Gardner Museum Heist Investigation

Episode One Transcript Episode Three Transcript

Episode Two Transcript Episode Four Transcript

This Is A Robbery Episode Three Transcript

Dick Ellis: In 1989 I set up the Art and Antique Squad at Scotland Yard. I'd recovered a lot of stolen artwork. I'd had a number of international investigations. After the robbery from the Gardner Museum, the FBI were in touch with us as soon they took over the investigation. We discussed the case in detail. Who did the thieves hand them over to? We don't know. Where would they have gone from there? We don't know.

But what we do know is art travels the world every day. It's easy to smuggle and use as an international currency. In Boston, in 1990, the two front runners, shall we say, is the Italian mob or the Irish mob. If it was the Irish Mob, that was gonne be used as collateral for buying arms for the IRA by sympathizers in Boston, which let's face it there were a lot.

Cullen: You begin with the premise that there is a large presence of Irish-American gangsters in Boston. Whitey Bulger, Pat Nee, and Joe Murray, who'd not only sympathized with the IRA, but provided them weapons. The most notorious case of that is the Valhalla.

Reporter: Officials suspect the Vahalla of Gloucester was instrumental in delivering almost ten tons of weapons and ammunition to a smaller ship seized last month in Irish waters.

Ellis: When I was at Scotland Yard, I was involved in the recovery of a painting by Yeats, which was commissioned by the IRA and the artwork was to be used to raise money for arms. So you know, there it is, 100% proof that stolen art is used to buy arms. Paintings really wouldn't have had trouble crossing the international borders and into Northern Ireland.

Richard O'Rawe: I call it the north of Ireland. To call it Northern Ireland is to recognize the state of Northern Ireland. And Republicans don't do that. My name is Richard O'Rawe. I joined into the IRA in around 1971. The atmosphere was very heady. You went literally from a very sort of happy youth to- It was as if you skipped about ten years.

Explosions boom, Bloody Sunday:

Man: Jesus! Down! Get down! Everybody! Get down!

Woman on megaphone: Good people, stay down and stay calm.

O'Rawe: By 1990, the IRA had developed a whole sort of empire. They were raking in money hand over fist. Thirteen paintings would have been the last thing, that they would bring up at an Army council meeting.

O'Rawe: What are we talking about this shite for? the IRA had nothing to do with this. What's happened here is that someone has introduced this IRA thing to deflect attention away from who really has these paintings.

Ellis: On the other hand, if it was the Italian mob, that was almost certainly going to be used therefore in some other area of criminality, probably as a bargaining chip.

Cullen: In that period I could see a serious organized criminal saying, "you know what this is a good time to do this?"

Cullen: Who would be in a position to do something like this?

Murphy: Bobby Donati
Connor: Bobby Donati
Kurkjian: Bobby Donati
Leppo: Bobby Donati

Abath: They said Boston Police," and I buzzed them in.

Newscaster: Boston, a quiet museum, a daring robbery.

Leppo: It was an easy, easy score.

Newsman: The biggest art heist in history. The thirteen art treasures stolen are worth a half a billion dollars,

Newsman Ted Koppel: Take a look at these composite drawings.

Murphy: These paintings were a get out of jail free card and everybody knew it.

Cullen: You had this coalescing force, Las Cosa Nostra.

Mafioso: Hey How you doing? - I'm good.

Cullen: The Mafia

Newsman: Gardner Museum doubling its reward to $10 million.

Murphy: The racketeering and loan sharking and murders.

Criminal: I stabbed him in the face and I stabbed him in the chest.

Green: Why not just kill these people?

Hawley: I had no idea what I was going into. It was just horrifying.

Newsman: The empty frames are all that remain on the museum walls.

Murphy: There's no shortage of possible suspects. That's part of the problem. Back in the 80's, Boston was like the bank robbery capital of the world. It was the Wild West.

sirens squawking:

Murphy: There were so many different organized crime groups. They would each be doing their own thing. It was huge.

Officer: come out with your hands up!

Brekke: In Boston, the complexity of the cases was unbelievable.

Police officer: Police. open the door! They would bring in a close-knit group of people that were career criminals. Very planned out, very well-done criminal activity. Sometimes they would go on for months before they would actually strike. It was much more involved and much more difficult to break into those groups. You're dealing with people that had a loyalty to their neighborhoods and to their friends.

Murphy: There was sort of, like, code of silence. You know you could have twenty people in a bar witness a fatal shooting and nobody saw anything.

Reporter: Think people were surprised today? I don't know. I don't know nothing. I work in the back. I don't know nothing.

Murphy: That's the way it was. It was this very sort of distrust of outsiders.

Mafia Don Gennaro Angiulo: That's right you ain't supposed to be down here. You're supposed to ask permission you wanna take pictures. You know better than asking questions. No. I don't want to answer.

Murphy: Very "us against them kind of mentality in some of the neighborhoods.

Anti-Forced Bussing Demonstrator Male: We have just as much rights as anybody else.

Anti-Forced Bussing Demonstrator Female: Let us go to our neighborhoods, where our kids are safe. We want our kids safe. We want our children safe.

Cullen: Boston is a city of neighborhoods. It's really important to understand how organized crime works in the city of Boston. You had the Irish faction in Southie. You had another Another Irish faction in Charlestown bleeding into Somerville. In the North End you had this sort of coalescing force called La Cosa Nostra. "This thing of ours." The Mafia. At the end of the 80's, going into the 90s, what we knew as organized crime in the city of Boston had changed, because the FBI had a national policy to take out the Italians. Not only would they take out the top tier of leadership, but the second tier. They weren't going to stop until there was nobody left to prosecute.

Jeremiah T O'Sullivan, former United States, head of the organized crime task force: The objective of the organized crime program of the Department of Justice, which the FBI... is to essentially and ultimately destroy the La Cosa Nostra as a functioning criminal conspiracy in the United States. That's what I come to work every day to do.

Cullen: What is really squeezing organized crime is not just the prosecutions, but the change in culture. The revenue streams that organized crime had traditionally relied on had dried up. So that's killing the wise guys.

Murphy: There's a lot of dissension within the ranks and there's a lot of unhappiness. For the years building up to March 1990, there's already a family in complete disarray.

There was this renegade faction that was trying to wrest control of the family. Vinnie Ferrara was a capo in the New England Mob, allegedly behind an effort to kill the family underboss. There's murders on both sides. It's violent

gunshots:

flashbulb popping:

indistinct police radio chatter:. And they have this Mafia induction ceremony in 1989. It's supposed to be a peacekeeping ceremony. Mobsters from around New England gathered in this little house in Medford. They prick trigger fingers, burn holy cards, They welcome these four new members into the Mob.

Man on FBI Mafia induction ceremony recording: If we ever, on anybody, any of us, any one of us here, if we ever find out that you've given the secret that we hold, you can never get out alive.

Murphy: And The FBI had a bug in there. They caught everything on tape. And this was a huge coup for the FBI, not just locally but nationally, internationally.

Murphy: Vinnie Ferrara was arrested in late 1989.

Reporter Ron Gollobin: Vincent "The Animal" Ferrara. A man with a college background, described by police as a sadistic killer.

Ferrara: Don't put it too close to my eyes.

Murphy: There continue to be successful prosecutions. They know they're going away. They know that they're in trouble. Gangster. Hey how you doing?

man:

Reporter: Pretty good how's it going?

Gangster: good

Cullen: These are not guys who say, "Maybe I should go back to school and my degree in something." These guys are criminals, so they're always thinking what's the next score. How do I make money so I don't become a civilian? In that disarray somebody would be more emboldened to do something as bold as the Gardner heist.

Murphy: It had been sort of a way of criminals locally to barter for leniency, to steal art. I mean, this was a plausible theory.

Kurkjian: "The reporting showed that the Mafia in Boston and the Ferrara gang knew about the vulnerability of the Gardner Museum. It's a get of jail free card." One of the first people to visit Vinny Ferrara in jail was his driver, Bobby Donati. Three visits one before, two after the theft. They were very good friends. Donati was a low-level, more white collar criminal associate. Had businesses in and around East Boston and Revere. An ice cream shop there. I found that he was very good friends with Myles Connor. One of the major art thefts Myles pulled off. They stole five or six Wyeth paintings. Important paintings. And he had a partner with him. His great friend Bobby Donati.

Myles Connor: Bobby... There's something that I always liked about Italians. They're outgoing. They're boisterous. Much more amicable. Wyeth... that was the Woolworth estate. That was actually Bobby Donati's deal. And he had actually put the whole thing together. That's how I ended up getting grabbed by the feds. It was thanks to them that I stole the Rembrandt.

Reporter: A year after the museum robbery, Connor offered to get the painting back... for a price. He wanted out of prison and a deal was made.

Kurkjian: Donati would have known through the Myles experience, you know that getting piece of artwork that's so important, the feds will do business with you. So he would've had the idea in his mind. And Bobby felt that their gang would not be able to survive, would not be able to win the gang war that they had ongoing, unless Vinnie was on the street and out of jail. So what Bobby Donati said to Vinnie-- "We're going to pull off a theft so shocking that the feds will let you out of jail." But it seems to me that after the theft, Donati wanted to wait for things to cool down and then would approach the FBI to get this artwork back and Vinnie Ferrara out of jail.

Myles Connor: Bobby Donati was found decapitated in the trunk of his car, shot to hell.

Kurkjian: Donati's body was found recovered several days after his murder. News crews did show up at his home to get video of the house and of the car. The police had already found remnants of blood on the front porch. The speculation was that he had been attacked there and then put into the trunk of his car where his body was found several days later. It was investigated by the FBI and as I learned when I sought his FBI file he had been under surveillance by the FBI after the theft but before his murder. people who knew Donati, and one of them turned me onto a guy. He told me of an event involving Bobby Donati that I was really intrigued by. Bobby very soon before the theft showed up at a place they called The Shack in Revere, he was there with a paper bag and in the paper bag were two Boston Police uniforms.

Jesus he's walking around with police uniforms. What the hell's he doing with police uniforms?

Kurkjian: Is Bobby Donati the key? That's the best scenario I can come up with. That Donati had the paintings.

Kurkjian: Between 1990 when the theft took place and around 1997 there was nothing.

Hawley: I think so many people in the Boston community did not realize the significance of this place. They just didn't. To get the word out again to a large audience is really important. For the continued search for the work. I think that was one of the reasons behind increasing the reward. I think the Bureau thought we needed to get a larger number out there.

Mashberg: I remember reading a clipping in the newspaper that said. Gardner Museum raises reward for recovery of paintings, and literally the first thought I had was, "Wait, they're still missing?"

Very remarkable that between 1990 and 1997 there were very few stories about the crime. There was never say an arrest or a suspect being questioned. Bobby Donati, nobody ever had a chance to ask him any questions obviously. With him dead whatever he might have done to hide the art so it could be used as leverage, I mean that mystery would have disappeared with him.

Right off the bat to me the obvious angle was to look into Myles Connor again. He was in prison at the time which is a pretty solid alibi, but this guy Donati was a close friend of Myles and had been involved in helping him with a lot of cases.

So I just jumped to this conclusion. The art had been stolen. And because he was in jail, he needed a place to hide the art. So I call Myles. I get him on the phone 'cause you can at least make calls sometimes. And he said that he had this trailer. Where better to hide it than in Myles' trailer?

Interviewer: Ah, is this the infamous Myles' stuff?

Myles Connor: Nah this is... this is just storage. I had a big trailer, you know a forty foot trailer, filled with stuff. Japanese swords were what I really specialized in. I had a collection that rivaled what they had at the MFA or at the Met. Two hundred blades.

Most expensive ones would be $500,000 dollars.

{Mashberg: So just kind of out of nowhere this petty criminal named William Youngworth pops up. And this guy Youngworth is a caretaker of Myles Connor's property, which is essentially museum loot.

Connor: Youngworth was a guy who had done me a favor that I could not get anybody else to do. So all my stuff went to Billy's place, the trailer and everything else.

Mashberg: In talking to this guy, I realized that he had at some point opened up Myles' trailer and was basically selling off items of Myles' without telling Myles.

Connor: Then, there it went.

Mashberg: He [Youngworth] was facing prison time for an unrelated crime. He started trying to negotiate his way out of that and he said that he had information that could lead to the recovery of the Gardner art.

It's plausible that Youngworth stumbled across those items, while just sort of randomly going through Myles' trailer.

Reporter: How do you know they're real?

Youngworth: I saw them in the Gardner Museum before. I believe they're real.

Reporter: You've seen them both?

Mashberg: I basically said to Youngworth "You're never going to get around this problem of not being believed unless you produce something. that's going to give credibility to your claim." But I convinced him to at least show me one of the items. You know, I wouldn't be in any position to take it. I wouldn't even know where it was. You know, you could put it in a location, then move it right away. But you know, help me out here, uh show me something and I can at least report that.

One night I was at work, kind of working late, and I got a call saying. "Be at your office a little before midnight and we'll go from there." I'm very skeptical, right? I mean, to me this is sort of like implausible. But I thought, you know, "What's to lose?" We just took a long drive… to New York. There was another car that was along behind for a while. Eventually, you know, we pull up outside of this very kind of basic-looking warehouse structure in Red Hook. It was sort of a rough-looking building. Youngworth had the key to get into the facility. He had a flashlight. We went up two or three flights. And he opens this storage locker, has me stand just outside of it. He gets a tube out. And he pulls out the tube and then he holds up what looks to be "The Storm on the Sea of Galilee." And he's kind of running the light over it a little bit. Eventually, like the beam hits the Rembrandt signature. And then he says, "Okay, that's all. You've got to go. There's my proof." Obviously, I have no idea whether this is a forgery. I'm no expert in art. It just seemed to me that it was very plausible that the stolen art was stored here at least temporarily.

Pieter Roelofs: If there is one master, who really interacts with the beholder, then it's Rembrandt. So you really need someone in front of that painting to interact with, to finally get out of it what Rembrandt, as the master, intended to be there. Looking at "The Storm on the Sea of Galilee," I mean, that's one of these examples where we really see Rembrandt as a storyteller. The focus and framing is fully on this ship. Everyone seems to believe that they will sink down in the next few seconds, except Jesus…fully in control, and then the contrast with all of the other people around it and storm in the background.

Hawley: Christ on this storm-tossed sea is in motion, and you can feel the movement. And I think that's why it's such a wonderful picture.

Roelofs: This young guy did something that he had never done before, but also something that no one else had ever done before.

Hawley: If you stare at it long enough, you realize something strange is going on here and you have Rembrandt looking at you very wisely.

Hawley chuckles: Who's in charge here anyway? Is it the painter or the subject?

Roelofs: The most interesting moments in art history are the moments of change. Standing in front of that painting, for me, would be an unbelievable experience.

Mashberg: Before we even went with the story, we sat down for a long time with a curator and the head of the Gardner Museum so I could describe in detail everything I'd seen.

Hiatt: I think it was the FBI that was trying to dismiss it. Having a sense of urgency in the absence of them, I think we felt we had no choice. I asked Tom if he'd be willing to talk with some of our curators so they could help him identify the painting.

Mashberg: They were looking for clues, like whether there was paint flaking off in these little tiny, weird shape flakes. They call them craquelure. Then if you were to roll one up, the painting would crack here and there along the lines.

Hawley: These objects are so old… rolling them would be devastating, because it would, it would crack. It would put more cracks into… into the paint. And they need to be stored flat.

And also not in acidic boxes. You know, they need to be in acid-free boxes. Everything has to be treated so carefully. Like a newborn baby, really.

Mashberg was asked some questions by one of our curators. Had he seen a tear on the upper left hand corner, or some marks on the back of the painting? And he seemed to give the right answers, so that kind of added credibility. And so we went with that.

Reporter: In early October last year, the Boston Herald was still the main player keeping the Gardner story alive.

bell ringing: Reporter Tom Mashberg asked Bill Youngworth for more proof he had access to the paintings.

Mashberg: Youngworth kept calling me every so often saying like, "What's going on? What's the progress? We aren't hearing anything." And I said, "Well, they don't think it's worth giving you complete immunity deal based on just that." So I said, "What else can you provide?"

Reporter: Days later, a plain manila envelope arrived at the Herald. Inside, a roll of photographs.

Man at Herald: This is probably the best one for page one. Because it's gonna reproduce the best.

Reporter: Were these two of the missing Rembrandts?

Mashberg: The museum never issued much of a statement, but what I was sort of told was essentially that it was just too inconclusive.

suspenseful music playing:

puffing: You know… long story short, there was another possible proof of life that collapsed. But we sort of thought about paint chips. And I said, "Well, would it be that hard to scrape a little paint off?" Walter McCrone out of Chicago had done a lot of work debunking frauds, using an electron microscope. So, we flew out there, he looked at them. Moment of truth here. I'm literally expecting him to say, "What, are you kidding"?

chuckles:

Walter McCrone: I felt as though I was looking at something that Rembrandt had just plain produced, and it looked exactly like the paint layers and the pigment that was produced in Holland at that time. Everything was just perfect for a Rembrandt paint layer. I've never experienced this before.

Leppo: Youngworth seemed to be credible. Somehow he always had just enough information to keep us all interested.

Mashberg: When we sent the chips over to the museum, they looked under their own microscopes and they saw that the color had not been used in any of the Rembrandts that were stolen. They may be chips from the 17th century, but, if the color doesn't match the colors in the painting, then they can't come from one of those paintings. 'Cause it's very specific. The color of these chips, I learned, was something called Red Lake.

Roelofs: Red Lake is one of the materials that an artist could use. We could come up with a conclusion that it is part of a 17th-century Dutch painting. But identifying the artist is the next step, and just on the basis of one simple sample, that would be highly tricky, I believe.

Mashberg: At that time, I think the museum people really wanted Youngworth and Connor to get a full immunity package and a guarantee of reward money, and then let's see the art returned. It kind of became a put up or shut-up moment. But at the time, the FBI and law enforcement rejected that idea. They still felt that it was caving in to extortion, and there was no way they were going to shorten Myles Connor's prison term for the return of the art.

Reporter: Could this be just an elaborate hoax?

Youngworth: Could it be? Anything's possible. Uh, are you asking me if it is?

Judith Youngworth: Let's get outta here, honey.

Mashberg: Youngworth had moved, because he was afraid that Myles was gonna wreak revenge on him for basically ruining his collection and selling it all off. As a result of that, the whole thing went south. Nothing came of it. Nothing came of that or the paint chips or anything else.

Hiatt: I think Mashberg was truthful. He was just… He was a victim of selective information.

Hawley: You go through so many of these that you just get exhausted from, you know, the high that you think you're on it, and then the terrible disappointment when it's not real. So it's very, very hard to keep your spirits up about the process. The enormity of it, you can imagine, is just overwhelming.

Interview: Did you ever think you'd be talking about this ten years later?

Hawley: No, I really thought we would have recovered these by now.

Hawley: What I cannot understand is why no one has come forward. Because there have to be people that know where it is.

Interviewer: So when the robbery happened, did you know or generally know where the art went after the robbery?

Connor: No, I didn't. Whatever he showed to Mashberg, I'm not sure. Mashberg swore up and down it was the real thing. But, like I said, it was set up by Bobby Donati.

Kurkjian: I sense the secret is the network of… where the paintings went on March 18th, 1990 in the early morning hours, where they were stashed, was through these hands of Donati.

Interviewer: Under the scenario that it's Donati, do you think Donati went in himself,

Kurkjian: He had to.

Interviewer: Or do you think he hired people to go in?

Kurkjian: No. Well…Hm.

Kurkjian: You don't just get somebody random. You get somebody who's connected, whom you know you can trust. You find your nearest and dearest to do it with you. And the day after Bobby Donati went missing, his son picked up the phone. Whom did he call looking for his father? He called Bobby Guarente. Donati…and Bobby Guarente were great friends. These guys grew up together in the East Boston neighborhood. They knew each other.

Leppo: Bobby Guarente was somebody that… Very personable. Was not ashamed to have his name be mentioned and associated with a lot of tough people.

atmospheric music playing:

Leppo: Bobby once robbed a bank. Getting away, they kidnapped somebody. They ran into a house and took a hostage. Unfortunately, it was a judge's daughter, who they took hostage. That's the story he tells me, Uncle Buck. That was his code name, Uncle Buck. Always carried a biscuit.

Kurkjian: Guarente sort of is a big thinker. I believe he was involved. It makes sense because it may have been known to Guarente and the Rossetti gang. Guarente was a family relative of the Rosetti's, and it was the Rosetti gang that had cased the museum for a theft in the early '80s.

Hierdorn: It was September 1981. They were going to pull the Whistler, the Matisse, and the Sargent.

tense music plays:

Kurkjian: There was a case at the time of the theft being built by the state police, involving TRC Auto Body Shop on Dot Ave in Dorchester. Guarente is several times showing up during the state and federal surveillance periods, at the auto repair shop.

Ed Whelan State former Police Officer: Bobby Guarente was in and out of TRC. I'm sure he was a lot more involved than that. TRC was a place to go if you needed a particular item. We would park our surveillance van at the closest spot we could get across the street from TRC. And We would just wait for them to open, see who arrived. No one was getting their car fixed.

chuckles:

Former Massachusetts Attorney General Robert Sikellis: They were colorful characters. A bunch of colorful characters, as we came to know them. Carmello Merlino was kind of the godfather, the one that people would bring their problems or ideas to, who, everyone told me at the time, was a legitimately made guy in the Mafia. The other key people around him, Charlie Pappas… David Turner, George Reissfelder, Leonard DiMuzio. Our information was that Carmello Merlino was supplying Robert Guarente with drugs to sell.

Whelan: And Mello was doing a million-dollar cocaine operation. There was a continual criminal enterprise. I mean, it went on-- As long as we were there, it went on and on and on and on.

Sikellis: Everything from armed robberies, an armed home invasion, the robbery of Cheers, the bar.

Whelan: Turner and Pappas, I was looking at for a homicide in Plymouth County. It was abundantly clear very early, that this was a group that needed to be taken off the streets. Because they were very, very dangerous. We developed enough to charge them with conspiracy to traffic in cocaine.

Sikellis: Carmello Merlino and Charlie Pappas are the two main people to get indicted. And they get five years. As a result of that, Charlie starts cooperating with us. Carmello takes a different approach. He starts talking about returning artwork with the Gardner Art Museum.

Whelan: Because we were after the drugs and the murder, I mean, we didn't get involved in people shoplifting. I believe it's very possible. They would send out their teams of people, and they would find that item that you wanted, steal it, and bring it back to TRC.

Kurkjian: The feds in their account believe that the idea for this theft was hatched at Merlino's TRC Auto Body Shop on Dot Ave in Dorchester.

Murphy: They obviously have evidence that leads them to this certain crew, and they think that they had their hands on it at one point. You don't know who's sitting out there somewhere that has a little piece of the puzzle.

Kurkjian: So no one knows where they are. And their criminal associates don't know anything. But members of their families know something. You know, we all know what our brothers are involved with, what are brother in laws have done. Know something.

Donna Reissfedler: I hate water.

Reporter: George Reissfelder, a garment worker in Boston's Chinatown, was arrested following an anonymous tip.

Murphy: Reissfelder had served time for murder. The conviction was overturned and he was released.

Defense Attorney Roanne Sragow: So the big breakthrough came when the Deputy Superintendent of the Boston Police Department told me that George was serving a bum rap, that he was innocent, that he was wrongfully convicted.

Murphy: He wasn't a made member of the Mafia. He fraternized with these guys, knew them.

Donna Reissfelder: My ex brother-in-law, he was very stern looking. You'd look at him and you'd run. He would look intimidating, but he wasn't. I loved George. George was like my big brother. He was best of friends for a long, long time with Carmen Mello

Carmello Merlino:. He was very, very slow moving. He really was. He wasn't a fast anything, and he would drive like this. Like, I said, "Oh my God, the old lady."

chuckles:

Geirge Reissfelder: It was being in the city every day. All the people. I wanted to get away from all the people. Because being in prison, you're in a cellblock, and day in and day out you got no privacy. You can't go to the bathroom without people looking at you, uh…

Donna Reissfelder: When you come out 16 years from prison for something that they found out that he wasn't involved in, there's no way that you can really change that quick. Around eight o'clock, we went out to George's apartment. He said, "I have to hang a picture, I need you to come up, and you know help me do this." Reissfelder was standing against the wall, being his helpful self, and while I'm in the middle, trying to get the picture behind me hanging straight on the wall. The frame was gold and it had, like, I would say, fingertip marks all around it. It was a foo-foo frame. It was a woman's frame. It didn't belong in a bachelor's apartment. I said, "Well, go get a different frame for this." He said, "No." I had to… I had to make sure I got the right measurements and everything." I mean, it's ugly enough, never mind having a foo-foo frame on it. I mean, it really is-- It's an ugly picture, or art, whatever you wanna call it. And I asked George if he posed for it.

chuckles: Finally we got it right, but it was a lot of fun hanging it.

laughs: I don't read the paper or the news on TV. I didn't know there was this big old robbery going on. Many years after the robbery, I got a phone call from the Gardner Museum. So then, I'm looking at the paintings. I'm saying, "I never seen any of these. He's too skinny. He wouldn't be able to lift that Galilee thing if his life depended on it." So I turn around and I got down and I said, "Oh Jesus." I got sick to my stomach. Like someone punched me right in the stomach. All of a sudden, everything comes crashing in. It's like, "Well, well, well, you know, you said you saw it." Yeah, but I wasn't anything involved in it. I just was hanging it on a fricking wall.

electronic beat plays: I like calling him Tortellini.

laughs: I saw it hanging on a wall. That was the first and last time I ever seen it. When I was talking to Gardner Museum, I said, "My brother-in-law couldn't do that." I said, "He's too slow, he drives 25 miles an hour on the expressway." "Donna, it took 'em 81 minutes." I said, "Well that could be." And then he said, "One of the thieves kept going down to the basement where they tied the guards up, asking 'em, "Are you comfortable, do you need water, is the tape too tight?" And I said, "Yeah, that's my brother-in-law." Because he knows how it is to be treated in a bad way."

Man: Suspect number one is described as a white male in his early thirties.

Reissfelder: George had a, like… Is that an egg shape? If I remember, an egg shape. His skin was olive. He had black hair. The first car that he had was a red with a white top convertible. One was a hatchback. I think it was gray or blue or something.

Stratman: For uniformed policemen to be in what I recalled as a Dodge Daytona, it was like this little hatchback, that seems odd.

Leppo: He died of a cocaine ingestion. And two guys, including Merlino, were on their way to his apartment to see him, and walked in and he was dead.

Murphy: There was all this speculation. That where did the painting go that was over his bed? Was it the Chez Tortoni? Did Carmello Merlino take it?

Donna Reissfelder: I'm still trying to think what happened. What snapped him off to do something like that?

Reporter: How do you feel? I feel great. Happiest guy in the world. -

reporter: Any bitterness?

George Reissfelder: A little bit. A little bit. -

reporter 2: What kind of bitterness?

George Reissfelder: I think it could have been avoided.

Donna Reissfelder: You know, 16 years in prison, you know, and he got nothing for it. So I think that with all that on top of it, I would blame the state of Massachusetts.

George Reissfelder: But I always remember, my mother said to me, just a couple of days before she died, she says to me, "Don't worry about it," she said, "because as long as you didn't do anything, you got nothing to worry about." She believed that ah, if you were innocent, you got nothing to worry about. But she was wrong. You know, she believed that, you know, what's right is right, but it doesn't always work that way.

Muprhy: In terms of the thieves, there've been different names that they've raised over the years. Also David Turner's name came up.

Sikellis: Around March 18th of 1990, David Turner-- he had gone dark on us for a few days around that time. We didn't know where he was.

Whelan: I know a Weymouth detective called his house, I believe, and his girlfriend answered and she said he took a trip to Florida. Now, there was no cell phones at that time, so we couldn't call his cell, so we dunno if he was beside her.

Kurkjian: There is some paperwork filed. That paperwork shows that he had rented a house in Florida. February, March area. I find credit card receipts. Receipts that he's bought hundreds of dollars' worth of equipment from something called the Spy Shop in Miami. I also see a receipt that's dated March 20th, 1990. And it's at a… auto rental place in Fort Lauderdale, and it looks to be he's returning the car that he had rented for a month down there. But on the receipt, there is another license number. So in my mind, there is a possibility that David had given his credit card to somebody else to give him an alibi, that on March 20th, two days after the theft, he was down there in Florida. The FBI didn't find anything that looked like association or involvement with the Gardner Museum case, except one surveillance report.

tense music playing:

Kurkjian: One surveillance report of David Turner… David opens up the trunk of his car… and takes out what appears to be a Ming vase.

Sikellis: You know, who are you gonna get to do something like this? Someone you know you can trust. Local made folks who know their way around Boston and are cocky enough to pull something like this off. Where the paintings go within minutes of them walking out of there, then it gets into more sophisticated hands. All of this, you're trying to put together, painting a picture, and the key is usually informants in these kinds of things. Someone or some group of people gotta start talking to you.

David Nadolski: The date is 11/27/98. This is Special Agent David T. Nadolski. The time is 5:35 a.m. The purpose of this tape is a consensual voice recording between Anthony Romano and Carmello Merlino to take place in Dorchester, Massachusetts.