By dessert, we’d run out of small talk and fell into silence. G poked at the half-eaten flan on his plate. Motyka stared blankly into a full glass of sangria. The comisario chiseled a thick wedge of chocolate cake with a spoon. I stole a glance at the newspaper by G’s elbow, headlines from the international edition of USA Today. “Housing starts soar, lifting economy. Gov. Ventura drops out of the race. Fires rage in the West. Senate tells baseball: Test for steroids….”
Motyka’s phone rang, startling us out of our listlessness.
He spoke in French. “Oui? … Oui? Bon, bon. Pas de problème.” Motyka broke into a smile. “Vingt minutes? Um, uh, l’entrée du Hotel Meliá Castilla? … Mmmm … OK, à bientôt.”
He snapped the phone shut. “We’re on again. The lobby. Twenty minutes.”
WE WAITED FOR the targets in richly upholstered high-backed crimson chairs in the lobby. A pair of Asian blue and white vases, probably cheap knockoffs, stood behind us. A set of antique locks lined the shelves of a hutch against the far wall. Those, I could see, were real.
Motyka spotted Flores and Candela in the foyer and met them with firm handshakes. They lingered for a few minutes and the FBI agent brought Candela to meet me and G in our seats. Flores stayed about twenty feet away, standing, arms crossed.
To my surprise, Candela spoke English.
He seemed thrilled to meet an American art expert and I seized on this, turning to a technique I call “the decoy.” With the decoy, you create a bond by finding a common interest, one that doesn’t have anything to do with the case at hand. If I pulled it off, the target would be lulled into thinking he was teaching me something I didn’t know. It was the same technique I’d used when I got Joshua Baer to teach me about Indian artifacts, when I got Dennis Garcia to send me magazines about the backflap, when I got Tom Marciano to mail me a copy of the law that says selling eagle feathers is a crime.
I offered my opening gambit to Candela. “Hey, do you like antiques?”
“Sí.”
“Come here, I want to show you something I really like.” I led him by the arm to the far wall and to the display case of antique locks. For a few moments, we talked about craftsmanship and history.
“They’re from Seville,” he said. “These locks are famous there.”
“Really?” I said, feigning interest.
“If you like, I’ll take you to Seville sometime and show you.”
“Sure, I’d like that. You could show me which are the best to buy.”
We moved back to the red chairs to talk about the paintings. I nodded at Motyka and said, “My friend takes care of the money. I take care of the paintings.” Candela smiled at that.
I told him I’d want to see the Brueghel first for verification. He agreed, but just to be sure we understood each other, I took out my stack of pictures of the stolen paintings.
“Brueghel,” I said, flipping to the page with the painting. “The Temptation of St. Anthony.”
He looked at me quizzically.
“Brueghel,” I said again.
Candela studied the paper printout. “That’s from the FBI,” he said. “This list, from the FBI.”
I caught my breath. Candela was better than I thought. The pictures were indeed from the FBI’s public website. I’d cut them out and pasted them on blank pages, figuring they were just pictures of paintings. But Candela instantly recognized the sizes and formats from the bureau website. Apparently, he’d been busy researching his robbery.
Concealing my terror, I stuck close to the truth. I smiled and said, “You recognize that, huh? The FBI site, yes. Only place I could find all the pictures.”
Candela let out a hearty laugh. “Ah, the Internet. Yes, the FBI has best pictures.”
I laughed too, trying not to sweat. What a screwup. What a save.
Candela took the stack of images and began thumbing through them, putting a check by the paintings still for sale, an X by the ones he’d already sold.
When he finished, I said, “You’ve sold seven already?”
“For eight million.”
I didn’t know whether to believe him. “Nice,” I said.
“How about I show the Foujita? It’s smaller. Fits in a suitcase.”
“No, no,” I insisted. “The Brueghel.”
“OK, let’s go,” he said, standing. “I take you to the painting.”
We weren’t prepared for a rolling surveillance, and I worried the Spanish might move in and ruin everything if we started walking toward the door.
“Whoa, I’m not going anywhere,” I said, trying to look as terrified as possible. “You bring me art, I’ll look at it. I’m an art professor, not in your business.”
Candela smiled, knowingly. He turned to Motyka. “Ah, that’s right, he’s not a professional like us. He’s afraid.”
Candela stood. “Tomorrow afternoon, then.” We shook hands.
Motyka walked with him to Flores, still standing about twenty feet away. I couldn’t hear them, but I presumed they were making the arrangements.
I looked at my watch. It was nearly 1 a.m.
THE NEXT AFTERNOON, in the minutes before Candela arrived in our suite, I dozed off, slouched in a chair.
I woke to the Spanish undercover agent staring at me. “How can you sleep? Aren’t you nervous?”
I could understand why he was nervous. He was guarding 500,000 euros with a tiny five-shot pistol, toting it to and from a bank vault each day, putting his career on the line each time he took the cash. I said, “Nah, I’m not nervous. Jet-lagged, hot.” It was 6 a.m. in Philadelphia; the air-conditioning in our five-star suite was broken. It was 90 degrees, inside and outside.
I wandered over to the window and opened it, hoping to catch a breeze. I stuck my head out. I looked down and jumped back inside. “Yo, G! Check this out!” I motioned out the window with my eyebrows. G ran to look.
Ten stories below, we could see the pool, surrounded by a bevy of topless bathers. G whistled. Motyka took his turn. Our fun lasted only a moment. A supervisor came running in from the surveillance room next door. Cut it out, he said. We’re getting this all on tape!
Candela arrived a few minutes later. On time!
“Bonsoir,” he said brightly, bearing a rectangular package wrapped in black plastic. He shook hands with Motyka, G, me, and the Spanish undercover agent, the guy with the revolver hidden in his pants.
Candela eyed the open gym bag on the bed brimming with bank notes.
He crossed and dug his hand inside. Instantly, he said, “This looks like only half of it.”
“Euros,” Motyka explained. “It’s easier than dollars.”
Candela kneeled on the bed, closer to the money. “It’s fine. I can take some bills out?”
“Of course, take your time.”
He started to count the money. He pocketed a 20-, a 50-, and a 100-euro note from the bag, saying he needed to check to see if they were counterfeit. I stole a glance at the Spanish undercover officer. I could tell he was thinking he was going to end up 170 euros light.
Finally, Candela finished his tally. He stood and nodded.
Motyka spread his arms and smiled. “I showed you the money. You know we are serious.”
“Oui, mais … un moment, s’il vous plaît.” He took out his cell phone, punched a number, and cupped his hand as he spoke. He moved toward the door, leaving both the money and the package on the bed. “À bientôt,” he said. He’d be right back.
The Spanish undercover agent looked at me, confused.
“His package was a decoy,” I explained. “He’ll be back.”
Three minutes passed. Candela returned, huffing, as he lugged a second package in plastic through the doorway.
“Now,” he announced. “We can be more relaxed.”
For show, I put on a pair of gloves before unwrapping the painting. “This is beautiful, amazing design.” I wasn’t lying. The fine brushstrokes showcased Brueghel’s special skills, the way he depicted movement in pr
e-surrealist form, naked demons dancing around a cauldron as St. Anthony reads his Bible. Even after four centuries, the colors—magenta, crimson, ivory—remained vibrant. It was truly a masterpiece.
Candela agreed, but for different reasons. “Yes, it’s one of my favorites. You can see people fucking. Il faut jouir de la vie—one must enjoy life, no?”
He started rambling, talking about the sale of the first set of paintings, sold to a Colombian drug dealer. “They paid in euros, a huge amount of small bills.”
I engaged him as I studied the painting in my hands. “Huge quantity, huh?”
“Phew, yeah. They filled the whole back of an SUV.”
Everyone laughed.
I walked the painting to the darkest corner of the room.
Candela followed, interested in my examination. “Four hundred and fifty years old,” I said, whistling. “Painted on board, not canvas.”
Candela nodded. He, of course, didn’t have any doubts about authenticity, and seemed to be dropping his guard. “It’s good to verify the merchandise because you might imagine that we could be putting copies out there—make ten copies and sell to ten different people.” As he hovered, he bragged about his exploits. “I make things happen. I’ve been robbing banks and taking things from museums for eighteen years and I’ve never been caught.”
“No kidding?” I sounded impressed.
He laughed. “Everyone knows it’s me. When the paintings are stolen, they arrest me but don’t have proof. The papers were saying it couldn’t be me! I could not pull off a job this big. This”—he pointed to the painting—“is the proof and would be the end for me. That’s why I was afraid to come with a big painting.” He looked around the room and then focused back on me. I was still hunched over the painting. “So,” he said, “you are happy?”
“Mmmm.”
Candela kept jabbering, and offered to hire me. “You work for me and I’ll pay you really, really well.”
I kept my eyes glued close to the painting.
He tried again. “I’m going to have four van Gogh and one Rembrandt in September.”
This got my attention. “Really? Four van Gogh?”
“I haven’t taken them yet.” As he said it, I saw the Spanish agent pick up the phone. I inched toward the bed with the Brueghel.
I turned to the undercover Spanish cop and gave the code word. “It’s real.”
He spoke into the phone.
In seconds, the connecting door swung open and a team in black riot gear swinging automatic weapons roared in. Candela cried out and the men in black piled on top of him, throwing punches into his soft midsection. Shielding the Brueghel with my body, I leaped out of the way and rolled to the side of the bed, yelling, “Bueno hombre! Good guy! Bueno hombre! Don’t shoot!”
Flat on the floor, I winced as the Spaniards pummeled Candela.
Downstairs, the Spanish police converged on Flores, who was waiting with nine paintings in the back of an SUV. Later, the police would recover the rest of the paintings at the Colombian drug dealer’s beach house.
MOTYKA AND G flew home, but I stayed behind to help create a cover story to protect the source.
I would be identified as an FBI agent, but the two “bodyguards” in the hotel room with me—Motyka and G—would be Russians named “Ivan” and “Oleg.” In the chaos and confusion of the takedown, the cover story went, the police mistakenly arrested me, allowing Ivan and Oleg to escape. The police planned to leak this story to the local media.
When we finished with the paperwork and cover story, I wandered into the sultry Madrid evening and caught up with Donna for a few minutes from my cell phone. After a few blocks, I found a bench and sat down. I unwrapped a Partágas cigar and lit it.
I puffed and watched a couple stroll by a newsstand. I thought about what tomorrow’s headlines might say. I also recalled that Koplowitz had willed the paintings to the state. Someday, these works by Goya, Foujita, Pissaro, and the others would hang in the Prado, the country’s most prestigious museum. I felt a calm sense of satisfaction.
I thought about how the case might be received back home. I was sure it would make a splash, both inside the FBI and in the media. The Madrid case would mark a new chapter for me and for the FBI’s art crime effort. I could feel it. I was sure that from now on, we could go anywhere, anytime in pursuit of priceless cultural treasures. We could deploy even when the stolen property wasn’t American. We could lend a helping hand across oceans and nations—and be welcomed.
I kicked back on the bench, stretched my legs, and soaked up the moment. I sat there until the embers on the fine Cuban cigar singed my fingers.
CHAPTER 15
NATIONAL TREASURE
Raleigh, North Carolina, 2003.
THE UNMARKED BUSINESS JET PIERCED THE POWDER blue Carolina sky.
The FBI director’s plane is reserved for the bureau’s most sensitive missions. With a top speed of 680 miles per hour and a bank of secure radios, phones, and satellite connections, the Cessna Citation X can fly the director or the attorney general coast to coast in four hours. It is the jet the FBI uses to scramble its elite hostage rescue team and fly government experts to crime scenes at a moment’s notice. On occasion, the FBI deploys the Citation X for the secret rendition of terrorists.
Inside, I sprawled in one of six large leather chairs, sipping a Coke, across from my partner, Jay Heine, and our supervisor, Mike Thompson. The fragile cargo we guarded was strapped to the seat next to mine, snug inside a custom-built three-by-three-foot wooden box. Its appraised value was $30 million. We flew in silence.
A small computer screen embedded in the cherry wood bulkhead projected our arrival time in Raleigh. We were ten minutes out.
In a few hours, we would present our boxed cargo to the U.S. marshal in Raleigh, concluding a case in which we’d used an undercover sting to recover a seminal document of American history, a parchment stolen as a spoil of war more than a century ago.
Inside the box, we carried one of the fourteen original copies of the Bill of Rights—so valuable because it was the sole surviving copy missing from government archives.
The jet banked gracefully to the left and we began our descent. I glanced out the oval window and spotted the Confederate-gray dome of the North Carolina state capitol, the scene of the crime.
NORTH CAROLINA’S COPY of the Bill of Rights was no “copy.”
On September 26, 1789, a clerk of the First Session of the United States Congress took a quill pen to fourteen sheets of vellum. On each page, he crafted in large calligraphic hand identical versions of a proposed “bill of rights,” a series of amendments to the Constitution adopted just days earlier by the Senate and House of Representatives. The presiding officers of the chambers, Speaker of the House F. A. Muhlenberg and Vice President John Adams, signed each of the fourteen copies. On orders from President Washington, the clerk sent one copy to each of the thirteen states for consideration. The final copy remained with the new federal government.
The proposal Washington sent to the thirteen states was a working document, one that contained twelve proposed amendments, including the ten amendments most Americans associate with the Bill of Rights—freedom of religion, the right to due process, the right to trial by jury, etcetera. The two amendments that did not make the original cut were administrative, related to congressional pay raises and apportionment.
Remarkably, the twelve proposed amendments fit on a single sheet of parchment thirty inches high.
In early October 1789, Governor Samuel Johnston received North Carolina’s copy. Upon ratification of the Bill of Rights by the states, including North Carolina, the ten amendments to the Constitution took effect immediately, without additional paperwork. Thus, the fourteen original copies of the parchment with the twelve proposed amendments became the document we now recognize as the Bill of Rights—the one on display at the National Archives and commonly sold as a souvenir in tourist shops.
In North Carolina, the state’
s copy of the Bill of Rights and Washington’s transmittal letter were immediately treated as historical documents, and a legislative clerk placed them in a strongbox. The records did not find a permanent home until 1796, when the state finished construction of the State House in Raleigh. North Carolina’s new capital, like Washington, D.C., was a planned city—ten square blocks that rose from a former plantation and were modeled after the cityscape in Philadelphia. Although the State House burned in 1831, aides hustled nearly all of the records out in time to save them. When North Carolina completed construction of a new three-story, cross-shaped granite State Capitol in 1840, it filed the most important historical documents in the offices of the secretary of state, treasurer, and State Library, and in alcoves next to the State Senate. Generally, these records were folded in half, bundle-wrapped in plain paper, secured with twine, and placed in pigeonhole cabinets with doors. According to the most likely account, the file containing the Bill of Rights was stored in the first-floor offices of the secretary of state, inside a vault, inside a locked box.
There the historic parchment remained, apparently undisturbed, until the final hours of the Civil War.
ON APRIL 12, 1865, three days after Lee surrendered to Grant and two days before Booth shot Lincoln, Sherman gathered 90,000 troops on the outskirts of North Carolina’s capital.
At midnight, Governor Zebulon B. Vance locked the Capitol doors and fled on horseback.
He left a letter for Sherman with the mayor: Promise not to sack and burn Raleigh, and Confederate troops will abandon the city. “The Capitol of the State with Libraries, Museum and most of the public records is also in your power,” the governor wrote to Sherman. “I can but entertain the hope that they may escape mutilation or destruction in as much as such evidence of learning and taste could advantage neither party in the prosecution of the war whether destroyed or preserved.” The Union troops who received the letter on the city’s outskirts made no promises, and the Confederates retreated anyway.
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