Master Thieves (8 page)

The Gardner Museum contained extraordinary masterworks like Titian's
Rape of Europa,
said to be the single most valuable painting in all of Boston, but the thieves never went near it, or anything else on the third floor of the museum, for that matter.

Most baffling was the final painting stolen: Edouard Manet's
Chez Tortoni.
It lay on a table in the Blue Room, on the first floor of the museum, beneath a better-known Manet portrait: one of the painter's mother. Even more mystifying than the thieves' choice of that painting was that the Gardner's motion detectors—which had picked up every step the thieves made that night—didn't show any footsteps leading into, out of, or even inside the Blue Room. With an infrared sensor covering the expanse of the smaller Blue Room, no sign that the thieves set foot in the gallery has ever emerged. In fact, the only footsteps the equipment picked up going through the Blue Room that night were Abath's, during the two times he passed through the gallery on his patrol earlier in the evening.

Several weeks after the theft, museum security consultant Steven Keller was called in to review the aftermath and concluded that the Aerotech motion detector equipment the museum used had worked fine the night of the heist. Keller said he tested the equipment himself, trying to avert detection by tiptoeing around the presumed placement of the sensors and crawling on the floor. He failed with every attempt, leaving him with only one explanation: that the Manet had been taken by someone other than the thieves.

Because of Abath's conduct and the spate of curious actions that night, investigators have remained suspicious of him and kept open the possibility that he was somehow involved in the scheme. They point out that in 80 percent of major art
heists, the thieves have had the assistance of an insider at the museum. It made sense given his friction with Grindle; Abath might have had something to do with the heist. Even the thieves' final act before leaving the museum, dropping the gold frame in which the Manet had been set on the chair Grindle used in the makeshift office behind the security desk, had the feel of a final insult toward Grindle.

In 2010 Abath was called before a grand jury, where he admitted to investigators that he prided himself on being able to avoid having his footsteps picked up on the motion detector equipment by “duck walking” through a gallery, like rocker Chuck Berry. But he insisted he had had nothing to do with the thieves or the theft itself, and reminded the grand jurors that he had remained duct-taped and handcuffed in the basement the entire night.

The thieves didn't need any help from him, Abath later told me: “They knew exactly what they were doing.”

But nearly twenty years after the theft, two FBI agents suddenly appeared in the Vermont town where Abath lives with his wife and two sons from a previous marriage.

“You know we've never lost sight of you, never been able to eliminate you as a suspect,” the agents told him. “We've kept an eye on your bank account even.”

“I passed your stupid lie detector tests,” Abath reminded them, referring to the two tests he'd passed soon after the robbery in which he was pressed about any involvement in the heist or associations he may have had with the thieves. While not entirely true—Abath had said he failed a question on the first exam, when he answered “no” to whether he had taken any drugs within forty-eight hours of taking the test—during the second examination, after the FBI's polygraph specialist had advised him to skip the question about drugs, Abath said he did pass with flying colors. (An investigator familiar with Abath's tests would not comment for this book, but
shook his head no when asked whether Abath was describing the results of his polygraph correctly.)

Besides, Abath has lived a threadbare lifestyle, in Portland, Oregon, where he moved a year or so after the theft, and later in Vermont, where he and his wife have lived for more than a decade. More than anything else, his modest existence is the most convincing proof that Abath's culpability stems from negligence rather than any role as an accomplice.

Yet the man who trained Abath for the night watchman's position says his story doesn't add up. JonPaul Kroger insists that Abath had been told specifically to be skeptical of anyone who sought entry into the museum after hours, even if they identified themselves as police officers. In fact, in such events, the night watchmen were trained to take down the names and badge numbers and phone Boston police headquarters to confirm that the officers had actually been dispatched to the museum.

“It was something I was taught when I did that shift,” Kroger says. “And it was something that I stressed when I taught Abath and others like him.”

Also, Kroger insists that everyone who manned the security desk knew that the only way to summon the outside world to an emergency inside the museum was through the alarm buzzer behind the desk.

“To have walked away from that buzzer is beyond negligent,” Kroger says ruefully. “Really it was foolhardy, but then that was Rick.”

Furthermore, Abath was unreliable. Kroger says Abath was often late or called in sick, saying he was ill or too inebriated to work.

Most disturbingly, Kroger casts doubt on Abath's explanation for why he opened the museum's outside door before taking over the security desk to begin his night's work, as the computer printout showed he did a few minutes before
the thieves showed up. Abath, for his part, contends that he did it routinely to make sure the outside door was locked, and contrary to some speculation, it certainly was not meant as a sign to the robbers that they could begin their theft.

Kroger insists that the computer printout was checked every day by security supervisors and that if Abath had been opening the side door on a routine basis, the supervisors would have quickly detected it as a security breach and stopped. Kroger is adamant that all night watchmen were trained never to open the museum door except in case of an extreme emergency, such as a fire.

As for the FBI, it took possession of all the museum's security equipment and surveillance reports soon after the robbery and has declined to answer questions about Abath's actions that night or on prior shifts.

Abath says that while it was preposterous to think so, he always had in the back of his mind that perhaps the thieves would return someday and provide him a reward as they had promised, to show their appreciation for being so compliant during the robbery. And when he found a package of marijuana in an alley near his Brighton home several months later, he took it as a possible gesture from the thieves and he stopped his daydreaming. No one was ever coming back to thank him and he was lucky to be alive.

Although he acknowledges that he made errors in judgment that allowed the theft to take place, Abath does not blame himself. Instead, he said he should have been better trained by his superiors.

Before the thieves left the building, one of them made his way back down the cellar stairs to check on Abath and Hestand. Abath says he could hear the thief breathing steadily, standing there just watching him. Then the thieves left.

With their small hatchback waiting outside the museum, the thieves didn't bother to take everything they had stolen
in one haul. At 2:40
a.m.
, both sets of doors were opened, and then closed again just a minute later. Five minutes later, at 2:45
a.m.
, both sets of doors opened and shut again. The men must have left separately five minutes apart, each carrying a portion of the stolen artwork. Were they able to get all thirteen pieces into the confines of the small hatchback they had been seen sitting in minutes before the robbery? Or had a second vehicle met them outside of the Palace Road entrance to help them? Like so much else they did that night, the question remains unanswered. Just as mysteriously as they'd arrived, the men disappeared into Boston's still misty night.

______________________

Four hours later,
the two security guards who were to take over for Abath and Hestand arrived at the Palace Road entrance to the Gardner Museum and rang the bell. There was no response, and the pair didn't have a key. One of the reliefs ran to a nearby pay phone and she called Larry O'Brien, the museum's deputy director of security, at his home in nearby Somerville.

O'Brien was there in ten minutes. As soon as he entered the museum through a rear door, he noticed a first sign that something was terribly wrong: A clothes hanger, unwound to its full length, was lying at the foot of the candy machine near the rear entrance. Director Anne Hawley was a stickler for keeping the museum clean and debris-free, and O'Brien knew she would have suspended anyone who left a hanger lying there like that, let alone if they'd left it after using it to steal from the candy machine. Had the thieves gotten hungry while pulling off the greatest art heist in American history? O'Brien would later wonder if the famous score had included not only the Rembrandts and the Vermeer but a few candy bars as well.

Finally, making his way to the security desk, O'Brien realized something much more serious had taken place. His two night watchmen were missing and not responding to his calls on the museum's two-way radio system, and there, on the chair behind the desk in the makeshift supervisor's office behind the security desk, lay the empty frame that had once showcased
Chez Tortoni,
one of Manet's finest works.

O'Brien immediately found a phone. He dialed Lyle Grindle at his home.

“Lyle, you'd better get in here immediately,” he shouted. “I can't find our security men and there's sure sign there's been a break-in.” What he didn't tell Grindle was that he feared the thieves were still inside the museum and that the night watchmen were dead.

“Call the police right now, and don't touch anything,” Grindle said, clearly shocked. “I'll be right in.”

______________________

Boston police Sergeant Robin DeMarco
and Lieutenant Trent Holland were in the midst of picking up their breakfast of egg sandwiches and coffee when they received the emergency call. With sirens blazing, they drove quickly to the Gardner, where two rookie police officers and Lieutenant Patrick Cullity, the patrol supervisor for the district, joined them.

All these years on the force, and I never knew this was a museum,
Cullity thought to himself as he arrived at the scene of the burglary.
I always thought it was a big house.

Inside, the officers were met by O'Brien. He told them immediately that he feared the thieves might still be inside the museum and that the overnight guards were missing.

“I think they might be dead,” he told Cullity.

As lead supervisor, Cullity took control of the scene and ordered the two rookie officers—Dan Rice, a former standout college football player, and Kenny Hearns—to begin searching in the basement while he and DeMarco went looking through the upper floors, making their way through the darkened galleries with their flashlights.

“Jesus, look at this,” Cullity said to DeMarco when they reached the Dutch Room on the second floor. The beam of his flashlight caught the shards of broken glass and broken frames that had been left on the floor. “What did these people do here?”

“Lieutenant, I think we've found something down here in the cellar,” Rice radioed. “Can you get down here right away?”

There, seated on a perch, still handcuffed, with his shoulder-length curly hair nearly completely wrapped in duct tape, sat Rick Abath. Hestand, too, was nearby.

“We're Boston police,” Cullity told them. “Just sit there a couple of seconds longer; our police photographer is on his way and we don't want to touch or change anything until he gets his pictures.”

Abath was dumbfounded by the request, but happy to have been found and alive. He sat by quietly but began to fume when one of the officers told him they would have to cut some of his hair to get the duct tape off.

Upstairs, Gardner director Anne Hawley had arrived and was trying to understand the full extent of what had happened. That would not happen until midday, after her conservator had been allowed under police guard to tour the galleries to assess what had been stolen. But standing there on the first floor, having just arrived after Grindle's near-frantic call, she shook her head in sadness as the police told of the lost Rembrandts and Vermeer.

“If I had only followed my instincts, I would have been able to stop this from ever happening,” she told Grindle. “I left my party last night early enough and I wanted to come over
here to get some work done. I'm thinking now I would have walked in on them as they were doing this. I don't care what would have happened to me if I could have prevented this.”

By mid-afternoon, having been questioned for several hours, first by Boston police detectives and then by a swarm of agents from the FBI's Boston office who had already taken over the investigation, Rick Abath was told he could go home. When he got to the head of the three floors of stairs that wound up the inside of the house he shared, he shouted out to his roommate and fellow night watchman, John Murray.

“John, it happened. Everything we warned them about. It happened. Good luck working tonight!”

Then, as he had been planning for weeks, he got in a borrowed van and drove to Hartford to see the Grateful Dead.

Abath did not understand the size of the robbery or what had been stolen until he read the headlines the next morning coming out of his hotel in Hartford. Realizing immediately that he had to be considered an accomplice, and that his leaving the city would raise deeper questions, Abath abandoned any plan he had to stay to see the band's second performance that night and drove quickly back to Boston.

Part II

The Search

Chapter Three

We've Seen It

T
here is little doubt
that William P. Youngworth was an unreliable source. A petty criminal and a drug abuser, he was known to exaggerate if not outright lie in almost every dealing he had, whether it was with fellow criminals, the police, or reporters. There was perhaps no one he might have misled as prominently as Tom Mashberg, an experienced journalist with a top-notch reputation during his stints at the
New York Times,
the
Boston Globe,
and the
Boston Herald
. By the time Youngworth and Mashberg came in contact, the Gardner's works had been missing for over seven years. Youngworth could have been the key to cracking the Gardner case, providing him with the story of a lifetime in the process.

Stories abound about how Mashberg was blindfolded by strangers—he had not been—and driven to a secluded warehouse 45 minutes outside of Boston in fear for his life to see the stolen Gardner paintings. Elements of this story are true—but one critical detail, that the proximity of the warehouse was close to Boston, is simply wrong.

Mashberg began dealing with Youngworth in July 1997, after local police and FBI agents raided Youngworth's house in the suburb of Randolph, Massachusetts. Mashberg got hold of the FBI report authorizing the raid on the house, which doubled as an antique furniture outlet, and in it Boston FBI agent Neil P. Cronin wrote that he believed Youngworth “could assist with the recovery” of the Gardner paintings. Youngworth had been under FBI surveillance for several months before the raid.

That was an intriguing possibility for Mashberg, as Youngworth was close to longtime New England art thief Myles J. Connor Jr., who had stolen a Rembrandt from the Museum of Fine Arts in 1973. In the mid-1970s, Connor had also stolen from the Massachusetts State House a document of great historical value known as the Massachusetts Bay Colony Charter.

The charter was recovered in a raid on one of Connor's stash houses several months after it was stolen—but the charter was missing the 370-year-old royal wax seal that King Charles I had affixed to the document. That seal was recovered in the raid on Youngworth's house more than twenty years later, in 1997, which focused Mashberg's attention on Connor and Youngworth. Connor was behind bars serving a ten-year prison sentence for cocaine trafficking. Mashberg said he soon learned that Youngworth had secretly stored virtually all of Connor's possessions, including items Connor had stolen from museums through the years, inside Youngworth's rambling house in Randolph.

“I was exploring the idea that Youngworth had found some of the Gardner loot among Myles's possessions.”

Mashberg met Youngworth while Youngworth was out on bail awaiting charges related to illegal firearms police had found during the raid on his house. The firearms were in fact three antique pistols with no firing mechanisms, and it seemed clear to Mashberg that law enforcement officials wanted to squeeze Youngworth for information on the Gardner paintings. He wrote several articles in July and early August about
Youngworth, Connor, and the new Gardner lead the FBI was pursuing.

In mid-August 1997, Mashberg received a call at his desk at the
Herald
. It was Youngworth. Mashberg was startled when Youngworth came right out and said what he'd been hinting at for some time: that he had proof that, if certain conditions were met, he could facilitate the return of the Gardner paintings to the museum.

“What are you doing tonight?” Youngworth asked him.

“Putting out the paper. They called me in on my day off because the other guy is on vacation,” Mashberg responded, reminding Youngworth that as Sunday editor he was usually off Sundays and Mondays.

“Forget that,” Youngworth scoffed. “I'll be there at midnight. Let's take a ride.”

That night, Youngworth pulled up in front of the
Herald
driving a late-model Ford Crown Victoria. They began driving south. Mashberg had met with Youngworth a few times that month already and knew that the crook liked calling the shots, and would stonewall if Mashberg tried to cajole him into giving up information he didn't want to make known—or at least wasn't ready to just yet.

Like many ne'er-do-wells, Youngworth had unpredictable moods. That night he was alternately sullen and violently angry, spewing venom about gun possession charges that had been filed against him earlier in the month. To Mashberg, he also seemed to be strung out on drugs, in bad need of a fix.

Youngworth ranted that he wasn't going to play into the FBI's hands and give up the Gardner paintings without getting something in return. He wanted concessions, including immunity from prosecution for any crimes related to the Gardner heist, before he would agree to turn anything over. There was also the matter of a stolen van that had been found in the driveway of Youngworth's home in Randolph. Inside it authorities had found the remnants of a joint. If the gun
charges fizzled, the authorities could always use the stolen vehicle charge to pressure Youngworth into cooperating.

“They know I had nothing to do with that van, or the roach,” Youngworth shouted. “They've just figured out that I'm telling the truth about the paintings and they're trying to squeeze me.”

It took Youngworth a while to get around to telling Mashberg where they were headed, and as the turnpike signs flashed past, the journalist got more and more anxious. Finally Youngworth told him: They were bound for Brooklyn.

“What's in Brooklyn?” Mashberg asked.

“You'll see for yourself,” Youngworth shot back. “You want something to prove I'm for real? Well, I'm going to show you I'm for real.”

Mashberg had noticed they were being tailed by another car and he also, finally, got Youngworth to acknowledge that the second car was being driven by his wife, Judy.

Mashberg knew Youngworth couldn't go much longer without a heroin fix and, regardless of what else they were going to do in Brooklyn, he also knew that Youngworth would stop somewhere to buy drugs.

What have I gotten myself into?
he wondered to himself.
How do I explain this if the police pull us over, and he's high on drugs or has something stashed away in here?

It was still dark when Youngworth pulled the Crown Victoria into the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn and parked outside a housing project. Mashberg sat and waited for what seemed like an eternity, but after about half an hour Youngworth emerged, seeming calmer and even refreshed.

He's gotten himself a fix,
Mashberg thought.

A storage unit in Brooklyn's Red Hook neighborhood was the site in August 1997 where antiques dealer William Youngworth showed
Boston Herald
reporter Tom Mashberg a painting purported to be the stolen Rembrandt seascape. Authorities later claimed it was a fake.

Within minutes, they'd pulled into the nearby parking lot of a giant warehouse on Clinton Street, directly behind the Red Hook Post Office. It was dark, and with a flashlight guiding their way they climbed the three flights of stairs to a storage unit midway down one of the corridors. Youngworth opened the door with a second key and directed Mashberg to stand by the doorway.

Inside, in the dim light, Mashberg could make out a large bin about ten feet away containing several big cylinder tubes. Youngworth walked over and pulled one out, took off its large plastic top, and removed a large painting from inside it. He unfurled it, rolling it out so it hit the floor. Then he held it up higher so Mashberg could see the whole thing.

“Let me show you something,” Youngworth said, breaking the eerie silence. From five feet away, with Youngworth directing his flashlight over the enormous canvas, Mashberg saw the instantly recognizable features: the sail, the waves, the figures. He couldn't make out brushstrokes, but there was cracking along the canvas throughout. The edges weren't frayed but cleanly cut.

Among the few disclosures the museum made following the theft was that the two large Rembrandts had been
cut cleanly from their stretchers and frames, with only a few frayed edges.

“See the signature,” Youngworth said, pointing the flashlight.

Amazed by what he was seeing, and believing it was Rembrandt's masterpiece, the seascape that had been missing for more than seven years, Mashberg edged forward to where Youngworth was standing, holding the painting above his shoulders.

“Don't get any closer,” Youngworth warned him, and with that he shut off the flashlight and rolled the painting up and back into its tube.

In all, Mashberg saw the painting for about two minutes. Nine days later he broke his story on the front page of the
Boston Herald
: “WE'VE SEEN IT: Informant Shows Reporter Apparent Stolen Masterpiece.”

It read, in part: “The vivid oil-on-canvas masterwork—Rembrandt's only seascape—was rolled up carefully and stored in an oversized heavy-duty poster tube with two airtight end caps at a hiding place in a barren and forsaken Northeast warehouse district.

“Under the soft glow of a flashlight, the painting was delicately pulled out and unfurled by the informant and shown to a reporter during the predawn hours of Aug. 18.

“The furtive viewing was offered to the
Herald
as proof that the paintings, stolen on March 18, 1990, from the Gardner Museum in Boston, are here in the United States—ransomable for reward money and immunity from prosecution.

“This reporter was unable to verify that the painting was the original. But the work, which was flaking slightly and somewhat frayed at the edges where it would have been cut from its frame during the Gardner heist, bore the Dutch master's signature on the ship's rudder.”

Quoting his “informant” (presumably Youngworth), Mashberg's
Herald
article stated that the robbery had been
pulled off by five men, only two of whom were identified: Robert A. (Bobby) Donati, who was one of the two robbers who entered the museum, and David A. Houghton, who was responsible for moving the stolen art to a safe house. Both Donati and Houghton were dead when the article was published, and none of the other three men were identified.

A few days later, Mashberg was summoned to meet with museum director Anne Hawley and other museum officials.

“What do you feel the likelihood is that you saw the real thing, the stolen Rembrandt?” Hawley asked point-blank. Mashberg didn't hesitate.

“On a scale of one to ten, I'd say close to a ten,” Mashberg responded. Later that day, the museum put out a statement saying that what Mashberg saw could be “either the original or a close replica.”

In the near quarter-century since the theft, Mashberg's viewing, which he walked me through in a three-hour, on-the-record interview, remains the most authoritative statement by a credible source that any of the thirteen stolen paintings had been seen. Yet the account has been subsequently tarnished: Federal authorities tested paint chips Youngworth supplied to Mashberg to verify his story, and found them to be clearly dated from Rembrandt's era (seventeenth century) but not a match to
The
Storm on the Sea of Galilee
. The museum's security director argued that the heavily varnished Rembrandt painting could not have been unfurled in the way Mashberg described. Even Mashberg now doubts that what he saw was in fact
The
Storm on the Sea of Galilee
. Perhaps it was just a very good replica.

“My doubt comes from [the fact that] nothing ever came of it,” Mashberg said in a recent interview. “Here was the painting literally seeming like it was inches away from being recovered, then, poof, it's gone and the whole potential scenario is wiped out, and everybody off on other trails. I know what I saw but if I am getting dubious responses, then I have to own to the possibility that I was wrong.”

Mashberg's bombshell article, which strongly implied that Youngworth had arranged the viewing, touched off a mad scramble by FBI agents and federal prosecutors. They tried to convince Youngworth to explain to them how he had arranged the viewing, how he might have gotten his hands on the painting, and if nothing else, where the viewing had taken place. But Youngworth held firm: He would cooperate only if all of his demands for immunity—dropping of the charges against him and releasing his friend, the master art thief Myles Connor, who was serving time in federal prison on drug-related charges—were granted.

But while numerous other lowlifes like Youngworth had sought money from the museum on the pledge that they could produce the missing paintings, this junkie-criminal now had something none of them did: credibility.

Youngworth met with Hawley, museum trustee Arnold Hiatt, and several other museum officials, and traded on that credibility. He asked for $10,000 so he could continue his pursuit of the artwork. Hiatt gave him the money as a loan. It was never repaid, and for his generosity Hiatt was subpoenaed to testify along with Hawley before a federal grand jury on whether Youngworth had coerced the money out of him.