific ask a financial professional about how pacific life can help give you the freedom to do what you love or visit www.pacificlife.com. Last month, the first of an avalanche of lawsuits filed against the manufacturers and distributors of opioid painkillers went to trial. The state of Oklahoma is trying to convince a judge that drugmaker Johnson & Johnson is legally responsible for the epidemic of addiction and death caused by opioids. Oklahoma is not alone. There is a national movement by state and local governments to go after opioid manufacturers. At its center is attorney Mike Moore. Moore says he's just a

country lawyer from Mississippi, but he has engineered two of the most lucrative legal settlements in American history, the 1998 case in which Big Tobacco paid billions to address smoking-related health issues, and the 2015 settlement with oil giant BP over its huge oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Now, Mike Moore, along with his legal allies, has taken aim at the opioid industry. As we first reported late last year, he says he has powerful new evidence that proves states like Ohio, among the hardest hit by the opioid epidemic, should collect billions from all the companies he's suing. If we try the Ohio case, if we win a verdict against these manufacturers and distributors there, it could bankrupt them. They put them

out of business. These are huge, profitable, huge companies. You know, they can be as profitable as they want to. But Ohio is losing four or five5 billion a year from the opioid epidemic, and they're losing 5,000 or 6,000 people a year from overdose deaths. So when a jury hears the evidence in this case, they're not going to award just a couple hundred million dollars. It may be $100 billion. And whoever amongst these companies thinks they can stand up to that, good luck. We are hurting now in Ohio. We need help now in Ohio. Mike DeWine is the

Republican governor of Ohio. He was previously the state attorney general, and he hired Mike Moore just after filing suit against opioid manufacturers and distributors. They flooded the state of Ohio with these opioid pills that they knew would kill people. They knew would kill people. If they didn't know it the first couple of years, they clearly would have seen it after that. You can't miss it. When one year we had close to a billion, a billion pain meds prescribed in the state of Ohio, you know, 69 per man, woman and child in the state of Ohio, you know, 69 per man, woman, and child in the state. And that lies at the feet of the drug companies. They're the ones who did that. Ohio is one of four states Mike Moore formally represents, but he's coordinating with 40 plus states that have filed suit,

and with many of the more than 1,500 cities and counties that also are suing. He is the unofficial commanding officer of the army that's attacking the opioid industry. This is where your war room is located. That's right. The unlikely command center for Moore's legal war is the sleepy town of Grayton Beach on Florida's Panhandle. In a place like this, you're not limited with a bunch of tall buildings and coats and ties and that kind of thing.

You can think outside the box a little bit. When we were in Grayton Beach... To me, that's how we went. ...about a dozen lawyers from all around the country, some working on state cases, others on local lawsuits, had gathered for all-day strategy sessions focused on an audacious goal. Success for me would be that we would find funding to provide treatment for all the two and a half million opioid-dependent people in this country.

That would take many billions of dollars, of course. But remember, Mike Moore has done it before. Look, when I filed this tobacco case in 1994, there was nobody that thought that we had a chance to win. We showed up for our first hearing. And in our first hearing, there was three of us there. On the courtroom on the other side, they had 68 lawyers. Despite that early mismatch, within four years, Moore had all 50 states lined up against big tobacco. He did it partly by going to court, but mostly by going public. A case in court is a case in court, and that's fine. But there's also the court of public opinion. And the court of public opinion is sometimes the most powerful court.

60 Minutes played an important and controversial role in the public case against Big Tobacco. Moore was interviewed for a segment that at first CBS corporate lawyers refused to allow on the air. We're thinking to ourselves, look, if 60 Minutes seems to be afraid of these guys for whatever reason, then what about us? 60 Minutes finally aired the segment in early 1996 after the Wall Street Journal ran a story featuring the same tobacco industry whistleblower. You said this in that 60 Minutes story. This industry, talking about the tobacco industry, in my opinion, is an industry who has perpetrated the biggest fraud on the American public in history. They have lied to the American public for years and years. They have killed millions and millions of people and made a profit on it. Those are pretty strong words.

Well, they were true. Those words were true. And you finally got big Tobacco to cry uncle. That's right. They ended up paying, what, over $200 billion? $250 billion, yeah. So when you look back on what you did, what has been the impact? We reduced smoking rates to a place that nobody ever thought was possible.

So the number one cause of death in America has been reduced dramatically. That's pretty powerful. Now, going after the opioid industry, Mike Moore is using the same playbook he used against tobacco and, more recently, against BP for the Gulf oil spill. Build legal and public pressure until the companies see no choice but to settle and fork over billions. Here's the deal. There's a huge pill spill in this country. It's huge.

Pill spill. Pill spill. Huge pill spill. It never should have occurred. Everybody's got some fault. But we have 72,000 people dying every year. Let's figure out a way to resolve this thing. You guys made billions of dollars off of this. Take some of that money and apply it to the problem that you helped cause. He's a long way from convincing the drug industry to do that, of course. That's why all the lawsuits.

The first targets are opioid manufacturers like Purdue Pharma, which makes OxyContin the pill that fueled the opioid epidemic. Purdue Pharma created an environment so that opioid use was okay. So if you prescribe your patients this drug, there's less than 1% chance they'll get addicted. That was a lie, a big lie. Can you prove that in court? Absolutely. Purdue Pharma declined our request for an interview,

but said in a statement that when the FDA approved OxyContin in 1995, it authorized the company to state on the label that addiction to opioids legitimately used is very rare. But as evidence of abuse mounted, the company admitted in federal court in 2007 that it had misled doctors and consumers about just how addictive OxyContin can be. The Purdue Pharma case is an easy case. I hate to say it, but it's an easy case to prove. You can prove that they told the lies that they told.

It has been considered tougher to build a case against Mike Moore's other targets, the huge drug distributors who've made billions delivering opioids from manufacturers to pharmacies. The distributors are saying things like, we're just truck drivers. We didn't know where the pills went. Of course they did. There's a controlled substance act. Controlled substance act. You're supposed to control these pills. And when you don't, you have a responsibility for it. It's real simple.

It's also simple why Moore is going after the biggest players in drug distribution, because they have much deeper pockets than the manufacturers. Purdue Pharma, for example, had less than $2 billion in revenue in 2017. Distributor McKesson, by contrast, had $208 billion in revenue. McKesson, you're the sixth largest company in this country. You're telling the American public you didn't have systems in place to adhere to the Controlled Substance Act? Seriously? Mike Moore and his allies now have what they characterize as devastating evidence proving that distributors knew what they were doing.

A huge confidential DEA database called ARCOS tracks all transactions involving controlled substances. This spring, a federal judge in Cleveland, who is hearing many of the local lawsuits, ordered all that data to be handed over to the plaintiff's lawyers. And I can actually tell you which distributor distributed to which particular pharmacy by year, by volume, and where the pills came from. Wow. Burton LeBlanc is a Louisiana lawyer who regularly huddles with Mike Moore in Grayton Beach. His firm represents hundreds of cities and counties in their opioid lawsuits, and his team has taken the lead in analyzing the ARCOS data. In terms of the wholesale distributor's duty to report suspicious orders, we can immediately look at volume and detect patterns with the data that we currently have. So you can see that for every pharmacy in

the country? I have it for every transaction in the United States. What's the most important thing that it has shown you? That the stories that you've heard from some of the DEA investigative agents concerning the large volumes of pills going into certain parts of our country are absolutely true. One of those stories concerned Kermit, West Virginia, a town of just 400 people where 9 million opioid pills were delivered in just two years to a single pharmacy. Did the companies have access to this information? It was their data. That data has now been shared with state officials who have lawsuits pending,

including Ohio's Mike DeWine. I'm not allowed to talk about the specifics, but I will simply tell you it's shocking. Anyone who is looking at those numbers numbers as those middlemen were, as these distributors were, clearly, clearly should have seen that something was dramatically wrong. Like Purdue, drug distributors declined our request for an interview, but in a statement from their trade association said, it defies common sense to single out distributors for the opioid crisis. Distributors deliver medicines prescribed by a licensed physician and ordered by a licensed pharmacy. But Mike Moore insists that does not let the companies off the legal hook. If you got

walking around since and you care, you're going to check before you send nine million pills to a little bitty county in West Virginia or Mississippi or Louisiana or Ohio. You're going to check if you care. You think they don't care? I don't think they cared enough. And if they cared enough, maybe we would not have lost 500000 lives lives from this problem. It just, it appalls me. The first state case has now gone to trial in Oklahoma, and Moore are due to begin soon. But rather than try all the cases, and just as he did with tobacco, Mike Moore hopes to force a mega settlement to fund drug treatment, prevention, and education.

You had to have thought about how much money you would need to do the projects that you foresee. Oh, I've seen all the models. To be effective, we need at least $100 billion to start off with. And I know you've heard the criticism that with all these lawyers involved, that this is just a bunch of trial lawyers looking for a great big payday. I don't care one whit about any money in this case. Not one whit whatsoever about it. And nobody's going to believe that the attorneys are not going to make any money. No, no, no. No, no. And I'm not saying that. All I can speak for is me.

You made money off tobacco? Nope, not a penny. That's because for all the years of the tobacco litigation, and many years after, Moore was working for a modest state salary as Mississippi Attorney General. He made money off of BP Spill. I made some money on helping resolve the case, yeah. Moore has made enough money to be comfortable. At age 67, this may be his last big case, and he believes the Arcos data gives him the ammunition he needs to demolish the opioid industry's argument that it should not be blamed. Nobody in the world is going to believe that. And don't go try to tell that to 12 jurors in Mississippi or Ohio who've lost people from this.

You know what those jurors are going to do? They're going to go in the back room, they're going to spend about 30 minutes thinking about it, going to come back out and bam. It's not often you get the chance to meet a man who holds a place in history like Ben Ferencz. He's 99 years old, barely five feet tall, and he served as prosecutor of what's been called the biggest murder trial ever. The courtroom was Nuremberg. The crime, genocide. the biggest murder trial ever. The courtroom was Nuremberg. The crime, genocide. And the defendants, a group of German SS officers accused of committing the largest number of Nazi killings

outside the concentration camps, more than a million men, women, and children shot in their own towns and villages in cold blood. As we first reported two years ago, Ferencz is the last Nuremberg prosecutor alive today. But he isn't content just being a part of 20th century history. He believes he has something important to offer the world right now. You know, you have seen the ugliest side of humanity. Yes. You've really seen

evil. And look at you. You're the sunniest man I've ever met. The most optimistic. You want to get some more friends? Oh, this is nice. Watching Ben Ferencz during his daily swim, his gym workout, I'm showing off now. and his morning push-up regimen, 100. is to realize he isn't just the sunniest man we've ever met, he may also be the fittest. How's that?

And that's just the beginning. The case we present is a plea of humanity to law. This is Ferencz making his opening statement in the Nuremberg courtroom 71 years ago. The charges we have brought accuse the defendants of having committed crimes against humanity. The Nuremberg trials after World War II were historic, the first international war crimes tribunals ever held. Hitler's top lieutenants were prosecuted first, then a series of subsequent trials were mounted against other Nazi leaders, including 22 SS officers responsible for killing more than a million people,

not in concentration camps, but in towns and villages across Eastern Europe. They would never have been brought to justice were it not for Ben Ferencz. You look so young. I was so young. I was 27 years old. Had you prosecuted trials before? Never in my life. I don't recall if I'd ever been in a courtroom, actually. Ferencz had immigrated to the U.S. as a baby, the son of poor Jewish parents from a small town in Romania. He grew up in a tough New York City neighborhood where his father found work as a janitor. When I was taking the school at the age of seven, I couldn't speak English. I spoke Yiddish at home, and I was very small, and so they wouldn't let me in. So you

didn't speak English till you were eight? That's correct. Could you read? No, on the contrary. The silent movies always had writing on it, and I would ask my father, Vuzuktis, in Yiddish, what does it say? What does it say? He couldn't read it either. But Ferencz learned quickly. He became the first in his family to go to college, then got a scholarship to Harvard Law School. But during his first semester, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and he, like many classmates, raced to enlist. He wanted to be a pilot, but the Army Air Corps wouldn't take him. And they said, you know, you're too short, your legs won't reach the pedals.

The Marines, they just looked at me and said, forget it, kid. So he finished at Harvard, then enlisted as a private in the Army. Part of an artillery battalion, he landed on the beach at Normandy and fought in the Battle of the Bulge. Toward the end of the war, because of his legal training, he was transferred to a brand new unit in General Patton's 3rd Army, created to investigate war crimes. As U.S. forces liberated concentration camps, his job was to rush in and gather evidence. Ferencz told us he is still haunted by the things he saw

and the stories he heard in those camps. A father who, his son told me this story, his father had died just as we were entering the camp. And the father had routinely saved a piece of his bread for his son, and he kept it under his arm at night. He kept it under his arm at night so the other inmates wouldn't steal it you know so you see these human stories which are not they're not real they're not real but they were real forens came home married his childhood sweetheart and vowed never to set foot in Germany again. But that didn't last long.

General Telford Taylor, in charge of the Nuremberg trials, asked him to direct a team of researchers in Berlin, one of whom found a cache of top-secret documents in the ruins of the German foreign ministry. He gave me a bunch of binders, four binders, and these were daily reports from the Eastern Front, which unit entered which town, how many people they killed. It's classified, so many Jews, so many gypsies, so many others.

Ferencz had stumbled upon reports sent back to headquarters by secret SS units called Einsatzgruppen, or action groups. Their job had been to follow the German army as it invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 and kill communists, gypsies, and especially Jews. There were 3,000 SS officers trained for the purpose and directed to kill, without pity or remorse every single Jewish man, woman, and child they could lay their hands on. So they went right in after the troops.

That was their assignment, come up behind the troop, round up the Jews, kill them all. Only one piece of film is known to exist of the Einsatzgruppen at work. It isn't easy to watch. Well, this is a typical operation. Well, see here, they rounded them up. They all have already tags on them. They're making them run to their own death? Yes. There was a rabbi coming along there. Just put them in a ditch, shoot them there. Oh my God. Oh my God. Yeah. This footage came to light years later. At the time, Ferencz just had the documents, and he started

adding up the numbers. When I reached over a million people murdered that way, over a million people, it's more people than you've ever seen in your life. I took a sample, I got on the next plane, flew from Berlin down to Nuremberg, and I said to Taylor, General, we've got to put on a new trial. But the trials were already underway, and prosecution staff was stretched thin. Taylor told Ferencz adding another trial was impossible. And I started screaming. I said, look, I've got here mass murder, mass murder on a parallel scale. And he said, can you do this in addition to your other work? And I said, sure. He said, okay, so you do it. And that's how 27-year-old Ben Ferencz became the chief prosecutor

of 22 Einsatzgruppen commanders at trial number nine at Nuremberg. How do you plead to this indictment? Guilty or not guilty? Nicht schuldig. Standard routine. Nicht schuldig, not guilty. Guilty or not guilty? Nicht schuldig. They all say not guilty. Same thing. Not guilty. But Ferenczik, not guilty. Guilty or not guilty? Nish Cholik. They all say not guilty. Same thing, not guilty.

But Ferencz knew they were guilty and could prove it. Without calling a single witness, he entered into evidence the defendants' own reports of what they had done. Exhibit 111. In the last 10 weeks, we have liquidated around 55,000 Jews. Exhibit 179 from Kiev in 1941. The Jews of the city were ordered to present themselves. About 34,000 reported, including women and children. After they had been made to give up their clothing and valuables,

all of them were killed, which took several days. Exhibit 84 from Einsatzgruppen D in March of 1942, total number executed so far, 91,678. Einsatzgruppen D was the unit of Forenz lead defendant Otto Ohlendorf. He didn't deny the killings. He had the gall to claim they were done in self-defense. He was not ashamed of that. He was proud of that. He was carrying out his government's instructions. How did you not hit him? There was only one time I wanted to hit him, really. One of these, my defense, he gets up and he says, Was, you nashosen, das Hirsch hier zum Estemal. Which is, what, the Jews were shot? I hear it here for the first time.

Boy, I felt if I'd had a bayonet, I would have jumped over the thing. I put a bayonet right through one ear and let it come out the other. You know? Son of a bitch. And you had his name down on a piece of paper. I've got his reports of how many he killed. You know? Innocent lamb. Did you look at the defendant's faces? I'm a son of a bitch, and I've got his reports of how many he killed, you know. I'm an innocent lamb.

Did you look at the defendant's faces? Defendant's face were blank all the time. Defendant's absolutely blank. They're waiting for a bus. What was going on inside of you? Of me? Yeah. I'm still churning. To this minute.

I'm still churning. All 22 defendants were found guilty, and four of them, including Ohlendorf, were hanged. Foren says his goal from the beginning was to affirm the rule of law and deter similar crimes from ever being committed again. Did you meet a lot of people who perpetrated war crimes who would otherwise, in your opinion, have been just a normal, upstanding citizen? Of course, is my answer. These men would never have been murderers had it not been for the war. These were people who could quote Goethe, who loved Wagner, who were polite. What turns a man into a savage beast like that?

He's not a savage. He's an intelligent, patriotic human being. He's a savage when he does the murder, though. No, he's a patriotic human being acting in the interest of his country, in his mind. You don't think they turn into savages even for the act? Do you think the man who dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima was a savage? Now I will tell you something very profound, which I have learned after many years. War makes murderers out of otherwise decent people. All wars and all decent people.

So Ferencz has spent the rest of his life trying to deter war and war crimes by establishing an international court like Nuremberg. He scored a victory when the International Criminal Court in The Hague was created in 1998. May it please your honors. He delivered the closing argument in the court's first case. Now, you've been at this for 50 years,

if not more. We've had genocide since then. Yes, going on right this minute. Going on right this minute in Sudan. We've had Rwanda. We've had Bosnia. You're not getting very far. Well, don't say that.

People get discouraged. They should remember from me, it takes courage not to be discouraged. Did anybody ever say that you're naive? Of course. Are you naive here? Well, if it's naive to want peace instead of war, let them make sure they say I'm naive. Because I want peace instead of war. If they tell me they want war

instead of peace, I don't say they're naive. I say they're stupid. Stupid to an incredible degree, to send young people out, to kill other young people they don't even know, who never did anybody any harm, never harmed them. That is the current system. I am naive? That's insane. Thank you very much. Ferencz is legendary in the world of international law, and he's still at it. Are you going to help me save the world? I hope so. It's up to you.

He never stops pushing his message. War, not war. Never give up. And he's donating his life savings to a genocide prevention initiative at the Holocaust Museum. He says he's grateful for the life he's lived in this country. And it's his turn to give back. You are such an idealist. I don't think I'm an idealist. I'm a realist. And I see the progress. The progress has been remarkable. Look at the emancipation of women in my lifetime.

You're sitting here as a female. Look what's happened to the same-sex marriages if to tell somebody a man can become a woman a woman can become a man and a man can marry a man they always said you're crazy but it's a reality today so the world is changing and you shouldn't you know be despairing because it never happened before nothing new ever happened before we're on a roll we're. Ben, I'm sitting here listening to you, and you're very wise, and you're full of energy and passion. And I can't believe you're 97 years old. Well, I'm still a young man. Clearly.

And I'm still in there fighting. And you know what keeps me going? I know I'm right. Tonight we're going to take you into the wild with a remarkable photographer who spent his life on the trail of elusive and endangered animals. His name is Tom Mangelson, and at 73, he still travels to remote and inhospitable places. As we first showed you last year, what he brings back are some of the most spectacular pictures of wild animals you'll ever see. On most mornings for nearly 50 years, this is what Tom Mangelson has done. He's ventured into the wilderness, camera in hand.

In Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming, he waited in this early autumn snowfall for his subject to appear. As is often the case, it took quite a while. Over the course of your lifetime, the amount of time you've spent waiting is incalculable, I'm sure. Stupid. Stupid? Yeah. Have you learned anything with all that waiting?

You wait long enough, it does pay off. For Mangelson, it usually does. Whether it's a male grizzly bear with battle scars, a cheetah chasing down its prey in Tanzania, or butterflies sipping on the tears of a giant caiman in Brazil, each of Mangelson's photographs tells a story. His images have documented species like mountain gorillas, black rhinos, and jaguars,

once dominant, now in danger. On every continent, in every season, no matter the conditions, Mangelson has painstakingly built a reputation not on personality, but on patience. Do you have patience with people the same way you have patience with animals? No. No? No, I don't. I wish I did. I don't know. I don't.

Do you like animals more than people? Yes. Really? Well, not you. Okay. He especially likes the dangerous kind. In a jungle in India, where it would be deadly to be on foot, Mangelson climbed onto an elephant's back for this shot of a Bengal tiger, paws red, fresh from a kill. In the Arctic, where temperatures can be 30 degrees below zero, he spent years documenting the behavior of polar bears.

He nicknamed this group the Bad Boys of the Arctic. He's captured adult male bears play fighting, a mama bear slyly keeping watch as her cubs roughhouse nearby, and a group of bears trying to survive as their world melts away. People often mistake Mangelson's photographs for paintings, and since the 1970s he's sold them out of galleries, like this one in Jackson, Wyoming. His photo, Catch of of the day is often called the most famous wildlife photograph in the world. It's such an extraordinary image. In this day and age, people would think that this is Photoshop,

that you've got a photo of a fish somewhere. I mean, it's so perfect. It was taken in 1988 before Photoshop even existed. People think it's fake. But you don't believe in that as a photographer? No. I mean, this is the magic. This is the moment. This is the decisive moment. And this little tiny space right here I think is so important.

It's a quarter of an inch. It's in its mouth, but it hasn't actually made contact yet with its mouth. One nanosecond later. Mangelson shuns the use of digital manipulation. What he sees through his lens is what you get. And at a time when many photographers build their portfolios by going to game farms like this one to photograph captive animals, Mangelson insists on only documenting them in their natural habitat.

Okay, Anderson. Let's see what we can find. As we saw when we joined him before dawn outside jackson hole you always get up this early there's only one way to do it is like do it every day or be really lucky he's taking us to a bend he knows on the snake river do you know it's a sharp whistle. That's the sound of the wild deer. He's been here hundreds of times,

trying to get the perfect shot of elk crossing the water. So now it's just a waiting? Yep. Waiting. What's the longest you've ever spent in any spot Not here but anywhere? 42 days I was at Cougars 42 days?

I went home at night and slept And then we'd go back at daybreak But you would spend all day there? Yeah So 12 hours a day? 12 or 14 12 or 14 hours a day for 42 days? Yeah.

Did you get the shot? Finally. This was the shot worth waiting for, the elusive cougar coming out of her den at dusk, taken in 1999. It's among the first photographs to document the life of a wild female cougar. It helped launch a movement to protect the cats against human encroachment. Back at the river after a three-hour wait. Up between the trees there.

There she comes. Oh, that was pretty cool. It was worth the wait. Yeah. Just kind of extraordinary. We headed back to his office in Jackson to take a look at an amateur's attempt. I think it's beautiful. I think it's gorgeous. Yeah, me too, actually. There's nothing wrong with that one at at an amateur's attempt. I think it's beautiful. I think it's gorgeous. Yeah, me too, actually.

There's nothing wrong with that one at all. It's great. Is she out of focus? Maybe slightly, let's see. Yeah, not quite. I'm sorry. Mangelson's shot was, of course, in perfect focus. And look at what else he's captured at that same river

in fall, summer, and winter. Mangelson credits his father with his love of the wild. He grew up on the bank of the Platte River in Nebraska, where he was schooled in hunting and fishing. As a teenager in the 1960s, Mangelson earned the title World Champion Goose Caller. No small feat considering this is bird country. Home to 400 species, as well as one of the great migrations on Earth. Every spring, half a million sandhill cranes stop on this stretch of the Platte River. They're fattening up on grain before migrating north, as far as Siberia.

It is an awesome and ancient ritual. Fossils show cranes have come here for nearly 10 million years. It's a spectacle of sight and sound Mangelson has shared for 18 years with his friend and ally Jane Goodall, whose life work with chimpanzees has revolutionized our understanding of primates. Today, Goodall and Mangelson team up to raise money and awareness for the protection of cranes, as well as chimpanzees and cougars. He's taught me so much about the Platte River and what goes on here and what it was like when he was a boy and how he started off as a hunter because that's what one did, and then how gradually he realized he loved these creatures much too much.

He couldn't go on being a hunter. And so he hunts with his camera. Here they come. Lots and lots and lots. Look at the light on those up there. What's amazing is this ancient migration still carries on. I think it's completely amazing. I agree.

It gives me hope that nature will manage in spite of us. Oh, look at this. Beautiful, huh? Next year, do you think you could invest in a silent camera? One of the qualities that I love about Tom is his passion. And it's when you have that kind of passion and that kind of commitment that you're more likely to get other people involved because we can never win an argument by appealing to people's heads. It's got to be in the heart.

And I use the power of storytelling and writing, and Tom uses the power of images. If all artists have a muse, Tom Mangelson's is this 23-year-old female grizzly bear. She doesn't have a proper name, but is known by the research number 399, a creature from America's wild past when 50,000 grizzlies roamed the lower 48. Less than 2,000 grizzlies remain today. For more than a decade, Mangelson has chronicled every facet of 399's life,

emerging from a long winter's nap, swatting magpies away from a meal. He's watched and worried as she's given birth to three sets of triplets and a set of twins. She's nursed, protected, and taught more than a dozen bear cubs. Mangelson's photographs, including this one he dubbed an icon of motherhood, have made 399 the most famous grizzly in the world. What do you think it is about grizzly bears that so captures people's imagination? I think it's the wildness and the rarity. And you see how intelligent they are. It's like 399 will go to the road and she'll look both ways.

She'll tell the kids to stay on one side of the road. She'll go across and then she'll talk to them. Okay, you can come across now. Isn't that smart? There's also something about grizzly bears that there's a grace to it, but ferocity is always lurking there. But I like that idea that we're not the top of the food chain. In Mangelson's portraits, ferocious grizzlies have personalities too,

but sometimes it's easy to miss the details. Notice a leftover piece of grass tucked in the corner of this grizzly's mouth like a toothpick. But it's Mangelson's wide shots that may matter the most. They help people understand animals like 399 can't survive without their habitat. Mangelson took us out to show us why he believes seeing your first grizzly can change your life. It's right there. It's right there.

Okay, so it's really close. It was an adult female grizzly resting just off the road. That's crazy. It's a gorgeous bear. You know, you see how she just, like, just scratched the back of your ear, just like your dog might? Yeah. Isn't that great?

Now she's scratching your belly. It's so incredible to see. It's amazing. A third of 399's offspring have died in interactions with humans, hit by cars, or shot by elk hunters out of fear. In 2017, the federal government removed grizzlies around Yellowstone from the endangered species list. Wyoming and Idaho plan to open hunts, but a federal judge restored protections. His ruling is being appealed.

There's people here who have said that they can't wait for a season to open so they can shoot 399, because that would be the biggest prize, the biggest trophy. You've had hunters actually say that to you, that they want to shoot 399, because 399 is so famous. Yeah. Hard, hard to believe. While he worries about what will be lost, Tom Mangelson is determined to show us the beauty and fragility of what still survives. And so he sets out once again, patiently making his way alone into the wild. It's my gift in a way that I can give people, hopefully, to preserve what we have left, preserve wilderness, preserve species like boozy bears,

and make them think about it, and make them think that this is what we need to save for our children. I'm Bill Whitaker we'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes tomorrow be sure to watch CBS This Morning and the CBS Evening News