Master Thieves

by Kurkjian, Stephen

  “They don’t know what they’re talking about,” the caller said. “David Turner didn’t have anything to do with this. If he did, he wouldn’t be spending the best years of his life behind bars.

  “Bobby Donati robbed the Gardner Museum,” the caller said flatly.

  “Why would Donati pull off a heist like that in 1990?” I asked the caller.

  “To get Vinnie Ferrara out of jail,” he responded.

  _______________________

  By the late 1980s, Vincent Ferrara had ascended to the top level of a Boston-area group that was trying to assert control of the New England underworld. Although he’d been inducted into the Patriarca family and was regarded as a cunning strategist and fierce enforcer of the mob’s rules, Ferrara was a different sort from his brothers in his own gang, not to mention the gang headed by Frank Salemme that he was battling for control.

  Ferrara hadn’t grown up around the mob, like most of his consorts. In fact, once upon a time Ferrara had been headed for a career in finance. Then he started hanging around with the toughs in Boston’s North End. After he was convicted for illegal possession of a firearm in the mid-1970s, his chances of convincing legitimate people to trust him with their money evaporated and he turned to offering protection to bookies, loan sharks, and their brethren.

  Even more unusual in his line of work, Ferrara was different in how he maintained his personal life. He was obsessed with healthy living. He’d never smoked and had avoided eating red meat since the late 1970s. He worked out religiously, was a voracious reader, and was a good enough high school student to have been accepted at Boston College, where he’d graduated with a degree in finance. But more akin to his fellow mobsters, he maintained strict adherence to the mafia code that all key decisions and conflicts were to be handled by the heads of the families, and that its members were strictly forbidden from engaging in drug trafficking.

  According to those who knew him, Ferrara told of conversations he had had with mob boss Jerry Angiulo on how he should conduct himself if he expected to succeed in business or in the mob. “Don’t do business with anyone unless you think he’s as strong and smart as you are,” Angiulo had told him, according to one Ferrara associate. Ferrara heeded that advice, believing the old man meant that while anyone can be your partner when times are good, when things get screwed up, you want to be sure you’ve got someone beside you who isn’t going to panic and who is going to back you up no matter what you decide to do.

  The war between the two gangs had been going on since US prosecutors had indicted the Angiulo brothers on multiple counts of racketeering in 1985.

  Jerry Angiulo and his brothers had maintained an iron grip over Boston’s bookmaking, loan-sharking, and other criminal activity since Raymond Patriarca had anointed him as underboss of most of New England’s organized crime activity in the early 1970s. Secret tape recordings of the North End office Angiulo used to run his criminal enterprise proved to be his undoing. In conversations intercepted by the FBI, Angiulo bragged to Ilario Zannino, his consigliere, of his organization’s powerful reach and his belief that he and his associates couldn’t be indicted for racketeering, believing the offense applied only to the illegal takeover of legitimate businesses and not of illegitimate ones.

  “Our argument is we’re illegitimate business,” Angiulo told Zannino, describing the legal defense he would raise to any indictment. “We’re shylocks,” Zannino agreed.

  “We’re shylocks,” Angiulo echoed. “We’re fuckin’ bookmakers.”

  “Bookmakers,” parroted Zannino.

  “We’re selling marijuana,” Angiulo picked up.

  “We’re not infiltrating,” Zannino added.

  “We’re illegal here, illegal there,” Angiulo continued. “Arsonists. We’re every fuckin’ thing.”

  “Pimps, prostitutes,” Zannino picked up.

  “The law doesn’t cover us,” Angiulo stated boldly. “Is that right?”

  “That’s the argument,” Zannino replied.

  Angiulo turned out to be wrong and the feds convicted him of an avalanche of criminal charges. In February 1986 he was sentenced to forty-five years in prison. Angiulo died in 2009 following his release from federal prison. The battle between Salemme and Ferrara to succeed Angiulo as Boston’s crime underboss began almost immediately after his conviction. Raymond Patriarca had died two years before, so there was no ultimate authority to choose a successor. The decision would be made by the power of the gun.

  It was under these circumstances that Frank Salemme was nearly killed, and soon thereafter, Raymond Patriarca Jr. held the ill-fated cease-fire talks that the FBI secretly recorded. Rather than re-securing Patriarca’s hold on the Boston underworld, the events of that day essentially guaranteed his fall from power.

  For his part, Ferrara was undone by a different set of tapes. In early 1987, he summoned two aging bookies, Moe Weinstein and Harry “Doc” Sagansky, to Vanessa’s, a mob-friendly restaurant in downtown Boston. There he informed them that the old ways of doing things under the Angiulos were changing. No longer would they be allowed to operate their booking operations rent-free.

  Both would need to pay $1,500 each month in tribute to Ferrara, and each would need to come up with a $500,000 payoff just to stay in business.

  “I’m not making that kind of money,” Doc Sagansky, who had operated a bookmaking business in Boston for fifty years, told Ferrara. His traditional moneymaker, the daily three- and four-digit numbers games, had been made obsolete by the state-run Massachusetts Lottery.

  “What I’m driving at,” Sagansky told Ferrara plainly, “is that the business has been destroyed. You pick up the paper and look at the payoffs on the four numbers and three numbers, and the four numbers is almost 100 percent more if you play with the lottery. . . . I don’t know if you ever look at it. We look at it because . . .”

  Ferrara finished the sentence for him. “It’s your business.”

  As it turned out Sonny Mercurio, Ferrara’s close friend and the best man at his second wedding, had turned FBI informant and had arranged for the feds to secretly tape Ferrara’s meeting with Sagansky and Weinstein. The tapes would ultimately be the underpinning of the racketeering indictment against Ferrara and eight others.

  But the tapes weren’t Ferrara’s only problem. He was also indicted for ordering the murder of Vincent “Jimmy” Limoli, whom federal prosecutors tried to show Ferrara wanted killed because he had persisted in selling drugs in the North End. Ferrara’s lawyers claimed that the prosecution’s lead witness on the murder charge was lying about Ferrara’s involvement but it would take twenty years and the unearthing of long-buried government files for that defense to be upheld.

  In the early 1990s, however, Ferrara, who was forty at the time, was convinced that he faced a life sentence if he went to trial on the murder charge and was convicted. Believing his only recourse was a plea deal, he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and in 1992 he was sentenced to twenty-two years in jail.

  Bobby Donati was one of the first people to visit him in jail. The two had been close for nearly a decade, as Ferrara was growing in power in the Boston underworld, and when Ferrara needed someone he could trust to be his driver, he picked Donati.

  Donati was the perfect wheelman for Ferrara. The two had spent hours at a time together in Donati’s red Mercedes two-seater through much of the 1980s, and Donati, a perennial jokester, kept the conversation light. That is, except when he was broke, which was most of the time, and he was looking for advice from Ferrara on whom he could tap for a quick loan or to find an easy score. Donati had an appreciation for the finer things in life, including oriental rugs and antiques, and spent many weekends visiting museums, galleries, and second-hand shops with his son.

  But that day in the federal lockup in Hartford, where Ferrara was first taken after his arrest, Donati was deadly serious, according to a source who knew both
men.

  “I can’t let you stay here,” Donati told Ferrara, keeping his words clipped and vague as both men knew that conversations between prisoners and their visitors were likely tapped, according to the source. “I’m going to get you out of here.”

  “What are you talking about?” Ferrara asked Donati. “Don’t you do anything. No matter what you do, it’s not going to get me out of here.”

  “They will for these; you’ll see,” Donati said.

  Vincent Ferrara (left) and Robert Donati (right) enjoy a meal with an unidentified third man sometime before Ferrara was arrested for racketeering in November 1989—three months before the Gardner Museum was robbed. Donati allegedly told Ferrara he arranged the heist to assist in bartering for Ferrara’s release.

  “Bobby, don’t do this,” Ferrara implored, according to the source. “Whatever it is you’ve got planned, do not do it. You’re just going to get yourself in trouble. Besides, they’re not letting me out of here no matter what you’re offering.”

  But three months later, Ferrara read the news that two men dressed as police officers had stolen thirteen pieces of art, including several masterpieces, from Boston’s Gardner Museum, and he knew immediately who was behind it.

  Ferrara had been moved back to Massachusetts and was incarcerated in the Plymouth House of Correction when Donati came to see him. “Was that you?” he asked Donati, the source recounted.

  “I told you I was going to do it. Now I got to find a way to begin negotiating to get you out,” Donati responded.

  “You’re insane,” Ferrara responded, remembering that the headlines had said the Gardner heist might be the largest art theft ever and that the FBI had more than forty agents scouring Boston’s neighborhoods for clues. “They’re not going to do any deal where they have to let me out. They want me locked up forever, now more than ever,” the source said, quoting Ferrara.

  The Justice Department was indeed intent on eliminating Boston’s mob. US attorney general Richard Thornburgh and FBI director William Sessions had even traveled to Boston in a government jet to announce the indictments, saying they represented the most sweeping attack on a single organized crime family.

  “The case is important in that it represents a stake in the heart of a major organized crime family from the boss on down,” Thornburgh said at a press conference. “It establishes beyond doubt the existence of a secret clandestine operation that takes itself very seriously in terms of the illegal operations it carries out.” Although the press conference took place eight days after the Gardner theft, nothing was said about the status of the investigation.

  But the heist was certainly on Ferrara’s mind when Donati sat across from him at the Plymouth jail. “Bobby, you’re going to bring more heat on yourself than ever before,” Ferrara said, actually sounding genuinely concerned for his fellow mobster. “For your own good, I’m telling you to get out of town. Go to Florida. Anywhere. But get out of town.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” Donati said, seemingly unfazed. “I’ve buried the stuff. Once this blows over, I’ll find the right person to negotiate with.”

  Donati never got that far. He was brutally murdered in September 1991, sixteen months after the theft. The FBI had him under continuous surveillance at the time. It is possible the feds believed he was a vulnerable target in Boston’s ongoing gang war—or they may have been looking at him as a suspect in the Gardner case.

  There has long been evidence linking Donati to the Gardner heist. His name had surfaced in connection with the museum in 1997 because of his association with legendary Boston art thief Myles Connor. But this account provided by the source, of Donati visiting Ferrara to tell him of his plans to get him out of prison, has never been disclosed before.

  The story is a reminder of the importance of one of the most elemental aspects of detective work. From the time Louis Royce first began casing it in 1981, the Gardner Museum’s poor security was an opportunity staring every Boston criminal in the face. Turner and Guarente may have fit the profile. And Rossetti may have had the means. But in the person of his recently arrested boss, Bobby Donati had something no one else had: a motive.

  _______________________

  Vinnie Ferrara is not the only person who believes Bobby Donati was one of the two men who carried out the greatest art theft in world history. Myles Connor, the son of a police chief who turned into a legendary art thief in New England, says he was told the same thing—by Donati’s alleged partner in the crime, a similar ne’er-do-well named David Houghton.

  Houghton had long been friends with Connor, sharing Connor’s love of rock music and often accompanying Connor to gigs his band would get in and around Boston. Like Donati with Ferrara, Houghton had taken it personally when Connor was arrested on a drug deal gone wrong in 1989 and was sentenced to ten years in federal prison. Around the same time in mid-1990 that Donati was visiting Ferrara at the Ply­mouth House of Correction to tell him of the Gardner robbery, Houghton was flying to Lompoc federal prison in southern California to visit Connor.

  “You think I was going to let you rot to death here?” Houghton asked Connor. “Me and Bobby Donati did that score, and we’re going to use the paintings to get you out,” Connor recalled Houghton telling him.

  To this day, Connor believes Donati was involved in the Gardner theft, saying they often discussed how vulnerable the museum was to being ripped off. Also, he says when they first met in the early 1970s, Donati was already familiar with how useful stealing valuable art was. In his book, The Art of the Heist, Connor wrote that Donati had shown him how easy it would be to break into the Woolworth Estate in Monmouth, Maine. In May 1974 they stole five stunning paintings by Andrew Wyeth and his father, N. C. Wyeth from the estate.

  Connor says he stashed the Wyeth paintings with his girlfriend in western Massachusetts, then went looking for someone who was interested in purchasing valuable, albeit stolen, art. After rejecting overtures from several gallery owners, Connor says, he thought he had found the right person, on an introduction through Donati. The two men agreed to meet in the parking lot of a Cape Cod shopping center.

  But instead of being interested buyers, the individual was an undercover FBI agent, and Connor was arrested.

  Once out on bail, Connor continued his life of crime, robbing a bank and then setting his sights on Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. With the trial for his theft of the Wyeth paintings only months away, Connor figured the only way he could gain leverage against federal prosecutors was to make an even bigger score.

  On a sunny April morning in 1975, Connor drove with two friends to the MFA in Boston’s Fens neighborhood. With one pal parked outside, Connor and another man made their way into the museum and headed for the second floor. There they pulled a large Rembrandt painting called Girl with a Fur-Trimmed Cloak from the wall and ran from the building. A guard gave chase and quickly caught up to the pair. He grabbed the painting but was bludgeoned with the butt end of a rifle and decided to give up his grip rather than risk his life for the painting. Connor stashed it underneath the bed of his best friend’s mother.

  Several months later, with the federal trial for his role in the theft of the Wyeth paintings about to take place, Connor reached out to the Massachusetts state police and the assistant US attorney prosecuting the federal case through his lawyer, Martin Leppo. If the authorities entertain a plea deal, Leppo told them, Connor would facilitate the return of the Rembrandt.

  “Negotiating for stolen art is a controversial subject,” Connor wrote in his autobiography. “Certainly none of them [in law enforcement] wanted to be seen making a deal with a convicted cop shooter and known art thief.”

  But that’s exactly what Connor and Leppo were able to arrange. In exchange for the return of the Rembrandt, prosecutors dropped the charges of bail jumping against Connor after he had failed to show up for one hearing. And the US attorney’s office agreed to rec
ommend that the four-year sentence against Connor in the Wyeth thefts run concurrently with the sentence imposed for the MFA robbery.

  Robert A. Donati (following an arrest in the 1980s) cased the Gardner Museum for robbery with legendary Boston art thief Myles Connor Jr., with whom he had robbed a Maine estate of valuable paintings in the 1970s. Donati was amazed when he learned that Connor’s lawyer had been able to secure a plea deal with federal authorities by promising to return stolen artwork.

  Donati clearly marveled at Connor’s ability to swap the return of a stolen masterpiece for leniency within the federal and state court systems. At the same time Connor was completing his sweetheart deal with the US attorney’s office in Boston, Donati was seeking something similar from a federal judge. He wrote to US district court judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr., asking for reduction in a ten-year sentence Garrity had imposed on him following Donati’s guilty plea on stolen securities charges. Donati had been serving a state prison sentence, during which he’d participated in a work release program. If Garrity checked with state correction officials, Donati argued, he would find that Donati had become a model prisoner while serving in that program, and deserved a reduction in the federal prison term he was now facing.

  “I am not asking that I be released overnight, but only that I be afforded some relief so I can go back into work release and continue my upward strides so that I need never come back into these places again,” Donati wrote.

  But unlike Connor, Donati had nothing to trade for his freedom, certainly no Rembrandt. Garrity denied Donati’s motion.

  Despite their disparate treatment by the court system, Connor and Donati remained friends both inside and outside prison in the ensuing years. After discussing how easy it would be to rob the Gardner, the two men even visited the museum on several occasions, with Donati paying particular attention to the security desk and the guard manning it, Connor said.

  What’s more, Donati was dropping suspicious hints to others at the key time. Just before the robbery took place, Donati walked into a Revere, Massachusetts, social club called The Shack, run by his close friend, Donny “The Hat” Roquefort. Donati carried a large paper bag under his arm and Roquefort insisted that Donati show him what was inside. When Donati resisted, the larger and tougher Roquefort approached him and grabbed the bag, and ripped it open. Two police uniforms fell out of it.