Master Thieves

by Kurkjian, Stephen

  Then, nearly a decade later, when authorities pressed Turner to come up with the stolen artwork after he was arrested along with Stevie Rossetti for participating in the scheme to hold up an armored car headquarters, he swore he knew nothing about the whereabouts of the paintings.

  Turner is now serving a thirty-year prison sentence. Despite speculation that he might be writing a book about his involvement, he has been behind bars for over fifteen years without any such documents surfacing.

  Bobby Guarente is the swingman in the FBI’s account. Elene Guarente, his widow, testified to a federal grand jury in 2010, according to one source, that she saw her husband pass several paintings to his cohort Robert Gentile sometime before Guarente died in 2004. Yet in the several telephone interviews I have had with her she has insisted that she saw her husband pass only one painting to Gentile, and that one did not appear to be any of those stolen from the Gardner Museum. She said she did not recall telling the grand jury that her husband had given more than one painting to Gentile.

  With her approval, federal authorities conducted a thorough search of the farmhouse in Madison where her husband lived while in Maine. They found nothing.

  And then there’s the time she and an old friend of Guarente’s approached a lawyer in Boston in 2005 with paint chips that Guarente’s daughter, Jeanine, provided, saying they came from the missing Gardner masterpiece Storm on the Sea of Galilee. The tests were negative. As a result, the Guarente connection rests on the accounts that were secondhand or could not be corroborated with physical evidence.

  As for Robert Gentile, he had every reason to assist the FBI when they approached him in 2010. Although he denied any knowledge of the location of the stolen artwork, his mobster ears perked up when he heard about the $5 million reward. In fact, he went so far as to sign a contract with his lawyer’s firm to share a healthy chunk of the reward money if something did develop.

  Gentile’s life had been spent in search of a big payday, and if the FBI believed his old friend Bobby Guarente had some inside knowledge of the theft and disposal of the artwork, then he was willing to play along with them. But when agents pushed for him to assist David Turner, who attempted to connect with Gentile from federal prison, he hesitated out of concern that it might place him in danger.

  Gentile’s problems really began, though, when he broke off those discussions completely after agents suggested he introduce an undercover G-man to Turner’s underworld cohorts in the hope that the agent might locate a clear path to the artwork. Frustrated, the FBI dispatched an undercover informant to the used car lot where Gentile was working to buy prescription drugs from him. After spurning the overtures at first, Gentile relented. He was soon indicted on—and pleaded guilty to—related charges.

  At sentencing a federal prosecutor suggested openly that Gentile had information on the stolen Gardner paintings that he was not sharing with investigators and asked for a stiff sentence of nearly five years in prison in an effort to entice him into talking. But US district judge Robert N. Chatigny rejected the recommendation, ordering Gentile to serve just another year beyond his time already served.

  Gentile stayed mum and since being released from federal prison in early 2014 hasn’t assisted the authorities or the museum in its quest to regain its stolen paintings. He’s bitter over his treatment by the federal investigators after he declined to cooperate with them.

  “They ruined my life,” Gentile told me, contending that federal efforts to nab him as a drug dealer would never have happened if he had continued to cooperate on the Gardner case. “All because Elene Guarente told them something that they knew wasn’t true.”

  Even two retired FBI agents involved in the investigation dismissed major segments of the sketchy account DesLauriers and Kelly have made public about the Gardner case. Robert Wittman, who worked undercover investigating art thefts for most of his twenty years as an FBI agent, cast doubt on the certainty of the information that the Gardner paintings had been offered for sale to Philadelphia mobsters in 2002.

  Wittman said the FBI art theft task force that he worked for during those years was assigned to the FBI’s Philadelphia office and his own desk was located “within feet” of the agency’s organized crime unit.

  “I find it inconceivable that that unit would have picked up word of such a conversation and they’re not telling us in our unit about it,” Wittman told me.

  In light of all this, I had a host of questions I wanted to ask DesLauriers. Unfortunately, he demurred, saying that having retired from the Bureau, he did not want to say anything without FBI approval that might imperil the ongoing investigation.

  The FBI, for its part, declined all my requests for interviews.

  But another agent, who had worked on the investigation into the criminal activities that Merlino operated out of his Dorchester garage, found it difficult to imagine that members of the same crew had any real connection to the Gardner case. The now-retired agent, who asked not to be identified, said that while the informant picked up much talk by Merlino and others about the possible whereabouts of the Gardner paintings, “it was all bluster.”

  “If these men at any time knew where those paintings were, they would have turned them over in a heartbeat because of the $5 million reward,” the agent said.

  As for DesLauriers’ claims at the 2013 press conference?

  “I imagine that it was a convenient story to tell to get more people to pay attention,” the retired agent said.

  This made perfect sense as I struggled to understand why the FBI had provided such scant—and, as it turned out, debatable—details of its investigation. Regardless of what Des­Lauriers and Kelly had said about what the FBI investigation had uncovered, in the end it didn’t matter how strong their case was regarding the involvement of Merlino, Turner, Guarente, or Gentile. Merlino and Guarente were dead, and Turner and Gentile had both gone to jail after rejecting offers from the FBI to make deals for what they knew about the paintings.

  The ultimate goal of the investigation now was not to prosecute anyone for the theft or for hiding the artwork. Accurate information—hard evidence—was needed for arrests and criminal court cases, but with the statute of limitations having run out, no such prosecutions are part of the plan.

  The purpose of the 2013 press conference and DesLauriers’ sensational, if unspecific, assertions were to draw maximum public attention to the special website the FBI had established to show what the thirteen stolen pieces looked like. Most people might know immediately what Rembrandt’s Storm on the Sea of Galilee or Vermeer’s The Concert looked like if they happened upon them in the attic or the trunk of a long-lost relative. But what about the eleven less-recognizable pieces, such as Manet’s portrait or the five Degas sketches?

  Getting an accurate account of what had happened in the pre-dawn hours of March 18, 1990, what had motivated the largest art theft in world history, and where the stolen pieces had been stashed was the priority of reporters like me. The ultimate, if not only, aim of the FBI’s Boston office, however, was to return those paintings to the museum’s gallery walls. By using what the FBI had learned—or perhaps, even more, what it appeared to have learned—from its success in capturing Whitey Bulger, the FBI felt they could find this out by piquing public interest.

  As DesLauriers stated in closing his remarks at his March 2013 press conference: “To close the book on this theft we need to recover the art and return it to its rightful owner. We are calling upon the American public to assist us in this investigation, as they have so many times before.”

  And then, not long after the Boston Marathon bombing took everyone’s attention away from the Gardner press conference, just as it seemed that the secrets of the Gardner case would die in the murky Boston underworld, a call from a rival gang would call into question all of the FBI’s assumptions.

  Chapter Ten

  A Tale of Two Gangs

  T
he Boston mob in the 1980s was in complete chaos.

  After Raymond Patriarca, an Italian mobster who had ruled the New England mob with an iron fist for more than thirty years, died in 1984, leaving control with his son, there was a scramble for primacy among the gangland thugs.

  Raymond Junior was neither as smart nor as brutal as his father. After all, who could have been as tough as the man who had ordered a man under his control to kill his own son because a deal-gone-wrong had cost Patriarca money? Struggling to live up to his dad’s Godfather-like reputation, the younger Patriarca had a tentative grip on things, at best.

  A second shock hit the Boston underworld when Gennaro Angiulo, who with his brothers ran the city’s criminal organization as Patriarca’s underboss, was indicted and jailed.

  For several years, with no single individual emerging with the necessary power and prestige to lead the underworld, several smaller rings that had operated under Patriarca and Angiulo’s authority jockeyed for control. One such group, out of Boston’s North End, included the mob soldiers Vincent A. Ferrara, Joseph A. “J. R.” Russo, and Angelo “Sonny” Mercurio.

  And of course, there was South Boston mobster James “Whitey” Bulger, who had the force and toughness to carve out his own place in Boston’s mob scene. Bulger operated independently of the Angiulos, yet had been as murderous as any gang leader in America. Two obstacles stood in Bulger’s way, however. He wasn’t Italian and, in 1988, it was revealed in a series by the Boston Globe that he had enjoyed a “special relationship” with the FBI as a key underworld informant.

  On the cusp of that revelation, when all-out war seemed inevitable, one of Bulger’s allies, Frank “Cadillac” Salemme, was released from jail. Salemme faced neither of Bulger’s obstacles in seeking leadership of the Boston mob, and he immediately began to consolidate his control.

  One of Salemme’s first moves was to persuade Raymond Patriarca Jr. that, as titular head of the New England mob, he had the clout to name Salemme as his Boston underboss. Although they believed—mistakenly as it turned out—that Patriarca would not give Salemme the blessing he was seeking, Vinnie Ferrara and J. R. Russo waited to see which way Patriarca Jr. would go. They didn’t have to wait too long.

  In June 1989, Salemme was lured to a meeting outside a pancake restaurant in Saugus by Sonny Mercurio, a Patriarca gang member who later turned mob informant, and was ambushed.

  Salemme was badly wounded—shot in the chest and leg—but he survived. Those responsible for the ambush were never prosecuted.

  Then Patriarca Jr., in a half-baked effort to bring peace among the warring factions, approved a ceremony in which foot soldiers of both gangs would be inducted into the mafia. It was intended to be the most formal of ceremonies, with vows of loyalty underscored with the sharing of blood from pricked fingers, but unfortunately for Patriarca, several members of the group crowded into the basement of a Medford residence owned by the relative of a mob underling were FBI informants.

  To top it off, the whole ceremony was bugged by the Boston office of the FBI.

  Frank Salemme led a criminal gang that sought to take over Boston’s underworld after Gennaro Angiulo; his brothers were indicted and removed from the scene in the mid-1980s. Salemme is shown here (left, in white) with members of his inner circle, including Richard Devlin (second from right). Courtesy Boston Globe

  Patriarca began the meeting by saying that, to bring peace between the two groups—Salemme’s and the one Russo, Ferrara, and Robert Carrozza controlled—he had agreed to make his stepbrother J. R. Russo his consigliere in Boston. Both sides would agree to abide by Russo’s decisions, he told those attending. Then, with the FBI picking up the entire session through an extraordinary “roving bug” from outside the house, the ceremony began.

  Each would-be mobster took the same oath in Italian, following the lead of Biagio DiGiacomo, the balding, pudgy-faced captain of the Patriarca family.

  “I want to enter into this organization to protect my family and to protect all of my friends. I swear to not divulge this secret and to obey with love and omerta.”

  Each inductee’s trigger finger was then pricked, drawing blood for use in the ceremony. Eventually a holy card, with the image of the patron saint of the Patriarca family, was burned in the hands of each inductee.

  “As burns this saint, so will burn my soul,” DiGiacomo read. “I want to enter alive into this organization and I will have to get out dead.”

  Then, in an ominous, almost monotone voice, DiGiacomo stressed the importance of the secret oath taken by the inductees.

  “It’s no hope, no Jesus, no Madonna,” DiGiacomo warned. “Nobody can help us if we ever give up this secret to anybody. Any kinds of friends of mine, let’s say. This thing that cannot be exposed.”

  When it was discovered that the induction ceremony had been compromised by the FBI—compounding the doubts the other families already had about Patriarca Jr.—the son’s hopes of controlling the New England mob evaporated. His only recourse was to “go to the mattresses”: an all-out war between the two Boston crime rings. The soldiers controlled by Salemme took on those controlled by Ferrara, Carrozza, and Russo, a gang known as the “renegade group” because they owed their allegiance more to the Angiulos in Boston than the Patriarcas out of Providence.

  The hostility between the two gangs was so intense that it touched off more than a dozen murders and assassination attempts, and all efforts to bring peace following the attempt to kill Salemme in 1989 failed miserably. And when the innocent son of one soldier in the renegade group was killed fixing a flat tire, the situation only intensified.

  “This was a very dangerous time,” said one member of East Boston’s Rossetti family, which was loyal to Salemme. “People were looking over their shoulder all the time. It wasn’t good for business, and it wasn’t good for anyone’s health.”

  Both sides drew up assassination lists of who was most vulnerable and in what order they should be hit, according to a 1994 indictment that resulted in the arrest of more than two dozen members of both gangs and put a halt to the outright warfare.

  “I left right then,” the Rossetti family member told me, after hearing his name was on a list prepared by the Russo/Ferrara gang and two strangers showed up at his sister’s house asking for him. “I went as far north as I could in New England, changed my name and never came back.”

  _______________________

  In the early days of the war between the Salemme and Ferrara/Carrozza/Russo factions, as the two gangs tried to kill each other in shocking numbers to exert control over Boston’s underworld, a few members in each camp shared a common secret: that the Gardner Museum was vulnerable to a theft.

  The Rossetti gang, whose members were loyal to Salemme, knew by way of Louis Royce, the gay mobster who had slept inside the museum as a child.

  After the theft—but before Frank Salemme disappeared into the witness protection program—I asked a member of his family if Salemme might be able to shed some light on the theft and the whereabouts of the paintings. A few days later I got word back from Salemme.

  “He says he doesn’t know anything himself but would have to talk to Stevie Rossetti to know for sure,” I was told. At the time Rossetti was serving more than forty years in prison for bringing multiple weapons and bombs to the armored car heist he’d planned with David Turner and others in 1999.

  And at least one member of the Ferrara/Carrozza/Russo gang knew because he had hung out with the legendary art thief Myles Connor and, with Connor, had cased the Gardner Museum back in the 1980s.

  Although law enforcement and even the Gardner Museum had investigated countless leads over the years, the secret of who had actually pulled off the Gardner heist lay within these two gangs. At war since the mid-1980s, the gangs still shared connections. And those connections might just unlock the mystery of the March 1990 theft at the Gardner Museum.


  Chapter Eleven

  The Missing Motive

  On a Saturday evening in May 2014, my home phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number that showed up on my caller ID, so by habit I reverted back to my years as a Boston Globe reporter, giving my full name when I picked up. About a month before, I had written a letter to Vincent Ferrara, the former Boston gang leader, after hearing that he had told a lawyer I knew that he was interested in helping solve the Gardner mystery. After introducing himself, the caller, who asked to remain anonymous and identified as an intermediary to Ferrara, questioned what I knew about the Gardner Museum theft, and why I was interested in talking to Ferrara, whom he said he knew. Soon he sought my theory on the case.

  “I’ve been at this a long time,” I told the caller. “But really, I just don’t know. I’ll tell you one thing, though; the FBI is damn sure they know.”

  “Oh yeah?” the caller said.

  I told him that as far as I could tell, the FBI was certain the heist had been arranged by David Turner, who had turned the stolen art over to Robert Guarente, who before he died in 2004 had given at least several of the paintings to Robert Gentile.

  “Do you believe them?” the caller asked.

  “I know there are holes in their story on all counts,” I replied. “But I don’t see any reason for the feds to be lying about what they’ve come up with.”