Priceless (7 page)

We landed just before the edge of the circle, hurtled into the oval interior, skidded sideways, and flipped, left wheels over right. When the car’s roof slammed down on my head, everything went black.

At Cooper University Hospital, Denis and I were rolled into the same trauma room and a surgeon drew blood from our shoulders. The doctor asked me if I had had anything to drink. It was important, she said, for me to tell the truth, because they were going to administer pain medication. I thought back to my first beer at The Pub early in the afternoon. “Probably four or five beers over eight hours.” She nodded.

I looked over at Denis. There was a little blood on his cheek, but he didn’t look too bad. Denis caught my eye. “Am I going to be OK?” he mumbled.

I really didn’t know. “It’s OK, buddy. You’re going to be fine, partner.”

They wheeled Denis away.

The nurse told me I had four broken ribs, a concussion, and a punctured lung. The doctors performed a thoracostomy, cracking open my chest and inserting a tube into my damaged lung, draining fluid from my chest. About an hour later, I found myself lying in a recovery room, a plastic tube in my left side, surrounded by nurses, a doctor, and my FBI supervisor. I asked about Denis and they said he was still in surgery.

“You guys are lucky,” the doctor said. “Your injuries aren’t life threatening.” He pointed to the bed next to mine. “Your friend will be back soon.”

Medicated, I drifted off.

Three hours later, I woke with the hard winter sun. I felt foggy,
sore, confused. I reached up to my head and felt small pieces of windshield glass matted in my hair, a walnut-sized lump on the right side of my skull. I saw a nurse chatting with a female FBI agent and my wife by the door. Donna turned her bloodshot blue eyes to mine. She offered a nervous smile. The bed beside me was empty.

I winced as I spoke. “Where’s Denis?”

The ladies glanced at the floor.

“Where’s Denis?”

“He’s not here,” the nurse said.

“When is he coming up? He’s still in the OR?”

The nurse hesitated and the agent stepped forward. “Denis didn’t make it. He died.”

“What … what?…” My chest burned. My throat constricted. I coughed and the nurse stepped toward me. They’d told me he was going to make it! What was it the doctor had said?
“The injuries are not life threatening.”
Yes, those were his exact words.
Not life threatening
.

Donna crossed to my side. She held me and we cried.

“He had a ruptured aorta,” the nurse said, carefully. “He came back from surgery and then it ruptured around 4 a.m. We couldn’t stop the bleeding.” I sat mute for a few seconds and stared into her eyes. I think she felt compelled to fill the silence. “It’s common in this kind of accident,” the nurse said. I suppose she thought she was being helpful. I felt devastated.

I floated through eight days in the hospital, trying to lose the pain. Denis was buried while I was there. Fellow agents called with updates describing the funeral, but it was hard to focus. I thought about Denis’s family.

Before I left, a psychiatrist came to see me. I don’t remember the conversation, but years later I came across his handwritten notes: “Patient has feelings of guilt, anguish, chagrin, and humiliation. He feels solidly supported by wife, staff here, coworkers, and bosses…. Acute posttraumatic stress disorder … acute grief.”

A few days later, a reporter called me in my hospital room. She wanted to know if I had any comment on the investigation, or about the blood-alcohol results.

“What are you talking about?”

She told me the local county prosecutor was considering drunk-driving manslaughter charges against me. The prosecutor claimed that my blood alcohol level was .21, more than twice the legal limit. I told the reporter I had no comment. I hung up and tried to digest what she’d said. The blood test results sounded absurd. A beer every two hours over eight hours didn’t get you to .21. It probably didn’t even get you to .04. My mind raced for an explanation. Obviously, there was a mistake in the blood test. But where? And how? More important, could I prove it?

Five months later, the grand jury filed formal charges. While my FBI colleagues and supervisors appeared sympathetic, I figured my career was over. Worse, I agonized over Denis’s death. Why was I the one who survived? My driving error meant the death of my best friend. Now it threatened to tear away my job and my freedom. What would Donna and the kids do if I was sent to prison?

Facing a hard five-year sentence, I resolved to fight. I drew strength from the comforting familiar in my life—my family and my fledgling career, everything good I knew. Friends and colleagues were supportive, but a few urged me to consider a plea bargain. I couldn’t do it. As difficult as it was to accept that Denis died when my hands were on the wheel, my tortured heart told me he would want me to be forgiven—and his parents made it clear they didn’t hold me responsible, even urging authorities to drop the charges. But the prosecutor’s position was clear, so I hired a top-shelf criminal defense lawyer, Mike Pinsky, and he put his private investigators to work. Pinsky had a reputation for winning tough cases at trial. He was probably best known for winning not-guilty verdicts for a mobster accused of murder and a county clerk facing a bribery rap. Like me, Pinksy also had a reputation for being brutally frank. During our first meeting, we laid our cards on the table.

I asked him how he could represent mobsters, people he knew had done terrible things, including murder. How could he be so friendly with them?

Pinsky moved from behind his desk and took the chair beside me. He smiled.

“Bobby, let me tell you a little secret,” he said. “Appearances can be deceiving. It’s really all about perceptions, not friendships. These wiseguys call me all the time and say, ‘Mike, I got a parking ticket. Mike, I got a speeding ticket. Take care of it, will you?’ And I say, ‘Sure, no problem, I’ll take care of it.’ And you know what I do? I take the tickets and I pay them with my own money! Then later, much later, I bill them for it from some other case. They think I’ve got some sort of power and can fix their tickets. And I let them think that. It’s legal and it’s good for business.”

He leaned close.

“Bobby, I want to be clear about something in your case,” he said. “Before we proceed I want to make sure you understand exactly what’s at stake. If we go to trial, it may take years. It will certainly cost tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees and investigative expenses. There is no way to prepare for the strain this will put on your family, your marriage, and your job. And in the end, you could still lose and go to prison. You’re an FBI agent. You know that if you go to trial and are convicted, instead of pleading guilty at the beginning, the judge will give you a
much
longer sentence.”

I didn’t hesitate. “Mike, I’m innocent.”

Merion, Pennsylvania, 1991
.

I
PILOTED MY DINKY BUREAU
P
ONTIAC SLOWLY DOWN
North Latches Lane, a wide side street framed by graceful oak trees and gated stone mansions in the heart of Philadelphia’s upper-crust Main Line. I checked my hand-scrawled directions and followed North Latches until I arrived at a black wrought-iron gate with a discreet sign that said
THE BARNES FOUNDATION.
I pulled to the guardhouse and rolled down my passenger window.

The guard carried a clipboard. “Can I help you?”

“Hi. Bob Wittman. I’m here for the class.”

He checked his list and waved me in.

I was early and when I found a parking spot I sat in the car for a few moments. I gripped the steering wheel and exhaled. It was a crisp fall afternoon, almost two years after the accident, and I was still awaiting trial on the manslaughter charges. Pinsky wasn’t worried about delays, because it gave us time to get to the bottom of the screwy blood-alcohol test. Every few weeks, the lawyer would mail me a stack of documents related to the case—a pleading, a medical record, a private investigator’s witness interview. I’d quickly scan whatever Pinsky sent me, but I found it incredibly stressful to read investigative records about myself. It was even harder to read the
cold, clinical medical assessments about Denis. Sometimes, I would open the long legal envelope from Pinsky, stack the papers on the kitchen table, and just stare at them.

Thank God I was working. The FBI, following an internal investigation, cleared me and put me back on the street. For a while, I worked with the drug squad. We seized cash, cocaine, and Corvettes, and locked up some pretty dangerous guys. I backed up undercover agents who risked their lives in hotel-room stings. I ducked gunfire from a couple of thugs during my first shoot-out. But drug cases weren’t for me. I doubted we were making a big difference. Most people I met on the streets sold drugs because they couldn’t make it any other way; they did it to survive. The way I saw it, drugs were a social problem, not a law-enforcement problem. I asked to return to the property theft squad, and soon I was working art crime again with Bazin. It was good to be back.

Within a few months, Bazin and I recovered a set of two-foot-high tomes by eighteenth-century British wildlife artist Mark Catesby, books of sketches worth $250,000 and as impressive as any by John James Audubon. Rescuing such beautiful books meant so much more to me than busting some sad sack in a crack house. Bazin told me that if I was serious about making art crime a career, I should consider taking a class at the Barnes, an appointment-only museum in the suburbs I knew only by its reputation as a treasure trove of Impressionist art. I said OK and Bazin set it up.

As I got out of my car and headed to my first class that afternoon, I didn’t know what to expect.

I made my way to the intimidating grand entrance—six marble steps, four Doric columns, and two large wooden doors framed by a remarkable wall of rust-colored Enfield ceramic tiles, each centered with a relief of a tribal mask and crocodile by the Akan peoples of the Ivory Coast and Ghana. As I would soon learn, every arrangement at the Barnes carried meaning. The entrance theme represented the debt modern Western art owes tribal Africa.

I stepped inside, signed in at the security desk, and stepped into
the first gallery, an outrageous room jammed with a collection of masterpieces unrivaled by any one room in any gallery in Europe. On the wall in front of me, surrounding a thirty-foot window, hung three works with a combined worth of half a billion dollars. To the right was Picasso’s heroic
Composition: The Peasants
, a striking rendering of a man and a woman with flowers presented in deep hues of rust and persimmon, accented with a splash of carmine. To the left was Matisse’s
Seated Riffian
, a larger-than-life oil on canvas. It depicted a fierce-looking young man from the mountains of Morocco, his face rendered in bold Mediterranean hues. Rising above it all, reaching for the ceiling, was the Matisse masterpiece
The Dance
, a forty-six-foot-long mural with lithe figures in salmon, blue, and black, dancing joyously. I looked to my right and the room continued to overload my senses.
The Card Players
, a Cézanne in muted denim hues highlighted by the artist’s signature folds in the players’ overcoats, hung below Seurat’s much larger
Models
, which depicted demure nudes in a firework of color, the figures formed by millions of dots in the pointillist style.

A set of twelve folding chairs was arranged on a parquet floor in the center of the great room. Each student received writing paper, a pencil, and a copy of a thick book with a canary cover,
The Art in Painting
, by our benefactor, Dr. Albert C. Barnes. As we were warned in our letter of invitation, the museum doors were locked at precisely 2:25 p.m. The lecture began promptly at 2:30 p.m.

Our teacher, Harry Sefarbi, was an elderly gentleman with large round glasses and short wisps of white hair behind his ears. He was entering his fourth decade teaching art at the Barnes, having been trained by Barnes himself in a class just like mine in the late 1940s. Mr. Sefarbi, as he liked to be called, began with a little history lesson about Barnes.

Born to working-class parents in Philadelphia in 1872, Barnes excelled in public high school and had earned his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania by age twenty. He developed a wide range of interests, and became a student of the pragmatist movement, which
later served as a foundation for his commonsense, everyman philosophy about art. Barnes studied chemistry and pharmacology at the University of Berlin, and returned with a German colleague at the turn of the century to open a lab in Philadelphia. Together, they invented a new antiseptic silver compound called Argyrol, a treatment for eye inflammation. The medicine dominated the medical market for the next forty years, making Barnes a millionaire many times over. He began to travel extensively and soon became an art collector, joining the legion of rich and cultured Americans, including Jules E. Mastbaum and Isabella Stewart Gardner, who sailed to Europe to snap up Old Master and Impressionist works at relatively bargain prices. By any measure, public or private, national or international, the number and quality of Impressionist and Modern paintings Barnes acquired was astonishing: 181 works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 69 by Paul Cézanne, 59 by Henri Matisse, 46 by Pablo Picasso, 21 by Chaim Soutine, 18 by Henri Rousseau, 11 by Edgar Degas, 7 by Vincent van Gogh, and 4 by Claude Monet.

Barnes sought to bring his love of high art to others. He began with his employees, hanging valuable works in his factory and offering free art and philosophy classes. When he decided to build himself a new home on a twelve-acre plot just outside the city limits, he hired Paul Cret, the Frenchman who had laid out the Benjamin Franklin Parkway and designed Philadelphia’s Rodin Museum, and instructed him to build an art gallery beside the house.

This would not be a museum, Barnes declared, but a laboratory for learning. Each of the twenty-three galleries would be a classroom, and each of the four walls in each gallery would be a blackboard with a lesson plan. It was central to Barnes’s plan to make art accessible and understandable to the masses.