Master Thieves (11 page)

By the time he got the case, Falzon was already familiar with Myles Connor Jr., the one person whose name would forever be associated with art theft in the Boston area.

According to Connor, he had long cased the Gardner Museum, and as it turned out, it may have been Falzon's investigative work on another case that was responsible for Connor being behind bars when it did take place. In 1988, two years before the Gardner theft, Falzon received a tip that Connor was trying to fence two antique dueling pistols that were believed stolen.

Falzon sent a lengthy confidential report on his probe to other FBI offices nationally, and it drew the interest of an agent in Springfield, Illinois, who was investigating Connor for trying to sell everything from cocaine and LSD to stolen antiques and paintings. An undercover buy was arranged, and Connor was charged with trying to sell a Simon Willard grandfather clock that had been stolen from the Woolworth Estate in Monmouth in 1974, and two paintings worth $300,000 that had been stolen in 1975 from the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College. In November 1989, four months before the Gardner theft, Connor pleaded guilty to the criminal charges and was sentenced to twenty years in federal prison.

It wasn't just the good guys who were looking for the thieves. According to a past associate, notorious Boston gangster Whitey Bulger asked him to find out who might have pulled off the crime of the century. Being located in the Fens neighborhood of Boston, the museum was considered part of Bulger's turf, and whoever was responsible for such a heist would have to pay a tribute, a percentage of the value of what was taken, to Bulger or be threatened—or worse—until they did.

Bulger associate Kevin Weeks told me that he came up with several names, including Sullivan's, the South Boston amateur artist, as possibly involved, but got no further. Bulger also told Stephen “Rifleman” Flemmi, his second in command, to find out who was responsible, but Flemmi too came back empty-handed, except for a rumor that the paintings had been flown out of the country, possibly to Saudi Arabia, the day after the robbery.

Then, working on the belief that most museum heists have an insider as an active participant, the FBI administered lie detector tests to both night watchmen working the night of the theft. Randy Hestand, who had been called in to work in place of the regular man on duty, passed without a flaw. Rick Abath failed at least one of the questions and was ordered to take it a second time. Abath claims he failed the first test only because the FBI asked him about recreational drug use, and that he passed the second test.

The natural air of suspicion that surrounds any case involving the FBI was even more pronounced in the Gardner case. Agents were not sharing information with anyone inside the museum, including Lyle Grindle, then director of museum security. And when they asked Grindle or anyone else at the museum for information, they provided no explanation as to why it was relevant to the investigation.

It took more than a month for the FBI to send for an analyst who knew how to examine the computer that contained the case's key forensic evidence—the path the thieves had taken during their eighty-eight minutes inside the museum's galleries. Even then no one bothered to interview the technicians who had been installing the museum's security system for the prior two years.

The museum's trustees also felt they were being kept in the dark about the status of the investigation. Trustee Francis W. Hatch, Jr. recalled one meeting held ostensibly to gain a briefing from the agent and supervisor on the case. “They wouldn't tell us anything about what they thought of the robbery or who they considered suspects,” Hatch recalls. “It was very embarrassing to all of us.”

Then, while in England to attend a wedding, Hatch decided to look up Richard Ellis, head of the art theft squad for the New Scotland Yard, who had just recovered masterpieces stolen from an English mansion. Ellis had studied the Gardner theft in enough depth to give Hatch more information about the possible suspects than Hatch had received from the FBI.

Ellis told Hatch he believed the job had been pulled off by local toughs, not professional art thieves, and that it might take years but that the artwork would be returned when the thieves or their fence needed a favor from federal prosecutors.

“I was so impressed with him—he had great bearing, and he talked openly and confidently—and optimistically about what to expect,” Hatch says. “It was a whole lot different than how the FBI was treating us.”

Hatch convinced the trustees that the museum needed to hire a firm to investigate, and stay in touch with the FBI on its probe. IGI, a private investigative firm based in Washington begun by Terry Lenzner, who had cut his teeth as a lawyer for the Senate Watergate Committee, was put on retainer, and the
executive assigned to the case was Larry Potts, a former top deputy in the FBI.

Fearful that their authority was being undercut, the FBI's supervisors in Boston complained to US attorney Wayne Budd, who fired off a memo warning the museum that it faced prosecution if it withheld information relevant to the investigation. Hatch responded, saying in his letter that he was “shocked and saddened” by Budd's attempt to “intimidate” the museum and that it cast “a pall over future cooperative efforts.”

Similarly, convincing the FBI to share its responsibilities on the case with the Boston police department and the Massachusetts state police was apparently an impossible proposition. The FBI asked Boston detectives Francis J. McCarthy and Carl Washington, who conducted the initial investigation, to file their reports and then never consulted the two again. Ray Flynn, then Boston's mayor, says he remains baffled as to why the FBI never sought the assistance of Boston police.

“The Gardner art theft in Boston was devastating,” Flynn recalled recently. “Boston police were pretty much taken off the scene of the investigation by the feds, and we never could quite understand why that was the policy. Our robbery squad knew every wise guy in the city and had some reliable informants. They grew up and lived in Boston. Why wouldn't they hear things during an investigation?”

But the FBI resisted such a move from the outset. One agent, knowing Flynn's hunch to be true, told his superiors it would be a good idea to use the investigative resources of the Boston and state police and recommended a joint task force, if not an informal one. He was told bluntly that neither department had sufficient people to lend to the investigation, and a cooperative agreement was never signed.

Traditionally the FBI has resisted seeking assistance from local law enforcement in investigating federal crimes, out
of concern that confidential information might fall into the wrong hands and become known by the press or, even worse, those under investigation. Others in law enforcement, however, say the reason is that the FBI doesn't like sharing the decision-making on major cases—or the federal funds that go into the cases. And of course there's the public approval—the glory—that comes with solving major crimes.

Thomas J. Foley, who joined the state police in 1984 and rose through the ranks to head the department, says his department was never asked to join the Gardner investigation.

“We would have jumped on it, but the Bureau has this pride about doing things their way,” says Foley, who co-wrote a book highly critical of the FBI's pursuit of Whitey Bulger.

“The FBI is not about sharing any glory with the state cops, no less Boston,” Foley says. “Of course, that means they didn't have the advantage of our sources or our expertise. I think we could have helped, but no one ever asked for it.”

Then-governor Dukakis says he stood ready to lend the assistance of the Massachusetts state police to the investigation, especially since he felt kinship with the museum, having been taken to it often as a child by his mother, and being a personal friend of Anne Hawley. But the call for assistance never came.

“The place is so wonderful now that we tend to forget what a horrendous thing it was to have happened,” Dukakis recalled recently. “The wearing of police uniforms always bothered me, and then the seeming difficulty of being able to identify them.”

Hawley too, he said, has shared with him and his wife, Kitty, a very close friend, her frustration that the FBI has been unable to recover any of the stolen pieces.

“She's frustrated, highly skeptical about a lot of the stuff,” he said. “She's gotten tired with everything. Enough already.”

The FBI claims to understand that frustration, but has no plans to alter its investigative strategy on the case: check out
every lead that comes in, and stress publicly that no one will be prosecuted if they show up with the stolen pieces but instead will be eligible for the $5 million reward the museum has offered for their return.

Three successive US attorneys have publicly announced that anyone facilitating the return of the stolen artwork would not be prosecuted. But those announcements, which have been widely reported by the media, have not prompted a breakthrough lead. In fact, Falzon and Kelly, two of the three FBI agents who have been the lead investigators on the case for years, have stated that they have never received a concrete lead.

“In the last twenty years, and the last eight that I've had the case, there hasn't been a concrete sighting, or real ‘proof of life,'” Kelly stated in 2010 on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the theft. “At the same time I can't get discouraged about it. It would be very difficult to put my heart in this investigation if I allowed myself to get discouraged.” More recently, Kelly told a TV reporter that the FBI had received a “confirmed sighting” of one of the pieces, but did not provide any details of the sighting or identify the individual who had made the claim.

All investigative techniques have been used: throwing witnesses in front of federal grand juries; undercover operations; DNA testing of and trying to lift fingerprints from crime scene evidence; house searches; threatening reluctant witnesses with prosecution on minor crimes; and, in the case of Robert Gentile, actually going through with prosecution.

The FBI has even utilized psychics to help in the investigation, including the seer who in 1982 helped locate a US Army brigadier general who had been taken hostage and hidden by Italian extremists.

The one significant approach the FBI has not tried is expanding the investigation with fresh eyes and resources—sharing
the probe with a task force of other federal and local police agencies.

If there had been such involvement at the outset of the probe, the FBI might have been aware from the earliest days after the theft that the Massachusetts state police were already investigating the criminal network headed by Carmello Merlino and Robert Guarente on a cocaine trafficking scheme. The state police probe included surveillance of figures the FBI would later view as major suspects in the theft, before and after the Gardner heist took place.

An expanded investigation might also have brought to the FBI's attention, long before they began focusing on him, claims that Bobby Guarente wound up with the paintings.

In 2005, Guarente's daughter and his best friend spoke to a Boston lawyer about the possibility that Guarente had kept several of the masterpieces stashed in his farmhouse in Madison, Maine. But FBI agents didn't begin focusing on Guarente until 2010, when his widow, looking for cash, summoned them to tell what she knew of her late husband's possession of the paintings.

FBI agent Kelly says that while he appreciates that state and local police have been ready to assist in the investigation whenever the FBI has sought their help, he believes that opening the probe to a task force would be counterproductive.

“I don't think a task force per se [would be productive],” Kelly insisted in 2010. “As years go on, there's fewer and fewer people who have a good knowledge of the case. It would just take too long to get everyone up to speed.”

That position was echoed by the head of the FBI a year later, after then-senator John F. Kerry wrote to FBI director Robert S. Mueller asking what assistance the FBI might need to spur the investigation.

“Thanks for the interest but our current manpower and structure is fine,” Mueller responded. “If a lead develops that
requires more hands, the Boston office can call on the resources of the FBI's Art Theft Squad to assist it.”

Yet the FBI agents who control the Gardner case can treat even a member of the FBI's own art theft squad as an outsider. Robert K. Wittman helped form the unit for the FBI in the 1990s and led several undercover operations that successfully recovered millions of dollars' worth of art that had been stolen from museums, private galleries, and homes.

In 2006, he received a tip that two Frenchmen with alleged ties to mobsters in Corsica were hinting that they could deliver the stolen Vermeer, valued at more than $100 million, and at least one of the two large Rembrandts that were taken. Working on the lead put Wittman in contact with the two agents who controlled the case for the FBI's Boston office, agent Kelly and his supervisor, whom Wittman identified only as “Fred.”

For more than a year Wittman engaged the two intermediaries, working with Kelly and his supervisor, as well as French police, who also became convinced that the two mobsters had access to not only the stolen Gardner paintings but seventy other stolen pieces as well. But the operation fell apart, Wittman says, because of bureaucratic impediments imposed on him by Kelly's supervisor and, to a lesser degree, French authorities.

Wittman says Fred micromanaged Wittman's interactions with the two French accomplices, even though he was unfamiliar with overseeing an undercover operation. At one point, Wittman claims, Fred tried to get Wittman thrown off the case by sending an official memorandum to FBI chiefs in Washington questioning whether Wittman was trying to delay completing the investigation until retiring so he could win the $5 million reward as a private citizen.