Gardner Museum Heist —Blog

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January 1, 2022

The Circle of Lie

So many opportunities to profit, for white folks, who by circumstances are on the periphery, of the Gardner heist case, or who are willing to abase themselves in plain sight to earn a position there and are willing to stringently play along with the disinforming state-seeded, disinforming, disinformation narrative concerning the Gardner heist case.

Retired FBI agent David Nadolski, worked with the FBI's lead Gardner heist investigator Neil Cronin, on the case, when an informant named Tony Romano began sharing information about a drug dealer, and organized crime figure, named Carmello Merlino. Merlino, Judge Richard G. Stearns, wrote, in a court decision concerning Merlino's nephew, William Merlino, had "let it be known that he had access, if not to the paintings, at least to the persons who did. Agent Nadolski was Anthony Romano's handler.

Romano tried to find out what he could about the stolen Gardner art, but when that didn't produce anything, he set up Merlino and some of his close criminal associates, who were also suspected of having information about the stolen art. In an elaborate FBI sting, with Romano leading the way and wearing a wire while he was doing it.

Merlino had taken an interest in robbing the Loomis car depot in Easton, MA said to have up to $50 million dollars inside. But there was no actual movement toward actually robbing the facility until "the day after Thanksgiving in 1998 when "Romano told Merlino that a 'gambling fucking degenerate' he knew had gotten a job as a guard at the depot and would let them past the door. Over the next few weeks, Romano insisted the robbery would be a breeze. The vault was always open, he told Merlino, and there were few alarms." It had less much less security than the Gardner Museum, according to Romano.

It was an FBI sting. On February 7, 1999, Carmello "Merlino and three criminal associates – a nephew, William Merlino, 47, Stephen Rosetti, 49, and David A. Turner, 40, were seized by federal agents for conspiring to rob a Loomis-Fargo armored [car] depot in Easton."

"Merlino and his crew claimed investigators immediately started to question them about the March 18, 1990, Gardner heist." But none of them provided any information. Turner and Rossetti did twenty years. Carmello Merlino died in prison six years later and his nephew William Merlino remains in prison.

From "Last Seen" a Boston Globe WBUR podcast:

Last Seen Podcast Senior producer Kelly Horan: So, after all that, after the sting on the Loomis facility, the stack of confidential informant reports that mentioned Vermeer and Rembrandt and promises to return them, and the similarities between how the Gardner heist went down and how the Loomis hit was planned, did David Nadolski believe the plot to rob the Gardner Museum was hatched out of TRC Auto Electric? The former FBI agent who had been so expansive in his responses had this time just one thing to say.

David Nadolski: No.

But Nadolski's terse reply, on this Last Seen, episode, three, was immediately followed by Gardner Museum security director Anthony Amore saves the days with his special, stilted, plausibly deniable way he has developed, in serving as the high priest of the ever changing, media corrupting, disinforming Gardner heist narrative:

Jack Rodolico: Anthony Amore, who is still looking at the TRC gang, isn’t so sure.

Anthony Amore: They were capable. You know, if someone mentions to you the Merlino gang, which was a pretty big gang, out of TRC Dorchester, no one doubted their capability to do any sort of crime. And they were doing all sorts of crimes. And to say that they could have pulled off the Gardner? Yeah, they could have done it. Absolutely.

But the fact that they could have pulled is nothing like proof that they did pull it off, which may explain why none of the people associated with TRC were ever questioned about their possible involvement in the heist.

People should just go listen to these geniuses on an FBI wiretap discussing a $50 million dollar robbery of an armored car depot at a Dorchester Bickford's restaurant, in the shadow of the South East expressway. It's at the beginning of Episode 4 of "This Is A Robbery," on Netflix, and ask themselves if they sound like they are capable.

The Bickfidz Tapes

Surveillance recording TRANSCRIPT

Man 1: You see him?
Man 2: Yeah.
David Turner: I seen you guys looping.
Stephen Rossetti: I'm looking in restaurants. and you guys are in a car. I went in that place. I went over to that place.
Carmello Merlino: These bleep bleep-ers. Let him walk around, he needs the exercise.
Stephen Rosetti: I don't care.
Merlino: Nah you're good you're good.
Romano: This car just sucks in the snow. It just sucks.
Merlino Well we don't want anyone seeing four distinguished gentleman.
Turner: The only one they're going to memorize is me because I'm handsome.
Merlino: If that was our biggest fucking problem we'd be in real good shape.

Romano: The back door is just like the front one. No alarms on it. They open it with a key coming in. No key going out.
Rosetti: Okay so the first door you can go in and out of. And you need a key to open the other one.
Romano: The first door needs a buzzer or a key, the second door is just in and out. It's like a sally port.
Rosetti: Yeah.

Waitress: Cream. Oh see someone didn't tell me they wanted coffee.
Turner: Blame it on me.
Romano: You wanna fuck with her?
Turner: No. I don't.
Waitress: OK you're welcome.
Merlino: That looks delicious. You should share that white toast with me.
Rossetti: He shouldn't be having white toast. He should have at least wheat.
Man: He doesn't like when we eat bread. Not with his health.

Romano: Right.
Rossetti: Now, if we're inside and we're gonna run out the back we don't need any keys. We go straight out?
Romano: No. No. No. Straight out.

End of Transcript

Nadolski: That tape was dynamite.

"Dynamite"? Maybe. But completely unrelated to the Gardner heist.

Nadolski goes into even greater detail about the planning of the Loomis armored car depot sting in the Netflix documentary, than he did on Last Seen podcast. "This Is A Robbery," without getting into the question of the actual culpability of Merlino and his crew in the Gardner heist.

But now, less than a year after The Netflix documentary "This Is A Robbery" came out one of the interviews, retired FBI agent David Nadolski has a book out, The Con and the FBI Agent: An Unlikely Alliance. The first sentence in the description from the publisher, which appears on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and elsewhere, is false: "While FBI Agent David Nadolski risked his career, his informant, Anthony Romano risked his life to quash one of the biggest armed robberies of the twentieth century."

They didn't quash anything. It was a sting. The information Merlino and his crew had on the security of the depot was a con, like in the title of the book, "The Con..." As Nadolski says in "This Is A Robbery": That tape was dynamite. We've got a case. What we had arranged for was the next day, we had my squad, we had the FBI SWAT team, the surveillance squad, all out at TRC. The first one to arrive was Mello. A SWAT van pulls up… Boom! They take him and he's gone. The ringleader couldn't even get out of his own parking lot.

Turner and Rossetti are being followed by a plane. David Turner gets out, opens the trunk, takes out this huge duffel bag. The guns are in that bag. The guy in our car yells for the SWAT team, "Take him! Take him!" Take him!"

And who does Nadolski have for two of the four editorial views on his page:

Gardner Museum security director: "Anthony Amore, best-selling [co-]author of Stealing Rembrandts and author of The Woman Who Stole Vermeer" and Last Seen Podcast senior producer: "Kelly Horan, [now] deputy editor of Ideas at The Boston Globe and co-author of Devotion & Defiance

Horan, the prevaricating prestidigitator of Last Seen podcast, writes of Nadolski's book that "reads like something out of Dennis Lehane's imagination. Except it's all the more gripping and impossible to put down for being true."

No one ever actually says these people were involved. Amore says they were capable. Kurkjian says the feds believe they were involved. Nadolski amazon page says: "The Merlino gang also became suspects in the largest art theft in history which took place at the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum in Boston and remains unsolved to this day." When did they become suspects. Who suspected them.

The reverse vetted Gardner heist disinformation players all have multiple roles and all reinforce each other in a high profit disinformation syndicate.

Amore is chief of security at the museum, but he is also the museum's chief investigator, as well as an author on art crime and an expert in security, and sometimes political candidate.

Kelly Horan is a podcast producer, who is also an ideas editor, and an author, and Stephen Kurkjian is a reporter, and an editorial writer, and author and a treasure hunter on a team with ex-cons and con artists, and now David Nadolski is a retired FBI agent and an author with a connection to some of the crime activity of some individuals, falsely connected to the Gardner heist by liars. all joined in together in a circle of embargoed truths and facts optional deflections, a circle of lie.

Kerry Joyce

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