Episode 1111111111111111111111111111111111111 Read the transcript of ‘Last Seen’ episode one ‘81 minutes’
      
SEPTEMBER 16, 2018


ANTHONY AMORE: We’re in a strange place. Many people don’t come up here. You might have to duck a lot. We’re in the attic.

KELLY HORAN: It’s an unseasonably warm October day in Boston. The attic at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is stuffy and dimly lit. Anthony Amore, the museum’s head of security, has something he wants me to see. AMORE: We’re going to go around this corner here.

HORAN: At 6-2, Amore has to walk doubled over beneath the slanted eaves. We are high above galleries once ransacked by thieves in a daring overnight robbery almost 30 years ago. The attic space is dominated by a massive HVAC system. Its hum proof that it’s working to keep treasures on the floors below at just the right temperature and humidity level.



AMORE: Almost there.





 
HORAN: We step out of the low amber light into much cooler air and quiet. I think this is what Amore has taken me to see: a storeroom of the sumptuous textiles used on furniture and walls throughout the Gardner Museum. But that’s not why we’re here. In the back of the room, in a space barely wide enough to accommodate us both, Amore puts his cellphone’s flashlight on and pulls a plastic cover off something big. Oh wow.

 
Twenty-eight years later, we still have no idea who walked away with a potentially billion dollar haul from the Gardner Museum. Join us as we dig through everything we know.

AMORE: We’re looking at the rosewood stretcher that held “Storm On The Sea Of Galilee,” but what you’re looking at here is Rembrandt.

HORAN: So this is what was left behind after the thieves slashed “Storm On The Sea Of Galilee” from the frame.

AMORE: It is.


HORAN: When thieves slashed “Christ In The Storm On The Sea Of Galilee” from its frame with something razor-sharp, like a box cutter, they 
left behind the edge of the painted canvas attached to the stretcher underneath. It was Rembrandt’s only seascape. In it, Jesus, serene, rises to calm a raging sea aboard a fishing boat that is being battered in a mighty gale. Alongside Christ’s apostles is a face we recognize. It’s Rembrandt, gazing out at us. In a letter dated Aug. 30, 1898, to her Florence-based art dealer, Isabella Stewart Gardner wrote: “Your description of this sea picture makes me fairly ache for it.” I think I know what she means. I’ve only seen copies of the painting but even those capture human frailty and the fury of the ocean. I can’t imagine what it would feel like to stand before the original. But here I am, with a stretcher that once held it. It comes up to my shoulders at 5-feet 3-inches high and it’s 4-feet 2-inches across.

HORAN: Wow, it’s enormous.

AMORE: Yeah, you can see why they wouldn’t have been able to take it with them.

HORAN: No, it wouldn’t have been something you could carry out, but there is — that is paint that Rembrandt put there. What a thing to see. It kind of takes the breath away. In addition to that remnant of Rembrandt that the thieves left behind, they also left a clue about how they stole the priceless painting.

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AMORE: If you look closely here you can see the cut into the stretcher. You see that?


HORAN: Oh, yeah. So they were pressing hard, with something extremely sharp, because it’s a very clean cut.

AMORE: Right.

HORAN: Well, it’s a crime scene, really.

AMORE: It is a crime scene, yeah.

HORAN: It’s like the chalk line of the body, like the murder scene.

AMORE: It’s a victim.

HORAN: It is. It’s a victim. I don’t know why, but it makes me feel very queasy to look at.

AMORE: It does, yeah. I get the same feeling every time I look at it that you get. There’s so much to it. It’s Rembrandt so you’re in the presence of greatness, right? But you’re in the presence of history, too. This is the stretcher that held one of the most valuable things that was ever stolen. Why am I this close to something Rembrandt had? I’m from Providence, there’s no Rembrandts, or stuff like this. You know it’s just this awe-inspiring thing. I got to get it back -- because this is torture. You almost feel like, why, why did I get stuck with this? You know why -- because it’s, look at it, right. You understand. I can never walk away from this.

HORAN: From WBUR Boston and The Boston Globe, this is Last Seen. I’m Kelly Horan.

JACK RODOLICO: And I’m Jack Rodolico. For the last year and a half we’ve been investigating the holy grail of art crime -- the still unsolved robbery of 13 artworks from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. It remains the world’s greatest art heist with a haul valued today at half a billion dollars.

HORAN: We’ve gone behind the scenes of the investigation with the Gardner Museum’s lead investigator and we’ve tracked down sources who have never before spoken publicly about what they know. We’ve worked closely with the Boston Globe’s Steve Kurkjian, who has covered the Gardner heist for more than two decades. And we’ve gotten our hands on letters and a private diary, secret recordings and police reports that have never before been given a public airing. We’ve mined all of it in search of new insights into this old case.

RODOLICO: Because, after 28 and a half years without one arrest or a single recovery of any of the stolen art, we wanted to know why hasn’t this case been solved?

HORAN: And all these years later, with suspects dead or dying and memories fading, can it be solved? Each of the 13 pieces stolen on March 18, 1990, was last seen on the walls and in the galleries of the Gardner Museum. Picture a four-story, 15th century Venetian palace that’s been dropped into a leafy Boston neighborhood. In Venice, the view through the Gothic arched windows would be outward, at the Grand Canal. At the Gardner, the stunning view is inward, of a courtyard lush with flowers, palm trees and ferns. This palace museum was created at the turn of the 20th century by the Red Sox-loving, convention-flouting, 5-foot 2-ish force-of-nature Isabella Stewart Gardner.

Mrs. Jack, as she was known, shunned interviews, but she loved making headlines. She had her detractors, but her admirers shouted the loudest. An item in a Boston newspaper in 1875 referred to Mrs. Jack as “one of the seven wonders of Boston. There is nobody like her in any city in this country. Everything she does is novel and original. She is as brilliant as her own diamonds and is as attractive. All Boston is divided into two parts of which one follows science and the other Mrs. Jack Gardner.”

When that was written about her, she was only 35 years old. It would be another decade before she would make her mark as a serious art collector when she inherited a fortune after her father died. In the meantime she was an avid collector of fascinating people. Many were young, beautiful, creative men. And she was a philanthropic force in a city that was becoming the Boston that we know today. But art was to be her driving passion. Toward the end of her life, Gardner wrote to a friend: “Years ago, I decided that the greatest need in our country was art.” And so that is what she left, and among the artists that she gave us were the big men on canvas: Rembrandt, Vermeer, Manet, Degas -- and the thieves went straight for them.

RODOLICO: Rembrandt’s only seascape, one of only 35 or so Vermeers known to exist -- not one of these stolen works has come back, not even after the museum doubled the reward from $5 to $10 million. Not the bronze eagle finial that sat on top of a silk Napoleonic flag and not the oldest piece taken -- a 12th-century Chinese bronze gu, or beaker.

HORAN: All 13 works gone, along with the thieves. Nothing about what went down in the early morning hours after St. Patrick’s Day on March 18, 1990, fits the Hollywood-fueled mind’s eye notion of a museum heist. There were no cat-suited burglars repelling from the ceiling and snaking under laser beams. There was no elegant art-loving zillionaire who commissioned the theft so that he alone could enjoy the art from inside his fortified lair in some exotic far-flung locale. There was nothing elegant or art-loving about the Gardner heist at all.

RODOLICO: In the early hours of March 18, 1990, the city of Boston was still celebrating St. Patrick’s Day. Hangovers would be widespread come daybreak. So would news that the city’s most unusual museum had been the victim of a daring overnight robbery.

NEWS CLIP: Good evening, I’m Kasey Kaufman and here’s what’s happening. A priceless collection of artwork was stolen early this morning from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

NEWS CLIP: It was 1 a.m. Saturday that two men posing as uniformed policemen fooled security guards here by claiming to be investigating a disturbance.

NEWS CLIP: Initial estimates put the value of the stolen works at at least $200 million.

NEWS CLIPS: The 87-year-old Gardner Museum is considered one of the finest small art museums in the country.

NEWS CLIP: Officials say the museum’s elaborate surveillance system made no difference.

NEWS CLIP: Museum officials today said it was the largest art heist in history.

NEWS CLIP: Despite the confidence of museum officials that the precious artworks will be recovered, experts say they could disappear for years, perhaps forever. Brad Willis, TV4 Eyewitness News.

RODOLICO: The thieves who pulled off the greatest art heist in history had a pretty simple plan: They dressed up in cop uniforms and rang the bell. It was 1:24 in the morning and the thieves approached the Palace Road entrance of the Gardner Museum. There’d been a keg party nearby. A few revelers were still on the streets. And when the fake cops told the museum guard on duty that they were responding to a disturbance, it seemed plausible. Maybe some drunk kid had gotten up to some mischief. After all, earlier in the evening the guards’ rounds had been interrupted by a fire alarm blaring from the museum’s carriage house outside. It had really spooked him. Maybe that’s why the cops had come and so he buzzed them into the museum.

HORAN: That guard was Rick Abath.

RICK ABATH: They came in and they turned, so I could see them. I could see that they had hats, coats, badges -- they looked like cops, so I buzzed them the rest of the way into the museum.

HORAN: Steve Kurkjian and Rick Abath talked about that night at an Indian restaurant in 2013.

ABATH: The first question was, “Is anybody else here?” I said, “my partner.” So, “OK, get him down here.”

HORAN: We are devoting our entire second episode to Rick Abath. You’ll be hearing a lot from him then. So, here, we’re going to let you hear from the other guard who was on duty that night. The one that Abath called back to the security desk. This is the first time that former guard has ever spoken publicly about his experience.

RANDY: Wondering if they might just come up behind my head with a gun with a silencer and just you know do it real quickly.

HORAN: It was a terrifying night and, all these years later, he’d still rather we not use his full name. His first name, though, is Randy.

RODOLICO: In 1990, Randy had a passion for symphonic music, The Moody Blues and the trombone. He still plays -- makes a living at it, mostly in house bands on cruise ships. But back then, Randy had recently earned a masters in performance from the New England Conservatory of Music. He was trying to land gigs and make ends meet.

RANDY: But I always had to have some kind of a day job kind of thing to supplement the income, make sure the bills get paid and so forth.

RODOLICO: Randy knew a couple of people who worked at the Gardner and that’s how he landed his security job there.

RANDY: It wasn’t something that required you to have any kind of special skills, you know. I remember being trained to if any people were getting real close to a painting and we were told to get them to stand back a little bit and don’t get so close.

RODOLICO: A few months into his job, Randy began filling in on the overnight shift. The pay was better: $11 an hour versus 7 or 8 bucks for the daytime shift.

RANDY: At nighttime, when there are no visitors, when you’re not doing a round, you can bring stuff to read. I could bring my horn and practice. I was always happy to say yes to filling in.

HORAN: Randy doesn’t recall any special training or specific instructions for the night shift beyond the requirement that he register his presence in each of the galleries on all the floors during his rounds. He did this by swiping a magnetic strip. He wasn’t originally on the schedule to work the overnight after St. Patrick’s Day. Randy was filling in for another guard who had reportedly called in sick. Abath had told him about the carriage house alarm, but he hadn’t thought much of it until he saw the two police officers talking to Abath at the watch desk.

RANDY: It never occurred to me that they might be anything but Boston police. I immediately made that connection. Oh, this might have something to do with that alarm that went off.

HORAN: One of the uniformed men said he recognized Abath and asked to see his ID.

RANDY: He said, “Yeah I do know you. There’s a warrant out for your arrest.” And he told Rick to stand against the wall, put his arms up. He does the pat down. He puts the cuffs on. And I’m just standing there with my jaw open going, “Wow, you know, what’s going on? What did Rick do? Is he really into some kind of trouble?” It’s still never occurred to me that they were anything but policemen. HORAN: By stepping out and away from the desk, Rick Abath also stepped away from the sole means of signaling trouble to the outside world: the museum’s panic button.

RODOLICO: No sooner was Abath against the wall and handcuffed then Randy was too.

RANDY: I kept asking him over and over, “Why are we being arrested? Why are we being arrested?” and he wouldn’t answer. So the cuffs are on, my hands are behind my back and then duct tape starts going on around my eyes. So about the time that he begins putting the duct tape on, he says, “This is a robbery.” And so then everything was finally crystal clear what was going on, you know. It was just really strange, none of it made any sense, and then suddenly it made a lot of sense.

HORAN: I mean it’s scary enough to think you’re being arrested and not know why. What was going through your mind when suddenly duct tape is going around your head?

RANDY: It’s very scary and I’m worried for my life. But they were immediately saying -- I can remember both of them saying -- you know, “Follow instructions and you will not get hurt.” So that gave me some relief and I just felt like, “OK, don’t try anything stupid, don’t try anything stupid. Go along with whatever they -- there’s nothing here in this museum that is worth my life.”

HORAN: The thieves wound duct tape around Randy and Abath’s heads from chin to scalp across their eyes and across their mouths with only a slit so they could breathe. Then, stair by stair, the robbers led the guards -- who couldn’t see a thing -- down to the basement. One of the thieves used another pair of handcuffs to attach Randy to a drainpipe under a limestone sink near a boiler. Randy recalls that that thief was the calmer of the two and weirdly courteous.

RANDY: The guy who cuffed me, he was making sure that they weren’t too tight on my wrist and he adjusted it several times and he said, “You’re going to be here for a long time so I don’t want these to be too tight.” So he was real calm and real nice about it and he also several times said, “Sorry to have to do this.”

RODOLICO: Randy just wanted the guy to get away from him, to go do what he had come to do and to get out of there.

HORAN: Were you panicking?

RANDY: It was scary and I remember feeling like I needed to prepare myself for death, if it ended up coming to that.

RODOLICO: What did that mean, preparing yourself for death?

RANDY: Well, I was running music through my head a lot, just feeling like I don’t know what happens to us when we die. It’s all a mystery. But, I just felt like I needed to be mentally prepared.

HORAN: Was there a particular piece of music that you ran through your mind?

RANDY: Definitely I remember one of the pieces: the Mozart “Requiem.” It didn’t occur to me [until] later that that has to do with that has to do with dead people.

RODOLICO: Randy spent the next eight hours shackled on the basement floor, terrified the entire time that the thieves would return to kill him.

HORAN: Besides the thieves, no one knows more about what happened the night of the robbery than Anthony Amore does. He took the job as security director at the Gardner Museum 15 years after the heist. He is the beating heart of the investigation. Organized, meticulous, dogged -- you might even say haunted.

AMORE: This case is like the perfect storm for someone like me -- for it to like ruin your life. You know, to have 13 albatrosses around your neck forever because I know that if I go to my grave unsuccessful that I’ll go to my grave an unhappy person.

HORAN: Amore has access to the FBI’s files and says he talks to the Boston FBI’s lead agent on the case every day. He has elaborate spreadsheets for cross-referencing details about potential suspects and he responds to every single tip. Even the patently cuckoo ones, ‘cause you never know.

RODOLICO: The first thing Amore did when he took over the investigation of the heist was plot the thieves’ movements throughout the museum. Every time a thief tripped a motion sensor, a dot matrix printer at the watch desk recorded it.

AMORE: And that’s when the computer starts reading, indicating to a guard at the desk who’s not there. It’s telling him someone is in the Dutch Room, investigate immediately.

RODOLICO: He plotted every single alarm -- there were hundreds -- over a floor plan of the museum. The result is a minute-by-minute PowerPoint that shows the thieves moving through the museum.

AMORE: And if I didn’t show this to you and I told you I would spend hours looking at this back and forth you would think that’s crazy. But when you see it, that’s as close as you’ll ever get to witnessing the crime because that’s precise, it’s exactly how they moved about the museum, so it’s eerie.

HORAN: It is eerie and it tells us that after cuffing and blindfolding the two security guards in the basement, the thieves made their way straight to the Dutch Room, in the southwest corner of the museum just off the stone step staircase on the second floor. The Dutch Room is named for its Dutch and Flemish treasures but the room is better known now as one of the scenes of the robbery.

AMORE: Keep in mind, it’s three minutes until the heist. The vast majority of art heists I’ve ever looked at take about three minutes. Right, so it wouldn’t surprise me if this theft was over in three minutes.

RODOLICO: But the Gardner heist wasn’t over in three minutes. The thieves were in the museum for an astonishing 81 minutes. From the moment they were buzzed in at 1:24 until they left at 2:41. HORAN: And their movements across galleries tell us they were stealing less than half the time -- around 34 minutes.

AMORE: It’s 34 minutes. My god, you could have wiped out galleries. Thirty-four minutes would be one of the longest art heists in history. I mean, one of the five longest art heists in history.

HORAN: So does that suggest to amateurs?

AMORE: No, it suggests to me confident thieves.

HORAN: Confident thieves. Remember, they were quick to get Rick Abath away from the panic button. Anthony Amore says the thieves had the run of the place and they knew it.

AMORE: These were not scared pranksters, right, who are running around with nervous energy. You only have to look at the Rembrandt self-portrait etching to know not only weren’t they hurrying, they were calm, because you could just have taken it -- the frame is smaller than an 8-by-10 piece of paper -- but they stood there and unscrewed the thing, methodically, there’s a lot of screws in the back of that frame.

RODOLICO: The thieves lay the Rembrandt etching on a table face down and removed each screw one by one and while they did that, they left behind works of far greater value.

AMORE: The thief is standing beneath a Rubens painting, taking an etching, like I would like to have that etching but this is a Rubens masterwork. If you looked up, he’d see a Van Dyke portrait. Nope, just cavalierly unscrewed this little etching, like he had all the time in the world.

HORAN: And you think, though, that he just, he wanted a Rembrandt?

AMORE: They definitely, in my mind, came for the Rembrandts. I think this bears it out -- they went straight into that room and went right for Rembrandts. They took all four Rembrandts off the wall. It’s not a mistake that they went to the Dutch Room. HORAN: And why Rembrandt?

AMORE: Well he’s per capita, per piece of work in his body of work, he’s the most often stolen artist.

HORAN: Besides the three Rembrandts in the Dutch Room that the thieves stole, they also took Vermeer’s “The Concert,” a landscape by Govaert Flinck and that Shang dynasty gu. Does that to seem like a random grab to you? What’s the significance of the gu?

AMORE: It does seem like a random grab, and it’s always been a mystery to me. Why did they take that? And for years I just assumed that it was an afterthought. It was just there, grab it. Or maybe they knocked it over and picked it up and just took it. A gift for your grandmother or something because it looks like a vase, but then I came across something really unusual that told me this was not a random piece. Do you want to see it? You should feel how heavy this is.

HORAN: What Anthony Amore showed me in his office that day totally changed how I thought about the theft of that piece. He pulled out a sheet of metal that’s about a foot square and just as he said, it was really heavy. The gu sat on a silk draped table in the Dutch Room and it was anchored to that heavy metal through the tablecloth.

AMORE: So if you play it out, the gu is sitting there, the thief tries to take it, it doesn’t come.

HORAN: And so you figure they thought that just by cutting the fabric they’d free the gu but then --

AMORE: Cut, cut, cut still doesn’t come and then finally using force, they pull it off here. That’s a lot of effort.

HORAN: Yeah. OK, so the gu was not a random grab. Wow.

AMORE: It’s not a random piece.

HORAN: Someone wanted that gu.

RODOLICO: We know from Anthony Amore’s PowerPoint that the thieves, along with 13 irreplaceable artworks, were last seen at 2:41 a.m. leaving the museum through the same door they came in -- the one to Palace Road. But the guards in the basement didn’t know that.

RANDY: So I’m sitting there and it’s all quiet, and then suddenly I just hear a voice go, “Listen up,” like that and it made me jump because I didn’t hear the footsteps coming up to me.

RODOLICO: Randy says a thief had checked on him at least once during the robbery. He told Randy, “Don’t tell him nothing. If you’re good, expect a reward in a year.” And he also told Randy something else.

RANDY: He said, “We know where you live. We have your driver’s license. We know where you live.”

RODOLICO: So, startled by the thief’s sudden presence and feeling the weight of that threat, Randy says when he heard voices coming from the direction of the guard desk many hours later he didn’t dare make a sound.

RANDY: I was afraid to call out because I thought it was still thieves and then they -- if they hear me calling out -- they might decide, “This guy’s being unruly, let’s just kill him,” or I don’t know, I didn’t want to take that chance. HORAN: Around the time the security guards Randy and Rick Abath were found by police, Anne Hawley got a call at home. She was barely six months into her job as director of the Gardner Museum.

HAWLEY: So I just dropped everything and went into the museum in my blue jeans and when I got there, I was in shock.

HORAN: It was every museum director’s worst nightmare. Hawley had needed persuading to take the job in the first place, but once in the role she set about trying to reanimate a museum she felt was stopped in time. Now, she was facing the unimaginable.

HAWLEY: It was overwhelming to see what had been done. I mean to trash a museum like that. It was just like the barbarians had been through. I mean, to pull frames off the wall and shatter the glass, it was clearly not people that loved art that did that. I mean, cutting paintings out of frames. I mean, it’s unspeakable. And I guess I experienced this, I often think of it’s, like having a death in the family. It’s just, it’s too big to really talk about.

HORAN: Hawley describes the magnitude of the loss this way.

HAWLEY: Well, I always say for people who find it hard to imagine the enormity of this, who maybe are musically-oriented or theatrically-oriented to imagine what if Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony could never be heard again, or what if Louis Armstrong’s work could never be heard again, or what if Hamlet could never be played again. I mean, these are works of a civilization that are so important -- to remove them is to remove a piece of our civilization.

HORAN: The lost piece of our civilization that cut Hawley the deepest, the stolen painting that most haunts her, is “The Concert” by Vermeer. Hawley, who had trained to be a singer, says Vermeer captures an ephemeral moment just right.

HAWLEY: “The Concert” is one of his really great paintings and it depicts three people -- a man and two women making music together. And its beautiful composition of a woman sitting at a harpsichord playing and lute player with his back to you who has a very mythical appearance and then a woman standing at the harpsichord. So you have this triangulation of musicians and she’s about to break into song and it’s just such a meditative, quiet, beautifully painted picture by Vermeer and having that in Boston was one of Boston’s treasures.

HORAN: Today, “The Concert” alone is valued at upwards of $200 million, making it the most valuable piece stolen from the Gardner. When Isabella Stewart Gardner bought the painting at auction in Paris in 1892 she outbid the Louvre Museum to do so. It was her first major triumph as a private collector. But the painting that Gardner considered the cornerstone of her entire collection -- a large Rembrandt self-portrait -- that was initially thought to be missing, too.

HAWLEY: And the frame was leaning against a chest and it had been said it was gone, that they had taken it, but when I pulled the frame back it was still in it and I just, I mean, that was the only relief, the only moment of any grace in that room.

RODOLICO: So in all the thieves took six pieces from the Dutch Room: five of them Dutch paintings and that Chinese gu and we know that they took six more pieces from the Short Gallery.

HORAN: That’s the narrow slip of a room diagonally opposite the Dutch Room on the second floor. This room has the feel of a passageway, a room you walk through to get to other galleries.

RODOLICO: But the thieves stopped there and took the bronze eagle finial and five Degas sketches which makes 12 pieces in all.

HORAN: But 13 pieces were stolen. That 13th piece is “Chez Tortoni” by Manet. It was in a first floor gallery, the Blue Room.

AMORE: There’s no alarm in the Blue Room, on the first floor. All of the motion sensors from that night were either the doors when they came in or out or the second floor. HORAN: So what does that tell you?

AMORE: As someone who looks at these art heists, constantly, I can tell you there it looks like two different crimes. Something’s not right. There’s no getting around that if something is not right. When you look at what was taken from the second floor, the manner in which was taken, and what was taken from the Blue Room on the first floor, it’s almost as if it were two different heists because the M.O. is different. They’re not similar except that they happened the same night.

HORAN: Is it possible the thieves didn’t steal “Chez Tortoni” from the Blue Room? And if so, who did?

RODOLICO: Next time: Was the Gardner heist an inside job?

Episode 22222222222222222222222222222222222 Read the transcript of ‘Last Seen’ episode two ‘Inside Job?’
      
SEPTEMBER 24, 2018


KELLY HORAN: Imagine all the mistakes you’ve ever made. Now imagine that just one of them, one lapse in judgment in one millisecond in time, hung over you for all of your days to come. Imagine being known above all else for that one thing you did that you can never undo. And now imagine that the going estimate for the cost of your mistake is upwards of $500 million. Rick Abath, who was manning the watch desk in the Gardner Museum at 1:24 in the morning on March 18, 1990, doesn’t have to imagine any of this. He’s lived it.

RICK ABATH: I haven’t hidden it from anybody close to me. I haven’t hidden it. No, I’ve told this story a billion times over the past 22 years. At the same time, I’m not just advertising it normally either. It’s not like when I go to get a job, I’m like, “Oh, hey, I opened the door on this job 22 years ago, and they got robbed like $500 million, so hire me!” You know what I mean.

HORAN: Abath has always maintained his innocence. 
And, he says, he’s always been forthcoming about his decision to open the door the night of the robbery. 
Even in his earliest exchanges with the first Boston FBI agent on the case.



ABATH: And I said, “What do you want to know? I will tell you anything.” And I immediately spilled my guts. I didn’t have anything to lose.


 

HORAN: Rick Abath has never been arrested for anything related to the Gardner heist. But he’s also never escaped the 
suspicion of investigators who say that the men who robbed the museum had help from the inside, 
that they knew their way around it and knew the police weren’t coming. 
Their implication is that Abath is the reason why.
 
Twenty-eight years later, we still have no idea who walked away with a potentially billion dollar haul from the Gardner Museum.
 Join us as we dig through everything we know.
 
JACK RODOLICO: Those investigators have never publicly named Abath as a suspect. They won’t even name him as 
one of the security guards on duty that night. 
But Rick Abath must be a suspect. 
Why else would he have to keep answering investigators’ questions and testify before a grand jury?

HORAN: So in this episode we’re asking: What if Rick Abath didn’t just make a mistake when he let the thieves into the Gardner Museum? 
What if buzzing them in was all part of a larger plan to rob it? What if Rick Abath was the inside guy on the largest art heist in history?

RODOLICO: From WBUR Boston and The Boston Globe, this is Last Seen. I’m Jack Rodolico.



HORAN: I’m Kelly Horan. Episode 2: “Inside Job.”

RODOLICO: Whenever something is stolen from a museum, the most likely culprit is an employee.
 According to data reviewed by the FBI, about 80 percent of museum robberies are inside jobs. 
So given that stat -- and the fact that this security guard opened the door and let the thieves walk right into the Gardner -- it makes sense that investigators would look hard at Rick Abath. Our colleague from The Boston Globe, Steve Kurkjian, has been looking hard at Abath, too. He’s been reporting on the heist for more than 20 years for The Globe, and he’s written a book about it, “Master Thieves.” It took Steve a while to find Abath.

STEPHEN KURKJIAN: I spent a whole day up in Brattleboro, Vermont, trying to find Rick. I couldn’t find him, couldn’t find him. But I had been told he may be staying at a shack up in the hills. I went there. Around 9 o’clock at night, I find there is a tar paper shack, and there’s a car in the driveway. So I walk up and knock on the door and someone answers, “Who is it?” And I say, “Steve Kurkjian from The Boston Globe, trying to reach Rick Abath to talk to him about the Gardner Museum.” And phew, the door flies open and out comes Rick.

RODOLICO: In 2013, Steve and Rick Abath sat down in an Indian restaurant over chicken vindaloo and beer.

ABATH: For some reason, you know, I seem to be the only person involved in this thing who doesn’t give a f--- who did it.



KURKJIAN: Really?

ABATH: I seem to be the only one who’s not trying to figure it out. And that mainly comes down to: I’m glad to be alive.

KURKJIAN: Do you have a feeling of shame as to what happened to this, that you feel personally responsible for what happened here?

ABATH: No, I mean I feel bad about what happened, obviously, but no.

HORAN: So who was Rick Abath on March 18, 1990?

KURKJIAN: He had long, flowing, curly hair. Didn’t dress when he came to the museum as a night watchman or a guard. I think the night of the theft he was wearing sort of tight red leotards and a cowboy hat. HORAN: Abath’s getup the night of the robbery does bear mention -- if only because Abath himself knew how un-security-guard-like he appeared to the cops, who were really robbers.

ABATH: Cause I knew how it looked. I mean, I’m long haired, big-ass Stetson hat. I had my Berklee College of Music tie-dye on. And I had my Gardner Museum security shirt over that. It was unbuttoned.

HORAN: From the crime scene photos of Abath when he was found in the basement shackled and duct-taped the morning of the heist, we see that he also wore white high tops, faded red corduroys -- not, as Steve said, leotards -- and a fanny pack. Not exactly a picture of authority. But, Steve says, Rick Abath was an original.

KURKJIAN: He was outgoing in a creative way. But this group, this place, this that they lived in in Allston-Brighton became a hub of both rock ‘n’ roll, too much beer and too much drugs. And they would hold rock ‘n’ roll sessions in the basement.

ABATH: So it was a frat house before we moved in. There was already a bar in the basement when we moved in. We built a stage on the other side of the basement, and we were ready to rock.

KURKJIAN: So you’d hold these, what? Hootenannies, down there?

ABATH: At least once a month: $5 a head, usually two or three kegs.

HORAN: Abath and his housemates played in the jam band Ukiah. Abath partied a lot. And one party in particular, one that he wrote about in a paper for a writing class 20 years after the robbery, really caught our attention. It was just two and half months before the Gardner heist.

KURKJIAN: And they had started their New Year’s Eve celebration at the house, typically, with a lot of drugs, and they were doing mushrooms, and he describes the goo that was made up for him and his pals.

HORAN: About that goo. Abath and his pals boiled hallucinogenic mushrooms, reduced them to a blue goo, and drank it. Then, tripping, Abath moved the party from his basement to the Gardner Museum.

KURKJIAN: This is ridiculous. And now Rick is on the job here for at least a year. And that he would open up the doors of this museum for a psychedelic party for him and his random friends is incredible. HORAN: So, tripping on mushroom goo, Rick Abath, security guard, shows up with a handful of hallucinating friends for his night protecting the museum.

KURKJIAN: Let me just read -- and these are Rick’s words -- “My best friend Ed showed up just before dawn with someone we didn’t know, a mousy kid who looked tweaked out on crystal meth.”

HORAN: Abath writes that he and his buddies spent most of the night in the courtyard. For many who love the Gardner Museum, that courtyard is a kind of sacred space, so even just the idea that this happened has an air of sacrilege to it. There’s all the antiquities representing female power that Isabella Stewart Gardner herself chose -- Artemis, the eternally virginal goddess of the hunt; the pleasure-seeking maenads; Medusa, keeping her deathly watch. And along an edge of the courtyard, a second century Greek marble throne that Gardner herself -- and, it should be said, only Gardner -- sat in. Until Rick Abath did that night. Here’s Steve again, reading from Abath’s description of the party.

KURKJIAN: “I picked up a cup of water from the guard desk. I was very thirsty. I went to chug it down and got a bitter, burning taste. Gin went all over the place as I coughed and spit. The place was a mess.”

RODOLICO: So, isn’t it possible, drunk and stoned, that Abath said the wrong thing to the wrong person? Remember, the thieves seemed comfortable in corners of the museum the public did not access: the basement, the security office, a conservators’ lab hidden behind a secret door. They knew to move Abath away from the museum’s only panic button, and they knew where to find the security tape that recorded their entry into the museum. Steve asked Abath: Isn’t it possible that you accidentally gave someone -- a stranger -- inside knowledge of the security in the place.

ABATH: It’s possible. It seems like they had some kind of knowledge of what the security in the place was like, but I don’t know who they are, or how they gained that knowledge.

KURKJIAN: Yeah, yeah. $64 question.

ABATH: More than that. $5 million question.

HORAN: We’re not talking about a museum that was just named for Isabella Stewart Gardner. This was a palace that she built. Literally. From the ground up. All of it was borne of her vision, her collecting and her direction. In 1936, Morris Carter, the man Gardner chose to become the first director of her museum during the last years of her life, reflected on it as her living monument.

CARTER: A visitor therefore has the feeling that he is making the acquaintance of an extraordinary personality. Inconspicuously carved in a relief, over the main entrance, appears Mrs. Gardner’s motto, “C’est mon plaisir.” It is my pleasure.

HORAN: In her will, Isabella Stewart Gardner states that her collection and the museum that house it are “For the education and enjoyment of the public forever.” But for Gardner, the museum also served a private purpose: It was her bid for immortality. She lost her only child, a son, when he was just shy of 2-years-old. A tiny child’s sarcophagus in the courtyard offers a poignant reminder. And Gardner lost her husband not long before the pair planned to purchase the land on which the museum would be built. Death took her most beloved, but it would not touch her stone and stucco monument.

RODOLICO: But thieves just might -- and Gardner knew it. In 1911 the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in Paris. Gardner was alarmed. A headline in the New York Times not long after that heist reads: “Mrs. Gardner’s Art Museum Under Guard.”

NEWS CLIP: Mrs. John T. Gardner is taking no chances. She does not intend to have any member of the so-called international gang of high art thieves despoil the Fenway museum of any of its priceless pictures. RODOLICO: The article reports that Rembrandt’s “Storm On The Sea” and Vermeer’s “The Concert” were under special guard. Gardner knew those two pictures required extra protection, so she hand-picked her guards and gave them an order: Shoot to kill.

HORAN: So, nearly a century before the greatest art heist in history, Isabella Stewart Gardner herself foresaw the importance of dedicated security, which leads us to wonder: What happened over the course of the 79 intervening years so that, come March 18, 1990, a 23-year-old music school dropout named Rick Abath was the Gardner Museum’s best line of defense?

HORAN: It’s entirely possible that Rick Abath is guilty only of being a really lousy security guard. But there’s more you need to know. Twenty minutes before Abath buzzed the thieves into the museum, the alarms readout tells us, he opened and closed the same door. Why would he have done that? Was he signaling the bad guys, investigators have wondered. Was he saying, “Hey, the coast is clear.” Or was it, as Rick Abath has always said it was, just something he did every night to make sure the door’s alarm was working?

ABATH: I don’t recall when I did it but it was something I did regular. To test the alarm. We’d pop the door open, you know, and let it close.

JON-PAUL KROGER: I don’t care what he says -- there’s no way.

HORAN: Jon-Paul Kroger trained the guards -- including Rick Abath -- for the overnight shift at the Gardner Museum.

KROGER: That right there is a huge risk. It makes no sense that you would allow yourself to -- why in the world would you open that up? There’s a camera outside that shows Palace Road. There’s no reason in the world why you would ever open that door. Any door!

HORAN: So if it could somehow be proved that Abath opened and closed the outside door every time he worked the overnight, then his opening it the night of the heist looks a lot less suspicious. But how to prove it? Can we talk about Rick Abath?

ROB FISHER: We can.

HORAN: In 2010, Rob Fisher, the assistant U.S. attorney in charge of the Gardner investigation, had an idea. Show me the security tape from the night before the robbery, when Rick Abath was also on duty. Show me that Abath opened and closed the door that night, and I’ll believe that he did it as a matter of course. And what did you see when you watched the video from the night before?

FISHER: It was not a guard checking to make sure the doors were secured and locked. It was somebody being let in after hours and being let in, you know, where the robbers went almost exactly 24 hours later.

HORAN: So, the surveillance footage from the night before the Gardner heist does show Rick Abath opening the door. But he’s opening it to let someone in. When the U.S. Attorney’s office released the surveillance video 25 years after the heist, they did so with a public appeal: Who is this man? It was the closest thing to a bombshell that we’ve had in the Gardner mystery. Was it a bad guy? Was it a dry run for the robbery? Are we finally going to solve this thing? Well, no. And no. And no. Do we know who came in the night before?

AMORE: Yes.

HORAN: Who is it?

AMORE: It’s a person we’ve identified and we are absolutely certain that his entry was not connected to the heist in any way, shape or form.

HORAN: Anthony Amore won’t ID the night-before visitor. But three former security guards we interviewed confirmed his identity, as well as a source close to the investigation. The man in question was the Gardner Museum’s deputy director of security. So, it turns out Rick Abath was just letting in his boss. But Jon-Paul Kroger, who trained the guards for their third-shift duties, says no one was to be let into the museum after hours. Ever. Not your boss. Not even cops.

KROGER: The protocol was very straightforward: name and badge number, call and verify their identity, and then if there’s a legitimate reason for them to be there then only you let them in. Rick has made some statements that they were never trained on that, that’s completely false.

HORAN: Did anybody ever say, “Even if the Boston Police come to the door in the middle of the night, don’t let them in, get their badge number, call the local precinct?”

RANDY: No, no one ever said things like that to me.

HORAN: The other guard on duty the night of the heist, the one we’re only calling by his first name, Randy, says security at the Gardner Museum was lax.

RANDY: I do remember somebody ordered a pizza or some kind of food delivery and they just buzzed them right in when they came to the side door. It looked like that kind of thing was done there all the time by night guards.

RODOLICO: If Randy, as he says he did, witnessed a pizza delivery guy being buzzed into the museum in the middle of the night, how tight could that security protocol have been?

CYNTHIA DIEGES: Certain people really did take their jobs seriously and then others really did not.

RODOLICO: Cynthia Dieges worked at the Gardner Museum as a security guard at the time of the heist. To hear her tell it, if there was a rule against late night visitors, it wasn’t followed -- not even by the Gardner’s then-director Anne Hawley.

DIEGES: She had dinner with people and brought them in after dinner, like at 10 o’clock at night or later. She would bring people into the museum and go into the galleries.

RODOLICO: Does that set a certain mindset for the guards who are guarding the doors?

DIEGES: I mean, I would say so, yes sir. I would say that that breaks that mindset, that breaks that chain of command. “Do not let anyone in after 5.” Well, what is a guard, an underling, supposed to then do?

RODOLICO: So why is this a big deal? Why can’t the museum director come in at night to walk through the galleries with a trusted friend? Why can’t the deputy security director come in and chat with a guard? Well, it’s a very big deal, according to security experts. What if the director at the door is under duress, with a gun to her head? What if there’s a bad guy just beyond view of the security camera, waiting for his chance to slip into the museum? That’s why you never let anyone in after hours. The simpler the rule, the easier it is to follow. No one means no one. So, if Abath’s own bosses broke the rule, is it fair to blame him for breaking it too? And does all this door opening business say more about the state of security at the Gardner Museum than it does about Rick Abath?

HORAN: What was the security situation at the Gardner Museum in 1990? Lyle Grindle was director of security at the Gardner from 1981 until his retirement in 2004. And five years ago, Grindle told Steve Kurkjian that conditions at the museum during those early years were “prehistoric.”

GRINDLE: I didn’t have an office. I didn’t have a phone. I had an IBM typewriter and my desk was a table outside the men’s room in the basement, outside the guard’s room. It was very, very difficult to get a new mentality started.

HORAN: In the 1980s, the Gardner Museum was cash-strapped and sleepy, with a board that so literally interpreted Isabella Stewart Gardner’s will that it wasn’t fundraising. They couldn’t alter the collection in any way, after all, so they didn’t need money for new acquisitions. But they did need money -- for lots of things.

GRINDLE: I had to start someplace. And I started fire protection. Six battery-operated smoke detectors in the entire complex.

HORAN: There were many priorities competing for limited funds. Rembrandt portraits had been stolen from the Worcester Art Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in the 1970s. Anne Hawley had those thefts in mind when she asked the board to look into the cost of insuring the Gardner’s collection. But a more urgent need at the time appeared to be climate control in a museum that was at the mercy of Boston’s weather.

HAWLEY: When I first got there that summer there was a cloud in the courtyard because there was so much humidity, and so much condensation. And you could walk into the -- not the courtyard -- to the Spanish Cloister, and it would get to be 100 degrees on the third floor. People would faint; really elderly people would faint. It was really bad.

HORAN: So, the museum installed an HVAC system and fire protection. They didn’t get around to insuring the collection.

STEVE KELLER: Things there were not too different than they were in many museums at the time. It takes a Gardner-sized theft to scare the devil out of the museums.

HORAN: Steve Keller is a museum security expert. In the late 1980s, prompted in part by an FBI warning in 1981 that a pair of well-known thieves had been casing the Gardner, the museum hired Keller to size up its security apparatus. Keller had one main recommendation: layers. Build more layers between would-be bad guys and your collection.

KELLER: In theory, the way it works pretty much everywhere today because we’ve written new standards based upon the Gardner theft, if I were to make a move towards you I would be behind a bullet-resistant wall and a bulletproof glass.

HORAN: They have it now, but the Gardner didn’t have any of that back then. They had the watch desk and a single panic button for the entire museum.

KELLER: The person who you let in through that door ultimately was just across a counter from you.

HORAN: In other words, once the thieves walked in the door the night of the robbery, the museum was essentially theirs for the taking. The thieves who robbed the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum tripped the motion detector alarms hundreds of times over the course of the 81 minutes they were in the museum. Every time they did so, a computer at the watch desk announced the intrusion, via dot matrix printer. “Someone is in the Dutch Room. Investigate immediately.” Those alarm readouts tell us that the thieves were very busy on the museum’s second floor. In fact, the readouts tell us that the thieves were exclusively busy on that floor, stealing 12 pieces from two galleries -- five Dutch paintings and a Chinese gu from the Dutch Room, and five Degas sketches and a bronze eagle finial from the Short Gallery. But a 13th piece was stolen that night. Édouard Manet’s top-hatted cafe-goer with the beguiling brown-eyed gaze, the painting “Chez Tortoni.” That painting hung in the Blue Room, on the museum’s first floor. But there weren’t any alarms set off on the first floor. Security expert Steve Keller says that would have been just about impossible.

KELLER: You would have to have gotten past a motion detector twice. The odds of getting past those motion detectors are in the millions to one.

HORAN: Keller went to the museum shortly after the robbery to look into this for himself. First, he checked to see if the motion detectors in the Blue Room were broken. They weren’t. Then he tried to trick them.

KELLER: You know the rescue blankets, the aluminum, shiny, rescue blankets. They protect your infrared heat from being sent out into the room. So I put a rescue blanket over me and tried to go past it and then was not able to. I put a regular blanket down so I wouldn’t damage a table, and I crawled under the table, across the braces on the table. And I couldn’t defeat them. So neither could they.

HORAN: So how did that Manet get out of the gallery if no alarms were tripped?

KELLER: It just baffles me how that got out of there. That painting was removed from that room earlier than when the burglary occurred.

HORAN: This is potentially damning. Because the only footsteps recorded in the Blue Room the night of the robbery belonged to Rick Abath. We know this, because on his rounds that night, he swiped the magnetic strip to verify that he checked that room.

RODOLICO: Are you 100 percent convinced that painting was stolen by a guard.

KELLER: No I’m not 100 percent. I’m just saying it’s a theory. I don’t know who else would have taken it.

HORAN: Were there two heists at the Gardner Museum that night? Whereas the thieves who pillaged the second floor galleries left behind smashed glass and damaged frames, whoever stole “Chez Tortoni” removed it -- frame and all -- from the Blue Room. And then that thief did something surprising, and investigators think, telling: He removed “Chez Tortoni” from its frame and placed the empty frame on the security director’s chair. Steve Kurkjian addressed how bad this all looks for Rick Abath at that Indian restaurant back in 2013.

KURKJIAN: So you you go to the Blue -- you do your regular tour through the Blue Room and that’s the last footstep, they say, is seen in the Blue Room.

ABATH: Exactly. Yeah. They wanted to know how it would possible for the thieves to get that painting out of that room. And I said I didn’t know. And so they put forth the theory that, well, I perhaps took the Manet on my round and stashed it somewhere.

KURKJIAN: And you told them what?

ABATH: That I absolutely did not.

KURKJIAN: But you have to acknowledge the suspiciousness.

ABATH: Oh, yeah! I totally get it.

RODOLICO: Quick recap: Rick Abath opened and closed the door to Palace Road 20 minutes before the thieves got there. He let them in. He stepped away from the panic button. His footsteps alone were recorded in the Blue Room. “Chez Tortoni’s” frame was left on the security director’s chair. And Abath had given his two-week notice right before the heist.

HORAN: So why, in 28-and-a-half years, have investigators been unable to charge him with anything? Maybe it’s because even if Rick Abath could not have done things more suspiciously if he’d tried, suspicious behavior doesn’t mean complicity. This guy who has lived what appears to be a modest existence -- maybe he really did just make a mistake when he was 23.

RODOLICO: The FBI still doesn’t publicly connect Rick Abath to the Manet stolen from the Blue Room. They still don’t publicly connect him to anything. Is Rick Abath a suspect in the greatest art heist in history? If he isn’t, and if he’s been living under a cloud of speculation all these years, shouldn’t the FBI just say so?

HORAN: And if he is a suspect, our question is: Is that because the Boston FBI believes he’s guilty, or because they don’t have a better idea? We wanted to put this question directly to the Boston FBI, but they declined to speak with us.

RODOLICO: Next time, we venture four miles from the Gardner Museum -- and a world away -- to a grimy little autobody 
shop that one investigator likened to a Grand Central station for criminals. Did some of them rob the Gardner Museum?



Episode 33333333333333333333
 
 
OCTOBER 02, 2018

KELLY HORAN: Do you suspect the guards of collusion?

MARTIN LEPPO: No. I don’t think they’re smart enough. I mean, this is big league. This isn’t Triple-A ball down at Pawtucket. This is Fenway Park.

HORAN: This is Martin Leppo, a big-league criminal defense attorney with some strong opinions about the greatest art heist in history.



LEPPO: Let me say it this way: The Gardner Museum robbery was so easy, it’s a wonder there wasn’t a tsunami of burglars coming in and doing it. 
They have musicians guarding millions and millions and millions of dollars worth of paintings. Musicians! 
That’s like putting Dracula in charge of a blood bank. 
It’s so foolish and stupid that it’s, it’s, it almost invited the place to be robbed.





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HORAN: At 86, Leppo is still practicing. He says if there is one thing to know about him, it’s that he is loyal -- to his wife of 51 years, to his three sons, even the two who have given him some heartache, and to the veritable rogues’ gallery of clients he’s represented over the years, men whose rap sheets span decades -- and crimes.

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LEPPO: There’s a lot -- a lot of cases, a lot of murders, a lot of organized crime cases, a lot of disorganized crime cases.

HORAN: Armed robberies, drug deals, armored car stick-up jobs -- you name it. But it’s the crime that gave Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum the dubious distinction of being the scene of the single largest art theft in history that seems to hold special meaning for Leppo. Framed reproductions of some of the stolen paintings hang in his law offices, including one he’s especially partial to: “The Concert,” by Vermeer.

LEPPO: The painting just talks to you, it’s just so wonderful, magnificent. I think if you can’t appreciate art, you know, from one of the great masters, what else is there?



HORAN: If Leppo takes a particular interest in the Gardner heist, it isn’t only because he feels the loss of what was stolen. It’s also because he just might know who did it. No other defense attorney has represented more criminals who have been tied -- if only unofficially -- to the Gardner case. Seven in all. They are men Leppo has long defended for other crimes. And while he won’t comment on what they might have known about the plan to steal some of the most valuable and beloved treasures from Isabella Stewart Gardner’s collection, he will say this about whoever pulled off the robbery.

LEPPO: This wasn’t done by a bunch of jamokes. Cause this was a well-organized, a well-organized thing. The proof is in the pudding. They haven’t found a thing.

HORAN: By “they,” Leppo means the FBI. And he’s right. In the 28-and-a-half years since the heist, they haven’t found any of the stolen masterpieces. But one of the places the FBI has been looking at the longest reveals a lot about who they think might be behind this still unsolved crime. It’s a car repair shop, called TRC Auto Electric. A place hard to beat for criminals per capita. And if many of the men suspected of planning or pulling off the Gardner heist have needed Martin Leppo’s services, it’s because of other crimes they hatched at TRC. The question is: Was the plan to rob the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum one of them?

HORAN: From WBUR Boston and The Boston Globe, this is <em>Last Seen</em>. I’m Kelly Horan.

JACK RODOLICO: And I’m Jack Rodolico. Episode 3: “Not A Bunch Of Jamokes.”



HORAN: I might pull over for a second just to make sure, I think I’m going the wrong way.

RODOLICO: If one road to some of the suspects in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist leads to the law offices of Martin Leppo, another leads to 1325 Dorchester Ave. in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston. One day last summer, Kelly drove there with the Gardner Museum’s head of security, Anthony Amore.

CAR GPS: Your destination is on the left.

HORAN: Wait, here?

ANTHONY AMORE: That’s it. That’s TRC Auto Electric.

HORAN: Really? In my mind it was a much, a much greater thing. OK. Picture a low-slung brick and cinder block building, much longer than it is wide, with corrugated metal doors. There’s a spindly tree on the sidewalk out front, its canopy too sparse to offer shade under a withering July sun. There’s everything you’d expect to find at a mechanic’s: an assortment of vehicles, hoods up; three open repair bays; and spare tires and parts leaning against an exterior wall painted an industrial beige. What there isn’t is any suggestion whatsoever that the former TRC Auto Electric was, in its heyday, a front for a thriving hub of criminal activity. It’s only about four miles from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, but this place could not feel farther away.

AMORE: That’s true. It is a world away.

HORAN: You know, you go from this Italian Renaissance palazzo that Isabella Stewart Gardner built to resemble the one she loved to stay in in Venice and here we are at a single story brick building that’s just a real different look.

AMORE: But it is a great place for a crime headquarters, right? People coming and going all day. It’s perfect.

HORAN: Completely inauspicious, too. I mean, I would have driven right by it if, if I didn’t have you in the car to say, “This is it.”

AMORE: Right, but the police knew.

HORAN: And the police knew it because the man who presided over TRC Auto Electric was an underworld powerhouse with mafia ties and a long criminal record. His name was Carmello Merlino.

AMORE: He was involved in a lot of different bank heists. He was heavily involved in cocaine dealing out of TRC. There wasn’t any sort of crime he didn’t have his hand in.

HORAN: Carmello Merlino was a criminal the way other people are in a religious order. He seemed called to it, and he was devoted. The same is true, Amore says, of the assorted lowlives Merlino had swirling around him at TRC.

AMORE: They study crime, not the history of crime, they study the newspapers and say, “Hey, did you hear so and so did such and such?” It’s the way baseball fanatics might follow the Red Sox.

HORAN: One thing I’ve learned doing this reporting is that they also meet each other in prison.

AMORE: It’s crime college. And Merlino would be at Walpole and he would have the most desirable cell. He would be in really well with the prison leadership because he was likable and people listened to him. And I don’t want to say it’s like that scene in “Goodfellas” where they go to jail and it’s a big party and people are cutting up garlic for their pasta sauce, but Merlino made the best of it.

RODOLICO: In the late 1980s, Carmello Merlino’s side hustle in car repair wasn’t fooling anyone. He knew nothing about how to fix cars. But he had a real flair for turning cocaine dealt out of carburetor boxes into millions of dollars in cash. Between 1989 and 1991, a stretch of time that includes the hit on the Gardner Museum, state and local police, in conjunction with the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the DEA, had TRC Auto Electric under surveillance. Robert Sikellis was a fairly new assistant attorney general for Massachusetts at the time. He recalls being part of the massive effort to make sense of it all.

ROBERT SIKELLIS: We had wiretaps on TRC and Carmello Merlino’s home phone. And all conversations I ever saw were all cryptic and coded. I mean, nouns were -- nouns were off limits with this group. They never said a name, they never said a place, or anything. And we had situations where we were convinced that an important meeting was going to take place, given the discussion surrounding it, and then it turned out to be an innocuous, you know, lunch or something with an aunt. So it was very, very hard to really try to piece together what it is they were talking about. And the foot traffic in and out of there was utterly amazing. I mean, there was hundreds of people coming and going. It was a mini-Grand Central Station. So trying to piece all this together and understand exactly what was happening was exceedingly difficult.

RODOLICO: But not impossible. By 1992, Sikellis and his team had amassed enough evidence to indict Carmello Merlino and members of his crew on cocaine trafficking charges. In response, Merlino pulled a play straight from the gangster handbook: He offered authorities a quid pro quo. Give me leniency, and I’ll give you a stolen painting. Our colleague from The Boston Globe, Steve Kurkjian, says when Merlino made this offer, he also made himself a suspect in the Gardner heist. And that might have been the point.

STEPHEN KURKJIAN: It was a terrific feint, because I don’t think a) he knew anything about the Gardner heist at the time, and it really complicated his life. But it did absolutely get the attention of the state police and the assistant attorney generals, including Sikellis.

HORAN: Now, if you’re on the hook for one bad crime, why on earth would you want to raise your hand and make yourself a suspect in a worse one? Why would Merlino want to face that kind of heat?

KURKJIAN: Who wouldn’t want to be prince of the city? Find these paintings and you emerge prince of the city. All of your sins are forgiven. You know, you come back and you have helped, you know, civilized society, the museum, and the art loving world, young and old, to get these paintings back.

HORAN: This notion, this prince of the city ideal, offers an insight into nearly every Gardner heist suspect that we’ve investigated. Because, like Carmello Merlino, each of these guys, at one point or another, shot his hand up and said, essentially, “I did it.” Or, “I know who did it.” Or, “I know where the paintings are.” The criminal mind is nothing if not an aspirational one. Why wouldn’t you want your name attached to the greatest score of all time? Carmello Merlino wasn’t going to be crowned the prince of anything. Because the painting he dangled wasn’t a Rembrandt slashed from its frame at the Gardner Museum. It wasn’t a Vermeer or a Manet or even a Degas sketch. It was a portrait of George Washington that had been stolen in 1985 from the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow House in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Its estimated value at the time was $5,000 -- hardly the kind of bounty that doubled as a get out of jail free card. Merlino was going back to prison.

RODOLICO: Six years later, in November 1997, Carmello Merlino, out of prison and back at the helm at TRC Auto Electric, had a new hire at the garage, a younger guy he’d known for a long time -- both in and out of prison. Unlike Carmello Merlino, though, this guy really could fix cars. His name was Anthony Romano. He also answered to Tony.

DAVID NADOLSKI: He looked up to Carmello, admired him. And in fact, when Anthony was in prison he ran into Carmello, and Carmello took care of him. And Tony said, “Jeez, that guy, he was respected in prison. Anything he said went with the other prisoners.”

RODOLICO: Retired FBI Agent David Nadolski spent 21 years at the bureau. He has the tidy haircut and good posture you associate with a G-man. He has the warmth and easy laughter you don’t. Nadolski says Anthony Romano was not a thug, just a guy who made bad choices. He says he was a central casting image of a junkie convict: alarmingly thin, stringy hair, lots of tattoos at a time before everybody had one.

NADOLSKI: And then as parole would come up he would get out, and he would be good for a while, and then he’d get back into drugs, and then he’d be sticking up places again with a toy gun, and he’d be back in prison. So that’s basically his pattern. Never did he hurt anyone. I assess him as someone who really regretted the way things turned out for himself, and he wanted to do something about it. I think he wanted to make a difference, and I think he wanted to matter to somebody.

RODOLICO: While still in prison, Anthony Romano had reached out to Nadolski at the FBI with a tip that led to the recovery of valuable manuscripts stolen from the John Quincy Adams Library in Quincy, Massachusetts. Romano had even been right about who’d stolen them.

NADOLSKI: So based on this, I determined Anthony was truthful and reliable with information. When he got out of prison, he asked to meet with me, and wanted to talk about some information that had come his way concerning the Gardner theft.

RODOLICO: This was only six years after the Gardner heist. People still talked about it -- all the time. One of those people, according to Romano, was Carmello Merlino.

NADOLSKI: Eventually, it was clear that he was getting the impression that Mello -- Carmello Merlino goes by the name Mello -- knew where the paintings were, or, or thought he knew where they were, and somehow or other, wanted to get ahold of the paintings. He -- Tony didn’t think he was actually part of the robbery, but was working on getting the reward by finding the paintings.

RODOLICO: Nadolski wasn’t assigned to the Gardner case. He worked major crimes that fell under federal jurisdiction, like bank robberies and armored car jobs. So he pulled in the special agent who was leading the FBI’s Gardner investigation at the time, Neil Cronin.

NADOLSKI: I was basically introducing him to Anthony, and letting Anthony tell him what he knew about Gardner, or suspected. And not very long after that, Tony told me that Carmello Merlino wanted to rob the Loomis-Fargo vault facility in Easton.

HORAN: For the Boston FBI, Tony Romano was essentially a two-for-one informant. His notes on the comings and goings and conversations he observed inside TRC helped Nadolski work on his angle on Loomis, and they helped Cronin work his, on the Gardner. We obtained Anthony Romano’s confidential informant reports, or 302s. Between October 1997 and November 1998, one name appears in them more than any other alongside Carmello Merlino’s: Fat Ritchie. That’s not the name his mother gave him. Fat Ritchie was born Richard Chicofsky, Picture a sharply-dressed Bostonian missing all of his hair and some of his front teeth, with an inexplicable Brooklyn accent and a career as a scam artist as vast as the man himself was large, which is not to say tall. One day, Fat Ritchie called the Boston supervisor of the FBI squad that oversaw the Gardner case. Fat Ritchie didn’t introduce himself, but he didn’t have to.

NADOLSKI: And he actually said to the caller on the phone, he goes, “Are you Fat Ritchie?” Cause the guy hadn’t identified himself, and there was a big pause and he goes, “Some people do call me that.”

HORAN: Nadolski says Fat Ritchie told him and Agent Cronin that he could get the paintings from Carmello Merlino.

NADOLSKI: And he says, “But, f--- him, you know? If I can get the five mil by getting the paintings from him that’s what I want out of this.” He goes, “I’ll turn on him.” So we just looked at each other and said, “This is beautiful.”

HORAN: And that’s how Ritchie Chicofsky, aka Fat Ritchie, became the second confidential informant inside TRC Auto Electric. We obtained Fat Ritchie’s 302s, and they are full of instances of Carmello Merlino promising to deliver the paintings. In one, dated Jan. 6, 1998, Fat Ritchie reported that Merlino planned to return half of the stolen paintings and hold the rest for security. Merlino had also reportedly said to Ritchie, “I’ve got the news you’ve been waiting for. I have the Vermeer and the Rembrandt.” For the FBI, it must have been a shining moment. They had two informants ratting on two heists: one, the Loomis hit in the planning stages, and the other, the Gardner robbery still casting its long shadow over the city. Just maybe, the one that had yet to happen would yield clues -- or better still, an arrest -- in the one that had yet to be solved.

RODOLICO: It was at this point that the feds offered Carmello Merlino a quid pro quo of their own: a letter of immunity from prosecution in exchange for the stolen art.

NADOLSKI: But he assured Neil. He goes, “I don’t have them.” He goes, “If I had them, I’d take that five million. I’d give ‘em to you.” He goes, “I’m just as interested in finding them as you are. I want to get the money.”

RODOLICO: The feds didn’t buy it. They knew Merlino kept that immunity letter from the U.S. Attorney’s Office taped under his desk at TRC. Why would he need it if he was only in it for the reward? If only they had leverage, some other crime they could squeeze him on to make him talk about what he knew about the Gardner heist. Something like an armored car vault robbery?

NADOLSKI: He had told Tony that he was not just thinking of it, he was planning it. He was going on surveillances. He was sizing it up. He wanted to do this. And the way he wanted to do it was to put somebody on the inside who he could trust. In other words, get somebody in there as an employee that’s willing to give it up when the time came. That was his big plan. He wasn’t going to go in there guns blazing. He wanted to go in there and have -- have it set up already that the place was going to fall.

HORAN: There’s nothing like being jammed up on one whopping federal crime to make a bad guy sing about what he knows about another one. That was the hope, anyway.

HORAN: The entire time that Carmello Merlino was making claims about the Gardner paintings, he was also planning a strike on the Loomis-Fargo armored car vault facility, about 23 miles south of TRC in Easton, Massachusetts. The Loomis heist presented just the chance the feds needed. They didn’t have any proof that Merlino really did have access to the Gardner paintings. So they sought the next best thing: pressure him on a different crime. One serious enough to make him give up whatever he knew about the Gardner. David Nadolski had a come-to-Jesus-moment with his informant Anthony Romano. He’d have to do two things: Introduce an undercover FBI agent to pose as the inside guy at Loomis, and wear a wire to catch Merlino and his accomplices planning the takedown.

NADOLSKI: And this case is going to be made on conversations that Mello and others have regarding the theft. “So, as we discussed you’re wearing the wire now, right.” And he said, “Yeah, I’ll wear it.” And I said, “You know that when this happens, if it goes, and, you know, we make arrests, you gotta to testify in court, right?” “Yeah, I know.” “You’ve got to leave the state, right?” “Yeah, yeah, I know.” I said, “OK, and this is going to change your life drastically, right?” “Yeah, I know.” He goes, “That’s OK. I don’t want to -- I’m sick of Boston anyway. I want to go somewhere else.”

HORAN: Anthony Amore says the stakes for Romano could not have been higher.

AMORE: He wore a wire inside that place right there that we’re looking at, a place that professional, ruthless, vicious criminals were in and out of every day. One misstep would have cost him his life on the spot and he did it anyway because he wanted to redeem himself. It wasn’t about getting out of any sort of sentence. He didn’t have to.

NADOLSKI: I told Tony, “All you need to do is bring up the subject that you’ve got a guy on the inside. Shut your mouth and let him do all the talking.”

HORAN: For all of his misgivings, for all of how maddeningly terrifying it must have been to walk into that garage with a recorder strapped to his body in the midst of the baddest of bad guys, Romano was smooth. He was a natural. Here he is in one of the secret FBI recordings that we obtained, floating the news to Merlino that he found a guy on the inside at Loomis.

ROMANO: Remember, you know we talked about that Easton thing?

MERLINO: Yeah. The biggie, the big one.

ROMANO: But uh. [Whispering.] I got a guy in there.

MERLINO: Who is he? ROMANO: I’ve know him for a long time. I got a guy in there. Remember I told you this is too big for me? Well…

MERLINO: But it ain’t for me.

ROMANO: Mello, I’m talking $30 to $50 million.

NADOLSKI: And it was gold. It was gold. I mean Tony just went in there, gave the cover story, said, “Hey, you remember I wanted to do that job at Loomis? And I come across a guy who actually works there. You’ve been asking me to get a guy in. There’s a guy in there, and I know him, and he’s willing to do it! He’s willing to cooperate with us.” And Mello doesn’t really ask any questions. He just goes, “Wow. Really!” He goes, “Yeah. But the thing is Mello it’s too big for me. I need your help.” He goes, “Well not too f------ big for me!” And then he just goes on, and on, and on about how he’s going to plan it, run it. He’s going to do this. He’s going to do that. He’s going to bring his crew in.

RODOLICO: That crew had yet to be assembled. But one thing was certain: They would be experienced, and they would be discreet. Here’s Merlino explaining the consequences of indiscretion to Romano.

MERLINO: It’s gonna go six ways. There’s us two, screw, and the other three, so everybody gets an equal end and that’s it. They’re veterans, they’ve been around.

ROMANO: They’re all right, though, right?

MERLINO: Huh?

ROMANO: They’re all right?

MERLINO: You don’t have to worry about them. And the only thing I’m gonna say is, listen, everybody’s going to make one pact, no discussion about it or nothing, anybody spends more money than they show, they gotta get clipped. So as long everybody knows it, that’s what’s gonna happen.

RODOLICO: “You don’t have to worry about them,” Merlino says. “They’re veterans. But anyone spends more than they should, they’re gonna get clipped.” In his world, no one was above paying with his life. Merlino and his hand-picked Loomis heist crew, four men in all, plus Tony Romano, had one of their final meetings in a car in a CVS parking lot, across the street from a Bickford’s pancake house. It was January 1999. Romano was recording and transmitting the meeting to agents hiding nearby.

NADOLSKI: So I was sitting in a car along with a billion other agents listening to the conversation as it was taking place because if anything went wrong we had to move in fast. But nothing went wrong, and nobody suspected anything. Neil Cronin had great ears, and he goes, “Do you remember -- did you hear him saying about bringing a hand grenade?” I said, “No, I didn’t.” But that was on the tape. That’s considered a weapon of mass destruction, and that doubles your your time.

RODOLICO: That live hand grenade alone would mean a minimum mandatory sentence of 30 years in prison.

HORAN: So here was the plan: Merlino and his crew would storm the facility, take down their inside guy and the other guard on duty, empty the vaults, stuff the loot in a stolen Loomis armored car, and then race back to TRC to divide up their spoils. Merlino expected the take to be upwards of $50 million. Nadolski says the tally in the vaults that weekend was actually more like 100 million. It was go time.

NADOLSKI: The plan was for them to come together at TRC early in the morning. So we had 100 million cops out there. We had the surveillance squad in the air. We had the surveillance squad on the ground. We had police everywhere. But everyone is hidden. I had Tony take his car, park it outside TRC, go in, turn the lights on, and then jump back into my car and take off. So we took off. And so Mello pulls up. He sees Tony’s car, lights on, goes in -- or starts to go in -- and he gets jumped by the SWAT team and taken down.

HORAN: The sting was going as planned. After nabbing Merlino, the SWAT team took out the next accomplice to arrive at TRC. Two down. Two to go. But where were they? Nadolski remembers feeling that something wasn’t right.

NADOLSKI: They just drove by, and then they came around the block again, and they drove by again, and then stopped -- and they came back to TRC and for whatever reason they decided this doesn’t smell right. And they took off. And so the SWAT team decided to, in the event that these guys were going to run, that they were going to get on ‘em. They drove up onto the sidewalk and started tearing down the sidewalk and the SWAT vehicle collided with them. And the SWAT guys jumped out, smashed out the windows, and dragged them out of the car, um, and locked them up. And Anthony is on the floor of my car screaming and yelling. And he’s just, he’s scared s---less. So that’s how it all went down. And then when they were brought in, they realized that they were one man short.

HORAN: That one man was Anthony Romano. After the sting on TRC, he entered the federal witness protection program and relocated to Florida. It was there in 2013 that he died of a brain aneurysm. He was 56 years old. With Carmello Merlino and his Loomis heist accomplices in custody, FBI agents Nadolski and Cronin wanted to know one thing.

NADOLSKI: And we just talked to each one individually and said, “Look, you’re in some deep shit here. You know, if you know anything about the Gardner now is the time to talk. Maybe there’s something that we can do to help you.”

HORAN: The FBI seemed confident that the Loomis arrest would yield a break in the Gardner mystery. And it wasn’t only because they had Carmello Merlino on tape talking about the stolen paintings. Consider Merlino’s plan: He insisted upon having inside information about Loomis to ensure that the facility would fall without a fight. He had taken care to find out where all the security cameras were and how the alarm system worked. One of his accomplices had bought disguises for the men to wear during the robbery. Maybe this is how seasoned criminals plan all their jobs. But these are details you can’t help but associate with the Gardner heist, where the thieves wore disguises and took the museum with relative ease, where they seemed to know about the panic button, and they knew not only about the security camera footage, but where to find the tape.

RODOLICO: Other details ring a bell, too. Merlino had originally wanted to hit the vault facility the night of Super Bowl Sunday in 1999. That’s not exactly an official holiday in Boston, the way St. Patrick’s Day is, but it might as well be. So when FBI agents Nadolski and Cronin offered to bargain in exchange for information about the Gardner heist, what did each of these men facing decades in prison say?

NADOLSKI: And all four of them individually told us they knew nothing. You know, “Don’t bother me. I don’t have anything for you.” That was it.

HORAN: That was it. But what about Fat Ritchie’s reports that Merlino was going to return the Gardner art? Turns out Fat Ritchie put the con in confidential informant. The whole time he’d been telling the FBI that Merlino was promising the paintings, Fat Ritchie had been promising them to Merlino. Carmello Merlino, sentenced to 47 years and six months in prison, died there in 2005 at the age of 71. You’d think that if he’d had something to say about the Gardner art, he’d have said it.

NADOLSKI: No kidding. He could have gotten five million bucks for his family, anyway. And he has a family. He has some decent kids. I’m sure he would have wanted to help them out.

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.

NADOLSKI: No.

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

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.

RODOLICO: Robert Sikellis, the former assistant attorney general who was listening in on the TRC gang during the period when the Gardner Museum was robbed, he wonders, too.

SIKELLIS: It would not have been surprising. They were very, very careful. These were very seasoned, very experienced operators. They’re not going to get on the phone and say, “OK, we’re -- Don’t forget, we’ve got the Gardner heist tonight. We’ll meet you guys at 7 and then we’ll go do it.” That’s unheard of.

HORAN: Maybe Carmello Merlino hated the feds more than he hated the prospect of dying in prison. We can’t know. But what we can say with certainty is that Carmello Merlino was hardly the last, best suspect to come out of TRC Auto Electric.

RODOLICO: Next time, two more men who made TRC Auto Electric their criminal home base. One remains locked up for his role planning the Loomis heist. The other is dead.

 

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Read the transcript of ‘Last Seen’ episode four ‘Two Bad Men’
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  OCTOBER 08, 2018

KELLY HORAN: This is the story of two men. One of them was born lucky. The other wasn’t. One of them had options and from them, chose a life of crime. The other had none, and defaulted to one. And when these two men met, the lucky one was young and handsome and had also, it is alleged, gotten away with murder. The other one was middle aged and beaten down and had done hard time for a murder he didn’t commit.

This is the story of David Turner and George Reissfelder, two men who prove that the criminal life is an equalizing one that erases distinctions like where you came from and where you could have gone.

This is David Turner, on a lousy phone line from prison, after his luck had run out.



DAVID TURNER: Um, you know, actually I had nothing to do with the robbery. It was 17 years ago. I was 23 years old. It’s just rumor and conjecture, you know. How do you defend yourself against that?





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HORAN: And this is George Reissfelder, remembering his worst hard time.

GEORGE REISSFELDER: One night I woke up about 12, 1 o’clock in the morning, sweating, shaking. I stood up at the cell door, looked out at the cell block -- it was quiet. That’s when it really dawned on me. I said to myself, “This is real, and I just might be spending the rest of my life in here.”

JACK RODOLICO: David Turner and George Reissfelder found themselves pulled into the gravitational orbit of crime boss Carmello Merlino at TRC Auto Electric at the same time -- the late 1980s.

That’s the auto body shop about four miles from the Gardner Museum that doubled as an underworld nerve center. Drug deals, illegal weapons, armored car heists, murder.



Last time, we told you about the FBI sting in 1999 that brought Merlino and that criminal enterprise down.

But we didn’t tell you everything.

RODOLICO: From WBUR Boston and The Boston Globe, this is Last Seen. I’m Jack Rodolico.

HORAN: And I’m Kelly Horan. This is Episode 4: “Two Bad Men.”

And here’s someone who spent years trying to follow the trail of both of them.



BOSER: My name is Ulrich Boser, and I’m the author of “The Gardner Heist.” My book argued that David Turner and George Reissfelder were the individuals who robbed the museum.

HORAN: Boser, who is a senior fellow at a Washington, D.C., think tank now, remains passionate about the Gardner mystery.

BOSER: At the heart of this case is a question mark: We don’t know where the paintings are. And it’s remarkable. These are five hundred million dollars’ worth of art that’s stolen. Let’s just be clear, right. You could trade the paintings to, you know basically make a Hollywood film, right? And have money left over to buy, like, a seven-bedroom house. It is-- it is crazy how valuable they are. You know, if you just look at the Vermeer per inch what you could buy with it.

HORAN: And running through this story, Boser says, is a tale of two cities. The tension between those who possess the Old Masters, and those who would risk everything to steal them.

BOSER: The Gardner is the perfect vehicle to tell the story of Boston. It in my mind represents so much of the city’s respect for art and culture, its value of learning, and these sort of really richer ideas. And then also represents this other side of the city that is rough, and dirty, and criminal, and we have this tension that rests at the center of it all.

HORAN: And someone who moved between those worlds and settled in the latter is David Turner. He turned down our request for an interview, but Ulrich Boser spoke with him in 2007. Not in person -- Turner was on a phone line from prison. That’s because Turner was one of the men, alongside Carmello Merlino, arrested in that early morning Loomis-Fargo vault sting on TRC Auto Electric.

Remember the two suspects who fled TRC and crashed their car after FBI agents pursued them? David Turner was in the passenger seat.

BOSER: I do believe that David Turner is going to go down in history alongside the Boston Strangler, alongside Whitey Bulger, as one of the most notorious criminals to come out of Boston.

HORAN: Turner told Boser that, once the FBI had him in custody, there was just one thing the agents wanted to know. Boser typed notes as he listened to Turner on speaker phone.

TURNER: You know, they wanted to know about the Gardner Museum. What he always said was, you know, “Give us the paintings and you can go home,” you know. They told me they had information from several sources that I was an actual participant in the robbery.

HORAN: David Turner told Boser that the FBI said, essentially, ‘we know you did it.’

RODOLICO: So, who is David Turner? And why were the Boston FBI agents who arrested him so convinced that he knew something about the Gardner heist, they offered him a get out of jail free card to talk?

MICHAEL BLANDING: Well, let me take you back to the beginning.

RODOLICO: This is investigative reporter Michael Blanding.

BLANDING: When I was a staff writer at Boston Magazine, I received a letter from a prisoner. This one in particular really caught my attention because it mentioned the Gardner Museum robbery. And so right away I was intrigued by it and wrote right back to the person who wrote me the letter, which was a fellow by the name of David Turner.

RODOLICO: That first letter started a correspondence between Blanding and Turner that lasted for several years. Some of Turner’s letters, Blanding says, offered tantalizing hints about the Gardner heist and other unsolved crimes.

BLANDING: I can show you one of these letters that I found where he says, “I’m happy to share this information about the Gardner Museum, as well as these other crimes that, that I have knowledge of.” And he never said that he actually participated in any of the crimes, but he certainly made it seem like he had some ability to talk about them.

RODOLICO: In a letter dated Oct. 26, 2003, Turner proposes that Blanding write a book about his life. In a neat schoolboy’s script, Turner writes: “I would briefly go into my childhood and the events that I believe contributed in my going down the wrong path, namely the death of my father.” He continues, “I think a book of this type would appeal to a wide audience. ... The target would be the true crime, artsy type.”

“Let me know what you think. I hope to hear from you soon. Best regards.”

BLANDING: He was always just a consummate gentleman in all of his correspondence with me. I sort of grew to believe that there was always some sort of angle that he was working.

HORAN: David Turner’s high school career had been dotted with superlatives. At school in a suburb of Boston, Turner had been a standout three-season athlete. His peers had voted him “most unique” and had given him the nickname “Crackerjack.” He had a broad, round face with wide, high cheekbones, a mop of light brown hair, and a grin that conveyed confidence -- and mischief.

BLANDING: You know, I talked to several of his childhood friends who said he was just, you know, really intelligent, and charismatic, and loyal. He would always be there for you. And, you know, just painted this picture of this, you know, real all-American kid, you know, somebody who was like really going places.

HORAN: Just not places like TRC Auto Electric.

Because one of his accomplices from TRC had brought along a hand grenade for the Loomis-Fargo vault heist, David Turner had also received a long sentence.

TURNER: Thirty-eight-and-a-half years. No one would be happy about it, but you woulda thought, you know, once they had arrested us and, you know, the paintings didn’t show up, you know, they would have gotten reasonable with us. But, you know, it’s business as usual for the Boston office of the FBI.

HORAN: By “business as usual,” Turner meant that he believed he’d been set up for one crime -- the planned Loomis-Fargo robbery -- because the FBI needed leverage in order to question him in another one: the Gardner case.

Turner alleged entrapment by the FBI and twice appealed his conviction -- and lost.

RODOLICO: But the reason the Boston FBI was so interested in David Turner in the first place is because of other crimes he is alleged to have gotten away with. Crimes with dates that bookend the Gardner heist and with M.O.s that resemble it.

Robert Sikellis is the former assistant attorney general for Massachusetts who spent years in the 1990s trying to put David Turner behind bars for those crimes.

SIKELLIS: The feeling was to, you know, to really take a run at David Turner. The feeling was that he was a very dangerous individual.

RODOLICO: Sikellis’s break came in 1992, when a longtime friend and sometime accomplice of David Turner’s was swept up in the drug-trafficking sting on TRC Auto Electric. His name was Charlie Pappas.

Charlie Pappas was a second-generation coke dealer for Carmello Merlino. When he was hauled in on drug-dealing charges, Pappas’s best option to avoid prison time was to flip on Turner. The two young men had been inseparable for years. Their criminal pastimes overlapped, too.

BLANDING: Eventually, and I should say allegedly, David was involved with a number of more serious crimes. There was a murder of a gay social worker who gave Turner and Pappas a ride home from Provincetown, and he turned up dead that night. They were never able to pin Turner to the crime, however. There was a robbery of the Bull & Finch pub, the Cheers -- you know, the pub that serves as the model for Cheers. And someone lifted $50,000 from, uh, the Bull & Finch, and David was thought to be involved with that. And then there was a home invasion robbery that happened in 1990 where allegedly Turner and Pappas came and invaded the home of this couple, and made off with $130,000 in cash and jewelry.

HORAN: David Turner’s rap sheet is both long and incomplete. Missing among its 29 charges is that social worker’s beating death in 1985 -- the summer after Turner graduated from high school.

Robert Sikellis says Turner was one of the coldest criminals he’d ever met.

SIKELLIS: In my opinion, it was just ice cold. I mean, it was--, it was--, it was chilling to be in the same room at times. And that’s from very seasoned State Police investigators, as well. He was a cool customer, as they say. I mean, he showed no emotion whatsoever. Very stoic, very focused, very sure of himself. And seemed wholly uninterested and unconcerned with what was going on around him -- although he was not-- not-- not a dumb person, that’s for sure.

HORAN: Sikellis’s first run at David Turner in the so-called Cheers robbery ended in an acquittal. Sikellis next prepared to prosecute Turner for a 1990 home invasion. Charlie Pappas agreed to testify that he had been the getaway driver for Turner and his accomplice in that robbery.

Then, just days before the trial was set to start in late 1995:

SIKELLIS: Charlie Pappas was shot and killed on Thanksgiving eve. I still remember that very, very vividly. I got a call from a State Police lieutenant, and we all rushed to the scene. He’d been shot, if I remember, twice in the mouth, if memory serves. We were never able to prosecute anyone for that. We have-- we had very clear suspicions as to who that was, given he was a cooperating witness, but unfortunately we never had enough evidence to prosecute.

HORAN: Charlie Pappas had been shot twice in the mouth.

SIKELLIS: It was explained to me as a young prosecutor at the time by some very, very seasoned State Police agent that’s the telltale sign of, “Don’t be a rat. Don’t talk. Don’t cooperate.”

HORAN: Robert Sikellis says he believes that David Turner was behind the killing.

SIKELLIS: He was our prime suspect.

HORAN: Robert Sikellis says he believes that David Turner was behind the killing.

SIKELLIS: He was our prime suspect.

HORAN: As ever, suspicion clung to David Turner, but charges didn’t. A prosecutor dubbed him “the Teflon gangster of the South Shore.”

RODOLICO: So, four years before the Boston FBI sting on TRC Auto Electric that would finally put David Turner in prison, Robert Sikellis, who had tried and failed twice to do so, had an epiphany about Turner’s alleged robberies: They looked an awful lot like the Gardner heist, but on a much smaller scale.

Sikellis realized that the entire time he’d been working with Charlie Pappas to nail Turner for those robberies, he could have been asking him if Turner had also been one of the men who robbed the Gardner.

SIKELLIS: And unfortunately, by the time we sensed any connection to the Gardner Museum, Pappas was dead.

RODOLICO: Two thieves relying on an inside guy, wearing disguises, using handcuffs in the middle of the night at the end of a holiday weekend. In details of David Turner’s alleged robberies, it was hard to miss the hallmarks of the Gardner heist.

This is when David Turner, a free man, if not an innocent one, landed squarely on the radar of investigators for the Gardner robbery, too.

TURNER: I’ve seen memos that they sent directly to, uh, the director of the FBI saying that they believe I was a participant. They, they, uh, sent my prints to Washington, trying to match up with prints at the Gardner. Came back negative.

HORAN: Ulrich Boser says that while David Turner had to deny involvement in the Gardner heist, he seemed unable to keep from insinuating that he knew something about it.

BOSER: The most curious thing that happened with me and David was that he-- he wrote me this letter where he included this poem and essentially said, you know, he did not commit the Gardner theft, but he did want to be on the cover of my book.

And in my mind, you know, it was-- it was a form of bragging, right? He tried to insert himself into this case. And if he did commit the robbery, and we don’t know that for sure, right? He’s in a tough position, right? He doesn’t have access to the paintings or he’d be out of prison.

HORAN: Now, David Turner has always said he’d never cooperate with authorities investigating the Gardner heist. But what if he could lead them to the stolen Gardner art? Would they let him go? What if he couldn’t give them the paintings, but could give them something useful? That’s what Boston Globe reporter Shelley Murphy wondered in 2016, when she made a sharp discovery.

SHELLEY MURPHY: I was hearing some things about whether or not he might cooperate. And I looked at the Bureau of Prisons’ website, which shows a release date. And when I looked at it, I knew. I said that wasn’t the release date that was there before. And I noticed that the release date had changed. So that’s how I saw it, that I knew that he initially was supposed to get out on one date. And suddenly, they just took off a bunch of years.

HORAN: David Turner’s 38-and-a-half-year prison sentence was suddenly seven years shorter. Why? Why would a judge shave that time off the sentence of a man suspected in an at least one unsolved murder? Our colleague Steve Kurkjian thinks he knows.

STEPHEN KURKJIAN: Seven years reduction off a criminal sentence? There’s only one reason for it, according to the Bureau of Prisons: because he cooperated. What was he cooperating on? The Gardner Museum. What did he give? That’s the ultimate question.

HORAN: Shelley Murphy, who wrote a Globe piece about this with Steve, says this makes sense.

MURPHY: I mean, I think our story certainly suggested it was a possibility, because there’s no public explanation as to why it was reduced. And in those cases it generally means cooperation. If it was because of some new federal sentencing guideline, you know, decision it would be detailed in the record. And it’s not.

HORAN: Was David Turner in on the robbery of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum?

MURPHY: The FBI has said they believe the two thieves that actually went in are dead. So, that tells you they don’t believe David Turner went inside. So, everything that we’ve seen about David Turner, he’s usually the guy inside, like strong arming, like he’s very aggressive. And so, what role would he have played? You know somewhere on the outside, standing guard? Why wouldn’t he be inside? And you know, it’s frustrating. All these theories are frustrating. For everything that points toward these particular suspects there’s something that points away.

HORAN: Something like the presumably straightforward question of where David Turner was the night of the Gardner heist. There are clues that seem to let him off the hook. And there are others that don’t. Steve Kurkjian explains.

KURKJIAN: I went looking for documents. I found receipts. Credit card receipts. They showed David Turner was in Florida on March 15, three days before the robbery. Where was he? He was buying spy equipment from a Miami shop called the Spy Shops of Miami.

HORAN: And after that? There are no credit card receipts for the day of the heist, March 18. But, Steve says, there is one for two days after -- March 20.

KURKJIAN: It showed he was turning in a vehicle, a rental car, at the Fort Lauderdale airport, and using his credit card to pay for that vehicle. But on that receipt is another driver’s license number.

HORAN: So someone returned a car that had been rented in David Turner’s name. It’s just not clear, based on that different driver’s license number on the receipt, that it was actually David Turner. Steve doesn’t know for sure, but he knows what it looks like.

KURKJIAN: This was a ploy by him in order to later tell the investigators, “Oh, I was in Florida at the time.”

HORAN: It’s-- he created an alibi.

KURKJIAN: He created an alibi.

HORAN: And while he was in Florida, three days before the heist, Turner spent six-hundred-and-forty-five dollars and one cent in a spy supply store. We don’t know what he bought there, but we can guess.

KURKJIAN: Well, the Spy Store had all sorts of James Bond-type equipment. They had listening devices that could pick up two-way radios. They had all sorts of -- at the day -- non-digital devices, electronic devices, that could look over the fence.

HORAN: The type of equipment that could help a guy waiting outside of a museum while it’s being robbed.

KURKJIAN: Exactly.

RODOLICO: When we come back -- the other guy.

ROBERT BEAUCHAMP: OK, I’m Robert Beauchamp. I’m a prisoner at MCI Norfolk.

RODOLICO: In 1973, Robert Beauchamp was sentenced to life in prison for murder. The man who would become his cellmate, George Reissfelder, had been in since 1967, serving a life sentence for a murder he said he did not commit.

Our colleague from the Boston Globe, Steve Kurkjian, joined us for an interview with Beauchamp in prison.

KURKJIAN: What was your commonality? What did you see in him?

BEAUCHAMP: It was a homosexual relationship.

KURKJIAN: Yup.

RODOLICO: Could you just describe him physically? What did he look like back then and, you know, what drew you to him? What attracted you to him?

BEAUCHAMP: Well, he was halfway decent-looking. He had a-- he was very well built. He worked out all the time. He had kind of a Beatle haircut -- very straight hair. And about 5’10”, maybe 170, -75 pounds.

RODOLICO: Robert Beauchamp and George Reissfelder were lovers. And in 1974, the pair escaped from prison. Reissfelder was caught after three years and sent back to Massachusetts. Beauchamp remained on the lam for a decade before being caught.

It had not been a placid romance.

BEAUCHAMP: Yeah, a couple of times we had Mexican standoffs, and the only reason that he backed down was both times I had a .357 and he only had a small .22 or .25 automatic. As I had said to him at the time, “Worst you’re gonna do is wound me. This hits you anywhere, you’re dead.” So, he backed off.

RODOLICO: In 1980, assistant district attorneys Roanne Sragow and John Kerry -- yes, that John Kerry -- took on Reissfelder’s claims of innocence. The pair unearthed evidence that had been suppressed at trial. They also learned that, just a year into Reissfelder’s sentence, the real killer had made a deathbed confession exonerating him. No one had let Reissfelder know.

Sragow, who is now a judge in Massachusetts, and Kerry, the former U. S. Secretary of State and presidential candidate, won Reissfelder’s release in August of 1982.

HORAN: Reissfelder had not only lost sixteen years of his life in prison. His first wife left him. His kids were taken away. His mother died. And when he got out, he was denied compensation for his wrongful conviction.

Anthony Amore says Reissfelder had few prospects.

AMORE: He spent a long time -- 16 years -- in the country’s toughest prison for something he hadn’t done. Who was he going to be friends with when he got out of jail? You know, it wasn’t, “Oh, George is out. And John Kerry and Roanne Sragow are going to, you know, be his best friends forever now.” That’s not how it works. You know, you gravitate to the people that you know.

RODOLICO: The people he knew were from prison. People like Carmello Merlino.

HORAN: Robert Beauchamp says that when Reissfelder was released in 1982, Merlino was waiting for him with a job at TRC Auto Electric.

BEAUCHAMP: And they started a major cocaine operation for years.

HORAN: Someone else was waiting for George Reissfelder when he got out, too.

JANICE SANTOS: OK. So my name is Janice Santos. Well, I was married at one time to George Reissfelder. And George Reissfelder is, I guess, a prime suspect in the robbery, the theft.

HORAN: I guess I wonder-- Did you guys fall in love when, when he was in prison?

SANTOS: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I thought so, you know, but, you know, in hindsight what did I know about love, you know? But yeah. We did. And so, the plan was for him to come out, move in with me. And that’s what happened.

HORAN: Two months after George Reissfelder’s release, Janice Santos married him. It was Oct. 16, 1982, and Santos was in the Army National Guard.

SANTOS: I was 22 years old. I was working a supply job, but I had just taken the flight aptitude selection test, and I had, like, the second-highest mark in the battalion. I really did well on the test, and I went and took the flight physical, and I was going to be going to flight school.

HORAN: What were you going to fly?

SANTOS: U-eez.

HORAN: I don’t know what that is.

SANTOS: A helicopter. A UH1. It’s a helicopter.

HORAN: Wow. So that seems pretty impressive. Were there many female helicopter pilots at the time in Massachusetts?

SANTOS: There were none. I would have been the first.

HORAN: But Janice Santos didn’t become the state’s first female helicopter pilot.

SANTOS: So he wouldn’t let me leave the house, so I couldn’t go to work. He wouldn’t let me go out on the weekends to go to drill, because, obviously, when I went to work, I was gonna screw around with somebody. He couldn’t watch me. So, um, eventually, after I didn’t go to enough drills I got thrown out of the military -- thrown out with a dishonorable discharge.

HORAN: Reissfelder was vicious to Santos. He went through her stuff, looking for evidence that he couldn’t trust her. A poem a previous boyfriend had written threw him into a rage. Just a warning: What you’re about to hear is disturbing.

SANTOS: He was frothing at the mouth about this thing. And he grabbed me by the hair, and then-- and then-- and of course, I was stupid. I fought back. And this is-- was always my problem, you know. I always fought back. And, uh, so then he grabbed me by the throat and started choking me. So I mean, so very quickly, within the first two weeks, it was violent. And I figured, “Well, he just got out of prison. He’s just got to adjust a little bit,’ and it didn’t happen. And then it got to where I was-- I wanted to leave, or wanted him out of there. And he said, “You can’t leave me. I will go after your-- I’ll go after your family.” And know he would have. He was very capable. So I just became a prisoner for six, seven years.”

HORAN: George Reissfelder had an altogether different take on his life with Santos. Here he is in the 1986 documentary about wrongfully imprisoned men, “Exonerated: The Wrong Man.”

REISSFELDER: I was fortunate. I was finally able to move up to New Hampshire and get away from the rat race. I married a beautiful young girl. I’d love some day to own my own house. Maybe a couple more years down the line having a couple of little ones running around. That would be nice. That’s all I want.

HORAN: In one scene, Santos walks behind Reissfelder, her head down. She’s so young. She looks submissive. We never hear her voice.

Even as that documentary aired, Santos was trying to find the courage to leave Reissfelder. She finally managed it in 1989. The following year, her divorce would come through, and her ex-husband would join a cast of men named in connection to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum robbery.

RODOLICO: In the late 1980s, David Turner and George Reissfelder’s lives in crime converged. Carmello Merlino’s coke-dealing operation out of TRC Auto Electric was thriving. It was also being surveilled by a law enforcement operation that would take it down in 1991.

Robert Beauchamp says the TRC gang was flying too close to the sun. And from his perch in prison, he says, he knew it. So he offered Reissfelder, who still visited him in prison -- sometimes with David Turner in tow -- some advice.

BEAUCHAMP: Turner was interested in getting out of the drug business. And I kept telling Reissfelder the same thing: “Sooner or later you guys are gonna get popped because you’re dealing with the scum of the earth with junkies, and as soon as one of them gets busted, you know, they have diarrhea of the mouth. They’re gonna sell out their mothers to get out of jail. And they’re gonna say, ‘oh, he’s my supplier, Reissfelder.’ “

So that’s when we started talking about getting some crime insurance, figuring that that was going to happen sooner or later. So that’s when I suggested to him, “You know, if you could steal a few million dollars’ worth of art and just put it away, then if you get popped you can, you know, wheel and deal it at that point.” So he told Merlino and Turner about it, and they all thought that that was a fairly good idea. And I told him probably the best museums to rob would be university or college ones because they probably have the least amount of security. And so I guess Merlino basically -- and maybe Reissfelder and Turner to a far lesser extent -- started canvassing museums in the Boston area. And eventually Merlino decided on the Gardner.

RODOLICO: Did you get all that? Robert Beauchamp says the idea to steal paintings as crime insurance was his. Steal a painting. Get popped. Swap that painting for freedom. Easy.

Just don’t blame Beauchamp for the Gardner heist.

BEAUCHAMP: My only connections with the Gardner robbery is I had the generic idea they should steal art as crime insurance. I never ever mentioned the Gardner. And that’s it. I don’t want to take any blame for the Gardner.

RODOLICO: Over the years, Beauchamp has told many versions of his theory about the Gardner heist and the whereabouts of the paintings. Anthony Amore told us, his leads haven’t panned out. But the one detail that Beauchamp has never changed is who he says, did it: Carmello Merlino, David Turner and George Reissfelder.

BEAUCHAMP: When he came to see me after the Gardner robbery I just looked at him and shook my head and said, “Way too much, George.” Because I realized at that point-- I thought maybe they’d steal maybe up to five million dollars at the most, but when it turned out to be hundreds of millions, I said, “You know what type of investigation this is going to be compared to what it would have been?”


RODOLICO: Way too much, George. If Beauchamp had harbored any doubt at all about whether his old friend and lover had pulled off the Gardner heist, he didn’t once he saw the police sketches of the suspects.

BEAUCHAMP: And when I started seeing the FBI sketches of them I thought, those disguises weren’t really all that good. I mean, if you knew who it was you could just look at it and tell them it was who it was. Of course they didn’t have anything with Merlino because he waited outside the museum in a van, you know, and a walkie talkie keeping, you know, as a lookout.

KURKJIAN: How do you know that?

BEAUCHAMP: Reissfelder told me.

HORAN: In 2009, Anthony Amore, working with the Boston Herald newspaper, hired a forensic medical artist to redo the police sketches of the Gardner heist suspects. She worked solely off the description given to her by one of the guards who had seen both thieves.

AMORE: She’d never seen George Reissfelder in her life. And, um, when she unveiled these portraits to me, and she brought up one of the images -- the thief with the slimmer face -- I looked at it and said, “Wow, that’s George Reissfelder.” But let me be very clear. I’m not saying George Reissfelder committed the heist. I’m just saying the work of art looked exactly like George to the point where we had a police uniform photoshopped onto him, and you hold the two and he looks exactly like this composite work of art.

HORAN: George Reissfelder does resemble the police artist’s sketch of one of the suspects. Long narrow face. Prominent chin. Bowl haircut. Of all the men floated as possible suspects in the Gardner heist, no one is more of a dead ringer.

Anthony Amore showed the drawing to Janice Santos.

SANTOS: I said, “Yeah, it looks like George.” And I told Anthony right off, but I don’t-- the George that I knew it would never ever put on a cop uniform, so I don’t-- I really don’t know that he would have done this. And I don’t think he could have done it, but--

HORAN: Why do you think he couldn’t have done it?

SANTOS: The George that I knew wasn’t-- He never-- he couldn’t think on his feet. And you kind of have to think on your feet doing something like that. You have to be really planned and articulate. I don’t know that he could have pulled it off. Like I said, he could have changed, but the guy that I was married to could not have done that.

HORAN: But someone else could have. And when Janice Santos first learned about the heist, she had an immediate intuition about who that was.

SANTOS: I thought it was Mel.

HORAN: Yeah, so you hear the news and you think Carmello Merlino.

SANTOS: Yeah.

HORAN: Carmello Merlino. The very man who died in prison rather than give up anything he might have known about how the Gardner heist went down or where the paintings might have been.

HORAN: On March 11, 1991, almost the anniversary of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum robbery, George Reissfelder died. He was 51. The cause of death was a cocaine overdose.

But his story doesn’t end there.

RODOLICO: Some time after Reissfelder’s death, his brother, Richard Reissfelder, who has also since died, reached out to Anthony Amore. He’d heard his late brother’s name mentioned in connection with the Gardner heist, and he wanted to clear his brother’s name. Amore invited him to the museum and asked him to look at images of the stolen art.

AMORE: I always start with “[Christ In The] Storm On The Sea Of Galilee,” which is the one that’s most commonly recognized by people. And he had never seen it, and had never seen “The Concert.” And after you pass by those two it seems like an exercise in futility, but I went through the other 11 pieces. And the last one was “Chez Tortoni.” And when he saw it, he, I can only describe it as jumped in his chair and became very upset and told me -- I’m paraphrasing -- he said, “Anthony, I have to tell you. I’ve seen that painting in my brother’s apartment.” He was very upset. It was visceral. He was teary-eyed. And he said, “My brother did it. My brother did it. He had that painting.”

HORAN: And before then he was saying that his brother hadn’t done it, but it was seeing that painting that convinced him that his brother must have done it.

AMORE: Yes. And I believed him.

RODOLICO: Amore says Richard Reissfelder put him in touch with someone else who’d also seen Manet’s “Chez Tortoni” in George Reissfelder’s apartment. Amore reached out to that person, and after a long delay came the response: Yes, they’d seen it in the apartment.

AMORE: And I replied and said, “On a scale of one to 10, how certain are you?” And the person replied, “10.”

HORAN: A search of George Reissfelder’s apartment turned up a cache of stolen goods, including drugs and weapons. But no Manet. So, if it had ever been there, where did it go?

At a press conference five years ago, the Boston FBI said that they knew where the Gardner art was taken after it was stolen.

PRESS CONFERENCE: For the first time, we can say with a high degree of confidence, we’ve determined that in the years since the theft ...

HORAN: Next time, we follow the stolen art’s trail and tell you with a high degree of confidence what we think.


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Read the transcript of ‘Last Seen’ episode five ‘The Bobbys’
      
  OCTOBER 15, 2018

RICK DESLAURIERS: OK, good afternoon everybody. Great to have each of you here today. My name is Rick DesLauriers and I’m the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Boston division.

KELLY HORAN: On March 18, 2013 -- the 23rd anniversary of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum robbery -- the Boston FBI convened a press conference to discuss the case. In the previous two-plus decades, they’d never done anything like it. So in a room packed wall to wall with press, in air that must have felt taut with expectation, the then-head of the Boston FBI spoke.

DESLAURIERS: For the first time, we can say with a high degree of confidence we’ve determined that in the years since the theft the art was transported to Connecticut and to the Philadelphia area. For example, recently, we determined that approximately a decade ago some of the art was brought to Philadelphia where it was offered for sale.



HORAN: This was big. This was new. This was the FBI lifting the lid of secrecy on the Gardner case and inviting the public to peek inside. And what they showed us were the dots that they’d connected from Boston to Connecticut to Philadelphia.





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DESLAURIERS: However, we do not know where the art is currently located. And with a high degree of confidence we believe those responsible for the theft were members of a criminal organization with a base in the mid-Atlantic states and in New England.

HORAN: This was the United States government saying: We figured out who committed the biggest art heist in history. We know where the criminals took the art after they stole it. There was just one problem.

SHELLEY MURPHY: Look, when the FBI says, “We solved it. We know who did it.” It’s like, “No, you don’t!” Because you don’t have the paintings.

HORAN: Boston Globe reporter Shelley Murphy has covered organized crime in Boston since the 1980s.



MURPHY: You probably have stuff that we don’t know that makes you pretty sure you know who did it, but based on what’s been made public it doesn’t appear that there’s ever been confirmed sighting of any of the paintings.

JACK RODOLICO: When it comes to the investigation into the Gardner crime, the FBI has said so little. So when they came out and told this story, it felt like something major was about to happen.

DESLAURIERS: With today’s announcement we begin the final chapter.

RODOLICO: It’s been five years since that press conference. That’s a pretty long final chapter. And that public statement remains the most specific the Boston FBI has ever been about what happened to the stolen art. In the absence of any new statements from the Boston FBI, we’re going to follow the trail to scrutinize the story they told in 2013. Does it hold up? From WBUR in Boston and The Boston Globe, this is Last Seen. I’m Jack Rodolico.

HORAN: I’m Kelly Horan. This is Episode 5: “The Bobbys.” Our story begins in a state the FBI didn’t mention in the press conference: Maine. We’re starting there because two separate confidential sources told two separate investigators -- the case agent from the Boston FBI and the Gardner Museum’s Anthony Amore -- that that’s where the stolen art was once hidden -- presumably before it made its trip down the eastern seaboard, to Philadelphia. The sources didn’t just say Maine, they also gave an address -- the former summer home of a serial bank robber, cocaine dealer, murderer and long-time associate of the TRC Auto Electric gang: a man named Bobby Guarente.



ANTHONY AMORE: I remember going. It was very, very cold. It was desolate. There’s nothing around except snow. It looked like Fargo.

HORAN: Anthony Amore and the Boston FBI agent trekked up to the middle of Maine in February of 2010. Once at the long-abandoned house, they looked for the kind of hiding place both sources had described. They found it on the second floor.

AMORE: There was a small door, like half the size of a normal door, and you open it up and it looks like a place you can keep pots and pans, relatively large. And I flashed my light in there and you could see further in there was a hiding spot. Definitely could have fit our art back there. So it checked out.

HORAN: But when the FBI agent crawled inside, he found nothing. So, no paintings, but there definitely was a hiding place. And that piqued their interest in Bobby Guarente as a suspect for having at least possessed the Gardner Museum’s art. On their way out of town, Amore and the FBI agent stopped off at the home of Bobby Guarente’s widow, Elene.

AMORE: This small woman with short, dark hair opens the door. She was smoking.

HORAN: Elene Guarente said living with her late husband was a nightmare.

AMORE: And she told us this monster used to come home and beat her on the weekends. And I asked her, “Do you have any pictures of him,” because they’re hard to come by. And she said, “No, I threw them all away as soon as that son of a bitch died.”

HORAN: They weren’t planning on spending much time with Elene Guarente. But something happened after Amore asked if she’d ever heard of the Gardner Museum.

AMORE: She said, &quot;No.&quot; And we’re like, “Well, thank you, Elene, blah, blah, blah.” But I notice, I notice her hand shaking now. It starts to shake. And she starts crying. Like, seriously, crying. Not a tear. She’s crying, like, I have never experienced before. And she breaks down and says, “I have heard of the museum. My Bobby had those paintings.”

HORAN: Elene Guarente claimed her Bobby had two of the Gardner paintings. When Amore asked what the paintings looked like, she described an image of a woman sitting down, seen in profile. In two of the paintings stolen from the Gardner -- “The Concert” by Vermeer and “A Lady and Gentleman in Black” by Rembrandt -- there is a woman sitting, in profile.

AMORE: She told us a story about when Bobby got out of jail for the last time that they went to Portland, Maine. And met with a friend of Bobby’s and his wife and they had dinner at a Howard Johnson’s up there.

HORAN: Elene Guarente said that during that dinner in 2003, her husband and this other guy walked out to the parking lot during the meal before coming back inside.

AMORE: And then on the ride home, he told her you can stop worrying. I got rid of those paintings. And it’s then she understood that he gave those paintings to the guy they were at dinner with.

HORAN: Whom did Bobby and Elene Guarente have dinner with? Whom did Bobby Guarente allegedly give the paintings to?

AMORE: She said, “I know it. It’s at the tip of my tongue. He’s a gambler.” She was trying to remember -- I think she said he cooked.

HORAN: Elene Guarente paged through an old address book and found the name: Bobby Gentile. He had a nickname: The Cook.

AMORE: We walked out of the apartment, and we slowly and calmly walked to the car. And as soon as we noticed we were out of sight we looked at each other, our eyes opened wide, and we high-fived and we’d never done that before. I remember him saying to me, “Can you believe it? Can you believe it?” Like we finally had a big break in the case.

RODOLICO: This was 20 years after the Gardner heist. It had taken that long to get a high five. Anthony Amore and his FBI counterpart weren’t leaving Maine with the paintings, but they were leaving with two names that would prove to be compelling suspects in the trafficking of the Gardner art: two gangsters named Bobby. In the case of Bobby Guarente, it validated investigators’ long, hard look at the TRC Auto Electric gang, because Bobby Guarente had been close to several members. Guarente was also connected to Bobby Gentile, aka The Cook. And it was that connection -- these two Bobbys -- that opened a new avenue of investigation, one that led to Connecticut.

RYAN MCGUIGAN: I asked one person in the criminal underworld who I had, I guess, the pleasure of knowing, and his quote to me was, “Bobby Gentile, best damn sausage and peppers I ever had.” Hahaha. And the second I heard that I’m like, he’s really The Cook.

RODOLICO: This is Ryan McGuigan, Gentile’s defense attorney. The FBI never mentioned Gentile by name at its press conference, but McGuigan says, anytime the FBI says Connecticut, they mean Gentile.

MCGUIGAN: I mean, they could’ve just said it went from Boston to Philadelphia, but they didn’t. They said it went through Connecticut.

RODOLICO: The FBI went from Maine to Gentile’s home in Manchester, Connecticut, and confronted him. Did Bobby Guarente give him the stolen art in a Maine parking lot seven years earlier?

MCGUIGAN: He remembers distinctly the dinner because his wife ordered the double lobsters, which was the most expensive thing on the menu. And you’ve met my client so you know that he’s a bit parsimonious when it comes to paying for other people’s stuff, so he was a bit miffed by that. But he certainly doesn’t acknowledge receiving two very, very large paintings in the trunk of his car.

RODOLICO: Bobby Gentile had a criminal record stretching back to 1956. McGuigan says the FBI had no proof that Gentile had received the paintings in that Maine parking lot, so they asked for his help finding them. They gave him a letter of immunity from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and reminded him he would be eligible for a $5 million reward from the museum.

MCGUIGAN: They asked him a lot of questions. He provided answers to the questions as best he could. I’m sure that they would claim that he was not as forthright as he should have been.

RODOLICO: He wasn’t, according to federal prosecutors. They say Gentile flunked a lie detector test and lied to a grand jury. So, with no cooperation from Gentile, the FBI changed tactics. This time they sent in an informant, wearing a wire. And Gentile started talking -- telling stories. He claimed the other Bobby, Bobby Guarente, masterminded the heist. He hinted that he knew where the art was. This is all according to what prosecutors would later say in court. Our colleague from The Boston Globe, Steve Kurkjian, says these secret recordings must have had FBI agents on the edge of their seats. Then, one day in 2012...

STEPHEN KURKJIAN: The informant sees a handful of Percocets on the table and he reaches over and says, “Can I take these?” And Gentile says, “Yeah, they’re no good. My back is -- that doesn’t relieve my back pain.” But that’s a crime.

RODOLICO: The FBI swooped in and arrested him for distributing his prescription medication - - hoping the prospect of jail time would get him to talk.

KURKJIAN: What they’re doing is upping the ante, making it more crucial that he cooperate in their investigation. “When did you have the paintings, how did you get them, and where are they now? What did you do with them?” If he doesn’t cooperate then he’s gonna have to face these criminal charges.

NEWS CLIP: Teams of law enforcement agents have swarmed the home of a reputed mobster.

HORAN: After Gentile’s arrest, federal agents searched his Connecticut house, looking for the art.

NEWS CLIP: Good afternoon, Keith. You can see the federal agents. They’re working under that canopy -- a sort of command center they’ve set up right in the driveway. This is a mystery.

HORAN: Here’s what the TV crews could see: streams of men, some in dark suits, others in white coveralls, walking in and out of a house on a leafy suburban street.

NEWS CLIP: The federal agents swarming this modest ranch house early this morning. It’s the home of 75-year-old Robert Gentile.

HORAN: From the street, here’s what the TV cameras couldn’t capture: federal agents in Gentile’s basement uncovering a small arsenal, ammunition, guns, silencers, explosives and lots of cash. And remember, the Gardner thieves conned their way into the museum by dressing up as cops. Once inside, they handcuffed the guards in the basement. While searching Gentile’s house, FBI agents also found police caps -- and handcuffs. Steve Kurkjian says they found something else in that basement, too.

KURKJIAN: They came up with one sheet of paper that listed all the 13 pieces of art that had been stolen from the museum and what each piece would get on the black market. HORAN: What was that? A shopping list? A receipt? Whatever it was, it was folded inside a 22- year-old copy of the Boston Herald, the first edition published with news that the Gardner had been looted. That piece of paper convinced investigators they needed to keep looking. Because their search warrant didn’t extend to the shed out back, they got another one. Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Brian Kelly was there during the search.

BRIAN KELLY: And the FBI was looking around and they found a secret compartment beneath the shed. And everyone got real quiet like, “Uh oh, you know, this is where they may be buried.” They had to move a big piece of equipment, which exposed the trap door, and they opened the trapdoor. And we’re all looking and it looks like they were pulling up a giant, you know, container. One of those plastic containers, I don’t know if it’s Tupperware or what it’s called. And like, “Here it is, here it is.” And empty. Nothin’. We thought we had something, and we got nothin’.

HORAN: No paintings. But evidence that suggested that Gentile knew more about the stolen Gardner art than he was admitting. And the feds had a slew of new charges against him. Gentile was a felon distributing narcotics and hiding weapons in his home.

KURKJIAN: And even though he’s in jail and he’s still refusing to give them any palpable assistance, they think they’ve found the right person.

RODOLICO: So now is a good time to remind you that this is what precipitated the FBI’s press conference. Everything seemed to point to this one guy -- 76-year-old mobster Bobby Gentile who had recently undergone quadruple bypass surgery and was living a seemingly quiet life with his wife of 50 years. As the cameras clicked at that press conference in Boston, Gentile sat in jail, waiting to be sentenced on all these charges. For the FBI to stand at a podium and tell the world this story, they must have been confident they had their man. So what did Gentile do? He did not return the art and collect a hefty retirement. He did not share information about the art in exchange for a get-out-of-jail-free card. He pled guilty. Sentenced to two and half years, he chose time over talking, and walked out a free man.

HORAN: When Bobby Gentile was released from prison, one of the first people to go see him was Steve Kurkjian.

KURKJIAN: So he does get out of jail in late 2013 and he is smokingly angry that he had fallen for the setup that the FBI had entrapped him in.

GENTILE: It’s a curse. It’s a curse. I mean, it’s like a dream. I can’t believe this happened to me, ruined my f-----’ life. Ruined my f-----’ life. My wife’s home here for two years by herself with two broken arms, nobody to take care of her.

HORAN: Gentile told Steve that the FBI was pressuring the wrong guy.

GENTILE: How can they squeeze me? I don’t know nothing. You know what I mean? Never seen the paintings. Never did nothing to the paintings. Never even talked about the paintings.

HORAN: But Bobby Gentile himself had been caught on secret recordings talking about “the pictures,” as he used to called them. He remembered that meal in Maine with Bobby and Elene Guarente. He bragged about being a made member of the Philadelphia mob. Gentile also told Steve that he had not only driven to Philadelphia -- he’d done so with another mobster, who also happened to be named Bobby.

GENTILE: Back and forth they were doing, they were booking. They were booking. They&#39;d go down, bring the money if you want it. So I met a couple of trips to help them drive back and forth.

KURKJIAN: To Philadelphia?

GENTILE: Yeah. There was no cocaine. It was all about collecting money from the bookmakers. HORAN: Maybe Gentile tried to traffic the stolen Gardner art on one of those trips to Philly. In 2013, that appears to have been the FBI’s best guess.

RODOLICO: If the Gardner art did surface in Philadelphia around 2003, some key people there would have known about it.

GEORGE ANASTASIA: This is the heart of South Philadelphia. That’s where we are.

RODOLICO: Meet George Anastasia. He’s covered organized crime in Philadelphia for 40 years. He gave me a tour of the Italian market district -- the fish on ice, the awnings, the fruit piled high.

ANASATASIA: And there was one infamous attempted hit, this block or I think the next block. There’s a guy who was sitting on a bench eating some raw clams on a half shell and it was a drive-by shooting.

RODOLICO: This neighborhood was the mafia hotbed for generations. And Anastasia knew all the mob families. He finds it hard to believe those mobsters would have known how to sell any masterpieces, let alone Rembrandts. Just consider the time they got their hands on a Lamborghini.

ANASTASIA: These guys kept it in a garage for a while, then they got a tip the FBI was onto them. They tried to move the Lamborghini. They got an Avis rent-a-truck. But it didn’t have lifts, or a ramp, so they used two wooden planks to try to drive the Lamborghini onto the truck. It fell off the planks. They wrecked the car. I mean, if they can’t deal with a Lamborghini, how are they going to deal with a Degas, Manet, or a Rembrandt? I don’t know. It’s almost dangerous to think about what might have happened to this precious stuff.

BARRY GROSS: The Philadelphia La Cosa Nostra has never been confused with a sophisticated group. It used to be joked that they couldn’t go north of Broad Street -- they would be lost.

RODOLICO: A little north of Broad Street, I met Barry Gross, a retired mob prosecutor. Gross’s career in law enforcement started seven years before the Gardner heist and ended four years after the art allegedly surfaced in Philadelphia. Here’s the former head of the Boston FBI at that press conference again.

DESLAURIERS: Recently, we determined that approximately a decade ago some of the art was brought to Philadelphia where it was offered for sale.

RODOLICO: So what does Gross think? Was the art in his city when the Boston FBI said it was? GROSS: Interesting. Uhm. I mean, they really think if they... Number one, I’m unaware… You know, I was in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section from 1983 -- from February 1983 to the end of January 2007. So that’s 24 years. I prosecuted dozens of made members, four mob bosses, capos, everything. I am not aware. I’m unaware of this. Not a word. Never have heard any of this.

RODOLICO: Wait, wait, not a word of what?

GROSS: Of anything about this stolen art.

RODOLICO: If anyone in the Philadelphia mob knew anything about the Gardner art, Barry Gross says he would have known about it too. Mobsters facing prosecution didn’t hesitate to rat out other gangsters in order to knock years off their prison time.

GROSS: You know, your attorney can make an argument, “Well he cooperated. He testified and helped convict, you know, on two murders, six extortions, and, by the way, judge, the Isabella Gardner Museum paintings.” I mean, that’s international news.

JACK: And is that what leads you to believe that if there was even mentioning of these paintings here that you feel like you would have heard about it.

GROSS: Yes. I feel I would have heard about it, or one of my colleagues and we all worked very closely.

RODOLICO: While we were in Philadelphia, we also spoke with a former FBI agent and a former federal prosecutor, neither of whom believed the Boston FBI’s premise about where the paintings ended up. So if the Bobbys had them, what’d they do with them? Finding a cold trail in Philadelphia, we return to the FBI’s person of interest in Connecticut, Bobby Gentile. After he was released from prison, the FBI sent in more informants to try to set him up again.

KURKJIAN: And he falls for it.

RODOLICO: Again.

KURKJIAN: Again.

HORAN: In 2015, the FBI arrested Gentile again, this time for selling a gun to a felon, who happened to be the second informant to ensnare him.

MCGUIGAN: I believe with 100 percent -- well, 99.9 percent, like Ivory Soap surety -- that the two informants were paid very well by the FBI. And they wanted the gravy train to continue, so they would tell them anything. So all you’re doing is you’re hearing back the information that you’re giving, and then you’re saying, “Aha! It’;s confirmed what I believe.” Well no, it’s not confirmed, you ding-dong. You just told the guy that, and he told you back the same information. It’s just a hall of echoes.

HORAN: In the months before the arrest, federal prosecutors say they got Gentile on tape again insinuating he knew where the art was. Gentile’s attorney, Ryan McGuigan, has listened to some of those undercover recordings. He claims Gentile never said anything incriminating about the art and that in at least one instance, the FBI’s transcript of the tapes doesn’t match the tape recordings. Still, there have been many times when McGuigan has been frustrated with his client.

MCGUIGAN: You know how many times I’ve tried to beat him over the head, and I’ve tried to cajole him, I’ve tried to threaten him, everything I’ve tried -- starting with the premise that, you know what, he might know where these paintings are, and he’s just, for some reason the FBI is right and I’m wrong, and he’s a sociopath, and he thinks that this is all funny, and he’s playing a game.

HORAN: Steve Kurkjian has the same questions about Gentile. But he says just because the guy talks about the paintings doesn’t mean he knows anything about them.

KURKJIAN: I think he said more than once that he’s a victim of his own con. And his own con being, when in the right company, which are people he wants to impress. He includes this allure that he does have access to the paintings.

HORAN: Remember, for criminals who have only ever known the wrong side of the law, there’s an almost irresistible urge to connect themselves to a big, headline-grabbing crime. Maybe that’s all Gentile was doing -- posturing.

KURKJIAN: Whom are you to believe? Is this Bobby, the con man, talking? Or does Bobby really have a deeper story of his involvement with the Gardner paintings?

RODOLICO: So you can see how the FBI would want to continue this dance with him because he keeps saying things that...

KURKJIAN: ...gives anyone, anybody reasonable, the sense that he really does have access to the paintings.

AMORE: What I believe is that Bobby Gentile knows something about our paintings and will not tell us.

HORAN: The Gardner’s Anthony Amore doesn’t buy that Gentile doesn’t know anything.

AMORE: If tomorrow there’s a knock at the door at the museum and the Japanese Yakuza has our paintings, I would say, “How do you know Bobby Gentile?” I’ve never in my life conversed with someone so willing to lie about things that were demonstrably true than him. He knows something and he will not tell us.

HORAN: Ryan McGuigan knows his client made it easy for the government by repeatedly committing crimes they could hold over him. But he asks: What has that leverage gotten the government? Twice, Gentile received prison sentences that could have ensured he died behind bars. Both times, he didn’t give up any information about the stolen art. These are the same tactics -- with the same outcome -- that the Boston FBI used on the TRC Auto Electric gang, and it has to make you wonder: Do these guys know something or not? Is there just a whole class of criminal who would rather serve time, and even die in prison, than cooperate with the feds? McGuigan says there was this one moment -- more than any other -- that convinced him that, in spite of the FBI’s belief that Gentile knows something, he’s not their guy. In September 2016, McGuigan got a call from a prison hospital in North Carolina. His client was on his deathbed. He flew from Connecticut to be by Gentile’s side.

MCGUIGAN: And I looked up and his eyes were looking right at me. And he said, “It’s you. It’s you. It’s you. It’s my lawyer.” And he kept saying, “I can’t die here. I can’t die here. I can’t die here.” And I told him, I don’t know if it was coldly or just matter of factly, that, “You’re gonna die.” And I told him that, “If you tell me where the paintings are, or anything more about the paintings that I need to know, I can guarantee you that I will have you on a medevac plane and you can die in your bed this very night with your wife. Forget about 5 million bucks, forget about 10 million bucks. Forget about anything. At the end of your life, what is the thing that’s most important?” And he had tears coming down both the sides of his face. And he said, “But there ain’t no paintings.” And I looked at a defeated man, in the face of a defeated man. After that day I’ve never entertained the thought that that man has any idea where the paintings are because that day any human being would tell you.

HORAN: Gentile survived that ordeal. He’ll be 82 when he gets out of prison late this year.

RODOLICO: It’s been five years since the Boston FBI opened “the final chapter” of their investigation into the Gardner heist. 
Five years since the press conference when the lead authority on the case claimed the stolen art went from Boston to Connecticut to Philadelphia. 
That remains the only explanation the FBI has ever offered about what happened to upwards of $500 million worth of art. 
And it seems that what the FBI said doesn’t hold up. The FBI has declined to talk to us, but we’re left wondering: 
Do they still think that story is true? What other leads are they following that don’t involve an old and lying gangster in Connecticut? 
In a story featuring so many unreliable narrators, is the FBI one of them?

HORAN: So we continue to look for other plausible explanations about what might have happened to the art. And while we were in Philadelphia, we sat down with a former FBI agent. A retired art recovery expert who had a 
 tale to tell about the Gardner’s lost masterpieces. And his story wasn’t about Italian-American mobsters from the Eastern seaboard.

Next time: French gangsters in Miami, an undercover operation on a yacht and allegations of misconduct against the Boston FBI.

Episode  666666666666 
Transcript:
KELLY HORAN: It’s not everybody who can recover stolen art. Having a tolerance for con men is helpful, because you’ll be spending a lot of time with them. You need to have patience — a lot of it — because these things take time. And you have to have both a knack for building trust and a comfort with destroying it.

BOB WITTMAN: You know, in every operation that an agent goes undercover his main goal is to befriend and then betray. That's the whole point.

HORAN: This is retired FBI art recovery agent Bob Wittman. He spent his entire career based in the Philadelphia bureau — about two decades — befriending and betraying as a job description. It was all in the name of recovering hot art. By his reckoning, Wittman has gotten back some $300 million worth of art and cultural property: Geronimo’s eagle feather headdress, a ring with a lock of George Washington’s hair in it and precious artifacts thought to be lost forever.

WITTMAN: Including documents such as an original copy of the Bill of Rights that was stolen by a Union trooper in 1865 from the state of North Carolina.

HORAN: But the most valuable — and elusive — art that Wittman says he was this close to recovering, was stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990.

JACK RODOLICO: Wittman’s account of how those masterpieces slipped away offers a master class in how to plot to get stolen art back, and also how to blow it entirely. And in a tale with roadblocks to spare, was the Boston FBI one of them. Did they sabotage Bob Wittman’s efforts to recover the Gardner art?

HORAN: From WBUR Boston and The Boston Globe, this is Last Seen. I’m Kelly Horan.

RODOLICO: And I’m Jack Rodolico. This is Episode 6: "Befriend and Betray."

Our story begins in 2006 with Bob Wittman, undercover, befriending a pair of French gangsters with ties to a murderous Corsican gang.

WITTMAN: The actual information was that they had paintings that were stolen two decades ago from a museum in the United States. And one of the paintings was a Vermeer and the other was a Rembrandt.

View The Stolen Artwork
Johannes Vermeer's &quot;The Concert," painted between 1663-1666. Oil on canvas, 72.5 x 64.7 cm (28 9/16 x 25 1/2 in.) canvas. (Courtesy Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum)
‘The Concert,' By Johannes Vermeer
Last SeenSep 15, 2018
‘A Lady And Gentleman In Black,’ By Rembrandt Van Rijn
Last SeenSep 15, 2018
‘Christ In The Storm On The Sea Of Galilee,’ By Rembrandt Van Rijn
Last SeenSep 15, 2018
‘Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man,’ By Rembrandt Van Rijn
Last SeenSep 15, 2018
RODOLICO: The Vermeer really piqued Wittman’s interest because at the time, there was only one missing: "The Concert." In Miami, Wittman adopted the persona of a shady art dealer in the market for stolen masterpieces. He called himself Bob Clay. And he began to spend a lot of time with two Frenchmen. One was named Sunny. The other, Lorenz.

WITTMAN: Lorenz was a French national who was living in Miami. He had done well in the real estate business. Drove a Rolls-Royce. He had his hair well-coiffed. He went and got facials. He had his nails done on a regular basis. Sunny was the exact opposite. Sunny was short, very squat, all muscle from the neck to the waist, but he had a big waist. He was heavy. He had a haircut, uh, what they call those — the long in the back and short in the front?

RODOLICO: A mullet?

WITTMAN: Mullet, yeah.

RODOLICO: Both men — Lorenz, well-coiffed, and Sunny, rocking a mullet — had serious criminal records back in France. Sunny’s rap sheet included charges like theft, drug trafficking, aggravated assault. Lorenz was allegedly on the run from charges for financial fraud.

WITTMAN: In the end we found that Lorenz was basically more like a mob accountant, whereas Sunny was more like the hired muscle.

RODOLICO: Wittman, posing as Bob Clay, spent months cultivating their trust. As he did, he says he grew increasingly persuaded that Sunny and Lorenz held the keys to getting the stolen paintings out of France, where they were allegedly held in the hands of that Corsican gang.

HORAN: It was a gambit that could have cost all of them their lives. Those Corsicans were stone cold killers. In order for his Operation Masterpiece, as the FBI called it, to succeed, Wittman had to secure Sunny and Lorenz’s unwavering trust.

One day, the three men met in a Miami cafe.

WITTMAN: And Sunny said, "OK, we're going to do this operation, but we're going to have to set this up in a triangle." And he took a little piece of tissue, or a napkin, and with a pen he wrote a triangle, and he said, "This is a closed triangle. It’s just three of us. This is a Triangle of Trust. If anything happens, we'll know it's one of us was the informant."

HORAN: As Sunny drew his Triangle of Trust, he wrote each man’s initials in each corner — B, L and S: Bob, Lorenz, Sunny. Three strangers pledging their trust to each other and to one goal, an art sale. But not just any art sale, a $30 million black market swap of cash for two stolen masterpieces. Wittman and other former federal officials we spoke with say this was the best lead the FBI ever had in the Gardner case. They also say that Bob Wittman was, hands down, the best, the only, man for the job. No one else had his background, his eye or his expertise.

RODOLICO: And Wittman says he's been an art lover since he was a kid. He grew up in Baltimore. And his parents met during the Korean War, when his dad was stationed on an air force base in Japan.

WITTMAN: That's where he met my mother, married my mother who was Japanese, working on the base, and he fell in love with all things Japanese at that point. And I grew up around these antiques. When other people were throwing footballs in the house, I was looking at Japanese Satsuma, and Kutani ceramics, and looking at Ukiyo-e prints.

RODOLICO: After the war, his dad opened three antique stores. And it was in these stores that Wittman learned how to buy and sell art — skills that would later serve him well. He started at the FBI's Philadelphia office in 1988. Back then, there wasn’t really a job designed for an aspiring art cop.

WITTMAN: Art theft back in 1988 was considered the same as any type of property crime. It didn't matter if it was a Chevrolet or a Monet. It was the same. So there was no professionalism involved in how to do an art theft investigation in 1988 when I started.

RODOLICO: Over time, Wittman gravitated to cases that spoke to his love of art and antiquities. He linked up with Assistant U.S. Attorney Bob Goldman, who helped him find legal avenues to pursue cases of stolen art. Goldman says Wittman solved bigger and bigger art crimes because he was so smooth undercover.

GOLDMAN: Even knowing he’s an FBI agent, I would buy heroin from him 'cause he was able to sweet talk you and he did it with dignity. He used to keep pictures of some of the guys that he used to arrest. And he had pictures of himself and the guys smiling and shaking hands at the time of the arrest. I mean they actually liked him.

HORAN: One of Wittman’s bosses Eric Ives, a retired FBI supervisor, says Wittman’s successes helped convince the FBI that they should be doing more to solve art crimes.

IVES: Bob Wittman, in a football analogy, was the quarterback. He had the experience and expertise and, unusual to many programs, Bob not only had the art expertise, but he also was an undercover agent. So it was a rare opportunity for us to take advantage of his skill set. And so he was the thinker or the creator of the idea to create an Art Crime Team.

HORAN: Wittman’s work relied on a basic truism of art crime: Stealing the stuff is easy. Selling it is the hard part.

WITTMAN: These individuals are not always well-versed in the business of art. If they were they wouldn't have stolen what they stole. I mean, there's no way you're going to steal a Rembrandt from the Swedish National Museum and be able to sell it on any kind of market.

HORAN: Bob Wittman would know. He’s the one who recovered that $35 million Rembrandt. He bought it in a dingy, Danish hotel room in 2005 from an Iraqi criminal, who was promptly arrested after the sale. When Wittman went undercover, he never wore disguises. He didn’t use fake accents. He had a rule.

WITTMAN: Try to keep everything as true as possible. In other words, you don't have to remember the truth. So remembering lies is much more difficult than just remembering the truth.

HORAN: Wittman might have been posing as a shady dealer, but he told the truth about where he grew up, how many kids he had and what kind of art he liked. And he always used his first name, ensuring he would react naturally. Like the time he met a criminal carrying a stolen item in an airport.

WITTMAN: And as we walked through the airport there was someone there who actually knew me, a neighbor, and who said, "Hello, Bob." And it was perfect. So my response was, "Hey, how are you doing, Jeff?" And we kept walking.

RODOLICO: Does an unplanned moment like that, sort of, deepen your credibility in a criminal’s mind, right, when they see you sorta being vouched for?

WITTMAN: That's a possibility, but I can tell you for a fact: Moments like that are terrifying, and they make your rear end slam shut because of the, the moment that you might be found out.

HORAN: One of those moments came when Wittman watched in horror as some fellow undercover FBI agents went too far.

RODOLICO: Talk about the strawberry eating contest.

WITTMAN: Nah, I don't want to talk about that.

RODOLICO: Really? Even though it's in the book and you've talked about it already?

WITTMAN: Eh, I don’t like talking about that. Yeah, I don't want to talk about strawberries.

HORAN: Wittman doesn’t want to talk about the strawberry incident, but we can because he wrote about it in his memoir.

In 2007 the FBI rented a yacht in Miami for a party — the kind of party a black market art dealer like Wittman’s alias Bob Clay might attend. Other than the criminals Sunny and Lorenz, everybody on the yacht was FBI — the Captain, Colombian drug dealers and their bikini clad wives. All agents. Wittman haggled with a fake drug lord over the price of some presumably stolen paintings — in fact they were FBI stock forgeries of works by Salvador Dalí and Georgia O’Keeffe. All of this was for the benefit of Sunny and Lorenz so they could see Wittman, aka Bob Clay, in action.

Wittman played his role, but he says the other agents on the yacht over-acted theirs. The drug dealer wives suggested a strawberry eating contest. Then, to Wittman’s dismay, they got down on their knees and started sucking whipped cream off the strawberries, and they designated Sunny the judge. Wittman wrote, “It didn’t play right — the chubby, lowest-ranking guy in our gang getting the royal treatment. Sunny fidgeted uncomfortably. Once again, our investigation was veering dangerously off course.”

Wittman thought that was bad enough. What came next threatened to derail the entire operation.

RODOLICO: So, quick recap: Bob Wittman, posing as Bob Clay, the kind of art dealer undaunted by the prospect of handling some of the world’s most famous stolen paintings, was in Miami, trying to buy them. The more time Wittman spent with Sunny, who represented the Corsican sellers, and Lorenz, who was brokering the deal, the more Wittman became convinced that they really did have two of the Gardner Museum’s most prized stolen treasures: "The Concert," by Vermeer, and Rembrandt’s only seascape, "Storm On The Sea of Galilee."

WITTMAN: You know, throughout my career it's been my, my, I guess job, my training, my experience to identify individuals, to see if they're lying. Identify if what they're saying is true. And for Sunny my radar was up in the beginning, of course. But, I believed what he was saying because he was basically saying what he had heard. He was parroting what he was told. He wasn't actually, you know, puffing. He didn't say he had 50 paintings. He said he had two — one by Rembrandt, one by Vermeer.

RODOLICO: He offered $30 million for the paintings. On behalf of the Corsican gang, Sunny accepted, and then informed Wittman the sale would take place in southern France. French and American law enforcement got to work; they met in an art museum in Paris to devise an undercover operation in France. On one side of the table, the French. On the other side, the Americans.

WITTMAN: And as we discussed this operation the French were starting to buy in.

RODOLICO: As it has since the day of the heist, March 18, 1990, the FBI’s Boston Field Office controlled the Gardner investigation. And so agents from Boston were at the meeting in Paris, too. Wittman remembers one in particular — an agent he describes as the head of Boston’s bank robbery and violent crime squad. From now on we’ll refer to him as the Boston supervisor. Wittman says the meeting took an awkward turn when the Boston supervisor made an outlandish demand.

WITTMAN: He wanted to carry a gun in France, which is not allowed.

RODOLICO: He was on foreign soil, insisting that when the undercover sale went down, he and his agents be armed.

WITTMAN: So here he is representing the United States, in a very sensitive, possible undercover operation to recover some of the largest, valuable objects, ever stolen in the United States, and he's demanding, basically, to be able to do things that he can't do.

RODOLICO: Wittman says the Boston supervisor didn’t seem to understand that most French police don’t even carry guns. More than that, he seemed to be trying to throw his weight around in another country because he was in charge of the case.

WITTMAN: Which really was kind of an embarrassment. That set the tone for the rest of the investigation as to his experience and ability in these types of cases.

RODOLICO: Wittman will talk about this guy, but he won’t name him. Others we spoke with who have knowledge of Operation Masterpiece won't name him either. The Boston FBI has refused our requests for an interview, so we can’t confirm his identity. If there were an impasse over who would go undercover — Americans or French agents — everyone involved in the negotiations seemed to agree on one thing: This lead was worth pursuing.

WITTMAN: During that period of time, too, the French National Police, they had wiretaps on phones that Sunny was using. And they heard Sunny talking on the wiretaps about — in code about the Vermeer and the Rembrandt.

RODOLICO: Do you remember what the code was?

WITTMAN: He was talking about apartments, buying apartments on Vermeer Street and Rembrandt Street.

HORAN: The push and pull between the French authorities and the FBI in Boston and Philadelphia aside, Wittman’s triangle of trust remained intact. Even as his role in a planned sting was in question, Wittman never lost momentum with Sunny and Lorenz. They set a date for the sale of the Vermeer and the Rembrandt.

After 16 years, there was at last a plan in place to recover the stolen Gardner art. At least some of it. But then, Wittman says, the Boston supervisor canceled it, citing vague security reasons. Next, he told Wittman that he was thinking of pulling him off the case entirely, replacing him with an agent from Boston.

Why would the Boston supervisor do this, if Wittman was the art recovery guy at the FBI, and if he had cultivated sources who had gotten him this close to what promised to be a recovery of the stolen art, why would he undercut the whole thing?

DAVE HALL: It was a high-profile case where there was a lot of, you know, potential for glory. Individual glory. And that’s when people in the government are at their worst. The job isn’t to get into the newspaper.

HORAN: This is Dave Hall. At the time of Operation Masterpiece, he was the prosecutor assigned to the FBI’s Art Crime Team. Hall says it wasn’t just Boston’s wanting to control the case. It was about something that’s not supposed to be a factor, but totally is.

HALL: How can personal glory trump your duty? The hypocrisy and the, you know really the failure to live up to a sacred oath makes this kind of problem particularly bad. It's the kind of conduct that should really be avoided at all costs.

RODOLICO: What exactly is the cost?

HALL: Unsolved crime.

HORAN: About six months into Operation Masterpiece, something else happened that would mark a low point in Bob Wittman’s FBI career. It’s something he and his colleagues are still reluctant to talk about. It’s almost mundane, except that it’s the office equivalent of a back stab. The knife in Wittman’s back was a memo. It was written by the Boston supervisor and sent to FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. It also went to Wittman’s old boss, Eric Ives.

IVES: And the memo that was written about Bob Wittman was not accurate. I mean, I don't want to get into the specifics of the memo, but, you know, we rely on our integrity in the FBI and so it goes to the heart of integrity.

HORAN: Our colleague from The Boston Globe, Steve Kurkjian, says the Boston supervisor’s memo was designed to inflict maximum damage on Wittman.

KURKJIAN: This kind of memo would have been so dangerous, so destructive, to the investigation. All he had to do was send it. He knew what he was doing. It was gonna to sabotage it and it served its purpose.

RODOLICO: So, what did this memo say? It charged that Wittman was working this Gardner lead because he wanted to collect the reward offered by the museum.

WITTMAN: Saying that I was involved in the case 'cause I wanted to try to somehow claim the reward.

RODOLICO: So you're saying that the Boston office claimed to the D.C. office that you, Bob Wittman, were trying to get $5 million — the $5 million from the Gardner Museum. What did you think?

WITTMAN: It was disgusting and frustrating.

RODOLICO: As an FBI agent working the case, he wasn’t even eligible for the Gardner’s reward. More to the point, Wittman says the memo was slanderous.

How was that memo received?

WITTMAN: Ultimately, it was withdrawn. So that tells you how it was received because they wouldn't have withdrawn it if it had been accepted. It was unacceptable.

RODOLICO: Wittman says the Boston supervisor was told to withdraw the memo — by headquarters. But its damage was done.

HORAN: This is a story that makes Bob Wittman look like both a victim and a hero. It’s a story that has served him well — he’s sold a lot of books. He’s given paid talks. And he’s enjoyed an international profile as an art crime expert. But he’s essentially accusing the Boston FBI of misconduct. And the Boston FBI won’t talk to us. So we turned to Anthony Amore, who’s as close to the Boston FBI as we can get. Amore is at pains to say that he respects Wittman, that the man’s record speaks for itself. But, when it comes to his lead with the French gangsters...

AMORE: They never produced one shred, not one tiny iota of evidence that they had our art other than talk. Take away the intrigue of Corsica, take away the intrigue of an undercover operation and international goings on, and then think to yourself: But they never produced anything ever that tells us they had the Gardner art. So it's an interesting story, but that's where it ends. I don't believe they were there.

HORAN: Amore was only a year into his job as the head of security at the Gardner Museum when Wittman was a senior investigator undercover in Miami. But today it’s Amore’s job to find the Gardner art. So it says something that he’s not poking around in southern France looking for it. But in the absence of conclusive evidence from the Boston FBI or anyone else, this story hinges on Wittman’s track record and his credibility. And to the people who know him best, like former prosecutor Dave Hall, if Bob Wittman says it, they believe it.

HALL: No one in the FBI had his experience as an undercover in the, you know, art and cultural property space. And nobody since. You know, he was one of a kind. So he was a really, really precious resource at this moment in time in this really important case.

HORAN: Wittman says, despite how close he was to the gangsters Sunny and Lorenz, and despite how solid the intelligence was, after the memo and the interference from the Boston supervisor, he withdrew from Operation Masterpiece. He said he had to.

RODOLICO: I mean it also sounds like you have to be able to trust your life in the hands of the supervisor in Boston as well as others. Did you?

WITTMAN: No! These departments and these agents weren't gonna have my back on this, so because of this tension we had to let the Gardner paintings go.

RODOLICO: You had to let the Gardner paintings go?

WITTMAN: Let 'em go.

RODOLICO: Wittman was off the case, but Operation Masterpiece continued without him. And the triangle of trust remained. Or so Sunny and Lorenz thought. They had no idea why their American buyer Bob Clay had vanished. They kept reaching out to him, but Wittman kept his distance until …

WITTMAN: Sunny came up with information about two paintings that were stolen in Paris. These two paintings were Picassos that were stolen from the apartment of Picasso's granddaughter.

RODOLICO: Sunny and Lorenz wanted to sell those Picassos to Bob Clay. Wittman passed the tip to French police, who set up a sting in France, arrested the thieves and got the paintings back.

WITTMAN: Total value of those two paintings was about $65 million. That was very good for the French national police. It wasn't so good for us, because at that point the information was that somehow they were turned in by the individuals in Miami. In other words, how were these guys set up? And the question was, who set them up? And the only other outsider in Miami was me. The thought there was that I was some kind of informant and that I should be killed.

RODOLICO: Two French hitmen flew to Miami and threatened to kill Lorenz. And they wanted to talk to the American. Wittman still felt himself beholden to the triangle of trust, if only because he held out hope for the recovery of the Gardner art. He went to Miami to face the French gangsters.

WITTMAN: They were introduced to me as Salt and Pepper. One was a white Frenchman the other one was a African or a black Frenchman. And in fact were known to be very violent criminals. They explained how they did most of their killings with knives, not with guns.

HORAN: This meeting was the first time Wittman ever went undercover carrying a gun.

WITTMAN: So I figured they were bringing a knife to a gunfight, and we'd see how that ended up. We went to the hotel bar. I sat at the table facing them. They were against the wall.

RODOLICO: And there's five people at that table, right?

WITTMAN: Yes. Salt and Pepper, Sunny, Lorenz, and myself.

RODOLICO: Oh, I meant six, wasn't there a sixth?

WITTMAN: Oh, yeah. And another undercover agent from Boston. That was the individual they were trying to insert into the case. And he was acting as a mobster from Boston who was somehow financing being involved.

RODOLICO: What did you really think of the idea to insert this person?

WITTMAN: Well they wanted to insert the Boston agent because they wanted to bring him in as... to overtake the role that I was doing, which is, you know, what their idea was, but he wasn't accepted because he wasn't in on the triangle. So he wasn't there at the beginning and it was very difficult to bring him in. Nobody trusted him.

RODOLICO: How did he act?

WITTMAN: He was fine.

RODOLICO: But he wasn't really fine, right? I mean you wrote in the book that he wasn't fine.

WITTMAN: I'm not going to comment.

RODOLICO: OK.

WITTMAN: I'll let the book stand on its own.

RODOLICO: What about the credit card, can you give the example of the credit card?

WITTMAN: I'm not going to talk about that. You know, look, turn it off a minute.

RODOLICO: Here’s a summary of what Wittman wrote in his book: The meeting was going well, but the agent, a guy the Boston supervisor pushed into the undercover operation, was talking like a clichéd character in a bad gangster movie, saying things like, “You deal with me. As far as you’re concerned, I am the business.”

At one point, one of the hitmen turned to the agent and said, “Who are you again?” And then, as though he couldn’t have been less convincing, the agent from Boston, with everyone watching, paid with his credit card. Bad guys pay with cash. Everybody knows that. Almost everybody.

HORAN: Already suspicious that a snitch was in their midst, the French gangsters walked away, refusing to work with the Boston agent. After nearly two years, Operation Masterpiece was over. Bob Wittman remains convinced the Gardner art was still in France by the time that operation ended. Today, he says, the Vermeer and Rembrandt paintings could be anywhere in the world.

Steve Kurkjian says he doesn’t understand why, after the alleged misconduct and mishandling of Operation Masterpiece, Boston’s FBI office today remains in total control of the Gardner investigation.

KURKJIAN: It just seems to be just the old boy way of doing things that were so well in place at the FBI's Boston office.

HORAN: If there has ever been any oversight of the Boston FBI’s handling of the Gardner case, it hasn’t happened in the public eye. With nearly 30 years gone by, you have to wonder why.

Next time, we go from a man trying to get the art back, to one who would steal it. Was the world’s greatest art thief behind the world’s greatest art heist?

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Read the transcript of ‘Last Seen’ episode seven ‘I Was The One’
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  OCTOBER 29, 2018

KELLY HORAN: Why did the Gardner thieves take those 13 pieces? The answer to that question could tell us so much. Two in particular seem to make no sense: the 12th century Chinese gu and the bronze eagle finial. They’re not even one-of-a-kind. The museum’s former director told us she always thought of them as “trophy steals.” But trophies for whom? As it turns out, maybe this guy.

MYLES CONNOR: Back then there was a tree, where you could climb the tree and overlook and see into the Gardner. Get the routine of the guards and that sort of thing.

HORAN: At 73 years old, Myles Connor Jr. isn’t climbing trees anymore. But as a young man, he studied martial arts. He was the kind of thief who could -- and did -- shimmy up a drain pipe in order to rob a museum. Connor wanted to rob the Gardner Museum. He says he would have gone for the Vermeer and the Rembrandts, and his plan for doing it looks an awful lot like what actually happened.



CONNOR: And so, I figured, I knew that the paintings were uninsured, and I knew they would do anything to get their paintings back. And so it made sense that they would come up with a substantial reward for a return of those things. And that, that was my plan for the Gardner.





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HORAN: Steal the art. Ransom it back. Myles Connor says he started casing the Gardner Museum in 1975, a full 15 years before the heist. And as he walked the galleries back then, he says he wasn’t alone. He was with another art thief, a guy named Bobby. Not a Bobby we’ve told you about though. His name was Bobby Donati.

CONNOR: Bobby was a typical, Italian crook. I wouldn’t call him a mobster because mobsters are what you associate with organized crime. He wasn’t that kind of a crook. His specialty was rugs, oriental rugs. That’s what he used to steal, deal with and collect.

HORAN: Connor and Donati had eclectic taste. Lucky for them, the Gardner has an eclectic collection. So after setting their minds on the museum’s Dutch masterpieces, which Connor says they intended to ransom back for the reward, they window-shopped for a little something nice for themselves.

CONNOR: When Bobby and I had gone through the Gardner, for some reason he was attracted to the finial. He said, “I like that.” And sure enough it was taken. Then there was a bronze -- didn’t they take a Chinese bronze urn?



HORAN: Connor is referring to the gu. He’s a self-taught aficionado of Asian art.

CONNOR: [Laughing.] That was something that I liked! I’m embarrassed to say! I never should have admitted that! But I’m damn sure he took that because I told him that I liked it. He liked the finial. I said I like that thing.

HORAN: Did Bobby Donati wind up with that finial? Were Bobby Donati and Myles Connor responsible for the heist? We put the question to the Gardner Museum’s head of security, Anthony Amore.

ANTHONY AMORE: I don’t like to speculate about who did it, where they are, but there are things I will throw out there. And one of my beliefs is that it’s likely that Myles Connor was the inspiration for the heist. Right? Because it’s hard to believe he wouldn’t be given how prolific he was in the decades leading up to it.

HORAN: Amore describes Connor as the world’s greatest art thief. He wrote the playbook for how to steal a Rembrandt, and -- more important -- what to do with it once you have it. The question is: Was Myles Connor more than just the inspiration for the Gardner heist? Was he the mastermind? From WBUR Boston and The Boston Globe, this is Last Seen. I’m Kelly Horan.



JACK RODOLICO: And I’m Jack Rodolico. This is Episode 7: “I Was The One.”

Myles Connor was born in Milton, Mass., a comfortable Boston suburb. His family stretches back to both sides of the city’s oldest class divide: blue collar and blue blood.

CONNOR: My father was a Milton police officer. My mother was a daughter of the Mayflower.

RODOLICO: By the way, Connor slurs his words a little -- the result of major heart attack he suffered a few years ago. He traces his lineage on his mother’s side to a founder of the Hudson River School of artists. He traces his criminality to his paternal grandfather, who fled Ireland after he shot a constable. He says the first museum he ever robbed was an act of revenge in the name of his father. Here’s what happened: A small museum in his hometown accused Connor’s father – the cop – of stealing from them, something his dad would never do.

CONNOR: My father, who was as honest as honest could be. And he said, “Can you believe that these WASP sons of bitches? You know, I’ve never been so insulted in my life.” And so, I picked up on this.

RODOLICO: And by picked up on this, Connor means he got even. He snuck into a museum at night and took enough antiques to fill the trunk of his car. He gave the museum just enough time to panic before all of it showed back up on their front lawn.

CONNOR: The stuff was mysteriously returned to the museum! [Laughs.]

RODOLICO: This sort of I-can-do-anything-at-any-time attitude, it stems from the fact that Connor pretty much could have done anything with his life. Before he became the best at a bad thing, he had the option of becoming really good at good things. Connor was an exceptionally bright kid. He says he was offered a spot at Harvard, where he would have studied to become a surgeon.

CONNOR: That was a turn in my life that I regret. Looking back at it, I think I would have been a better surgeon than I was an art thief.

RODOLICO: But he didn’t give up on being a surgeon so he could be a thief. He rejected college to pursue another passion altogether. Myles Connor was a rockstar. Here he is, on stage, at a place called the Beachcomber in Quincy, Mass., in 1978.

[Music]

RODOLICO: His band was called Myles Connor & The Wild Ones. He headlined clubs around Boston, and opened for big names, like Roy Orbison and Chuck Berry. He was a 5-foot-2-inch front man with a leather jacket and fiery red hair. Sometimes he drove his motorcycle right on stage. And he could impersonate rock legends. A local chain of gas stations hired him to record their commercials, where he’d imitate his heroes. Here’s one from 1963.

[Music]

HORAN: Connor’s music career was bound to suffer as crime took up more and more of his time. Martin Leppo is the defense attorney who’s represented seven different men who have been named in connection to the Gardner investigation. Myles Connor is one of them.

MARTIN LEPPO: Have I been out socially with Myles? Absolutely. Has he been to my house? Absolutely. Has my wife cooked dinner for him? Absolutely. Did I write to him while he was in jail? Absolutely. Did I defend his honor in certain things? Absolutely. Do I think he’s a criminal? Absolutely. But a very bright criminal, and if he had done things the right way, he would have probably been some famous surgeon or politician.

HORAN: Connor was a Renaissance criminal. He’d kidnap drug dealers, stick up banks, sell cocaine -- you name it. And he doesn’t exactly look back on all his crimes with remorse.

CONNOR: Got picked up with about $100,000 cash on me! But it was unmarked cash ... Bang! I hit the guy. [Laughing hard.] And so he goes down. Now a fight breaks out. It’s all of them against me. It’s the entire goddamn football team.

LEPPO: He was taking down Quaaludes from Canada. He was making around 20,000 bucks a week.

CONNOR: And so the guy says, “I know who you are.” And I say, “I don’t think so. I don’t know you.” “Oh yes, you do. You little f----- punk, you motherf-----.” Blam! I label him right across the top of his skull. He was an off-duty Boston cop. He was the first cop I ever nailed. ... A shotgun goes off. Ba-lam! Shoots himself right in the balls. So we’re all stunned! “Oh! I shot myself!” Could not have happened to a more deserving individual. [Laughs.]

HORAN: The crime Connor is best known for, though, is stealing art. And he says the question of who he would and wouldn’t steal from was all down to a personal code. A kind of thief’s honor system. Take the time he posed as a well-dressed gentleman, and talked his way into the storage area of a museum with vast holdings of Asian antiquities. Connor says he could have cleaned them out.

CONNOR: But I recognized their deep sense of affection towards the stuff that they had. It was that sense of appreciation that kept me from violating the trust that they had.

HORAN: Connor felt no such compunction about the prospect of stealing from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

CONNOR: They were going to get the paintings back! I was gonna get money! And so there was no harm done other than to the insurance company or the billionaire patrons.

HORAN: Myles Connor isn’t just smart. He claims membership in Mensa, the high-IQ society. And his genius is best on display when he is getting himself into and out of trouble. That’s his art. And it was a crime spree in the mid-1970s that solidified his reputation as someone who could outfox law enforcement.

CONNOR: When you steal something from a major museum, and you don’t take it out of storage, and it’s going to be missed, then the major purpose is to use that as a bargaining chip to help either oneself or somebody else out of a “jackpot.”

RODOLICO: Here’s how Connor got himself into what he calls a “jackpot.” In 1974, Connor says his old buddy who liked antique rugs, Bobby Donati, approached him about an estate he wanted to rob in Maine. It was owned by the Woolworth family, who had a private collection that rivaled an art museum.

CONNOR: I was not in the business of stealing some private collection from somebody who had a deep attachment to it. But somebody who had as much money as those folks had, and could go away for half a year at a time, that really didn’t bother me. So I went along with Bobby.

RODOLICO: For a leisurely hour in the middle of a warm summer night, Connor and three other men -- including, he says, Donati and a guy named David Houghton -- combed through the empty mansion. They filled a panel truck with two Simon Willard grandfather clocks, two paintings by Andrew Wyeth and three more by his father, N.C. Wyeth. One was an illustration the elder Wyeth had painted for the original cover of the book “Treasure Island.” Connor says he stashed it all and waited weeks for Bobby Donati to announce he had found a buyer for the paintings. Connor met up with that buyer on Cape Cod.

CONNOR: I ended up taking the paintings down there, and met these FBI agents. It was a sting operation and I got arrested for interstate transportation of stolen goods.

RODOLICO: Connor was staring at a long prison sentence -- possibly 10 years for trafficking the art, three more for violating parole. He was 31 years old. For the FBI, arresting Connor red-handed -- that was the jackpot, because he’d always managed to get away. Like the time he was on the lam when his mother died. Martin Leppo says Connor knew the police would stake out the funeral home looking for him, and he was determined to see his mother one last time.

LEPPO: He actually rented a hearse, got into a coffin transported to the funeral parlor. Got out, kissed his mother goodbye, got back in the coffin into the vehicle and left.

HORAN: Which, brings us back to that parking lot in Cape Cod, where Connor was nabbed with the five stolen Wyeth paintings. The FBI had him. He knew it. They knew it. And, according to Connor, the agent who arrested him rubbed it in his face.

CONNOR: And he said, “We’ve got you now, Connor. It’ll take a Rembrandt to get you out of this.” I said, “You know, you’re right.” And so then I set my heart on getting a Rembrandt.

HORAN: Myles Connor, out of jail and awaiting trial for trafficking the stolen Wyeths, heeded the Rembrandt advice. He just had to find one. He settled on one that was on loan to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: “Portrait of Elisabeth van Rijn,” Rembrandt’s sister. At the time -- 1975 -- it was said to be worth upwards of $1 million.

CONNOR: That particular painting was near the back entrance to the place so you could get a quick access, and a quick egress.

HORAN: Connor hatched a broad daylight robbery. This posed a few problems, not least of which was Connor’s budding notoriety as an art thief -- his name was all over the papers for the Wyeth arrest. Plus, that red hair.

CONNOR: I believe I had a tan trench coat, a wig and sunglasses. And I believe I also had a fake mustache.

HORAN: On a sleepy Monday -- April 14, 1975 -- Connor launched what sounds like a paramilitary strike on Boston’s MFA. Connor says there were three vehicles with eight armed men, one with a machine gun. Six men positioned themselves near the entrance while Connor and another thief, also disguised, bought admission tickets, and walked up to the gallery on the second floor. They pulled the Rembrandt off the wall and ran.

CONNOR: As the exit was made down the front steps there was a phalanx of guards that came rushing down.

HORAN: Connor says as he ran through the turnstile with the painting, the corner of the portrait’s frame jammed between the bars. It wouldn’t budge. Connor was stuck. The guards closed in. An accomplice opened fire.

CONNOR: And there was a guy with a machine gun, brrrrr. Let the machine gun go off. They went right back.

HORAN: The guards stood down. Connor, with the help of one of his men, pushed all of his weight against the turnstile. As he freed himself, the corner of the Rembrandt’s frame cracked and splintered. The thieves ran with it to the van. One guard chased them.

CONNOR: The guy would not let go of the painting. The guy ran up to the back of the van and latched onto the painting.

HORAN: “Don’t shoot the guard,” Connor said. One of them smashed him in the head with the butt of a gun. The guard, a retired cop, collapsed in the street as they sped away with the Rembrandt.

RODOLICO: Imagine the pressure the Boston police and the FBI were under to catch the thieves who stole a Rembrandt in the middle of the day. The investigation dragged on for months without a break. But there was one person who knew exactly what happened.

AL DOTOLI: So when I woke up and found that it was gone, I knew right away. I said that’s what’s been going on. He stole the damn Rembrandt.

RODOLICO: Al Dotoli is Myles Connor’s oldest and best friend. He is not a criminal. Dotoli is a law-abiding music production manager. The two met as teenagers when Connor was a music legend in their neighborhood. At 15 years old, Dotoli knocked on Connor’s door and asked for a guitar lesson. Almost 60 years later, Dotoli is still loyal to his friend. But that doesn’t mean he understands his choices.

DOTOLI: You know, I was never scolding him, but I said, “For Christ’s sake, don’t you ever stop?”

RODOLICO: Of course, Connor didn’t stop. And as crime derailed Connor’s music career, Dotoli moved on with his own, producing bigger and bigger acts. He’s set up sound systems for Aretha Franklin, Dionne Warwick, the Dalai Lama and Super Bowl halftime shows.

DOTOLI: I came off a plane. I was with Dionne Warwick. And we’re walking off the plane. He had just been shot robbing a freaking bank a couple weeks before. And he’s in a wheelchair with a cast on up to his hip, from the foot to the hip. I’m coming down, and I go, “Oh, my god.”

RODOLICO: Here’s the kind of friend Al Dotoli is: When Connor would go to prison, Dotoli arranged concerts behind bars, Johnny Cash-style. Like in 1977, when he got blues legend James Cotton to perform with Connor in Walpole State Prison. Here’s that recording.

[Music]

RODOLICO: It was this friendship and loyalty that made Al Dotoli the obvious person to shake down for information about the Boston MFA’s missing Rembrandt. Boston police, the FBI, even insurance agents were knocking on his door. One evening, a black limousine pulled up. Out stepped a nightclub owner, carrying a briefcase.

DOTOLI: He sits down and goes, “Well you know, the guys -- the guys on the hill thought maybe Myles would consider letting us deal this Rembrandt that he seems to have absconded.”

RODOLICO: “The Guys on the Hill” -- that was the underworld euphemism for the dominant Patriarca crime family.

DOTOLI: And he takes the briefcase, and he opens it up, and it’s jammed full of money. So I see that. He thinks it’s gonna jolt me to get something done. Well, that’s about as close as I ever came to wetting my pants. So I went to Myles and I said, “OK, this s--- has to stop. Right now. This is it.”

RODOLICO: Dotoli had no idea where the Rembrandt was. No one knew that except for Myles Connor -- and a friend of his, a guy they referred to as Charlie, who didn’t ask a lot of questions.

CONNOR: In this case it went under the bed of a friend of mine’s grandmother. [Laughs.] And so she never knew what was underneath her bed. There it stayed, safe and sound, safe and sound.

RODOLICO: Not so much for Connor. Less than two weeks after the Boston MFA heist, he was due in court for trafficking the Wyeth paintings. He skipped the trial, which made him a fugitive. Through the summer of 1975, Connor was in hiding -- until the FBI caught him. Again. But this time, Connor had his get-out-jail-free card: the Rembrandt. Except, now that he was in prison, he couldn’t deal that card himself. Plus, would the FBI play?

CONNOR: FBI will say, “No. We’re not going to deal with that guy. We don’t care what we --- we are not going to deal with that guy.” And so that is always the position of the FBI. So you simply go beyond the FBI.

HORAN: What -- who -- is beyond the FBI? From his jail cell, Connor started with an old friend of his father’s -- a state police major named John Regan.

CONNOR: The major distinction between an FBI agent and a state police officer is a sense of humor.

HORAN: Deliberately cutting out the FBI, Connor, through the state police, offered the federal prosecutor a deal.

CONNOR: And they went to a federal prosecutor who wanted the publicity. So he said, “Oh, you can get the painting back? We’ll do whatever he wants.” And so I negotiated the return from Charles Street Jail.

HORAN: In a sense, that was the easy part. But for the prosecutor to reduce his sentence, Connor had to return the Rembrandt. To do that, he needed someone he could trust. Enter Al Dotoli.

DOTOLI: Myles being Myles, he starts with all this cloak and dagger s--- on how he wants it done. “Use firecrackers. Let them think they’re machine guns,” and I said, “Listen, listen, listen, I’ll get this thing back to -- you’re sitting here. I’m outside. It’s going down my way.”

HORAN: After the black limo left his driveway, Al Dotoli was eager to see the Rembrandt returned. He reluctantly agreed to do it.

DOTOLI: I just wanted to see that picture of that Rembrandt on the front page of The Boston Globe saying it’s been returned, so I could get rid of all those fools that were jumping in on my -- you know, the insurance agents, and the FBI, and quite honestly, the underworld, and the mafia, and all those people would have no more reason to be, to be looking for me if, in fact, it was returned.

HORAN: I have to say you are a very tolerant friend.

DOTOLI: Yeah. You know, there’s some tolerance, sprinkle in a little stupidity, and rock ‘n’ roll. It’s not a good -- it’s not a good match.

HORAN: Connor says he wrote two letters with instructions on how the handoff should go. A friendly prison guard hand-delivered them both -- one to Charlie, who hid the painting, the other to Dotoli. Connor wrote to his friend: “This operation is vital and must be carried out successfully; no mob, no insurance men, no FBI or police, and no failure.” No pressure.

CONNOR: Make sure it goes smooth, and make sure the right people are involved, and the wrong people aren’t listening. Plus there’s a sense of romance associated with the adventure. So all of that plays into it.

HORAN: Jan. 2, 1976 was a cold, clear Friday. From jail, Connor made the call that set his high-stakes scheme in motion. He called Dotoli and said, “Tonight is the night.” Connor gave his friend a code name: Kevin.

DOTOLI: And I called Major Regan at his home, and he answered, and I said, “This is Kevin and we’re on.” And I said, “Get in your car and drive to the Pepsi distributor, which is down the street. There’s a payphone there. Pull up and wait for the phone to ring and you’ll get your next marching order.”

RODOLICO: It was just after 7 p.m. From a room at the Holiday Inn, Dotoli called State Police Major Regan and gave him directions to the hotel. When Regan pulled in, Dotoli was waiting for him, in the shadows. He approached the car and used the code language Connor had given him.

DOTOLI: I was to say to John Regan, “It’s a nice night out tonight.” And the answer was going to be, “Yes, there’s plenty of stars.” So I said, “Yeah, it’s a nice night...” I’m standing there all in black with a freaking ski mask on. So, OK. So, I opened the door and I get in back. And this other gentleman is in the car. So I said, “IDs” And that’s when I’m saying, “You know, you’re in pretty deep here now.”

RODOLICO: The guy in the car with Major Regan was the federal prosecutor who had the power to let Connor off the hook in the Wyeth case. Dotoli sent them across the street into a disco. Through his ski mask, he told them to wait for the bartender to announce a phone call for a Paul Greeter. They went into the bar. A few minutes later, Charlie pulled up with the Rembrandt in his trunk.

DOTOLI: Myles had arranged, I had a photo. Charlie had a photo. And it was a photo of what’s on the back.

HORAN: Of the Rembrandt?

DOTOLI: The Rembrandt, itself, but as importantly and even more importantly a bunch of numbers and things that were on the back.

HORAN: During any of this, did you have a moment to pause when you were holding this Rembrandt in your hands and kind of behold what it was?

DOTOLI: If you’re asking me if the artistic value of it ran through my veins, no it didn’t. What ran through my veins was, “Holy shit, this thing is finally here, and hopefully soon it’ll finally be gone.”

RODOLICO: Dotoli put the Rembrandt in the trunk of Major Regan’s car. He bolted up three flights of stairs to his room at the Holiday Inn, and called the disco.

DOTOLI: And the bartender goes, “Is there a Paul Greeter here?” I hear him go, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m right here. I’m right here.” So he takes the phone and I said, “OK guys, you walk out the front of that lounge. Walk, do not run.” I said, “If what you want is in that trunk then turn, face the building, and put your hands into your belt.” Earlier I said, “Nobody’s armed, right?” They said, “Oh, no, no, nobody’s armed.” So they open up the trunk and they’re flashlighting all over the place. So they open their trench coats, they put their hands in there. And what I observed was: I went, “The sons of bitches.” They both had a guns stuck in there.

RODOLICO: The state cop and the prosecutor left with the painting. Dotoli drove to the airport and flew straight to New York City for a gig. The next day, he picked up the paper.

DOTOLI: I read The New York Times. It wasn’t on Page 1, but it was on Page 2. And I was quite relieved.

RODOLICO: At a press conference announcing the return of the Rembrandt, the FBI was notably absent. Instead, the U.S. attorney’s office and the State Police proudly detailed the clandestine handoff. They stated plainly that they didn’t make any deals with prisoners in order to get the painting back. Myles Connor, who was facing 13 years in prison, only served 28 months.

HORAN: If Myles Connor could orchestrate the return of one Rembrandt from inside prison, wasn’t it possible he could organize the theft of another?

LEPPO: When the Gardner was hit, Myles became the No. 1 suspect. Did he orchestrate it? And so forth and so on. So that was number one.

HORAN: There was just one problem, as Martin Leppo recalls. On March 18, 1990, Connor was serving a long federal sentence for drug trafficking. He was in prison in Lompoc, Calif. So, Myles Connor didn’t rob the Gardner Museum. But he says he knows who did. His old friend and sometime criminal accomplice, Bobby Donati.

CONNOR: He was a pragmatist as far as being a thief goes. So if somebody wanted to cut the paintings out of the frame, he’d do it.

HORAN: Remember, Connor says he and Donati cased the Gardner together in the 1970s. The two had gone so far, Connor says, as to pick out what they’d steal. And Connor’s feat with the Boston MFA’s Rembrandt had shown the entire criminal world that stealing art -- especially a Rembrandt -- was not only possible, it could get you out of prison. Connor says Bobby Donati had an accomplice in the Gardner heist: David Houghton.

CONNOR: How I’m 100 percent sure that they did it was because David Houghton, who was a longtime friend of mine, flew all the way from Logan Airport to California just to tell me: “We’ve done with. We did it. And we got a bunch paintings, and we’re gonna use a couple of these paintings to bargain you into a reduced sentence.”

HORAN: If David Houghton were involved in the Gardner heist, he would have had to been waiting outside -- he weighed at least 300 pounds and bore no resemblance whatsoever to the police sketches of the thieves. What about Bobby Donati? With his round face and dark features, maybe. But Connor is convinced that it was Donati and Houghton who stole the Rembrandts and the Vermeer as currency to spring him from prison. And the smaller items they took ...

HORAN: So it sounds like the finial was a souvenir for Donati.

CONNOR: Beyond a doubt.

HORAN: The gu was maybe a gift for you.

CONNOR: [Laughs.] I’m quite sure. Yeah.

HORAN: If his friend took that gu as a gift for Connor, he says he never got it. That might be because Houghton and Donati died the year after the Gardner heist. Houghton had a heart attack; Donati was found brutally murdered in the trunk of his car. The Boston FBI has said they know who robbed the Gardner Museum -- and that the thieves are dead. They haven’t identified them. That could mean that the secrets of the Gardner heist died with Donati and Houghton -- or with any of the other dead men whose names have been floated in connection with the robbery.

Next week, one more dead suspect. His fingerprints were among the first sent to FBI headquarters after the heist. And some who knew him best believe he’s still alive -- and that he did it.

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Read the transcript of ‘Last Seen’ episode 8: ‘Flim-Flammer’
     
NOVEMBER 05, 2018

KELLY HORAN: A woman of considerable means and vision and with a passion for Old Masters begins collecting them: Rembrandt, Rubens, Raphael. Her collection grows so vast, she builds an Italian Renaissance-style palace in which to showcase it. And when she dies, she leaves it all to us, her art loving heirs. But her small jewel of a museum lacks funds. Its security is weak. And in time, it attracts the scheming of thieves. These details could only belong to one museum, the Isabella Stewart Gardner, in Boston. But what if we told you that these facts are also written into the DNA of another museum, one that is about 200 miles away, in Glens Falls, New York -- the Hyde Collection.

HORAN: Did you have guards?

FRED FISHER: No guards, no. We just had volunteer ladies who, when we were open, were meandering around, and usually chit-chatting with themselves.



HORAN: Fred Fisher was director of the Hyde for a dozen years, starting in 1978, when the museum was in its 15th year. It was was the creation of the heiress of a paper fortune, who built her Italian palace overlooking the family mill in 1912. Charlotte Pruyn met and fell in love with her future husband, Louis Hyde, in Boston, at the turn of the 20th century. The pair loved art. And Fenway Court, as Isabella Stewart Gardner was still calling her museum, had left an impression. In Glens Falls, the Hydes built their more modest version -- Old Masters, 16th century tapestries, center courtyard and all. When Fred Fisher was director, the paper mill in the Hyde’s shadow still belched sulfur. There were other things that stunk, too. The endowment-starved Hyde meant that Fisher’s job as director entailed wearing many hats, or rubber gloves, depending.





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FISHER: I was out sometimes working in the yard, washing windows, just a variety of things just to keep this little place clean, or cleaner than it had been. But, so it was a labor of love, it truly was.

HORAN: Imagine, then, what Fisher must have thought when he heard that a scion of one of America’s richest families -- a Vanderbilt -- was in town.

FISHER: I must have begun hearing stories about this guy driving a Bentley in town probably in the summer of ‘80. Once in a while, a guide would come in, or one of my volunteers, and say, “I just saw that Vanderbilt guy. Everybody’s talking about the Vanderbilt guy. We saw him the other day at lunch, and he’s such handsome. And I hear he’s got a lot of money.” And I, you know, being a director of a very poor museum, when you hear money, and you hear Vanderbilt, you think, “Oh wow, maybe there’s hope here.”

HORAN: Maybe. Or maybe Paul Stirling Vanderbilt, as he’d written in the museum’s visitor log, wasn’t who he said he was. His fingerprints would be among the first to be sent to FBI headquarters in the wake of the Gardner Museum robbery. Could Vanderbilt’s real identity hold the key to solving that heist? From WBUR Boston and The Boston Globe, this is Last Seen. I’m Kelly Horan.



JACK RODOLICO: And I’m Jack Rodolico. This is Episode 8: “Flimflammer.”

When Paul Stirling Vanderbilt first signed the guest book at the Hyde Collection in April 1980, he gave an address: Cady Hill House. That’s the spectacular Saratoga Springs mansion of a Vanderbilt widow, just 23 minutes down the I-87 highway from Glens Falls. If Saratoga Springs is the belle of the ball, Glens Falls is arguably her plainer sister, who doesn’t get asked to dance.

FISHER: Cady Hill House was the Saratoga home of Marylou Whitney, who was the social butterfly of Saratoga. So I thought, “Wow!”

RODOLICO: But Vanderbilt wasn’t staying at Cady Hill in Saratoga Springs. He was staying at the Queensbury Hotel in downtown Glens Falls, where he paid his bills in cash, tipped big and aroused suspicion.

FISHER: Even though he dressed well, he spoke well, he’s a good looking guy, the so-called Mr. Vanderbilt was just maybe a little bit too -- I think he might have been just giving himself away a little bit too much. But a very, very suave character.



HORAN: At the time, the Queensbury Hotel was a grand, if faded, lady. A fireside perch beneath a literary themed painting in the lobby seems to have appealed to Vanderbilt, who boasted of not only a blue blooded pedigree, but a literary one, too. He reportedly spent many hours there, writing, or telling people that’s what he was doing.

FISHER: Because he sold himself to all of us as a, as a freelance writer for The New York Times and various prestigious publications.

HORAN: You’d have to have family money to be a rich freelance writer. Vanderbilt looked and spoke and dressed like a Kennedy, people said. He sent armfuls of roses every week to a pretty local girl who would become his fiancee. He had a Bentley and a chauffeur named Giles. Even in fancy Saratoga Springs, these details might have turned heads. In humble Glens Falls, they caused a minor sensation. On Halloween day in 1980, six months after he first came to town, Vanderbilt called on Fred Fisher at the museum.

FISHER: We sat down in the courtyard and for about an hour or so he went on and on about how he’s so interested in art, and he was writing about art, and he’s particularly interested in art theft. And that was the beginning of a little bit of concern because he went on and on about various thefts that he’d heard about, and, you know, it was clearly movie kind of stuff -- catwalk, you know, walking on the ceiling, and jumping in through skylights, and he read about these things, and he was starting to write an article. It was basically, he was trying to draw out of me about what’s the security at the museum. And so I immediately — that was kind of the first red flag.

RODOLICO: And not the last. In subsequent meetings throughout the fall, Vanderbilt asked Fisher about renting the Hyde’s smaller mansion next door, as a writing retreat. Its windows happened to look directly into the museum. In mid-November, a friend of Fisher’s in the city planning office told him that Vanderbilt had been in asking to see the museum’s floor plans. Vanderbilt had implied that he was there on official business to review the Hyde’s structural details. He’d asked to take the blueprints with him, but was refused. And, Fisher says, Vanderbilt peppered him with questions about the museum’s security.

FISHER: “Are your windows secure? Do you have guards? And is there a security company that oversees your security?” And just enough — more than enough — to make me think, “Oh my gosh, what is this guy all about?”

HORAN: Fisher was torn between flickering hope that Vanderbilt really was good for a much needed windfall for the museum -- and a growing feeling that something wasn’t right.

FISHER: He came once and said he was going to New York to see some of his family members. And he wanted to have a book of photographs of the paintings to show them because he was sure that if they saw these wonderful pictures they would want to give us money. Well, I could only see that as a shopping list for somebody.

HORAN: Fisher demurred. He told Vanderbilt that he and his young assistant intended to catalog the collection — but progress was slow. They had one beat up typewriter and were on a six-month waitlist for a new one, an IBM Selectric.

FISHER: And so he said, “Well, let me see what I can do.” And one day he showed up with three of them in the back — trunk of the Bentley. They didn’t quite look brand new.

HORAN: They weren’t new. Fisher told the museum’s board he was growing concerned about this Vanderbilt fellow. And then, that very weekend, a news story about, of all things, the IBM Selectric, deepened Fisher’s susicions.

FISHER: The chair of the board called me and said, “Fred, you gotta watch ‘60 Minutes’! They’re talking about stolen IBM Selectrics!” And so, long story short, the following day I had someone come up here from Albany, an IBM, a rep. And he pulled — they had labels on them, “To the Hyde Collection” on each one. And when he pulled the labels off, there they were from a rental company in New York City. Um, they weren’t a gift. So that really got me pretty scared.

HORAN: Fisher began calling around trying to confirm Vanderbilt’s credentials. One of the calls he made was to an actual Vanderbilt.

FISHER: And she was very helpful, and she said, “You know, first of all, if they were a Vanderbilt they wouldn’t be driving a Bentley and being that officious — that’s just not the way we do things.” And she really laughed and said, “I’m sorry, but you oughta be calling the police. You ought to be doing something about this.” So that’s when I really knew that I had a problem.

RODOLICO: Fisher did call the police. And when Paul Stirling Vanderbilt next returned to meet him at the museum, plainclothes detectives from the state’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation were there, eavesdropping. It was Nov. 26, 1980, the day before Thanksgiving.

FISHER: As we were facing each other in my office, and he said, “I’ve got a $30,000 check for you in my briefcase, but I’ve decided I’m not gonna give you this check because you’re just about the worst director any museum could ever have.” You know, “You should be ashamed of yourself, if the board only knew what kind of an idiot you were,” you know, on, and on, and on. And then he said, and then “I understand you’re not using the typewriters.” And I said, “Oh, well let’s talk about the typewriters.” I was a little nervous about how I was going to manage that, but after he put me down so much I was ready to...

HORAN: To call his bluff?

FISHER: [Laughing.] Yeah. And then he was very kind of fishy after that. And, you know, he kept going on about, “Well, I’ll take ‘em back if that’s the way you feel.”

HORAN: Well, what did you say to him about the typewriters?

FISHER: I just said, “Lookit, fella, we’ve just — we had it evaluated, and they’re not — they’re rentals! They’re not, you know — where’d you get these?” And he was very red faced. He realized that he was kind of caught short.

RODOLICO: Fisher says Vanderbilt was furious. He loaded his typewriters into his Bentley and left. So did the detectives. They’d agreed that Vanderbilt was a condescending jerk but said they couldn’t arrest him for it. Fisher decided to keep the glass mug he’d served Vanderbilt coffee in -- just in case having fingerprints would come in handy.

FISHER: I carefully washed it out a little bit of it and then put it in a plastic bag and put it away. I’m sorry I didn’t save that cup for a momento.

HORAN: Very Columbo of you.

FISHER: [Laughs] Right. Obviously I’d seen way too many movies.

RODOLICO: What came next was straight out of one.

HORAN: At 5:30 in the morning on Christmas Eve, 1980, Fred Fisher, then the 40-year-old director of the Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, New York, awoke to a telephone call from police. Someone had tried to rob the museum.

FISHER: Vanderbilt immediately came to mind. There was no doubt in my mind that’s who it was.

HORAN: That is who it was. Only, Paul Stirling Vanderbilt was really a 20-year-old college dropout named Brian Michael McDevitt, from an upper middle class coastal town about 12 miles north of Boston.

RONALD KERMANI: Brian McDevitt could never walk into Saratoga Springs or Glens Falls, or any spot in America today and claim that he was a member of a Fortune 500 family. He would last about 13 seconds, or two beers, whichever came first.

HORAN: But in a pre-Google era, Brian McDevitt could. And when he did, this man, Ronald Kermani, was an award-winning investigative reporter for the Times Union newspaper in Albany, New York.

KERMANI: Here’s a clean-cut kid out of the middle-crust of Boston, coming to an area he has no idea where he is or what he’s doing here. He just lands here to be near the horses and the beautiful people and the money that he’s going to take every opportunity to make himself a fixture and a player in town. He’s got the cash and the chutzpah to do it.

HORAN: McDevitt had financed his charade with about $100,000 he’d stolen from some safe deposit boxes in Boston in the fall of 1979, where he’d been volunteering for Sen. Ted Kennedy’s presidential campaign. A Boston detective had been looking for him since. As far as he knew, McDevitt had just up and vanished. When he was arrested in Glens Falls, McDevitt explained his alias to police by saying “I was doing this to avoid trouble with Massachusetts authorities regarding a particular legal affair.” That’s con man code for felony. And now he was facing multiple felony charges in Glens Falls, too.

RODOLICO: Ronald Kermani was in the newsroom on Christmas Eve, when the call came in about two men arrested on kidnapping and robbery charges.

KERMANI: And police are telling me that these two guys, one 20-some years old, and one 30-some years old, kidnapped a woman, a female courier driver at gunpoint, and had elaborate plans to rob this museum of between 30 and 50 million dollars of classical artwork. And I said, “Wow. Are you kidding me? This is not April Fools, it’s Christmas Eve.” He said, “No, Ron,” the cops said, “No Ron. This is true, they’re sitting here in a holding cell as I tell you.”

RODOLICO: Kermani’s Christmas morning story about Brian McDevitt and his planned heist on the Hyde Collection was in the next day’s paper.

FISHER: There was this unbelievable article that just kinda blew my mind, you know, just sitting there reading it to my wife thinking, “I could be dead.” [Laughing.] Oh my, God. I had no idea this was so serious.”

HORAN: This was big news for a city of 15,000 best known for an annual hot air balloon festival and a minor league hockey franchise. McDevitt’s confession to police reads like a screenplay for a Hollywood caper. His tone is almost boasting. He told police, “I drew up equipment lists such as vehicles that would be needed. I reviewed the problem areas, such as whether there was a panic alarm someone could push.” McDevitt had bought ether, handcuffs and tape for subduing museum employees. He’d bought tool kits at Sears. He told police, “They were for various problems we would run into while removing the paintings from the walls of the Hyde Collection.” McDevitt’s accomplice told police they were prepared to cut some paintings from their frames. They’d planned to empty the place.

KERMANI: Their goal was to fence the stuff in southern Florida. It may have been worth $50 million. They were boasting that their take might be $15 million. They were going to retire in style and just jump the gun and get out of the country fast. Of course, what happened was, believe it or not this is like the Keystone Cops, they got stuck in traffic in beautiful downtown Glens Falls, the clock kept ticking on them, and the Hyde Museum closed, and the alarm was set, and they’re sitting in a truck with an unconscious FedEx driver, a couple of empty cardboard boxes, duct tape, a pellet pistol and an invitation to the county jail.

HORAN: About that FedEx driver. She was 26-years-old and had been on the job for five years when McDevitt’s accomplice handcuffed her, covered her eyes and mouth with tape and knocked her out with ether in the back of her truck. Fred Fisher says McDevitt appears to have targeted her specifically.

FISHER: He was contacting, ah, FedEx and mailing sham packages quite often only to find out who’s on the routes, who the drivers were, and really spent a lot of time, a lot of effort trying to figure out how best to do this.

HORAN: Almost 40 years later, the FedEx driver didn’t want to talk to us. She wouldn’t even come to the phone. Her husband said she had no desire to relive what had been a terrifying experience. In her statement to police, the FedEx driver says this about McDevitt: “He said he wouldn’t harm anyone and that he isn’t that kind of a person. He said, couldn’t I tell that by the way he was treating me? He said that if I helped him, he would make it worth my while. He said he would give me $25,000 for it. I said I didn’t want the money. He said that he could put it in a Swiss account so it would be there whenever I wanted it. He said that he was going to rob from the rich to give to the poor.” She reported that McDevitt had also told her that he risked ruining his family name, by which, of course, he meant Vanderbilt.

FISHER: When she gave a statement to the police she said that she recognized this voice. She was blindfolded, but she had heard McDevitt’s voice in the Federal Express truck. And she could recognize this voice, and she was pretty sure it was him.

RODOLICO: The FedEx driver noticed something else. She told police, “The dark mustache didn’t go with the blond hair.” McDevitt and his accomplice had worn fake black mustaches. And early reports out of Glens Falls put the two would-be thieves in FedEx uniforms.

HORAN: So did they or didn’t they dress up as Federal Express drivers?

FISHER: They did not. McDevitt tried to buy uniforms. Wherever he did this he was treated rather strangely. And I think he backed away thinking maybe that would -- maybe somebody would get the idea of what they were doing, but they did attempt to do it.

RODOLICO: McDevitt’s accomplice was a divorced father who was working as an assistant manager at the Queensbury Hotel. He told police that he’d gone along with McDevitt’s scheme out of fear. “He mentioned love for my son, and it would be a shame if anything happened to him.”

HORAN: To read the accomplice’s police statement is to realize that he had bought McDevitt’s cinematic worldview wholesale. He recounted that, pre-heist, McDevitt had given them and the operation code names. They’d boned up on art theft by reading the book “Thinking Like A Thief.” And post-heist, their plans included taking a Concorde supersonic jet to London, or maybe Zurich, and hiding their millions with the help of a financial planner in Los Angeles.

KERMANI: The headline is: The art heist that failed, but not for lack of imagination.

HORAN: Ronald Kermani could not get enough of this story. He drove to McDevitt’s hometown, found a payphone and started cold calling anyone who might have known McDevitt. He went to the library and found McDevitt’s high school yearbook. The insights he gleaned filled a three-part profile published in the Times Union newspaper. The first installment came out on Jan. 4, 1981.

KERMANI: Even in high school, Brian Michael McDevitt was the consummate hustler. At his best, classmates recall, he was articulate and aggressive. At his worst, he was brash to the point of being obnoxious. And today he’s in the Saratoga County jail in lieu of $50,000 bail, accused of plotting an elaborate robbery designed to net him millions in art treasures.

HORAN: Brian McDevitt served two years for kidnapping and attempted robbery. He was living in Boston in 1990 when the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum was robbed a decade after his Glens Falls misadventure. Fred Fisher says, when he heard the news of the Gardner heist, he knew right away who did it: Brian McDevitt.

FISHER: Immediately. Absolutely immediately. You know, not only I, myself, but my former staff, you know, we talked. The first thing that came out of his mouth was, “For God’s sake, Fred, did you -- it’s got to be McDevitt. It’s got to be McDevitt.

HORAN: Why do you think that is?

FISHER: It just -- it was so clearly a similar incident, you know, timed around a holiday, disguised as somebody else, duct tape, and, you know -- I guess they did have handcuffs, I think, at the Gardner. The similarities were just very much there.

HORAN: In the summer of 1989, Vermeer’s The Concert still hung in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. So did Rembrandt’s only seascape, Storm on the Sea of Galilee, along with eleven other works of art that would vanish before dawn on March 18, 1990. And on July 6 that summer, Brian McDevitt met a young woman who would factor in his life for several years to come. Her name is Stéphanie Rabinowitz.

HORAN: Did he tell you where he was from?

STEPHANIE RABINOWITZ: New York, somewhere in New York. He was pretty quiet about his past.

HORAN: She’s a photographer now, but then, Rabinowitz was 22, living in the Allston neighborhood of Boston, and working in animation for film and commercials. McDevitt was just a few weeks shy of his 29th birthday when they were introduced to each other at a comedy club. Rabinowitz went home and wrote in her diary:

RABINOWITZ: He has beautiful eyes, a mix between blue and green. He’s a screenwriter for “The Wonder Years” and Paramount and Columbia.

HORAN: His name and eye color might have been true, but nothing else was. Brian McDevitt had dropped the Vanderbilt ruse but was still laying claim to a literary status he didn’t have. But Rabinowitz didn’t know that. So when, six months into their relationship, McDevitt told her that he was headed to New York City for the Writers Guild Awards ceremony, she believed him. It was three days before the Gardner Museum would be robbed. Thursday, March 15, 1990. Rabinowitz, who kept a detailed diary at the time and shared it with us, recalled that McDevitt wasn’t himself when they’d spoken that day by phone.

RABINOWITZ: He seemed agitated and nervous, and just not welcoming, or lovey dovey or inviting.

HORAN: She didn’t hear from McDevitt all weekend. But his tone had altogether changed by the time he called her late in the day on Sunday, March 18.

RABINOWITZ: Oh, he was happy, cheery, happy to be back. Happy to talk to me, you know, looking forward to getting together again, much calmer than before he left, much nicer and more at ease with himself -- just his whole demeanor was much nicer.

RODOLICO: Former FBI Special Agent Thomas McShane was also in Boston on March 18, 1990. He’d been among the first on the scene of the robbery at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

THOMAS MCSHANE: It was of course taped off with the yellow evidence tape that we use. The frames were all on the floor, scattered in a real haphazardous way. And it looked very disturbing. And we were just praying that they didn’t ruin these paintings by the way that -- what they left behind, it looked like a disaster.

RODOLICO: McShane was an undercover art recovery expert for the FBI for a quarter of a century. By his lights, he returned some $500 million worth of stolen and forged art. There was an El Greco, a Rubens, and a Rembrandt that had been on loan from the Louvre when it was stolen.

HORAN: And so where in your -- in the spectrum of all these cases, where is the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum for you?

MCSHANE: That is top priority on my list.

RODOLICO: McShane says there was one suspect who was among the first to have his fingerprints sent to FBI headquarters. It’s the same suspect that McShane says he would still put his money on for having pulled off the Gardner heist.

MCSHANE: Brian Michael McDevitt. He was interviewed by the FBI and immediately afterwards he took off to California. This is a con man of a nature of Bernie Madoff.

HORAN: So, you put Brian McDevitt in that class of con man, like the best you’ve ever seen.

MCSHANE: Exactly.

HORAN: In the spring of 1990, Brian McDevitt left Boston and moved to a hilltop bungalow above Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles. He joined the West Coast branch of the Writers Guild, formed a production company, and touted serious credentials as a writer for television and film.

BEN POLLACK: First he’s this sort of like, you know, aristocrat who’s a famous writer, then he’s none of those things, and then not only is he none of those things, he’s a crook, and not only is he a crook, he’s a monster.

HORAN: Ben Pollack directs television commercials and music videos now. In mid-July of 1991, when he met Brian McDevitt at the Writers Guild, he was 19, just getting started in the business, and naïve.

POLLACK: He was introduced to me as this great writer who had this deal with Paramount doing all these wonderful things. And he said “Who are you? I like your attitude. Give me something -- you know, send me something that you wrote. I’d love to read it.” So I’m like, “Oh! This is exactly why I came there.”

HORAN: Pollack was completely taken in by McDevitt.

POLLACK: Sophisticated, and entertaining, and charming and giving, articulate, intelligent, fun person, kind of like an older brother. And he had big stories that you just believed. You know, that kind of guy.

RODOLICO: But within six months of meeting Brian McDevitt, Pollack would tell police, he’d grown so leery, he hired a private detective to dig into McDevitt’s story. He learned that McDevitt’s business partner was himself wanted by the FBI. That man would be extradited to Chicago on 12 counts, including grand larceny. Pollack learned that nothing McDevitt had told him was true. Not the big things, like his writing credits, and not even the small things, like his claim that he owned his home in the Hollywood Hills. Pollack made more calls, starting with the producers of a major Hollywood film that McDevitt had claimed to have been working on.

POLLACK: I asked them, I said, “you know, I understand Brian McDevitt was a writer on this movie.” And they were like, “Brian, who?” And you know, then I started to tell them what was going on, and they got fascinated by that story, and they checked out other things. So they were able to check out other parts of his resume. And then they gave me the telephone numbers to call other people. And then I did that, and I checked this one, and that one. I called the New Yorker, and I called the Guardian in London, you know, where he said he had published these stories. And s---, sure enough, nobody knew who he was. It was that simple! All you had to do was call. All you had to do is check it out. But it was so brazen, nobody did. I realized that I’m now with a total flimflam artist, and I have to get out of it, you know.

RODOLICO: Pollack confronted McDevitt.

POLLACK: I say, “I found out all these things about you. I just want to get out of this company. That’s all I want. I was -- my heart was pounding. My mouth was dry. I was thinking more for him, how embarrassed I would be if somebody found out that I was a flimflammer and caught me red-handed. You know, that’s really what I was thinking. Anyway, that’s when it all started. He was cool as a cucumber. He told me how it was going to go, and he threatened me. He said, “If you tell anybody what you discovered, you know, I’m going to... I’m going to do you in.” And then he was sort of, straight up to my face. I mean, he was doing the stuff that you just think, oh no, that’s stuff you’d read -- or see in a movie, you know, from some wacko. That really never happens. But no, he’s that guy who did all the things you didn’t think anybody would do.

HORAN: McDevitt began quietly tormenting Pollack, waging a kind of creepy psychological warfare. He’d knock on his door in the middle of the night, and then whistle from somewhere in the darkness when Pollack opened up. And he began calling Pollack over and over. Sometimes a hundred or more times a day -- just to hang up when he answered.

POLLACK: The hang up stuff was the real, real insight to this guy. He was sitting somewhere in the dark, or whatever, and calling me over and over and over and over, day after day after day after week after week after week. What was going through his mind when he was doing that? It was incessant.

HORAN: It took more than six weeks, but by April of 1992, Pollack was able to convince the police that he knew who was behind the calls. A trap on Pollack’s phone proved him right.

POLLACK: All I knew was that Brian was so afraid of going to jail even for 10 seconds -- and this is what he told me: that he would do anything not to go to jail. And he felt like he was going to go to jail because he got caught doing this thing with the phone.

HORAN: June of 1992 brought a perfect storm of trouble for Brian McDevitt. He faced criminal charges for harassing Ben Pollack. He was on the verge of being ousted from the Writers Guild, exposed as a felon and a fraud. And then, an article in The New York Times outed him as a prime suspect in the Gardner heist. There followed a similar article in The Los Angeles Times, and then another, in The Boston Globe. And on the heels of that, 60 Minutes came calling. Morley Safer, the show’s late correspondent, asked McDevitt on national television if he robbed the Gardner Museum. No, McDevitt said. But, he admitted, he didn’t have an alibi. There followed a summons to a grand jury back in Boston. The walls were closing in. It was around that time that McDevitt asked Stéphanie Rabinowitz, who had by then also moved to LA, to be his alibi with the FBI if they asked her about him and the Gardner heist.

RABINOWITZ: Yeah, I shut it down because the minute he said, “I really need you to lie to the FBI for me,” right there I was like, “I cannot lie to the FBI.” And then asking me to be his alibi -- you know, I didn’t put two and two together because I wasn’t thinking then like, “Oh, he was at the Writers Guild.”

HORAN: Brian McDevitt might have been in New York City the weekend the Gardner Museum was robbed, but he wasn’t at the Writers Guild Awards, as he told Rabinowitz. They were held that year in April. Rabinowitz last saw McDevitt on June 25, 1992, at a party for a show she worked on. She wrote about it in her diary and recalls that meeting.

RABINOWITZ: And he told me that this guy had paid him -- I believe and remember him saying $300,000 to cut out the art pieces in the museum to give it to him, and then all he would have to do is collect the money, and get out of the country. And then he could live the rest of his life being taken care of. And he offered me to come with him. He actually asked me so much. He’s like, “Please, please come with me. We could live a great life together. I’ll take care of you for the rest of your life.” And as great as that sounded for a 20-year-old who’s kind of struggling, I couldn’t do it. Yeah, I was a little tempted and I thought about it, but I thought, “No, I can’t do it. And I’m not going to live off of a whole lie,” and just of everything that had happened. So I told him I couldn’t do it. He was pissed again, mad, upset, hurt. That was the last time I saw him.

HORAN: She never heard from him again. But Rabinowitz did hear from an FBI agent about a month later. Rabinowitz says the agent had come to her apartment to question her about McDevitt and the Gardner heist. The agent couldn’t question McDevitt himself, though, because he’d vanished. Again.

RODOLICO: Nat Segaloff is a writer in North Hollywood who’s written a screenplay about Brian McDevitt. He knew him both in Boston and in Los Angeles. And he liked him.

NAT SEGALOFF: I’m a reporter. I started off as a reporter. I was cynical. And I’ve dealt with so many scumbags in the film business, both in exhibition and distribution, that an art thief, to me, is a step up.

RODOLICO: Two years after McDevitt left LA, he called Segaloff.

SEGALOFF: Absolutely out of the blue, in October of 1994 I got a phone call from him. He said he was in Rio de Janeiro waiting for the statute of limitations to run out. At that point I kind of got the idea that somebody was after him. He said he was in Brazil because there was no extradition treaty with the United States. And he also said that he had got wind from the grand jury that there might be an indictment handed down, so he fled the country.

RODOLICO: Segaloff didn’t hear from McDevitt again for another eight years, when he received an email in December of 2002.

SEGALOFF: We just started writing back and forth. We have a voluminous correspondence. Mostly he would send me articles about art heists all over the world and we would talk about movies and we’d talk about politics, especially the difference in politics between America and Central America, because at that point he was living in Medellín, Colombia.

RODOLICO: That’s where McDevitt was reportedly last seen. He’d set up a phony English translation business.

HORAN: Did you ever ask him outright if he had pulled off the Gardner heist?

SEGALOFF: I didn’t ask Brian directly, but I tried to be coy about it because by this point I was quite curious. He sent me a how to guide in a sense of how to rob a museum. He told me about other people who were involved. He told me about how the FBI was after him. These didn’t come off as paranoid. These came off as sensible reports. Putting all the pieces together I really did believe that he did it, but he wasn’t going to tell me directly unless I’d broken the code somehow and got him to tell me.

RODOLICO: Segaloff heard from McDevitt one last time: May 10, 2004. He said he was calling from Medellín, Colombia, and Segaloff recorded the call.

MCDEVITT: It’s Brian McDevitt.

SEGALOFF: Certainly is. How are you?

MCDEVITT: Well that’s why I’m calling, Nat.

SEGALOFF: What?

MCDEVITT: I didn’t want to do this over the internet because, ah, I just wanted to talk to you for a coupla minutes and I don’t have a lot of time. Ah, How are you? [fade out]

SEGALOFF: I’m fine. I’m holding my own here. You know how it is.

RODOLICO: McDevitt got down to business. He’d been ill. It was serious. He wanted Segaloff to know.

MCDEVITT: Look Nat I have to go back to the hospital tomorrow. You know, I didn’t want you to hear about it late or anything else. You know I consider you one of the few friends that I have left. So, everybody else has pretty much abandoned me, including my family, and I just felt that you should know and, I hate to kinda call you like this, but I realize that I haven’t really been as prolific as I used to be on the internet, really since I got back from the hospital in January. So let me just tell you what’s going on. Doesn’t look like I’m going to be living to your ripe old age, that’s for sure...

SEGALOFF: What?

MCDEVITT: When I got out of the hospital they asked me to come back and they told me I was HIV positive. Needless to say that came as quite a shock. The fact is, Nat, that I’ve slept with dozens of women down here and...

RODOLICO: McDevitt told Segaloff he had pneumonia and that he’d been having difficulty breathing.

MCDEVITT: But anyway, the point, Nat, is that I am just running out of time. I don’t want anyone to know but I wanted you to know. because you’re one of the few people that has been so nice to me over the last year or so, I, I wanted to let you know what was going on, because I really don’t have anybody to tell.

RODOLICO: McDevitt sounds like a man facing his own death. In June, Segaloff heard from McDevitt’s sister that her brother had died 17 days after that phone call. May 27, 2004. Brian McDevitt was 43 years old.

HORAN: Several of the people who knew Brian McDevitt -- his former girlfriend, the museum director he tried to scam, the aspiring screenwriter he flimflammed -- don’t believe he’s dead. Neither does former FBI agent Thomas McShane.

MCSHANE: We could dig him up and make sure that there is a body beneath the ground because I don’t believe there is.

HORAN: What does Nat Segaloff, perhaps McDevitt’s one true friend, think?

SEGALOFF: I don’t believe Brian faked his death for a very, very simple reason: He couldn’t keep a secret with me. If he called me before going into the hospital and said he didn’t expect to come out, maybe that was being overly dramatic, but he’s the one who got in touch with me on every single occasion once he left Boston. I don’t believe he could keep it quiet.

HORAN: The Gardner Museum’s director of security, Anthony Amore, doesn’t think so, either. He says he’s seen McDevitt’s hospital bills and Colombian death certificate. He says the guy is dead. What’s more, Amore says the only museum Brian McDevitt was capable of robbing was the one in his own mind. He wanted to rob the Hyde Collection, after all, but failed. On a drive through McDevitt’s hometown, Amore dismissed the Brian McDevitt theory entirely.

ANTHONY AMORE: The other thing about him being involved, though, is you have to think, this guy, his whole life was about self-aggrandizing. He wanted the attention. Right, after the statute of limitations had run out he had every opportunity to have come forward. And said he had them and would have been, you know, “I’m the world’s greatest art thief. I pulled off the biggest heist in history and I’m not even arrested for it.”

HORAN: Maybe so. He is in a good position to know. But then, so is this guy...

RANDY: He was the one that cuffed me. I feel, you know, 90 to 95 percent certain that it was him.

HORAN: Remember the security guard we spoke to in the first episode, the one we are only calling by his first name, Randy? He says that when he saw photos of all of the Gardner heist suspects, there was only one that jumped out at him. It was the thief who had treated him in an otherwise courteous manner -- he’d readjusted his handcuffs, told him he’d make it worth his while if he cooperated, apologized for having to do this.

RANDY: Yeah I mean, I feel like 90 to 95 percent sure that that’s -- that he was the guy.

RODOLICO: Next time: We go from the prospect of digging up the dead, to digging up the Gardner treasure.

Episode  99999999999999999 Read the transcript of ‘Last Seen’ episode nine ‘The Big Dig’

NOVEMBER 12, 2018

KELLY HORAN AND JACK RODOLICO: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16.

RODOLICO: Wow there’s...

HORAN: There’s 16; 16 to 20.



RODOLICO: Sixteen to 20 people over there. Do you think it feels as tense over there as it does over here?



 
HORAN: Oh my god. Does it feel so tense for you right now?

RODOLICO: Yeah. Yeah, it does. I feel like it’s very, very quiet.

HORAN: I can almost not breathe.

HORAN: Jack and I are in Orlando, Florida, on the porch of a family we met an hour ago. There are potted plants, a leather couch, a Harley Davidson -- and us, squeezed into the middle of it all. The people you just heard us counting are across the street, on a vacant lot, where a backhoe has been digging a giant hole all morning. The engine is cut now, and they are standing around that hole, staring down at something.


HORAN: They’re crouching now. They’re bending.

RODOLICO: This is such an odd little scene. All of them standing over there looking at the hole, and all of us standing over across the street just staring at them.

HORAN: Standing over here. Looking at them, looking at the hole.

RODOLICO: Looking at them, looking at the hole.

HORAN: FBI agents in khakis and fleeces oversee the excavation. And we’re here, watching in a state of heightened anticipation and recording all of it, because they are digging up our lead.


RODOLICO: Digging. I see him throwing dirt out of the hole.

HORAN: Yup. We’ve got two more shovels, three more shovels in the hands of the FBI.

HORAN: The agents poke at the bottom of the hole. They’re in it up to their shoulders. Whatever is down there, the shovels aren’t enough to unearth it.

RODOLICO: Somebody’s climbing back into the digger.

HORAN: The digger is going back to work.

HORAN: So why are we color-narrating the movements of a backhoe and getting all worked up over a hole in the ground? Because 28 and a half years since the greatest art heist in history, without a single arrest or recovery in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum robbery, the art could be anywhere -- even in a hole in Orlando.

RODOLICO: From WBUR and The Boston Globe, this is Last Seen. I’m Jack Rodolico.

HORAN: And I’m Kelly Horan. This is Episode 9: “The Big Dig.”

STEPHEN KURKJIAN: They are pursuing something right now. They are seeing something.

RODOLICO: Our colleague from The Boston Globe, Steve Kurkjian, began developing the lead that led us to Orlando, Florida, in 2016. Steve is the consummate skeptic. All those yarns spun by all those criminals about what they might or might not know about the Gardner art? Steve doesn’t buy any of it. But this lead -- this lead he likes.

HORAN: And, as he stands across the street from a 23-ton backhoe that’s delicately peeling away layers of earth, Steve likes this lead a lot.

RODOLICO: This now vacant lot was once a rented, warm weather getaway for a Boston gangster who tops the list of Gardner suspects. We’ve told you about him before. His name is Bobby Guarente. He’s the one who had that hiding spot in his house in Maine. And on a Venn diagram of Gardner heist suspects, Bobby Guarente would be in the middle. Before he died, he was mixed up in one way or another with so many of the men named in connection to either robbing the museum or trafficking the art.

HORAN: In May 2016, Steve Kurkjian got a call from a retired mobster who had been close with Guarente. The caller’s name, Alonso Esposito, didn’t ring a bell. But then he told Steve that was just the name he took when he entered witness protection.

KURKJIAN: So he said, “No, no, no, my name is Bobby Luisi.” And I was really shocked and very excited because I felt he was a very important person.

BOBBY LUISI: Can you hear me?

HORAN: I can hear you great. Can you hear me?

LUISI: Yes, I can.

HORAN: For a guy whose life depended on adopting a new identity and back story, Bobby Luisi doesn’t seem to recall his gangster past with regret. Relish seems a better word.

LUISI: You know, I was like a Tony Soprano. I had all the goomahs. I had the money, the cars, the nice clothes, and in my neighborhood, I was a star. There was no doubt about that. You know, I had a little charisma. I flashed money around. I took care of everybody. And it was a nice way of life for me.

HORAN: Luisi’s nice way of life came at a cost. People close to him murdered his father and half-brother. He lost years of his life in prison for trafficking cocaine. But he emerged from witness protection a few years ago dangling a tip about the stolen Gardner art. In the late 1990s, Luisi and Bobby Guarente were selling cocaine in Boston. They shared a safe house in a suburb. And one night, as the two were watching TV, a story came on about the Gardner heist.

LUISI: And they were talking about the artwork. And he says, “I know where the art’s buried.” He said it’s in Florida under a concrete floor. He didn’t say where in Florida. He just said it was buried under a concrete slab in Florida. This is what I was told directly from his mouth.

HORAN: And based on how well you knew Bobby did you feel like he was just, you know, posing and trying to show off, or did you really feel like, “Wow, he must know something.”

LUISI: Oh, no, no. I would believe him 100 percent. You know he’s a thief, a murderer. That’s what he was, you know. So I really do believe what he told me.

HORAN: When Steve Kurkjian learned this in 2016, he wondered: “What am I supposed to do with this?” A passing mention almost 20 years earlier between two mobsters -- one dead, the other known to embellish. Where do you even start with a tip like that?

KURKJIAN: Well, I had already done my due diligence on Guarente and I pulled out my biography file on him.

RODOLICO: Steve knew Guarente had lived in Boston and Maine. But buried in his paperwork on him, he found a DEA report with an address he’d never previously noticed.

KURKJIAN: And there was one place in Florida. So I said, “Mmmm, not eureka yet, but I think that’s the place we ought to start looking.”

RODOLICO: In a piece he co-wrote with Shelley Murphy for The Boston Globe in 2016, Steve all but published the Orlando lot’s address. If news of its existence had piqued the FBI’s interest, we don’t know. We do know that the FBI never contacted the owner of that land at the time. Something about that lot still bugged Steve. In August of 2017, Steve went to Florida to see it for himself. The house had been torn down a decade earlier. All that remained was a little under an acre of cleared land that sloped down to a sparkling lake.

KURKJIAN: And there are houses across the street. And people coming and going in the houses -- so, which was good.

RODOLICO: Steve started knocking on doors.

KURKJIAN: OK, I am here with Roque Cartagena, and we’re on his front porch on a beautiful, sunny day.

RODOLICO: Roque Cartagena’s front porch looked out over the empty lot, which had been vacant since he’d lived there. But he knew a guy who might remember the house where Guarente once vacationed.

ROQUE CARTAGENA: Ah-ha! Luigi, what’s up, boy?

RODOLICO: A neighbor, named Luigi Ferrari.

CARTAGENA: Not much man, not much. Listen I’m calling you because there is somebody here. He’s a reporter.

KURKJIAN: Can you hear me, it’s Steve Kurkjian.

LUIGI FERRARI: Steve Kurcher. OK, Steve, my name is Luigi. Nice to meet you.

KURKJIAN: Great to hear from you.

RODOLICO: Steve explained a little bit about what he wanted. You know that empty lot? Maybe there’s $500 million worth of art buried there. That kind of thing.

FERRARI: Uh, was born on that street in 1974. I’ve played on that lot since I was a child. And I pretty much know that area like the back of my hand.

RODOLICO: The next day, Ferrari walked Steve right onto the empty lot.

KURKJIAN: Let’s just take a walk down.

FERRARI: Sure.

KURKJIAN: The house was how far down? Was this a driveway that we’re on now?

FERRARI: There really never was a driveway before. It was actually just a...

RODOLICO: Luigi Ferrari turned out to be an unofficial neighborhood historian. He remembered the house -- it was sleek, modern, maybe a little gaudy.

FERRARI: There used to be a tiki bar. It was a big tiki bar. It had a -- I mean, back in the ‘80s it had a TV and all kinds of amenities. Yeah, they had -- the pool was gorgeous. It had table tops, which were mosaic, that the water would actually come up the base of this, and just percolate over top of the mosaic, keeping everything looking beautiful and white and everything. This is something that you didn’t see back then, you know. Very nice.

RODOLICO: Like something a gangster might like. The back of the house, facing the lake, was all glass. The lawn rolled down to a white sand beach. Ferrari didn’t remember Guarente, who’d rented the house in the early ‘90s.

HORAN: In 2016, Steve tracked down two contractors who were in a position to know what was below ground on the lot. 
One had torn the house down in 2007. The other had broken up that beautiful swimming pool. 
Neither had found a Rembrandt, or anything even approximating a hiding space underground. For Steve, it was starting to feel like a dead end.

FERRARI: I can tell you this -- it hasn’t been dug up right here.

HORAN: Until Ferrari noticed something curious.

FERRARI: Here’s the original phone lines. This is the original phone lines, right here. These are all, still all attached going under the ground.

HORAN: If the phone lines were there, maybe the contractors who tore down the house left something else behind. Steve thought: “Could the Gardner art be down there? Buried in Orlando, Florida? Maybe.” There was just one way to find out.

KURKJIAN: There’s no way I’m going to be able to find anything unless I dig up the lot. And it’s a big lot!

HORAN: Not only that. Steve had yet to find the owner of that lot.

KURKJIAN: So the second thing I did the next day is I drove into his -- surreptitiously -- into his gated community, the owner. And I left a note in his mailbox. I found his mailbox and I banged on the door. He doesn’t hear me! He’s not coming out. So I said, “This is gonna ruin it.”

HORAN: Just as Steve was willing to let it all go, the landowner reached out to him. Steve revealed why he was interested in his lot. And then, through an attorney, Steve got the go ahead: Find out what’s down there.

KURKJIAN: So this piece of equipment is what that’s being used?

BRAD DUPKE: This is the ground-penetrating radar.

HORAN: In December of 2017, WBUR and The Boston Globe hired an engineering firm to scan the empty lot for evidence that something worth digging up might be beneath the surface. This is the lead geologist, Brad Dupke, who did not know that he was looking for buried treasure. He pushed what looked like a lawn mower over the ground where the house once stood.

DUPKE: The four-wheel cart houses the antenna. It’s a transmitting, receiving antenna and this is the computer part of it.

HORAN: Dupke used two different technologies -- radio and electromagnetic waves -- to determine whether there was something not naturally occurring below the ground’s surface. If both types of waves identified an anomaly in the same spot, Dupke explained, then that spot warranted further investigation.

KURKJIAN: And in late December we get the report and eureka! They do see something four to six feet below the surface that they said they could not explain.

HORAN: There was something down there. Dupke said he knew exactly where it was: below where the back right corner of the house had been. It was rectangular, like a box.

DUPKE: We have a target. Let’s see what that target is.

KURKJIAN: Brad, do you mean similar survey work or excavation?

DUPKE: Excavation, like a test pit, digging it up.

HORAN: There was just one problem. This lead wasn’t about just any anomaly buried underground. It was about the Gardner art, which made this Orlando lot potentially a crime scene. And that meant, we could not do this dig -- not on our own. The FBI needed to know about it. So did the museum. We didn’t want to risk damaging some of the world’s most valuable stolen art. So we did what we thought we were supposed to do with the information we now had. And that’s when things got really complicated.

RODOLICO: Steve Kurkjian’s reporting on the lot in Orlando was playing out with a very loud clock ticking in the background. In May of 2017, the Gardner Museum announced it was doubling its reward for the return of the missing art, from $5 to 10 million. That reward would expire, they said, at midnight, Dec. 31. The guy who owned the Orlando lot became motivated to find out what was under it. So with the knowledge that the geological survey detected a rectangular shape beneath the surface -- a rectangle the perfect size to hold a five-by-four foot Rembrandt -- and with the landowner eager to register his claim before the reward reverted to a mere $5 million, Kelly went to the Gardner Museum to see head of security Anthony Amore.

HORAN: It was Dec. 28, 2017. With just three days to go until the museum’s doubled reward was set to expire, Amore had been barraged with tips from all over the world. And here I was with one more.

HORAN: OK. So my team might have a lead that we would -- we feel at this point that we’d like to share it with you, that we feel compelled to share it with you.

HORAN: Amore had long suspected that Bobby Guarente had once possessed the art, so I figured that he would have either already run this lead down, so he could dismiss it, or it would pique his interest. If our lead was good, I wanted the FBI to be able to do their job. And I wanted us to be able to do ours. But knowing that Amore was obliged to take our tip straight to the FBI, and fearing that they would shut us out, I was careful. So I began cautiously. I said, “We have a source. We can’t say who. He owns some land. We can’t say where.”

HORAN: The fear that I have as a journalist who’s been covering this is that I have no knowledge of how the FBI works because they have refused to sit down with us. And what I don’t want to have happen is to say, give you an address, and have our access to this site cut off.

ANTHONY AMORE: I would say that the museum, the paintings, are exponentially more important than a podcast.

HORAN: OK -- that hurts. But I understand. [Laughs.]

AMORE: It’s true.

HORAN: Of course it’s true. Of course it’s true.

AMORE: I can’t speak for what the FBI will do, what they’ll say. I just know that they’re committed to a recovery just like I am. But I can’t say, “Oh yeah, well they’ll let the media be involved.” I mean, that’s not -- my history with them tells me that whatever their decision is is going to be the one that I think is the way to go.

HORAN: It was tense. And after I left Amore’s office, things got even more tense. The landowner got jumpy about that expiring reward. His lawyer, who had been in frequent contact with us, went around us and reached out to Amore, to register the claim before the New Year. Amore deemed the tip “credible,” and he shared it with the Boston FBI. And that’s when we ran headlong into a wall of silence. Amore stopped communicating. The Orlando landowner and his lawyer stopped returning our phone calls and emails and texts. We’d been shut out, exactly as I’d feared. But all that silence spoke volumes. We sensed that the dig was imminent. And we presumed that the FBI didn’t want us to know that.

RODOLICO: When communications blacked out, we guessed. In the early hours of a Boston snowstorm, we flew to Orlando. And on the morning of Jan. 31, 2018, we hopped into our rental car and drove straight to the lot.

RODOLICO: Oh there’s all kinds of digging equipment. Take your headphones off. I’m going to keep my mic low.

HORAN: Yeah, keep your mic low. So we’ve got -- we’ve got a huge backhoe.

RODOLICO: There’s a big backhoe on the street. Holy crap.

GPS: Your destination is on the right.

RODOLICO: We’d guessed right. The gate to the lot was locked. FBI agents were present. It was happening. Now, we told you that we staked out on a neighbor’s porch. But we had to get there first, preferably without the FBI spotting us.

HORAN: OK. Here we go.

RODOLICO: We parked well out of sight. We shoved our mics into our bags. And we walked right past the dig site and into Roque Cartagena’s house. A photographer from The Boston Globe, John Tlumacki, was slung low in an SUV with tinted windows, taking photographs out the back. Inside, we peered through drawn curtains, trying to make sense of the movement across the street.

HORAN: The glare from this lake is making it really hard to see through these binoculars. But someone’s -- someone’s plotted out the dig area. He’s marking the grass right now. He’s walking the perimeter. It does look to be about 15 feet across.

HORAN: Steve, Jack and I were now in the house with Roque Cartagena.

CARTAGENA: You can open the refrigerator and grab whatever you want.

HORAN: And his mother was there too, and his daughter, and grandkids, and cats, two Doberman Pinschers, and a very chatty bird. And about an hour into our stakeout, around 9:30 in the morning...

HORAN: Oh, they’re digging!

RODOLICO: Whoa.

HORAN: The orange Doosan.

RODOLICO: The digger’s on the move. Oh my, god!

HORAN: ...is in motion.

RODOLICO: This is the spot. This is the spot.

HORAN: There! This is the spot. They are moving a lot of earth right now.

HORAN: We overheard Steve say to himself, “I can’t believe this is happening.”

KURKJIAN: This is... This is a culmination of, you know, eight months of good work. I’ve been on that lot by myself just wondering what’s below the surface and, look, the federal government is agreeing that there is a possibility that there is a recovery that could be gained here.

HORAN: We slipped onto the porch. We could see the whole lot, the digger, the agents. The Globe’s photographer was now on Cartagenas’ roof, perched there, shooting the action with a telephoto lens.

HORAN: They’ve stopped the digger. They’re going in now with shovels.

RODOLICO: Throughout the morning, a pattern emerged. The digger dug, then stopped.

HORAN: Everyone has gathered around the hole and it looks like this crowd has doubled.

RODOLICO: People stared into the hole. Then the digger started up again.

RODOLICO: Somebody’s climbing back into the digger.

HORAN: The digger is going back to work.

RODOLICO: They’ve got an eight foot tall pile of dirt that they’re just adding more soil to.

RODOLICO: Remember our geologist, the one who identified the rectangular object below the surface? Well, now we could see him overseeing the dig. He was in the backhoe. Clearly, he was no longer our geologist. He was the FBI’s. He was standing next to the hole, drawing a big box with his fingers over his head. Our new resident expert, Roque Cartagena, who was hours late for work at this point, was huddled on the porch with us, guessing at what they were seeing down there.

CARTAGENA: Yes, they did find something, I believe.

RODOLICO: And in these tense, anxious moments, we noticed that Steve had left the porch and was standing in plain sight on the sidewalk.

RODOLICO: Steve’s getting jittery. I can’t blame him.

HORAN: I can’t believe he hasn’t climbed the fence.

RODOLICO: Any moment.

KURKJIAN: [In the distance.] Come on! Talk to me!

HORAN: The man who owned this lead, who’d done all the reporting that put the FBI on this lot, who had spent two years turning a tip from a gangster into a credible lead in the Gardner mystery, was restless.

RODOLICO: Steve is losing it. Yeah. All of us are being discreet, somewhat, on the porch. We think John the photographer is up on the roof. Steve Kurkjian is standing on the sidewalk in broad daylight, looking back at us every once in awhile saying very loudly, “They’ve found something. They’ve got something.” He can’t keep it together.

HORAN: I like his -- I love his body language.

RODOLICO: He’s inching closer to the road. He’s almost standing in the street now.

HORAN: He’s about to climb a fence. [Laughing.] And now he’s got his iPhone out.

RODOLICO: He’s got his iPhone out, over his head. Steve, can you come over here?

HORAN: Come over here so we can talk to you. Well then I’ll go stand where you are.

KURKJIAN: Brad’s in the hole. There’s something. There is something there, Kelly.

HORAN: Steve looked the way we felt. The Gardner case does that to you. You get invested, obsessed even. We abandoned the porch and joined Steve on the sidewalk. It wasn’t like they were going to stop digging just because three reporters from Boston were there.

KURKJIAN: They. See. Something.

RODOLICO: They see something.

KURKJIAN: They see something. Wouldn’t you say, Jack? They see something?

RODOLICO: They see something. They’re gesturing a lot.

HORAN: Well, look how he’s digging. He’s-- he’s-- It’s very ginger, what he’s doing. He’s like tapping the ground. FBI agents conferring.

HORAN: They scraped at the bottom of the hole with rakes. You could lose a person in that hole. The digger started up again. We were still on the outside -- still far from seeing what the people around the hole were seeing. It was practically killing us.

HORAN: So, how did we get here? I don’t just mean a hole in the ground in Orlando, one that might or might not hold something as wide and as tall and as singular as Rembrandt’s “Storm On The Sea Of Galilee.” I mean, 28 and a half years after thieves made it look so easy to pull off what remains the single most valuable art heist ever, why does solving it still look so hard. All those unreliable narrators we’ve told you about are part of the reason. These con men and criminals, by turns tragic, comical and chilling. Dead or alive, each has been a pretender to the throne of the perfect crime. But was the Gardner heist a perfect crime? Or has it just been an imperfect investigation?

KURKJIAN: The FBI, in, with all of its skills, have used hard investigative tactics and that’s gotten them to certain clues and certain suspects, but it hasn’t gotten them to a single credible sighting of any of the artwork. And you’re playing the same note?

HORAN: The FBI does have a pattern of setting up people of interest on tough charges, hoping they give something up about the Gardner 
heist in exchange for leniency. The 1999 sting on TRC Auto Electric yielded nothing. 
One suspect died in prison rather than talk to the feds. 
The others arrested are still behind bars. Then, more than a decade later, the FBI set up and arrested Bobby “The Cook” Gentile twice. The result? Nothing. Does this suggest that criminals hate the FBI more than they want their own freedom, or does it suggest that the FBI has been pursuing the wrong guys?

RODOLICO: Parsing the FBI’s own statements about the case does make you wonder.

HORAN: In 2016, a retired FBI supervisor said that as of the last time he worked on a case, in 2001, the Boston office “knew no more than they did the day after it happened.”

RODOLICO: That remark echoed what another agent told The Boston Globe in 2010 about the stolen art: “There hasn’t been a concrete sighting, or real proof of life.”

HORAN: And just five years ago, the head of the Boston FBI admitted, “We do not know where the art is currently located.”

RODOLICO: We wanted the perspective of an outsider. Someone outside the Gardner investigation, but inside law enforcement. We landed in the small law office of Tom Dwyer -- a local who climbed the ranks of the district attorney’s office in the 1970s and ‘80s. Dwyer hopes the FBI solves the Gardner case, but he worries about what it means that they haven’t.

TOM DWYER: I think the case was it’s so spectacular. When you see something that’s so spectacular the public expects it to be solved. You know, it’s, it’s a longer period of time than solving most cases involving serial killers. I don’t think people perceive that nothing is being done. I think people do believe that something is being done. They just don’t know what it is.

RODOLICO: Which brings us to another conclusion: The Gardner investigation has a public relations problem.

HORAN: This case is so high profile -- so sensational -- that the Boston FBI’s silence in response to simple questions feels like ducking. They didn’t even respond to a short list of questions we submitted to them in writing. What is the public supposed to think?

AMORE: How would they know what’s good for the investigation or not when they’re not part of it, when all they know is what they’re reading in the newspaper?

RODOLICO: Anthony Amore bristles at any suggestion that the public might be critical of how the FBI has handled the case.

AMORE: It’s bizarre to me. It’s this feeling that the public has a need to know something that they don’t. They just don’t have a need to know. I mean, we’re not holding things back to play, to play games or whatever. We’re just trying to make every decision based on what is the best thing for the investigation.

RODOLICO: Amore has lost all patience with any suggestion that he, as the man leading the investigation for the museum, or the FBI, owes the public anything.

AMORE: To some people this is entertaining. It’s a mystery. It’s fascinating. It’s alluring. People think art theft is sexy. It’s you know, makes a great movie, that sort of thing. None of those things are what this really is. This investigation is about none of those things. It’s strictly about getting the paintings back, and putting them back on the wall.

RODOLICO: Amore might not have a duty to the public. But doesn’t the Boston FBI? They’ve investigated the Gardner heist from behind closed doors. And they’ve done it that way for far too long. We believe it’s time for some transparency in the Gardner case.

HORAN: But there, on the sidewalk in Orlando, we were beginning to see things clearly.

KURKJIAN: What was that?

HORAN: Looks like broken concrete. Yep, definitely looks like concrete.

KURKJIAN: Come on. Here he comes. Here he comes. Come on over here.

HORAN: He’s not coming to us.

KURKJIAN: Yeah, he is. Yeah, yeah.

HORAN: Is he? Why is this happening? Why are they coming now?

HORAN: With the backhoe dropping chunks of concrete on the grass, three people on the lot crossed the street and walked right up to us. It was the landowner, his girlfriend and his attorney, John Bill -- the guy who’d stopped returning our phone calls in the run up to the secret dig. It was a little awkward.

JOHN BILL: So they’re almost finished digging. And there’s a little bit of the perimeter over there to the-- that they’re still looking at, that’s still within the perimeter of what they believed to be an area including those anomalies. But they’ve pretty much excavated down nine feet.

HORAN: It was just about noon. All told, the dig had taken less than three hours. It felt much longer. Time has a way of slowing way down when you think you’re unearthing masterworks of our civilization.

BILL: So, it was pretty much exactly where they thought it was, and the size of the object, and everything checked out except...

HORAN: Except, John Bill said, it was a septic tank. In that moment, there could not have been three words in the English language that we wanted to hear less: a septic tank. And just like that, it was over.

KURKJIAN: Oh man. In for nickel, in for a dime.

RODOLICO: After this whole day standing across the street, mysteriously peering across, I’m actually just going to walk onto the land now. Oh, yeah. That’s a septic system. Smells like septic, huh?

HORAN: Just a few hours earlier, three skeptical journalists, following a lead that was good as any in a case that’s stretched on for nearly three decades, had given themselves over to hope. And that says a lot. Because even as our collective disappointment smudged that good and open feeling right out, we’d felt it. We’d been propelled by it all the way to Florida, been a little high on it, even. So that’s what we’re left with -- the hope that 13 long-missing pieces -- a Vermeer, three Rembrandts, a Manet, a Flinck, five Degas sketches, a Napoleonic finial and a Chinese gu -- will yet be unearthed on some other day, in some other place.

Before Isabella Stewart Gardner had even purchased the land on which her museum would be built, she reveled in the beauty of her art-filled home. On Jan. 20, 1898, Gardner wrote to her dealer in Florence, Italy, “Downstairs, I feel, are all those glories I could go and look at, if I wanted to! Think of that. I can see that Rembrandt any time I want to. There’s richness for you.”

And until that Rembrandt and the other stolen works are back in their rightful places at the Gardner Museum, we are all the poorer.

 
Episode  1010101010101010101010 Read the transcript of ‘Last Seen’ episode ten ‘Last Seen’ Live
      
NOVEMBER 19, 2018

KELLY HORAN: From WBUR Boston and The Boston Globe, this is Last Seen. I’m Kelly Horan. By the end of a process like the one to put together an investigative podcast about the most sensational unsolved art heist in history, the only thing more cluttered than our brains is the cutting room floor. There are characters and storylines and theories that are so compelling, we just couldn’t fit them all in or go quite as deeply with them as we’d have liked. Enter a Last Seen live event, a recording of which you’re about to hear. Last Seen fans in the Boston area joined me and my colleagues Jack Rodolico and Stephen Kurkjian as he spoke candidly about the Gardner mystery and took the audience behind the scenes of the last year and a half of our reporting. The event took place at the Great Hall at Faneuil Hall in Boston and was part of the GlobeDocs Film Festival. And we were joined onstage by our WBUR colleague and host of the Endless Thread podcast Ben Brock Johnson.

BEN BROCK JOHNSON: Welcome, guys. How’s it going?

STEPHEN KURKJIAN: All well.



HORAN: Very well.





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JACK RODOLICO: Always good when we’re with you, Ben.

JOHNSON: Likewise. I feel like you guys have been -- you’ve been sitting down on the couches near where we do our work at the iLab for so long, having these, like, really deep conversations about the reporting that you’re doing. And we’ve all been listening to the episodes as they come out, which has been incredible. But I’m really excited to talk about behind-the-scenes stuff with you, so thanks for being willing to do this. Kelly, I want to start with you. As you prepared yourself to tackle this story and this project, what were you most excited about?

HORAN: Well, I was most excited, I think, about the journalistic challenge of taking on a story that has been so often told, in many places and in many ways, and in trying to make it new and fresh. One of the things I vowed before I took it on was to never say the sentence, “Two men dressed as police officers...” Because I think that if you can’t even change up the basic facts, if they lose their sharp edges, then, you know, how can you make it new? And so I wanted to go back to the beginning and bring listeners something that they hadn’t heard. And it’s been gratifying because I’ve heard from people who said, “Oh, I heard about a podcast of the Gardner heist, and I thought, so what? But then I heard the voices.” And you hear the terror in a security guard’s voice. You hear the outrage in a defense attorney’s voice. You hear the disbelief in a suspect’s voice. And that just made me glad that I picked radio 25 years ago because it’s all about the voice. And then I also was wondering, can we make a podcast about art that people will want to listen to and that doesn’t sound like “Masterpiece Theatre” and that makes you care that this is missing? And I think the jury is still out on that. But I have heard from people that they’re happy when we talk about the art. So I think that...

JOHNSON: Wait. What’s wrong with “Masterpiece Theatre”?



HORAN: I love -- people who know me will tell you that this entire thing would have been a period costume drama. [Laughter.]

JOHNSON: Totally fair.

HORAN: But, you know, I think that it was the journalistic challenge of taking a story that is out there for everyone to read about and to bring new things to it and to advance it, I think. So I hope we did that.

JOHNSON: Jack, talk to me about why you think this story is still riveting. I mean, it’s been 28 years, right? Why is it still compelling?

RODOLICO: I think the grabbiest thing about the story is that the FBI hasn’t solved it, right? And it’s -- and that’s not a dig at the FBI. It’s a really difficult case to solve. But there are a lot of superlatives when you look at this crime, the way it was done. There are parts of it that play on ideas you have in your mind of the way somebody would pull off a heist -- dressing up as cops and tricking someone and taking a Rembrandt. You know, there are certain things -- even if you don’t know anything about art, which I would put myself firmly in that category, you know who Rembrandt is, loosely. So those things grab you. And then all you have to do is dig just under the surface, and you realize it does not line up with your thinking about what an art heist is at all. You know, there are no catsuit -- what’s the word? Cat burglars, right?



HORAN: Catsuited burglars.

RODOLICO: Yes, there’s no cat burglars. And there’s really almost no good information about where they are. I think we’ve told a good story despite that. But one thing that Steve said from the very beginning, which was terrifying to think about how we were going to do this as a podcast, was -- but it really stuck in my mind -- is, the whole, everything is feathers. When you look at this story, when you look at what the FBI has done -- and they have worked really diligently -- it’s feathers. It’s still theories after almost three decades. So you can kind of implant whatever you want on that in your mind. And then you start looking for facts. And they’re fascinating. But they still don’t lead you to the art. I think if it was solved 10 years after, we wouldn’t be talking about it now.

JOHNSON: Steve, you’re the OG here, I feel like. You’ve been covering this story for decades, right? You wrote a book about the case called “Master Thieves.” So you bring this level of experience with the story that I think is really unique. And I won’t pretend that reporters don’t have a reputation for being like a dog with a bone when it comes to a certain story. But why haven’t you let this thing go?

KURKJIAN: Thank you. That’s a great question. And I think it all goes down to the title of Nat Hentoff’s biography “Boston Boy.” And I am the “Boston Boy.” I grew up in Boston, went to public schools in Boston and joined the Globe at a young age and joined the Spotlight team when it was founded. And understand, the Spotlight team thrives because of the kind of reporting it does, purposeful reporting. And that’s the way I felt about this story right from the start -- that this needed some hard reporting. And as an investigative reporter for my career, I do hard reporting. And I kept thinking there’s a higher purpose to this. And understand, as we spoke here, 28 years, the largest art theft in world history, and it happened here in my city, in our city. And I just felt that if I continued on it and gave it more coverage, it would reach a larger audience, which is going back to why I feel this podcast is so special. And I’m just thrilled that I’ve been aboard with both Jack and Kelly and their team at WBUR. The Globe has done a lot with this story, but it needed this partnership. It needed this other media to get heard. And I hope somehow, soon enough, we’ll get a recovery. That’s my hope.

JOHNSON: So in any narrative, it’s the people that can make or break the story. It’s good news that Last Seen is buttressed not just by this incredible story, which, of course, we’ll get into even more, but by a really colorful cast of characters we get to meet in this podcast. And, again, I’ve been lucky enough to hear some of those, both as a listener and as somebody who’s been talking to you guys about the show as you’ve been making it. But it seems like there’s an endless number of them. We get to meet these people, explore their intertwining relationships. Steve, do you have a favorite moment, a favorite character or a favorite relationship between characters in the podcast?

KURKJIAN: I met a bad guy who worked with a good guy to do a remarkable thing here, which was to open up a crime syndicate about to do a major robbery of a armored car depot. And Dave Nadolski is his name. He’s the FBI agent who got this young man to do all sorts of derring-do, but only because of the trust that they built with one another, agent to an informant were we able to avoid an amazing, amazing art theft -- excuse me -- a bank, armored car robbery that only because of the trust that these two men had.

JOHNSON: Jack, what about you?

RODOLICO: The interview that I can’t shake from my memory was an attorney named Ryan McGuigan. And we interviewed him at ‘BUR. There wasn’t even a studio that day. We just sat in an office. And so there was nothing -- there was no scene built around him. There was nothing particularly spectacular about where we interviewed him. But he is a fascinating defense attorney because he defends the latest, I’ll call the latest person of interest in the Gardner investigation, which is a Connecticut, aging Connecticut mobster octogenarian named Bobby Gentile. He’s sitting in prison right now because of his suspected connection to the paintings -- not to the heist, but to the paintings. And Ryan has defended this guy tooth and nail for six years. The FBI set his client up on two different stings. They got him to commit crimes twice. They held all this pressure over him to try to get him to talk about the paintings, and he never did. And the interesting thing about McGuigan is that he has a lot of theories about why that is that expand beyond, well, my client has nothing to do with it, right? I mean, that’s what every defense attorney is going to say. He’s defending mobsters, so you can’t totally trust the guy. Let’s be honest, right? But what he has that very few people have -- very, very few people -- is that he has looked inside the FBI investigation. He’s looked over the fence with a very particular lens and with an eye on defending his client. But there are so few people who would speak to us who had any experience with the FBI and their tactics. And he makes a really compelling case that the FBI has tried again and again to squeeze individuals by helping them commit other crimes or catching them in the act of committing other crimes and then then saying, “OK, we’re going to send you to jail if you don’t talk.” And it hasn’t worked yet. I mean, it’s a good tactic. It often works. But it leaves you scratching your head as to, why won’t these guys talk? Is it because they don’t know something, or they do something and they still won’t say something about it? But he’s just sort of lived it in a way that very few people have. I mean, he’s exasperated with his client. He’s exasperated with the FBI. He doesn’t like anybody who has ever touched the Gardner investigation, and he can tell you why and when he stopped liking them. So, I like him a lot.

JOHNSON: Kelly, I know you have some favorite characters as well. I really want to hear from you about Isabella Stewart Gardner, though, because this is the person that I didn’t know anything about before hearing this show. And she’s had a huge impact, not only in the city, but she’s a really important character, obviously, in this story. So can you talk a little bit about her?

HORAN: If I must.

JOHNSON: It was one of my favorite parts of one of the episodes that we’ve heard so far, is hearing you talk about her.

HORAN: So, you know, I was so glad to be able to do a true crime podcast without the dead-woman trope, and then I realized there is a dead woman at the heart of my podcast. [Laughs.] Except she’s so alive to me. Isabella Stewart Gardner, I would say, is the animating force of this podcast, of this investigation. We are all here tonight because of what she built over in the Fens. And it’s true. I do love her. She wasn’t uncomplicated. And it’s like, well, all of the characters that we bring to you in the podcast, it’s not one thing or another. It’s not good or bad or black or white. I mean, there were nuances. But what she valued, among other things, was art, and so that’s what she gave us. And in order for me, before I could really understand this heist and what it meant -- I’ve never been good at numbers, I fudged my way through an econ major, and my dad’s in the front row and can tell you all about that -- but $500 million didn’t say anything to me. So I wanted to understand what that loss would’ve meant to her, so I read about her. I read her correspondence. And what I realized is that each of these pieces that was stolen was something that she chose, and not only something that she chose, it was something that she put in its place. So when you go to the Gardner Museum and you see it where it is, it’s where she wanted you to see it. I love control freaks, and I just thought that is, that’s something to aspire to. But she built the whole museum as well. And I love this story. I mean, she drove the architect, probably, to the brink because he’d have his Italian stonemasons that she brought over erect a wall. And she’d come in and say, “No, take it down, do it over.” And then when she was frustrated that her stonemasons couldn’t re-create the exact Tuscan pink stucco for her courtyard, she climbed a ladder and she did it herself. So, she’s my kind of lady.

And to understand what was lost, I’ll take the Vermeer, “The Concert,” as my example. So, you know, many of the paintings that she collected were sight unseen. She had dealers abroad who said, “This is why you should own this.” But for “The Concert,” she traveled to Paris, and she went to the auction house, and she sat there. She didn’t bid herself; it would’ve been untoward. But every time the bid was raised higher, she would raise a handkerchief to her face to signal to her secret buyer in the room, go higher. And she went higher, and she beat the Louvre Museum. Furious, they were furious when they found that it was going to an American woman. “The Concert” was her first major acquisition, and it put her on the map as a collector. But why did she love it? She loved it because her first love was music. And some say that her taste in music was more sophisticated than her taste in art, which -- and in “The Concert,” what we see -- John Updike wrote a poem called “Stolen” about the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist. And in it, he says, the concert is stopped between two notes. And you have a woman going like this. And Gardner, who loved music, responded to that, I think, viscerally. And now it’s gone. And that, for me, was my way into understanding why it mattered.

JOHNSON: Steve, you grew up with the museum. You saw the paintings. So talk about how, in some ways, maybe we as a society didn’t value this work until it was no longer ours.

KURKJIAN: Yeah. I’ve thought long and hard about a recovery. How does a recovery happen? What this needs is, it needs the help of the public. What’s been missing from this, except for one or two times, is a public appeal -- a public appeal that would be powered by a social media campaign. And the more I thought about this in the summer of 2014, when every one of you kids were pouring a bucket of ice over your head, to raise money for ALS research. You know what that did that summer? It raised $80 million for ALS research. And I thought to myself, that’s what’s needed for this case, it’s some media outreach ‘cause that type of campaign would reach the people who most need to be reached, which is, let’s say, the have-nots in society, those people who know something. They don’t know where the artwork is. I believe the FBI when they say the two thieves who stole it are dead. But they may have let their cousins or sisters or whatever know, “I know something,” and it’s those people who have to view this as a loss to all of us, including them. Why? Because this is the artwork of the ages. Everything passes. Art endures. And this is our art. Mrs. Gardner put those on the wall for us, put them on the wall for my father.

My father was a refugee from the Armenian genocide as a 3-year-old and came to Watertown and had, showed interest in art. They sent him -- they got him a scholarship. And every afternoon, he would go back to the museum free of charge. She wanted all of us to be able to enjoy and be inspired by art. And that’s as well in the bad guy world, in the have-nots. Their child, too, their grandchild, too, could be inspired by that art as my father was and became a successful commercial artist. So that’s the hope that we, maybe even out of HUBweek, of GlobeDocs, an event like this, that a campaign can be built with social media to tell the world it’s not ratting on your bad guys; it’s not ratting on your third cousin who may have had something to know about something; it’s being able to inspire your children and your grandchildren with getting this artwork back. Remember what happened when Tom Brady’s T-shirt that he wore, there were torchlight searches going on in my neighborhood. [Laughs.] There’s Rembrandts missing. There’s Vermeer missing. I want that enthusiasm to come to...

JOHNSON: Well-said. Now might be a good time to say if anyone here has the art, feel free to let us know. I think there’s some money involved. So let’s just do a lightning round here -- a real quick lightning round. We have a special guest coming up, and I want to give them proper time. But, you know, one of the amazing things about this story is just the theories of, you know, all these crazy theories of what might have happened to this artwork. And you guys chase a lot of them. So, Kelly, lightning round, you know, I don’t know, 30 seconds. What’s your favorite crazy theory about what happened here?

HORAN: I have taken no end of ridicule for my theory. I just want you to know because I want to feel your support and love right now. My theory is that a man named Paul Stirling Vanderbilt, alias Paul Stirling Vanderbilt, who tried to rob a museum in upstate New York in 1980, returned to Boston to do it right a decade later. His name is Brian McDevitt from Swampscott, Massachusetts.

JOHNSON: Wow. OK. Jack?

RODOLICO: You going for a harebrained theory or, like, what I think happened?

JOHNSON: I mean, I’m a fan of harebrained, but that’s just me.

RODOLICO: OK. Harebrained would be, if I am to believe...

JOHNSON: Aliens. No.

RODOLICO: You know...

JOHNSON: Sorry.

RODOLICO: You ask the questions. I answer them, OK?

JOHNSON: OK. Fair, fair.

RODOLICO: Aliens. No. If I am to believe the former FBI agent, who is the founder of the FBI’s Art Crime Team, that he got this close to getting some criminals to sell him the Vermeer and the Rembrandt “Storm On The Sea Of Galilee,” then they were at least 2007, in France or Corsica because that was the theory at the time. He was talking to these mobsters in Miami. They were connected to these criminals back on the other side of the ocean. They had really good intelligence coming in from French officials that were saying, “Yeah, these guys are talking about it on wiretaps that they are there,” and...

JOHNSON: All right.

RODOLICO: And maybe -- sorry, that was probably more than 30 seconds.

JOHNSON: Your 30 seconds is definitely.

RODOLICO: That theory keeps going from there -- Corsican mobsters, Corsican mobsters.

JOHNSON: Corsican mobsters, OK. And door No. 3.

KURKJIAN: My favorite anecdote here on where they are takes me into Bobby Gentile’s living room, where I had spent three days only fueled by Regina’s Pizza. He said, I’m only talking to you because you bring Regina’s Pizza. This was during that very brief six-month period that he wasn’t behind bars. So at the end of our third day of interviewing, he said to me, “Shut off your tape recorder; I want to ask you some questions.” I said, “Sure, Bob.” I shut off my tape recorder, and he said to me, “What do I get all about -- what do I get for all this information I’ve given to you?” And I thought to myself, what’s he getting at? Maybe he thinks I’m an FBI agent, and he wants -- and he doesn’t want to say anything because he’s been denying, denying, denying for all that, all those three days that he had anything to do with it. So I put out a harebrained idea of he and I would write a book, but, Bobby, I said, I need to know the truth. No more BS. No more denying. When did you get the paintings? What did you do with them? And where are they now? You tell me that, we’ll write, you know, an incredible bestseller. You’ll get all the money in the world, and you’ll get the reward. And I’ll get what I’ve all, now long wanted for 20 years, which is a story about what happened to our, what happened to the Gardner’s paintings.

Bobby looks at me, and he doesn’t say, “You’re crazy.” He puts his head down, and he keeps it down for 10 seconds. And then he puts his head up and says, “No, no, I don’t know anything.” So I get out to my car, say goodbye, and he -- Bobby says -- I said goodbye to Bobby, and I call Ryan McGuigan, his lawyer, and I said, “McGuigan, he’s been lying to you. He’s been lying the FBI. He’s been lying to me for five hours.” And says, “What the hell are you talking about? What did he say?” And I told him about waiting for 10 seconds before turning down my offer to tell me the whole thing. I said, “He knows something. He knows something.” He says, “You know what he was doing during that 10 seconds, Kurkjian?” I said, “No, what, what? He was waiting. He was thinking.” He said, “He wasn’t thinking. He doesn’t have anything. He was thinking to con you out of $10,000.” And he says, “I know you wouldn’t have given it to him, right, Steve?” You’re right. But another, you know, dead end.

JOHNSON: Fair enough. I think Kelly won that round for keeping it under 30 seconds. But all of those -- all of those ideas are good.

JOHNSON: Speaking of whodunit, it is now time to welcome our special surprise guest to the stage. His name is David Nadolski, a retired FBI agent who spent 21 years in the bureau. Welcome, David. I’ll give you a fist bump, fist bump. There we go.

DAVID NADOLSKI: Stand up. Stand up. Come on. Stand up. Meet my twin brother.

(Laughter.)

KURKJIAN: We dress alike.

NADOLSKI: Yeah, Mommy still dresses us alike. [Laughs.]

KURKJIAN: Nadolski and Kurkjian -- somewhere they meet.

JOHNSON: So for those of you who have been listening, David is a key character in Episode 3. And, David, welcome. Thank you. Thank you for being here tonight. We appreciate it.

NADOLSKI: Oh, my pleasure.

JOHNSON: Earlier this evening, Steve shared that he sort of really appreciated the relationship between you and one of your confidential informants, Anthony or Tony Romano. Now, this is a reminder to everyone, Tony Romano was a member of the TRC Auto Electric shop crew, the headquarters for mobster Carmello Merlino’s gang. Tony was tasked with giving you info on any conversations that had anything to do with the Gardner art. He was the man who came to you with the information, which resulted in a raid for another heist. Dave, talk about your relationship with Tony.

NADOLSKI: Well, Tony actually contacted me first at one time, before all this happened. We had a robbery at the John Quincy Adams museum, and several irreplaceable books were stolen at that time. And I was told that there was a prisoner at Concord prison who was interested in talking to me about this because he knows who did it. So I grab one of the detectives from Quincy, and we ran out to Concord. And across the street from the prison is a barracks for the state police. And he was working on their cars. This guy is a mechanic. And so he told one of the one of the troopers, he said, “You know, I know something about this crime. Could you help me get in front of an agent?” So that’s what the trooper did. He contacted our office. I was called. I went there with the detective. We sat, found Tony in a room upstairs in the barracks, and he was just sitting in a chair like this. And so we sat down in front of him, and he was, he was wearing his prison dungarees, which are blue jeans, blue jean shirt, short sleeves, and his arms were covered in tattoos.

JOHNSON: For those of you listening at home, the way he was sitting was sort of lax in his chair and his head looking at the ceiling.

NADOLSKI: Right, exactly.

JOHNSON: OK.

NADOLSKI: And so we said, “Hey, hi, how are you doing? I understand you want to talk to us about this crime.” And he just sort of looked at us and went back and looked up at the ceiling and didn’t say much. And so I looked over at the detective, and I thought, you know, “What’s with this guy?” And I said, “Well, you know, Tony, I know you got to get back to the prison here pretty soon, and we got things to do, but if you want to talk to us about this particular crime, we’re here. If it’s a bad time, we’ll come back.”

So he says,”OK.” He goes, “Kevin Gilday did it.” And I said, “Oh, who’s Kevin Gilday? And he said, “He’s a guy from Quincy. He’s a burglar, and I’ve known him practically my whole life. And we were in jail together, and he told me he was going to do this type of crime. He want -- he was really eyeballing that particular job.” And so I said, “Well, thanks. I appreciate that.” And long story short, it was Kevin Gilday. And it was Tony’s information to me that that helped solve that crime. We did recover the books. Gilday did five years. And all was well. So I called the parole board and said, “Hey, you know, I want to talk to you about one of your guys.” And of course, they said, “Oh, s---. What did -- who is it? And what did he do now?” So I said, “Well, he did something good, actually. His name’s Anthony Romano, and I think he’s coming up for parole. And I want you to know that he provided the information that allowed me to solve this case and get these books back, so he did a good job.” So they say, “Well, thank you. We appreciate that. You don’t usually don’t get good information on guys, so.” And that was how I met Tony anyhow, in answer to the question.

JOHNSON: So the raid that was the result of Tony’s work with the FBI, with you, brought a couple of key suspects into custody. You were there when everyone arrived, and you tried to get information out of these folks coming in about the Gardner.

NADOLSKI: How did that come up?

JOHNSON: Yeah, well, just tell me about those conversations.

NADOLSKI: Oh, yeah. Sure.

JOHNSON: Were you like, we do as reporters, you had a little notebook, and you’re kind of yelling at them as they get brought in?

NADOLSKI: I worked with the agent who was working on that particular case. And so after, you know, this whole thing came down with the armored car robbery, we went and thought, well, what the heck? We’ll you give them -- if they did know anything about this particular crime, we sat down with each one of them individually after the arrest for the armored, attempted armored car robbery and just said, “You know, you’re really in a lot of trouble here. And as such, you know, you’re looking at a lot of time. However, if you’ve got anything to say about the Gardner, that’s -- that would help you.” And each one said no. So that’s how, that’s the last time I talked to anybody about the Gardner.

JOHNSON: Fair enough. What makes some people talk and others not talk? What happened when some of these folks realized that Tony Romano was an informant?

NADOLSKI: Well, obviously, he was in a world of hurt because he had to leave town. And we had discussed all that beforehand originally. And I had to go before the parole board, by the way, before we did anything and ask their permission and get their permission to work with Tony, who was on parole. And when I explained to them that the only way into stopping this attempted crime, which was going to be the robbery of the Loomis Fargo vault facility in Easton, Massachusetts, where tens of millions of dollars was kept, was if we had somebody on the inside collecting information as the planning went forward. And they bought it and said, “OK, Tony can work with you.” And then I said, but, you know, when it all ends, they’re going to know he was involved, so he’s going to have to go into the witness security program and leave the state of Massachusetts and have his state parole transferred to some other location, which they agreed to. So the next thing was to talk to Tony about this whole idea and say, “Tony, if this works out and the information you provide is true and accurate, and we build a case, and it comes down, then clearly, they’re going to know, ‘OK, there’s five of us in this, committing this crime; there’s four of us sitting here. Where’s Tony?’ “ So they’ll know you cooperated. And he had to think about that for a long time because he was a drug addict. And the reason he was in prison a lot, which he was, was because he would, when he got out, he would get back on drugs, and then he’d start doing holdups. You know, the thing that motivated him, I believe, was a desire to do something right for a change. And he did.

JOHNSON: Why do you think the paintings haven’t been found yet?

NADOLSKI: Why haven’t they been located?

JOHNSON: Yeah.

NADOLSKI: Oh, I don’t know. I have no idea.

(Laughs.)

JOHNSON: Fair. That’s an episode. Follow-up... Who do you think did it?

NADOLSKI: I got to tell you: I don’t know.

(Laughs.)

NADOLSKI: I don’t think it was Carmello Merlino, who seems to be a prime suspect popping up left and right. He’s dead now. But, I mean, we talked to him several times. And we concluded Mel really doesn’t have them. And he is trying to get the reward money, but who isn’t? So...

KURKJIAN: There was time when he said to Tony, “I don’t have them, but Chicovsky does. So I’ll get them from Chicovsky, and then we’ll turn them in for $5 million.” And that’s when Dave sits down with the FBI agent on the Gardner case with Chicovsky at the VA hospital in Jamaica Plain. And Chicovsky says to him, “Listen, I don’t have him, but Merlino may. I’ll get them from Merlino.” So at that point, in my mind, it’s, you know, a hall of mirrors in the intelligence world. This is a hall of con men. I would not want his job because even if we don’t come up with it, we can tell this extraordinary story.

NADOLSKI: Yeah, yeah. Neil Cronin was the case agent from the bureau who was handling the Gardner case. And he had heard this song and dance from a lot of different people. So, you know, his thinking was, “OK, if you say you’ve got them or can get them or whatever, whenever you get them, I want you to take a picture. You have the paintings, you have you, and you have a newspaper from today’s date, with today’s date on it in front of it so I know what,you know, this is really the day, you know, a recent picture.” And nobody could do that. Nobody ever of all the people that came forward, and there’s lots of them with information, nobody could ever establish ownership or possession.

JOHNSON: Well, keep listening. Thank you so much for talking to us from your space of expertise and for expanding on the question, I don’t know. We appreciate it. We’re going to take some audience questions now. But, just, I’m going to ask for another -- thank you very much, Candice. I’m going to ask for another, like, super quick lightning round with just Kelly and Jack because you guys haven’t talked for a minute. So there’s only so much we can fit into these 30-minute episodes, right? And there are plenty of them that everyone should go and listen to. But what’s something that didn’t make it, didn’t make it off the cutting room floor, or ended up on the cutting room floor, I should say. Kelly, what’s a story or an angle that you wish you could have chased that you didn’t quite get to chase?

HORAN: Whitey Bulger. There is a theory that the Gardner art is in Northern Ireland. And I was in northern... I was in Ireland in May. I was there with this Scotland Yard, former Scotland Yard undercover man who was absolutely convinced that the key to solving the Gardner case is in Ireland. And I so want to do the story of Ireland and the Gardner art and at least this one thief because it’s so complex. And I think there’s so much there, but I don’t know that we’ll have time.

JOHNSON: Season 2.

(Laughs.)

JOHNSON: What about you, Jack?

RODOLICO: Um...

JOHNSON: Steve’s giving him suggestions.

RODOLICO: Good idea -- not what I was thinking. There were so many art thefts in New England before the Gardner heist. There were hundreds of them. And there was a period of time when I was convinced that we could do multiple episodes -- we could -- on all of the crimes that predated the Gardner and what those tell us about the Gardner. And there were people who were experts at disarming alarm systems in small museums, other people who were good at tricking cops in places like Greenwich, Connecticut, and on the North Shore and on Cape Cod. There were so many paintings stolen in New England in the 20 or so years that never came back because they were lower-profile. They weren’t Vermeers. They weren’t Rembrandts. And we sat down with one guy who stole a good chunk of them, and he would not go on the record. And the thing that he said that haunts me about the Gardner heist is that when he had no place else to sell... He would try to sell them on the black market. He would try to sell them to a dealer. Sometimes he would sell them back to the FBI. If none of that worked, he would burn them. He said he did it hundreds of times.

JOHNSON: This is -- oh, sorry. Go ahead.

RODOLICO: This is not lightning. This is not lightning, sorry. There is no lightning with the Gardner. You can’t ask a lightning question on the Gardner. I’m not David Nadolski. I don’t have a one-word answer. I wish I did. I wish I did. But that just makes, unfortunately makes a lot of sense as a possibility for what happened to the Gardner heist -- that it could have happened. I hope it didn’t. It’s a good chance it didn’t. But I could never shake that since he said it.

JOHNSON: This is an excellent transition to our first audience question, which is, what is the likelihood that any of the artwork has been destroyed? So anybody want to take a crack at that percentage, over/under? I don’t know.

KURKJIAN: I’ll just recount one interview I had with a guy who was -- it was the first chapter of my book. It was a guy named Louis Royce. And Louis had scouted the Gardner for a score since growing up in South Boston delivering papers to Whitey Bulger’s house, he used to tell me. But he told me that -- he didn’t drink, and I was pouring myself another glass of wine, taking my notes in an interview -- he said to me, “There’s no way they would be destroyed.” I said, “Why?” He said, “You see that bottle? The bottle isn’t important, but the cork is. We’ll hold onto the cork.” And he reminded me, he said “Every mobster you see whose house is raided, it takes two days to empty a mobster’s house.” Why? ‘Cause they keep everything. They’re pack rats. They’re not hoarders, but they’re pack rats. They don’t destroy anything. So it’s not much evidence, but it’s one thing that keeps me going to stay on the story. It’s within the 781, 508 area code, somewhere, there are 13 pieces of priceless art.

JOHNSON: Fair enough. Here’s another question: Crimes always have collateral damage. Who or what is the biggest collateral damage of the Gardner heist, Kelly?

HORAN: I would say that we all are because we don’t get to see these works. I mean, I really mean it. Anne Hawley, the former director of the Gardner Museum, likens the loss to what if you could never hear Beethoven or Louis Armstrong. I say, what if you could never hear Prince? But I think that it’s true. If you value these works as a piece of who we are, then we all lose that they’re gone.

JOHNSON: This is an interesting question that I think you guys get at in the show. But I’d love to hear you talk about it a little bit more. Why do you think the robbers stole the pieces they did? And there’s a little sort of sub-question here. The Chinese beaker, I believe I’m reading that right, has always been a fascinating choice.

HORAN: We have a lot of theories about this.

JOHNSON: Go on.

HORAN: Come in close. OK, so what we know is that Rembrandt is the most stolen artist because his body of work is so vast. So it’s easier to fake an attribution to Rembrandt. So we know that, from the thieves’ movements, we know that they went to the Dutch Room first. We know that they took the Rembrandts first. How do you explain the Chinese beaker? It’s not even that pretty.

(Laughs.)

HORAN: How do you explain the bronze eagle finial? In our reporting, we met the art thief who said that he used to case the Gardner Museum with another art thief. And our art thief said, “I wanted that beaker,” because he’s an aficionado of Asian art. And his friend wanted the eagle. And so that makes sense. Were they trophy grabs? Did they just snatch and grab? We don’t know. But what we can tell you about the beaker is that it took some effort. It wasn’t just something sitting on a table or knocked over. They had to cut through layers of fabric on the table and then pry it off of a metal base. They wanted that gu. So maybe we know who did it or who inspired it. They wanted that gu.

RODOLICO: They wanted that gu is a line that was in one of our episodes like eight times. And it has to be there. And we just were debating how many times -- how many times do we need to say it? And the good thing that we’re here is that we got to say it twice.

JOHNSON: We just got two more.

RODOLICO: I just want to say, they wanted that gu.

HORAN: I’ve been made fun a lot over the course of this by my esteemed colleagues. And I’ve been promised by other people my own cross-stitch. And I think my cross-stitch will say...

JOHNSON: They wanted that gu.

HORAN: ...They wanted that gu.

JOHNSON: Fair. I want to pose this question to the self-proclaimed twins down there. Gentlemen, this comes from Zoe, age 10. Were you ever scared interviewing someone?

NADOLSKI: Not me. I had a gun.

(Laughs.)

NADOLSKI: What about you?

JOHNSON: Solid one-liners from this guy.

KURKJIAN: No, I mean, the work that we do as reporters -- you don’t do the dangerous work that these guys, these people do. You announce yourself. You tell them what you want. You go to their seconds, which is usually an attorney. You show up. You ask them the questions you promised you would ask them. You take meticulous notes. And you tell them you’re going to write it straight. That’s all you have going for you. But, you know, as reporters, we ask the questions that any of you would ask. But you never surprise people. You never -- and you never disappoint them as far as writing it straight. So that’s why I’m -- never ever been afraid.

JOHNSON: I’m not sure who this is directed to, so I’ll let anybody take it. How did you get access to confidential 302s, which reminds me that tax season is coming. I don’t know. That’s just like a, I’m not sure.

NADOLSKI: Wait a minute. Wait a minute. I don’t think there were any confidential 302s involved, were there? There were?

(Laughs.)

NADOLSKI: A 302 is an FBI report.

HORAN: We got some. That’s all I’m comfortable saying.

NADOLSKI: My brother...

JOHNSON: Fair enough.

NADOLSKI: My brother is nodding his head.

RODOLICO: If we wanted to tell you, we would’ve told you in the podcast.

HORAN: We got them.

JOHNSON: Fair. I guess we’re not getting an answer on that one. Oh, my lightning round suggestions have now been incorporated into audience questions. I like it. Lightning round, apparently this is for all of you, what painting is your favorite, and why?

RODOLICO: Of the ones that were stolen, presumably?

JOHNSON: I think we could go with that. Yeah.

RODOLICO: OK.

(Laughs.)

JOHNSON: We’ll start with Kelly.

HORAN: Who, me? Oh...

JOHNSON: Yeah.

HORAN: I don’t know. I haven’t seen them.

(Laughs.)

HORAN: I’m really... I’m not being flip. I want to see them. You know, I’m...

JOHNSON: What’s the -- that’s a painting, isn’t it?

HORAN: So we have “Storm On The Sea Of Galilee” [on screen], and what I love about “Storm On The” -- I can tell you what I like because I’ve read about them. But I haven’t -- you know, so, OK, I have this idea that when you see a piece of art, it’s an interactive experience. You are experiencing what the artist wants -- intended for you to experience. But you’re also experiencing in spite of yourself what you bring to it. I don’t know what I bring to it. I’ve never stood before it. I can tell you what it was like to stand in front of the stretcher that once held “Storm On The Sea Of Galilee.” That almost made me cry. It was like seeing a dead body. And that’s really, that was a moment when I realized, “Holy moly, there are victims in this story.” And I would love the opportunity to see these works. I would say “Storm On The Sea Of Galilee” just because I love that Rembrandt painted himself in. He’s like, yo... And I like that.

JOHNSON: Definitely not the Chinese beaker, you’re saying. It’s not...

HORAN: I didn’t mean to put down the Chinese beaker.

RODOLICO: Somebody wanted it.

HORAN: I just meant to say someone really wanted it.

JOHNSON: Jack?

RODOLICO: I think that “The Storm On The Sea” is the most dramatic, and it’s the one I’ve thought a lot about. But the one I’m most perplexed by is the Vermeer, “The Concert,” because I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Vermeer. And they, there’s only 34 or so. I say or so ‘cause it’s not totally clear exactly how many there are of his, but there’s not a lot. And my understanding is that he was this master of light. And you don’t -- that does not come across in a photo of that painting, which is all I’ve ever seen. I look at it, and I can say, “OK, I guess that’s a masterpiece.” Like, what do I know? But I have the feeling that if you stood in front of it, you would get it. And apparently, Norman Rockwell was really inspired by Vermeer. He does things with light. And that was something that connected with me at one point. When I looked at a Rockwell in the process of reporting this, I was like, “Oh, that’s Vermeer, that’s light. I get it now.” But I still don’t know what it would be like to see the shadow and the light cast across the floor next to the people singing. And that’s the thing, I think, I’d most like to see.

JOHNSON: Steve?

KURKJIAN: Yeah, I think the painting that I would be most interested in seeing of, I mean, this “Sea Of Galilee” is the only time he painted the sea, that Rembrandt painted the sea. He loved it so much he painted -- etched himself in hanging over the gunnels. And there were enough people who appreciated art and knew his work that they put a little border up so that people didn’t point at, put their finger on the canvas. But my -- the one I want to know most about is the Manet that was stolen from the Blue Room. And if you haven’t heard the second episode, in which we talk of the possibility of there being a theft within the theft, that in fact the bad guys only thought they stole 12. In fact, it was -- when, in fact, there was an extra painting stolen from the Blue Room and how that fits into this whole extraordinary hall of, you know, hall of con men, hall of mirrors, but also hall of masterpieces. This -- it’s extraordinary that that painting was stolen from a room where there are no signs of bad guys being in the room. Everywhere else, bad guys’ footsteps are shown because the museum had a motion detector equipment installed. There is no footsteps of bad guys in that room. Yet, that room is missing the Manet. So that’s the one I want to -- that’s the one I would like to, one if I could see, the Manet.

JOHNSON: Dave?

NADOLSKI: I was afraid you were going to call my name. I got to tell you, my favorite painting is probably “Dogs Playing Poker.”

JOHNSON: OK.

(Laughs.)

JOHNSON: Totally fair, totally fair.

KURKJIAN: You see why we love this guy?

JOHNSON: I think we can get you a copy of that. I think that one is...

KURKJIAN: A reporter’s best source.

JOHNSON: Totally fair. I like this question. What happens to stolen paintings in general? What kinds of lives do they have after they’ve been stolen? I always thought that they’d just get placed in Dr. Evil’s lair above the sharks with laser beams on their heads. But how does this stuff exist in the real world?

RODOLICO: So it’s, it’s, it goes back to, it’s not what you think, which is people who steal art are not, generally, are not art thieves. They’re criminals. And stealing a painting is part of a portfolio of dealing drugs and dealing with weapons and things like that. And art is often just a commodity. It’s kind of stupid to steal a Rembrandt. Like, there are a couple of really good reasons to do it -- to get yourself out of prison. But you can’t sell it. It’s a lot smarter to steal from, I’m, like, endorsing this. [Laughs.] If you want to steal a painting, go to your local gallery. But you don’t want to steal a portrait. You know, you don’t want to steal something really distinctive. And there are enough people who steal paintings who understand that. Kelly and I talk a lot about, in the mornings about our Google alert about art thefts. And 99 percent of them is, somebody walked into a gallery, you know, with a camera on them and ripped it off the wall. And they’re trying to find the guy. That’s a lot of art theft. And when they find them, they find them, you know, that -- they have another criminal, they have a long criminal record. So, and then sometimes, and I’ll just add to that, in the U.S., it’s not very common to steal from a major museum. In Europe, it’s really common. And think about how much more art they have, and think about the churches that they have that are full of art. And just broaden your definition of art -- anything historical, anything that’s unique, right? So there’s more an organized crime element to art theft in Europe, where there is a black market and there is a ransom market. In the U.S., the Gardner heist is the total anomaly. There’s just really almost nothing like it.

HORAN: Well, and to piggyback off what Jack said, I was astonished to learn in the course of our reporting that ISIS supports its mission by stealing art, by looting antiquities. And so...

RODOLICO: And the Taliban did before them.

HORAN: And the Taliban did before it. And it’s -- you know, and so sometime in the 1970s, what we saw across Europe were these, as Jack said, unprotected churches, poorly guarded museums, was art theft. And it kind of pierced this veil, I think. You know, I think of an honor system. And I think we sort of think of, you know, you don’t -- who would steal from a church? Who would steal from a museum? But it began to happen. And art-napping as a term emerged as a thing. And the people who steal art we want to think of as this kind of, you know, goatee-stroking Dr. No in his lair with his masterpiece. And really, the evidence shows that it’s much cruder. It’s not about the art. It’s not about loving the art. It’s about trading it as a commodity. And if you were to sell it, you would only get about 10 percent of the value. And as Jack said, I’m not advocating. But you would want to go for something that isn’t very well-known -- just a tip.

(Laughs.)

JOHNSON: OK. So I have a last question from the audience here. Are there any surviving relatives of Isabella Stewart Gardner? If so, what do they think?

HORAN: I don’t know what they think. Yes, there are. There was a lovely man, I think, I tried to get an interview with him. Jack, his name is Jack Gardner. Isabella Stewart Gardner’s husband was named Jack. Her son, who died before he was 2, was named Jack. I don’t know what they think. I know that from my contact with the museum that they care deeply about Isabella Stewart Gardner’s legacy and that they want to see these works back. And they were very excited to know that we were doing something that might help in the effort to, at the very least, raise awareness of what these things look like so that on the off chance that someone sees it, they can say something.

JOHNSON: Thank you all for being here. Thank you to Kelly, Jack, Steve, Dave. Please give them a hand.

(Applause.)