Master Thieves

by Kurkjian, Stephen

  The two cases came together in early 1999. Merlino put together the five members of the crew to carry out the robbery of the armored car headquarters—including “Hollywood” David Turner and Stephen Rossetti.

  The FBI agents had gotten word from Romano the night before that the group was going ahead with the robbery plans. With Romano wearing the wire that secretly taped the conversation, the group had met at a pancake house a short distance from Merlino’s garage to go over the final details.

  Merlino was worried about the guards. “Just supposing whatever fuckin’ freaky thing happened that these two motherfuckers or one of them can get up,” he blustered.

  “He’s not gonna get up,” Rossetti said. “I’ll make sure these guys are secured.”

  The guards, it was promised, would be tied with nooses that would tighten if they moved.

  Turner said little, allowing Merlino and Rossetti to carry on about how they were ready to handle any surprise. Turner worried that if the police saw him and Merlino together, they might suspect they were up to something sinister. And he worried about the score itself. When robberies are under way, “a half hour feels like three hours,” Turner said. But he said he was ready if the need came to “throw down” with any police who tried to stop him.

  Rossetti made up in bluster what Turner may have lacked. At one point, a night or two before the theft was to take place, Rossetti and Romano sat together in the back of Merlino’s garage in a van that would be used in the robbery, going over the final details of the roles each would play.

  An active member of his uncle’s East Boston criminal gang, Stephen Rossetti was involved in armed robberies in the Greater Boston area in the 1970s and 1980s.

  “Steve Rossetti so loves himself and his criminal prowess, the dude is off his chain,” Romano wrote later of the encounter. “The quiet, up and coming wiseguy, closely connected to New England mob boss Cadillac Frank Salemme, Steve could not shut up! Him and I were bonding back there in the mini-van.”

  Rossetti’s big concern was about the weapons he and Turner would be bringing to the heist—“equipment,” he called it. Included in the arsenal was a Ruger Mini-14 semiautomatic rifle. At one point, in showing Romano how he would carry the rifle into the armored car headquarters, Rossetti put his hands on Romano’s lower stomach, in the exact same place he was usually wearing his tape recorder.

  Luckily, he wasn’t wearing it that night.

  “I was well aware that after all the recording I had done, all the meetings and phone calls with the feds, all the dry runs to Easton (the location of the warehouse), the whole investigation and probably my next birthday would have gone up in smoke if I had that recorder on me,” Romano wrote.

  Turner focused on the details of the robbery and how it would proceed. There would be three vehicles—Merlino alone in a getaway car; Billy, his nephew, driving the van laden with the weapons and with Turner and Rossetti in the back; and Romano in his own van, which on the sign from his friend, the guard on the inside, he would drive inside the warehouse and fill with $50 million.

  Eerily similar to the two “police officers” who had pulled off the Gardner Museum heist nine years before, Turner and Rossetti carried walkie-talkies and communicated with each other only through them. Also, Turner reminded the crew that once the theft was completed, they needed to make certain they found the device that captured their entry into the building and robbery, and, as took place at the end of the Gardner theft, took the recorded tape with them.

  The morning before the robbery was to take place, Turner showed up at the garage to tell Merlino that he was “very excited” about the next day and that everything looked good. He then handed Romano a cell phone wrapped in a rag.

  “Give this to your inside guy this afternoon,” he told Romano. “He’s to use this to call you tomorrow morning, to tell you everything’s okay on his end and we should do this.”

  The crew would be waiting nearby in their three separate vehicles.

  The day would begin with Turner driving his own car, a Chevy Tahoe, and meeting Rossetti before dawn so they could assemble the weapons. Then they would proceed together to Merlino’s garage in Dorchester in Rossetti’s smaller Honda. There they would load everything in one of the two vans.

  The garage lot was empty when they first drove by. Concerned that they might be stopped driving a car loaded with weapons as they continued to search for Merlino, Rossetti and Turner drove back to Turner’s Tahoe and transferred the guns into it. An FBI search of the vehicle later turned up five fully loaded semiautomatic handguns, and the Ruger Mini-14 semiautomatic rifle, fully loaded as well. Tucked in with all the weaponry were bulletproof vests, police scanners, masking tape, Halloween masks, and an explosive-fragmentation hand grenade.

  Under federal law, presence of such an explosive during the commission of a crime allows a judge to increase by twice as much if not more the number of years on a prison sentence.

  After dumping the weapons, the two men were unarmed as they continued to zip up and down Dorchester’s backstreets in Rossetti’s red Honda in a desperate search for the other members of their crew. They were totally unaware that Merlino and his nephew had already been arrested by Federal agents when they arrived at the garage earlier, and totally unaware that their every turn was being tracked by a surveillance team that included two agents in a small plane flying overhead.

  They were close to abandoning their plan as they drove onto Morrissey Boulevard and neared a public skating rink that was quickly filling with fathers bringing their kids to morning hockey practice. Out of nowhere, two GMC Suburbans smashed into the Honda, running it onto the side of the road. Agents surrounded the vehicle and Turner and Rossetti surrendered without a fight.

  The pair were quickly taken under armed guard to the Brookline police station and placed in separate cells. Among the first people to approach them in their cells was FBI agent Neil Cronin. He reminded Turner that no one had gotten hurt and that no guns had been fired in the day’s adventure. Everything could be forgotten if he helped recover the Gardner paintings, Cronin said.

  As Turner would later write to another author, the FBI was convinced that he had a hand in the museum robbery and getting his cooperation to recover the missing artwork was at the center of the FBI’s decision to allow the plot to rob the armored car headquarters to proceed.

  “They think that I was the person who committed the (museum) robbery, which is false,” said Turner in the letter. “They thought that if I was facing serious charges, I would be motivated to help facilitate the return of the paintings. Well, they got the serious charges against me, and now I am going to die in prison.”

  Rossetti, too, was worried about what a long prison sentence might mean for him and, before the trial took place, he got word to Turner asking for a significant favor: Would Turner acknowledge in court that it was his idea to bring an arsenal of weapons, especially the hand grenade? Rossetti faced a longer sentence than the others because he had already been convicted of a bank robbery, and had served a long prison sentence for it. He had a wife and son now, and did not want to serve the rest of his life in jail.

  Turner made no such admission during the trial and Rossetti was correct that his past conviction would bring a heavier sentence. In 2002, after the entire crew was convicted of robbery and conspiracy charges, Rossetti was sentenced to more than fifty-three years in federal prison. Turner was sentenced to thirty-eight years. Both sentences were longer by thirty years because of the hand grenade they’d brought.

  But Turner was not done with the courts. He spent the next five years appealing to either have his conviction overturned or be granted a new trial. His principal argument was still that the government had entrapped him into joining the robbery scheme to force him to provide information on the missing Gardner paintings.

  The appeals court upheld his conviction and denied his request fo
r a new trial in August 2007. In its twenty-seven-page opinion, the court found that his two prior convictions involving weapons possession and robbery, in 1989 and 1990, and his deep ties to Merlino cast a shadow on his claim he was a total innocent to the robbery scheme.

  Evidence at his trial showed that Turner had been sufficiently involved in planning the robbery, including casing the headquarters to make sure the insider was cooperating, to nullify the argument that he had been coerced into the scheme.

  “Turner engaged in additional surveillance of the target, ran an additional dry run with the ‘insider,’ stated that the group should shoot it out with police if stopped, expressed concern that his Tahoe was bugged, commiserated with Rosetti [sic] about the intense impatience one feels while waiting to begin a planned robbery, and expressed concern that he and Merlino should not be seen together because people know that when they are together something illegal is going to happen,” wrote Appeals Court Justice Jeffrey R. Howard.

  It must have been a rude awakening for Turner. But he wasn’t done. The US Supreme Court hadn’t heard his argument and he filed another appeal there, again stressing that the FBI had set him up to squeeze him to assist in recovering the Gardner paintings.

  But within six months of the appeals court decision, Turner received word that the US Supreme Court had refused to consider his case. They denied his appeal without giving any opinion as to why.

  The past had finally come back to haunt the man the Boston Globe had once tagged “the Teflon gangster of the South Shore” of Boston.

  For someone who had been arguing for nearly a decade that he had been wrongfully set up by the FBI, the Supreme Court’s opinion must have been devastating to Turner. Perhaps it was sufficient to make him reconsider his lifelong stance of never cooperating with law enforcement investigators. What is certain is that two years later, in March 2010, he wrote to Robert Gentile, a man he had met casually only once or twice before, and asked him to help recover the Gardner paintings—a remarkable turn for someone who claimed to have no knowledge of the Gardner heist and no inclination to work with the FBI for any reason.

  Turner’s Boston lawyer, Robert M. Goldstein, says Turner did indeed write the letter, but said it was only at the FBI’s insistence.

  “Yes, he suggested that Mr. Gentile cooperate with the investigation, but it was only because he [Turner] did not want to put himself in a position of being charged with obstruction of justice,” Goldstein said.

  Goldstein refused to say whether Turner was writing a book about his possible involvement in the Gardner theft, as has long been rumored, or whether he had sought from federal authorities an immunity agreement or even release from prison for his assistance in recovering the paintings. Regardless, such assistance would hardly be enough for Turner, who is not scheduled to be released from prison until he is nearly sixty years old, after his boyish good looks have faded.

  To gain his release Turner would have to do more than tell the authorities how he robbed the Gardner. He would have to get the masterpieces back on the museum’s walls.

  Part IV

  A New Theory

  Chapter Nine

  Rethinking the FBI Case

  For all its existing notoriety, the Gardner Museum heist is close to attaining still another superlative: the longest unsolved art theft on the FBI’s Most Wanted List.

  Of the FBI’s list of “top ten art crimes,” only the 1969 theft of a Caravaggio from an Italian chapel is older than the Gardner heist. And the loss of the Caravaggio in that case, estimated at $20 million, pales next to the $300 million–$500 million value placed on what was stolen from the Gardner Museum that cold March day in 1990. If the Caravaggio ever comes back, the Gardner heist will be number one in every sense.

  Although hopes for a recovery ran high in 2013, after the announcement by the head of the FBI’s Boston office that agents knew who had pulled off the theft, the statement, which was in fact made to try to gain the public’s help, has led to no breakthrough. Instead, the likelihood of returning the paintings to their still-empty places within the museum seems as remote today as it did in 2010, when the lead FBI agent on the case told me that “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.”

  Of course, it hasn’t been for lack of trying. The FBI has committed tremendous manpower and forensic resources to the case. Even more, it has tried to be creative in coming up with outside-the-box approaches to appeal to those who may know the whereabouts of the artwork, while making clear repeatedly that the statute of limitations on the actual theft ran out in 1995, so the two thieves and anyone who might have participated in the heist cannot be prosecuted.

  To those who possess the stolen artwork, federal prosecutors have been equally reassuring: If the pieces are brought back, they have said over and over again, those holding them will not be prosecuted for the outstanding crime of possession of stolen property. And if the pieces are in similar condition to when they were stolen, the holders would be eligible to claim the museum trustees’ $5 million reward.

  “Short of giving them a ride to the museum, I’m not sure what else we could offer them,” former US attorney Donald Stern, who oversaw the investigation for eight years, told me. “This is a no-brainer. It baffles me why they weren’t returned long ago.”

  As for the investigators who have worked the case over the years, two scenarios have been offered as to why the underworld thugs suspected of involvement in the theft and subsequently hiding the art have remained mum, with one being far worse than the other.

  In the first, the artwork was hidden—buried even—and the few people who knew where it was stashed have since died. That possibility is considered credible among the street investigators, who realize that knowledge of a theft is tightly held information within the Boston underworld.

  Among the Rossetti gang, whose fifteen or so members are believed to have engaged in dozens of robberies, large and small, in the two decades between the early 1970s and mid-1990s, only those who engaged in the actual heist—and its boss, Ralph Rossetti, or his nephew Stephen—might know who did it.

  “We were all responsible for coming up with our individual scores,” Louis Royce, the Gardner aficionado and member of the Rossetti gang, told me. “Everything had to be cleared by Ralph, or Stevie if Ralph wasn’t around. But I didn’t want the others knowing what I was up to. It only increased the chances of someone squealing on me if they got caught in something they were doing.”

  And considering their dangerous line of work, the thieves could have met an untimely death, leaving the artwork in its mysterious hiding place, with perhaps no one left alive with knowledge of the whereabouts.

  There’s also the distinct possibility that the thieves, in a panic when they learned that their heist had triggered a massive FBI investigation, with forty-five agents assigned to the case at its height, decided that the best thing to do was to get rid of the evidence, destroying the artwork in their desperation.

  Two men who traded often in stolen goods have taken very different positions on that possibility.

  “It all depends on the circumstances they were in,” said William Youngworth. “You’re not dealing with stable people who are making decisions in a rational way.”

  According to Youngworth, the bigger the score, the bigger the scare. And of course, the Gardner was the biggest score of them all.

  But Louis Royce, considered by the FBI to be one of Boston’s most able thieves, said he and his criminal cohorts never destroyed anything they had stolen, or even threw it away, unless it was a weapon that could tie them to a murder.

  “We don’t throw anything out, not even the cork of a wine bottle,” said Royce, who says he was responsible for dozens of break-ins of homes, jewelry stores, and banks during his criminal career, and who ran a secondhand shop that specialized in stolen goods. �
��You never know what’s going to be valuable tomorrow.”

  As for the FBI, it places little if any credence in the theory that the artwork was destroyed. Its belief is that the pieces were hidden and, regardless of why, those who are holding them refuse to turn them in.

  _______________________

  The Boston Marathon bombing and manhunt, coming so closely on the heels of the FBI’s press conference in March 2013, with the promising leads it offered and its appeals to the public for help, effectively stalled the Gardner investigation. Shortly after the bombing, Richard DesLauriers left the FBI and took a job in private industry, leaving sole responsibility for the Gardner case to special agent Geoff Kelly and Gardner security chief Anthony Amore.

  DesLauriers stopped responding to inquiries I made about his statements, but Kelly, in a one-on-one interview, added a few specifics to DesLauriers’ account: The plot had been hatched in the Dorchester auto body shop where Carmello Merlino, David Turner, and Robert Guarente congregated. And after the theft, Guarente had passed the artwork on to Robert Gentile, the Manchester, Connecticut, hood whose house and surrounding yard investigators had vigorously searched in May 2012.

  These names were familiar to me, from the work I and others had done at the Boston Globe, but further reporting I had done on their roles gave me pause as to how convincing their involvement in the case might be. Consider some of the evidence we’ve already seen:

  David Turner knew how vulnerable the museum was to a theft through his association with the Rossetti crime gang of East Boston and their man Louis Royce. But the belief that Turner was one of the two thieves seems wishful thinking in light of the credit card receipts I found, showing him in Florida in the days before and after the theft. Perhaps he arranged the theft but did not participate—but then who were his operatives? And how and why would he have coordinated with them while away when the theft could just as well have happened some other day, when he was in town? In any case, Turner’s resemblance to the police sketches created at the time of the theft was one of the most compelling pieces of evidence against him. If he was in Florida when the heist happened, this point is irrelevant. Also, Turner was unable to put his hands on the stolen artwork in 1992 when he sought to negotiate with the authorities to gain the release of his crime boss, Carmello Merlino, and closest friend, Charles Pappas, who had been jailed for cocaine trafficking.