Master Thieves

by Kurkjian, Stephen

  “If you don’t take me to see Martignette tomorrow, I’m going on my own,” Rocky told him.

  “That won’t get you anywhere,” Nichols told him bluntly. “The only way you’ll get him to cooperate is if you let me talk to him first.”

  The next morning the two men drove to Martignette’s gated complex, arguing all the way over how the approach would take place.

  “We’ll go in together,” Rocky told Nichols. “You’ll introduce me as from the Gardner Museum, and I’ll take it from there. This has gone on long enough.”

  “No,” Nichols insisted. “Let me go in first. I’ll tell him you’re in the car and want to come in and talk to him.”

  Martignette seemed surprised to see Nichols when he knocked on the door. Nichols explained that he was working with the Gardner Museum on recovering their stolen masterpieces. It was just registering what was going on when Rocky came bursting through the door, shouting at Martignette.

  “Okay, I know you know where our paintings are,” Rocky yelled. “Start talking now!”

  Rocky was enormous. Martignette knew immediately he wasn’t going to listen to anything he said, so he retreated and called the police.

  Hallandale police captain Kenneth Cowley was one of the first officers to arrive on the scene. He found Martignette and Rocky shouting at each other at the top of their lungs. “I’m not too sure either knew what the other was saying,” Cowley remembered later. “The big guy had a pretty good British accent, but I did hear him shouting about getting his museum’s paintings back. But it was Mr. Martignette’s apartment, so I ordered the big fellow to leave, and we would straighten it out at the police station.”

  A few days later, Cowley thought he had it sorted out after interviewing Martignette, Nichols, and Rocky.

  “Nichols was telling the museum’s investigator something that he had no evidence of: that Martignette had something to do with these stolen paintings and that they had gotten somehow to Belize.”

  But Cowley said that Rocky refused to give up on his suspicions about Martignette, and intimated that he was going to try to interview Martignette again on his own.

  “That was it for me,” Cowley said. “I told him that he was no longer welcome in Hallandale, and if he didn’t leave immediately, I would be calling his employer.”

  According to public documents, Rocky was paid about $150,000 by the museum for the eighteen months in 2005 and 2006 he spent trying to track the stolen artwork. Following his return to England, he assisted in making a documentary about better times: his work recovering the Turner masterpieces for the Tate Gallery.

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  Years of frustrating recovery efforts like the disappointments involving Nichols and Youngworth wore heavy on Hawley, and she gave up her lead role on behalf of the Gardner in pursuing the stolen paintings. In 2005, she hired Anthony Amore, a former US Transportation Security Administration agent, to maintain security at the museum while working closely with the FBI on its investigation.

  Smart and indefatigable, Amore was able to develop a productive working relationship with the FBI and the US attorney’s office, allowing him to work alongside agents and investigators on the tips that came in, while steeping himself in the leads that had not worked out in the years before he began working the case.

  He also built a private database, including the details of hundreds of art thefts dating back to the early 1900s, in hopes it would provide clues to better understanding what happened in the Gardner theft. He combed old files, libraries, and books about thefts for such clues as what time of day the theft took place, whether the thieves used force or trickery to gain entry, whether a weapon was used, whether the thieves had an inside connection, how many pieces were stolen, how long it took for the thieves to surface, and when they did, whether they revealed themselves to the museum itself or to an intermediary.

  After years of legwork, Amore came to agree with Richard DesLauriers, chief of the FBI’s Boston office, that the stolen artwork had found its way into the possession of Robert Guarente, a Boston hood who resided in Maine, and that after Guarente developed cancer in 2001, he turned over at least three of the pieces to his friend Robert Gentile of Manchester, Connecticut.

  In 2010, Amore and FBI agent Geoff Kelly were the first investigators to interview Guarente’s widow, who told them her husband had passed the stolen artwork to Gentile in the parking lot of a Portland, Maine, restaurant. Amore advanced Mrs. Guarente $1,000 from the museum to have her car fixed, the reason she’d decided to contact them about what she knew. Amore was also with Gentile in his prison cell following a search of his home, pleading with him to share what had happened to the paintings that investigators were sure Gentile had stashed away.

  Gentile stonewalled: He maintained he knew nothing of the heist.

  Amore appears to take such frustrating twists in stride, and he says he remains hopeful that a recovery will take place before too long. Even when a lead doesn’t develop, Amore sees the bright side: “It’s one less haystack we have to search to find the needle.”

  With Kelly in the lead, Amore has participated in FBI searches of residences in Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts in search of the missing artwork. To this day, Amore says he speaks to Kelly daily about leads each is working on, and they often conduct interviews related to those leads together.

  Amore appeared with Kelly at a March 2013 press conference in which DesLauriers, then still head of the FBI’s Boston office, made the dramatic announcement that they believed they knew not only who had carried out the theft but that there had been attempts to fence the artwork in Philadelphia a decade before.

  Although his remarks were not as dramatic as DesLauriers’, Amore said in a radio interview not long after the press conference that they indeed had made progress in solving the case. But within a month, Amore was failing to return phone calls from reporters seeking information about whether the bombshell announcement had produced new leads.

  However, the lack of any significant developments hasn’t stopped Amore from making public appearances to talk about the Gardner case and, even more so, to sell the book he co-wrote in 2011. Titled Stealing Rembrandts: The Untold Stories of Notorious Art Heists, it discusses several thefts of Rembrandts from individual museums and galleries over the years, but gives scant mention of the theft that Amore—and the world—is most intrigued by: the 1990 Gardner heist.

  The brief mention the book gives to the Gardner case focuses on the alleged viewing of Rembrandt’s seascape by Amore’s co-author, Tom Mashberg, and blames the failure of leading to a recovery to the animosity between Mashberg’s source, Youngworth, and federal investigators—not to the substance of Youngworth’s information.

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  Although it took place in Boston and Governor Michael S. Dukakis was a close friend of the museum’s director, neither the Massachusetts state police nor the Boston police department was involved in the investigation after the preliminary review of the crime scene. Instead, the investigation has been controlled by the FBI and involved only a handful of special agents and their supervisors. But believing that the thieves would be taking the stolen artwork across state lines, the FBI asserted its jurisdiction over the case.

  In the early going, the manpower was much greater. Within days of the heist, more than forty agents were assigned to the case, following up dozens of leads. One of the first that caused a scramble inside the museum was a bomb threat, apparently called in by a gang looking to get the FBI’s attention. “We also are being threatened from the outside by criminals who want attention from the FBI, and so they were threatening us, and threatening putting bombs in the museum,” Anne Hawley said recently. “We were evacuating the museum, the staff members were under threat, no one really knew what kind of a conundrum we were in.”

  Investigators needed to follow up on every lead, regardless how farfetched it ap
peared. One of the first leads the agents appeared to take seriously involved museum employees. The agents asked for the names of all older Italian women who worked stitching the tapestry and pieces of cloth at the museum, after a tip that a Boston gang member was related to one of them. The list was prepared but no connection was ever determined.

  Two Boston cops assigned to the US attorney’s office on organized crime investigations also were convinced they knew who had pulled off the theft. They had received a tip from a reliable contact that John L. Sullivan Jr., a South Boston amateur artist as well as a petty thief, had been seen around the Gardner Museum in the days leading up to the theft, and confirmed it through parking tickets.

  But again, the jurisdiction belonged to the FBI, and entreaties to the agents to follow up on the tip fell on deaf ears, with one agent telling them “we’ve got dozens of suspects that we’ve got to chase down.”

  Within three months, the number of agents assigned to the case had been drastically reduced. In fact, it went down to just one—Daniel Falzon, a young agent from San Francisco, where his father was a police officer. Boston was his first permanent assignment and the Gardner heist, understandably, was the biggest case he ever spearheaded. Although he could call for assistance from other agents, he did most of the legwork and all the decision-making on the myriad tips the FBI received.

  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 i
n 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.