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Both magazines met with a lukewarm response when they tried to sell syndication rights to U.S. television networks for up to $600,000. After the news conference in Sao Paulo, moreover, Menachem Russek, the retired head of an Israeli police anti-Nazi unit, confessed that he was "not angry but disappointed" that Mengele had apparently died unregenerate and unpunished. Others were finding the Mengele myth equally difficult to abandon. "I admit to having hoped that Mengele would have been more intriguing than the other Nazi fugitives," acknowledged Archivist Posner. "A number of us had fantasies about a man living deep in a heavily guarded jungle compound surrounded by bodyguards and police dogs. Frankly, a lot of the material we have found is very dreary." Thus ended one of the most dramatic searches of the century, not in a blaze of justice but, quietly, in a pile of bones.
