Priceless
Page 18
We filed into a sterile, windowless conference room inside the American embassy—four FBI agents and four comisarios, or supervisors, from the national police force, the Cuerpo Nacional de Policía. The Americans slid into seats on one side of an oblong conference table; the Spanish team sat on the other side.
On my first undercover mission overseas, I’d traveled to Spain to try to solve the nation’s greatest art crime—the theft of eighteen paintings worth $50 million, stolen from the home of a Madrid billionaire, a construction tycoon with close ties to King Juan Carlos. The case also carried geopolitical ramifications. It was one year after 9/11 and the FBI was aggressively courting allies against al-Qaeda. With this in mind, FBI director Robert Mueller III had personally reviewed and approved our op plan.
At the embassy, the comisario began his briefing in the clinical tone of the cop on the beat, a just-the-facts style that masked the political pressure he surely felt.
“On 8 August 2001, three unknown men broke a window at the private residence of Esther Koplowitz located at Paseo de la Habana 71, Madrid. This lured the lone security guard outside and they overpowered him. The suspects used his passkey to gain entrance to the second floor. The victim was away and because the residence was being renovated, the paintings were stacked together against two walls. Eighteen paintings were stolen. They are by Goya, Foujita, Brueghel, Pissarro, and others.”
The comisario flipped the page in his briefing book. “We determined that the guard was involved and that his role was to give information to Juan Manuel Candela Sapiehia, the mastermind. Señor Candela is well known to us. He is a member of a criminal organization run by Angel Flores. They call themselves Casper and specialize in bank robberies and high-end property theft. We have been investigating this gang for eleven years.”
I already knew the details of the Casper gang and as the comisario droned on, my mind drifted to my son Kevin’s high school graduation two weeks earlier. I couldn’t believe I’d soon have a kid in college. Donna was thinking about going back to college herself, eager to finish the last credits she needed for her degree. Jeff was a sophomore, Kristin an eighth-grader. Maybe I’d bring one of them to Madrid next time….
The comisario held aloft an ugly mug shot and I snapped back to attention. The man in the photo was bald and bug-eyed, buck-toothed with long black eyebrows. He didn’t look like much of an art buff. More like a stone-cold criminal.
“This is Señor Candela. Age: thirty-eight. Señor Candela has been arrested seven times. Drug trafficking, falsifying official records, armed robbery.”
The comisario held up a second mug shot. This man was bald too, but heavier, with a scruffy goatee and hard brown eyes. “Angel Flores. Age: forty-two. Señor Flores has been arrested five times. Drug trafficking, possession of stolen goods, and armed robbery. His last arrest was 22 June 1999 for homicide—not convicted.” I did a double-take. Homicide? I knew Flores had a long rap sheet and that he’d bragged about supposed influence with Spanish judges and police, that charges against him seemed to suddenly vanish, but no one had mentioned a murder charge. I jotted this down.
“On 4 December 2001, we searched their homes and the homes of four known associates. We found”—he turned to an aide—“commo pruebas circunstanciales?”
“Circumstantial evidence.”
“Sí. We found circumstantial evidence but no paintings. In February this year, we were contacted by our American friends.”
The FBI agent sitting next to me took the cue and stood. Konrad Motyka was a towering figure with bulging forearms, a thin goatee, and a crew cut. He was assigned to a Eurasian organized crime squad in New York.
“OK,” he said, “here’s what we know: In February, an extraterritorial source”—a foreign FBI informant who lived overseas—“called me to report that Angel Flores had approached him about buying the stolen Koplowitz paintings for twenty million dollars. Flores called my source because the source has extensive organized crime contacts in the former Soviet Union. My source reported that Flores was growing desperate, was short of cash and worried about paying for chemotherapy treatments for his mother, who has cancer.
“All right,” the FBI agent continued, “at our direction, my source told Flores that he’s located a potential buyer, a wealthy Russian who works with a corrupt American art expert. After many phone calls and a visit here with the source, Flores has agreed to sell the paintings for $10 million, once the art expert authenticates the paintings.”
Motyka pointed to me. “This is Special Agent Robert Wittman. He has an extensive background in art and has worked undercover on many occasions. He will use his undercover name, Robert Clay. Flores will expect him to bring bodyguards when he inspects the paintings. I will play one of the bodyguards. The other will be Special Agent Geraldo Mora-Flores, sitting here next to Agent Wittman. We call him G.
“Angel Flores is expecting us to deliver one million euros in cash and transfer the rest by wire to his bank. Flores may demand routing numbers to verify that we have the funds in place. We have placed nine million U.S. in a foreign bank account.”
The FBI agent sat and the comisario continued. “We have one million euros, cash, from the Banco de España. For Señor Clay, we have reserved a suite on the eleventh floor of the Meliá Castilla Hotel, downtown. We will position agents in the next suite, in the lobby, and on the streets outside the hotel. One of my officers will deliver the money to the hotel room. He will be armed. I regret that under Spanish law, foreign police officers are not permitted to carry weapons.” We knew better than to try to argue the point.
Motyka wrapped up the briefing. “Tomorrow, they’re expecting a call by cell from a man calling himself Oleg. That’ll be me.”
“You speak Spanish?”
“French,” Motyka said. “I don’t speak Spanish and from what I understand, they don’t speak English. But we all understand French.”
“Which painting will you ask to see first?”
All eyes turned to me. “The Brueghel,” I said. “The Temptation of St. Anthony. It’s valuable, worth $4 million. It’s probably the hardest one to fake because it’s very complex—large and filled with tiny hobgoblins, wild fires, and satanic images—and because it’s painted on wood and attached to a cradle frame.”
When I got back to the hotel, the jet lag hit me hard. Motyka, fired up but also nervous because he was about to go undercover for the first time in his career, invited me to dinner. I begged off—“I’m an old man, I need to be well rested tomorrow”—and went to my room. I changed, poured a Coke from the minibar, and flipped on the TV. I found the BBC, the only channel in English. As I drifted off, I worried how the case was shaping up.
Tomorrow, if everything went according to plan:
I’d be entering another hotel room across town.
To meet a desperate, possibly homicidal gangster eager to close a $10 million deal.
Unarmed.
Dangling a million euros cash as bait.
Working with an FBI partner in his first undercover case.
Negotiating in French, a language I didn’t understand.
Swell.
I WOKE EARLY the next morning and rang up room service.
Stabbing at a plate of eggs, I paged through a stack of seventeen colored prints, pictures of the stolen works I’d downloaded from the FBI’s public art crime website: The Swing and The Donkey’s Fall by the Spanish master Francisco Goya. Girl with Hat and Dolls House by the Japanese modernist Leonard Tsuguharu Foujita. An Eragny landscape by the French Impressionist Camille Pissarro. Carnival Scene by the Madrid intellectual José Gutiérrez Solana.
The multimillion-dollar art was as intoxicating as any I’d chased.
Yet something nagged. Something felt different about this case.
It was the victim.
For the first time in my career, I wouldn’t be risking my life to return works of art to a museum or public institution. I’d be trying to rescue art stolen from a private home. For
a lady I’d never met.
Who was she?
I pulled a dossier from my suitcase and opened it.
Esther Koplowitz was an heiress, a tycoon, a philanthropist, and a recluse.
A raven-haired beauty with chestnut eyes, Koplowitz was connected by birth and social status to Spain’s royal families. Her slightly younger sister, Alicia, was also a billionaire, and for decades they vied for the title of wealthiest woman in Spain. Together, their story was the stuff of Spanish legend. In business and charitable circles, the glamorous sisters were revered. In the tabloids that chronicled their soap-opera lives, the Koplowitzes drew comparisons to the Carringtons of the American television series Dynasty.
The sisters’ father was Ernesto Koplowitz, a Jew who fled Eastern Europe to Franco’s Spain before World War II and went on to run the cement and construction company Fomento de Construcciones y Contratas, a company he aquired in the 1950s, shortly before his daughters were born. The company was a public works behemoth. Founded in 1900, FCC had laid the tar for Madrid’s first paved roads in 1910, won the first contract to collect household trash in Madrid in 1915, and rebuilt bridges and railways blown up during the Civil War in the 1930s. When Ernesto Koplowitz took over FCC in the 1950s, he expanded efforts to win government contracts, in part by hiring executives with connections to the corrupt regime, including the father-in-law of Franco’s daughter. FCC laid the first kilometers of modern highway in Spain, built a U.S. Air Force base, and modernized Madrid’s telephone exchange. Ernesto Koplowitz died unexpectedly in 1962, after he fell off his horse while riding at the chic Club de Campo in Madrid. He left FCC to his daughters, who were not yet teenagers. A caretaker executive ran the company until 1969, when, to great fanfare, Esther and Alicia Koplowitz married a pair of dashing banker cousins, Alberto Alcocer and Alberto Cortina, and installed them as top executives at FCC. For two decades, the husbands grew FCC dramatically, winning major public works contracts across Spain.
Scandal struck in 1989. Paparazzi photographed Alicia Koplowitz’s husband dancing in the arms of the scantily clad wife of a Spanish marquis. Alicia promptly divorced her husband and fired him from FCC. When a second tabloid caught Esther Koplowitz’s husband cheating with his secretary, she too filed for divorce and expelled him from the family company. The publicity-shy sisters suddenly found themselves feminist heroes in Spain and majority owners of a $3 billion company. In 1998, Esther bought out Alicia’s stake in FCC for $800 million.
By the time I arrived in Madrid in the summer of 2002, Esther Koplowitz was principal shareholder of FCC and an accomplished businesswoman in her own right. The company’s annual revenues were approaching $6 billion and it employed ninety-two thousand people worldwide. FCC grew so large it was now one of the thirty-five publicly traded Spanish corporations whose stock price set the Ibex index, the local equivalent of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
Koplowitz had also become a noted philanthropist. A patron of the arts and the infirm, she started a foundation that contributed more than sixty-two million euros to Spanish charities. She gave fifteen million euros to create a national biomedical research center, and millions more to fund group homes and day-care centers for adults suffering from mental illness and cerebral palsy. Koplowitz and her three daughters enjoyed homes in the country, the city, and at the shore. The white, modern, two-floor penthouse from which the paintings had been stolen overlooked a lovely Madrid park.
UNDERCOVER WORK TAKES patience.
Criminals are rarely punctual. They may show up early to conduct countersurveillance or, more likely, arrive late to demonstrate who’s in control. Or forget where or when they were supposed to show up. They’re criminals, not bankers. Sometimes they just get there when they get there—whenever they feel like it, whenever they finish whatever it was they were just doing.
This drives most cops and agents nuts. They like to be in charge and are trained to try to control every situation. They take comfort in military precision and punctuality. They like to make a plan and follow it. I learned long ago to play it much looser.
On the morning of our sting, June 19, 2002, I locked my real wallet and passport in my hotel room safe, swapping them for my Robert Clay identification. I met Motyka and G in the lobby and we took a cab to the gleaming Meliá Castilla Hotel, where the Spanish police had reserved the suite in my name. The five-star Meliá rises in the heart of the city’s commercial center, not far from the Santiago Bernabéu soccer stadium and Paseo de la Castellana, one of Madrid’s grandest tree-lined avenues.
From my undercover suite, Motyka dialed Flores on his cell phone, at 10 a.m., right on schedule.
No one answered. Motyka tried again a half hour later and once more an hour after that. Each time, the call went straight to voice mail. At noon, Motyka dialed again.
He snapped his cell phone shut. “Negative.”
The comisario in the room frowned. He’d positioned perhaps one hundred officers in plainclothes wandering the lobby and streets outside the hotel. A lot of them were probably working overtime, earning time and a half. I chuckled to myself. Apparently, working a major undercover case in Spain was no different from working one in the United States—sometimes you had to work just as hard to keep your own side calm and focused as you did chasing your targets.
I broke the uneasy silence. “Hey, who’s hungry? Should we get some lunch? Walk around?”
“Good idea.”
We killed an hour wandering through the shops near the hotel, Motyka gripping his cell phone so he wouldn’t miss Flores’s call. I found a lovely hand-painted fan, black with red flowers, and bought it for my daughter, Kristin. G found a few souvenirs of his own. We slipped into one of the Museo del Jamón sandwich shops, with large hunks of ham hanging in neat rows. We ordered a couple of sandwiches and bottles of Orangina, and grabbed a standing table in the back, out of the sun.
Motyka glared at his silent cell phone. “I think the Spanish police are ready to pull the plug. What do you think?”
G said, “I don’t know. Doesn’t look good.”
I said, “I think everyone should relax. Give it time.” I held up my sandwich, trying to change the subject. “This is great, huh? Wonder if I could smuggle one on the plane for the ride back?”
“Shit,” Motyka said. “He’s not gonna call.”
“Whoa,” I cautioned. “These things happen on their own timetable. We gotta give it some time. Don’t worry about what the comisarios are saying—that this isn’t going to work out.” I lowered my voice. “Look, buddy, you’ve got to remember that the Spanish police have their own agenda here. They can’t be too crazy about us being here, after working a case for six months, getting nowhere. What’s it going to look like if the FBI waltzes in here and solves it in a few days? Now, they couldn’t refuse our offer to help—that would look bad—but they’re probably going to be pretty quick to shut us down. That way they can say they gave the FBI plan a fair shake. You can’t worry about that. What you’ve got to do is stay positive.”
“I don’t know.”
“Give them a couple of days,” I said. “We’re offering ten million. They’ll call.”
Motyka looked glum. “Hmmm.”
“Look,” I said, “we finish our sandwiches. We walk back. We call again. If Flores doesn’t answer, we call back in a few hours. It’s all we can do.”
“I don’t know.” He was beginning to repeat himself.
But back at the hotel, Motyka couldn’t keep his itchy finger off the redial button—3 p.m., 5 p.m., 6 p.m., and 9 p.m. I began worrying about the repeated calls. Only cops and fools pushed that hard. We had the money. They wanted it. We held the upper hand. The calls made us look desperate. Like amateurs, or worse, cops.
I let Motyka know. He shrugged off my advice.
When yet another call failed—this time around midnight—the comisario finally stepped forward.
“I’m sorry, but it’s late,” he said. “My men have been waiting a long time.”
I went back to my hotel to call home and say good night to Donna and give my love to the kids, and then grab some sleep.
MY PHONE BUZZED in the early morning darkness.
“Bob?” It was Motyka.
“Yeah, what’s up?” I groggily asked, blinking at the alarm clock. It was 6 a.m. What the hell?
He could barely contain his excitement. “I talked to Flores! I tried him one more time after everybody left. And he answered! We got cut off but we spoke three times. He says he’s got the paintings. It’s on!”
I sat up wide awake. “Dude!”
“Yeah, I know.”
I wanted details. “So what was the deal? Why wasn’t he answering his phone?”
“Some bullshit. Said he had to go out of town. He says he’ll be back this afternoon, and to call at 5 p.m. But bottom line: We’re on.”
I asked about backup. “The comisarios?”
“Sanchez got ’em to agree to give us one more day.”
“Great news. I love good news. Nice work, buddy.”
We met again in my suite at the Meliá that afternoon. At 5 p.m., we gathered around as Motyka dialed Flores.
No answer.
Motyka tried five more times over the next four hours. At 9 p.m., the comisario stepped in and shut down the operation. It appeared, he said, that the Flores gang was toying with the great FBI. These were very good criminals, the comisario said, with very good sources. Perhaps they’d gotten wise to the sting. Perhaps they were bluffing all along. Tell you what, he said. We feel bad about this and we’ve arranged to take you out to dinner tonight. Our treat.
The consolation dinner at the hotel restaurant was grim. What was there to say? We’d be returning empty-handed. The FBI director would receive a full report. We’d wasted a lot of time and money. I still couldn’t believe we were giving up so soon. But, keenly aware of the political realities, I didn’t say a word.