And then, in 2006, sixteen years after the crime, after all the false leads and con games, the FBI received a credible lead.
That tip landed on my desk.
CHAPTER 20
A FRENCH CONNECTION
Paris, June 1, 2006.
A LITTLE OVER A CENTURY AFTER GARDNER WON THE Concert at auction in Paris, I traveled there to give a lecture. And to follow up on the hot tip.
Each year, the men and women who supervise the world’s undercover law-enforcement operatives convene in a major capital. The conference goes by a secret name as bland as Universal Exports.
The agenda includes lectures on crime trends, updates on important international legal developments and treaties, and presentations on successful operations—war stories told by undercover agents on famous cases. In the spring of 2006, the group invited me to give a lecture on the Rembrandt sting in Copenhagen. I flew to Paris with an old Philadelphia colleague, Daniel DeSimone, the FBI’s unit chief for Undercover and Sensitive Operations. We looked forward to meeting and socializing with our counterparts, making the kind of personal connections that can be invaluable during international investigations. The undercover group planned a Seine dinner cruise and a behind-the-scenes tour of the Paris Opera, the venue immortalized by Renoir.
During one of the luncheons, I introduced myself to DeSimone’s counterpart in Paris, the chief of the French undercover unit called SIAT. The SIAT chief was busy hosting the conference, shaking lots of hands, making small talk, but when we met, he arched an eyebrow.
He put down his glass of red wine. “You’ve of course heard what we heard about these paintings?”
We spoke in vague, veiled terms. There were a lot of people around. But I knew he was referring to the tip that the French had just passed to the FBI: Two Frenchmen living in Miami appeared to be trying to broker the sale of two stolen masterpieces. One was a Rembrandt, the other a Vermeer. The world was missing only one Vermeer—the one from Boston.
“You should meet the officer who received the tip.”
“I’d like that.”
“Good. He works for another department, but I will find you his mobile number.”
I MET THE SIAT contact at the tourist entrance to the Louvre, outside the large glass pyramid.
We spied each other easily in the thick crowd of tourists in T-shirts and shorts—we were the only ones wearing suits. He was a grizzled Police Nationale officer who worked the busy undercover art crime beat in Paris. He was heavyset with a leathered face and narrow blue eyes, and introduced himself as Andre. We shook hands and laughed at ourselves: two hotshot undercover art sleuths meeting in coat and tie at France’s best-known museum! Andre and I strolled away from the mob in the warm sun, tossing back and forth the names of cops and museum chiefs we both knew.
Three minutes later, we were turning right on the cobblestones, following the sidewalk through one of the great arches and out of the palace complex. We crossed Rue de Rivoli and its cheap souvenir shops, moving north up Rue de Richelieu. I was eager to dive in, start peppering him with questions about the Gardner tip. But this was his town, his tip. I let him lead.
After two blocks, the crowds thinned. We kept walking, and Andre said, “You know in France, we have two different national police departments, the Police Nationale and the Gendarmerie Nationale?”
I did, but treaded carefully, having heard about the rivalries. “Kind of a complicated arrangement, huh?”
“Oui. There are important differences and it is important for you to understand.” Andre laid it out for me: The Gendarmerie, created during medieval times, is an arm of the Defense Ministry.* Their officers carry themselves with military bearing and discipline, and are deployed mostly in rural regions and the ports, but by tradition the gendarmes also keep a strong presence in Paris. The Police Nationale, created in the 1940s, is an arm of the French Interior Ministry. The force focuses mostly on urban crime. Andre worked for the Police Nationale.
“Sometimes the Police Nationale and Gendarmerie investigate the same case, compete, and this gives us headaches,” he said.
There was one other important nuance I needed to know, Andre said. “You must understand SIAT.”
SIAT was a division of the Police Nationale created in 2004, the same year the French repealed a decades-long ban on the use of evidence obtained by undercover officers. During the ban, France had used undercover officers sparingly, but in an informal, no-paperwork-involved manner, often with a wink and nod from the local magistrate. Back then, each unit in the Gendarmerie and Police Nationale had used their own people to go undercover. When the law changed and the SIAT was created, many undercover officers had transferred to the new unit. But some veterans, like Andre, had stayed where they were. They found the rule-heavy SIAT culture and configuration too bureaucratic and turf-conscious to be effective. Andre was warning me that SIAT would insist on running the show if this case involved any undercover operations inside France.
“Who runs the art crime team?” I asked.
“Complicated also: It is under the jurisdiction of the Police Nationale, but for political reasons the chief is always a Gendarme.”
“How’s the chief?”
“This one we have now is very good, very smart,” Andre said. “He would rather return an important statue to a church or a painting to a museum than put a man in jail. The problem was that Sarkozy, before he became President of France, was the Minister of the Interior and he didn’t agree. He was very much about law and order. For the Police Nationale, Sarkozy cared only about results—arrests, arrests, arrests. Sarkozy cared only about the statistics. He wanted to show he is fighting the criminals.”
“Sounds like the FBI. We’re not wired to recover stolen property, art. We’re wired to count convictions in court because that’s how you’re measured. We’ve got guys so cynical they call cases and convictions a ‘stat.’ We have arguments over which FBI office gets credit for the ‘stat.’” I smiled at Andre. “You have your Police Nationale-Gendarmerie-SIAT issues, we have our own problems.”
“Yes, I have heard this, though I thought all this changed after 9/11.”
“That’s what everyone thinks, but it’s probably only true in terrorism cases,” I said. “When it comes to everything else, not much has changed.” The FBI remains a largely decentralized law enforcement agency, divided into fifty-six field offices spread across the country. Each of these fifty-six field offices operates as its own fiefdom. Once a field office begins an investigation, it rarely cedes its turf. The FBI’s investigatory protocol is sacrosanct: Absent extraordinary circumstances, investigations are run and supervised by the agents in the field office in the city where the crime was committed—not by anyone at headquarters. “The case we’re talking about now is being run out of Boston because the paintings were stolen from Boston.”
“The FBI agents in Boston are experts in art crime?”
“No. Bank robbery. SWAT, that kind of thing.”
Andre cocked his head, confused.
“That’s the FBI, my friend,” I said. I didn’t want to go into too much detail because Andre still seemed to be sizing me up, deciding how much to tell me about the Florida tip. So I did not explain that despite my expertise, Eric Ives’s enthusiasm from headquarters, and the Art Crime Team’s worldwide successes, the Gardner case would almost certainly remain under the control of the Boston office. I would work for them. In theory, Headquarters could overrule a field supervisor or wrest a case away from a field office. But in reality, that rarely happened. It would be viewed as an insult to the field office supervisor and create a blot on his record, a slight he and his friends would never forget. The FBI is a giant bureaucracy—middle-management supervisors are rotated to new jobs every three to five years, between the field offices and Washington. This dynamic makes supervisors at Headquarters reluctant to make waves. The supervisor you cross today may become your boss tomorrow.
“But don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’ve b
een doing this a long time and never had a problem with that sort of thing. I just do my cases.”
We kept walking, crossing another busy boulevard.
The Frenchman said, “You know, Bob, you must be subtle in art crime. It is important to use discreet methods, sometimes methods that are not illegal but not by the book. Our chief understands that in some situations you have to be subtle.”
I nodded.
The French cop stopped on the sidewalk and looked me in the eye. “These are dangerous people, the guys who have your paintings. Corsicans. I’m going to put you in touch with someone in Florida.” Andre said his French contact in Florida did not know he was a cop, and that he had discreetly used the man’s information in the past. “All very quietly, you understand?”
“Of course.”
“I will give him your number in the U.S. What name will you use when he calls?”
“Bob Clay, art broker from Philadelphia.”
“Good.”
I said, “Let me ask you—just so I’m clear, the paintings for sale are…?
“Oui, a Vermeer and a Rembrandt.”
“A Vermeer, huh?”
“Oui,” he said, and walked off.
ANDRE RANG MY cell phone a short while later.
“Now,” he said. “I’ve told this guy you deal in fine art, big, multimillion-dollar deals. You’re based in Philadelphia and we’ve done business, made a lot of money.”
It was the vouch.
“Excellent,” I said, “I appreciate it. So, he’ll call me?”
“Oui,” he said. “This guy, his name is Laurenz Cogniat.”
“You know him well?”
“Laurenz? He is a fugitive. An accountant for many years in Paris. Worked with organized crime. Money laundering. Very smart, very rich. Moved to Florida. Big house, big car, Rolls-Royce. Knows many people still, here in France, Spain, Corsica.”
“Can I trust him?”
The Frenchman laughed. “He is a criminal.”
“If he says he can get the Vermeer—”
“Let me tell you something about Laurenz,” the cop said. “I do not think he will lie to you about this. Laurenz is not a con man. He is an opportunist. He views himself as a businessman, a man who makes deals in the space between the black and the white. You understand?”
“Sure.”
“But this man Laurenz can be trouble if you try to control him too much,” Andre said. “Be patient. He will take you in many directions, but I think he will lead you to what you want.”
* This changed in August 2009, long after this case ended.
CHAPTER 21
LAURENZ AND SUNNY
Miami. June 19, 2006.
LAURENZ DID NOT DISAPPOINT.
Two weeks after we began speaking by phone, I flew to Miami to meet him. He took me for a ride in his Rolls, an FBI surveillance team in slow pursuit.
Laurenz wore a salmon Burberry dress shirt with a cursive LC monogram on his breast, blue jeans, brown sandals; and a gold Rolex Cosmograph Daytona. He was forty-one years old, trim, with short-cropped curly brown hair.
“Nice car. New?” I asked because I knew the answer—I’d checked his motor vehicle records—and was curious if he’d tell the truth.
Laurenz answered honestly. “A year old. I get a new one every eighteen months. I don’t like to drive a car with more than twenty thousand miles on it. Not good for the image.”
I admired the cherrywood console, running a finger across the frosted silver lettering, PHANTOM. I said what he wanted to hear. “Very nice.”
Laurenz nodded. “If it’s good enough for the Queen…”
I laughed, and realized I couldn’t tell if he was joking.
“Her Majesty drives one just like this,” Laurenz added. He spoke English fluently, but with such a thick accent that it sometimes took an extra moment for what he said to register. “If you’ve never driven this car, you will never understand how smooth it is. You hear nothing outside. You speed up to seventy and you feel nothing. You go to one-ten and you feel like you are driving seventy. Everything is top of the line. The sunroof, the steering, the brakes. There are two DVD players in backseat. For many years, this was an old car for old people. But the new ones are magnificent. I have a guy who comes every month to do the leather. And a boy who washes the car every two weeks.”
He rapped the window with his knuckles. “Bulletproof glass. Custom armor-plated exterior. Four hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”
“Impressive.”
He sniffed. “That’s the point.”
Laurenz steered the Rolls onto the Dolphin Expressway, headed west toward the airport. An irritating pop song played on the radio—all synthesizer and falsetto. Laurenz cranked it up. “Good sound, huh?”
I studied Laurenz and wished I’d been carrying a recorder. What my handling agents and supervisors would make of such banter! Two weeks into the Gardner case and the FBI agents involved were already falling into two camps—those who believed Laurenz might be able to deliver the stolen Boston paintings and those who were skeptical. I fell squarely in the middle, not yet ready to pass judgment, still working him. With undercover cases, especially art crime, you never know until you vet it out. Was Laurenz a fool? A con artist? The real deal? We wouldn’t know until I sized him up.
Clearly, Laurenz liked to talk about himself and I didn’t mind listening. It was an easy way to ingratiate myself with him, and so far, I hadn’t caught him in a lie. His claim that he was worth $140 million was impossible to verify because his holdings were scattered across Florida, Colorado, and Europe in a variety of names and corporations, and Laurenz seemed to spell his first and last names a variety of ways, probably on purpose. But our most basic checks of public records showed that he was worth millions, if not tens of millions, of dollars, at least on paper. What really mattered was that the French police confirmed Laurenz’s connections to the Western European underworld, particularly gangs that dealt in stolen art.
Laurenz and I didn’t directly discuss my background on the phone. With the vouch from his friend in Paris—the undercover cop—it wasn’t necessary to talk about such things on an open line. After a few calls, Laurenz had asked me to fly down to meet him. He said he had a friend arriving from France, someone I should meet.
At Miami International Airport, Laurenz pulled the Rolls into the short-term parking and we walked toward the international arrivals terminal. We had forty-five minutes to kill and Laurenz bought two bottles of Fiji water.
I took a sip. “Looks like you’ve done all right for yourself. How long have you been in Florida?”
“Ten years. But I’ve lived all over the world. I speak seven languages.”
“Seven? How did you learn seven?”
“When I was younger, I was working for Club Med around the world. French Polynesia, Brazil, Sandpiper, Japan, Sicily.”
“What’d you do for Club Med?”
“Didn’t matter. I was twenty. Whatever they asked. Pool, beach, bartender, waiter. I was only thinking about eating, drinking and, you know, girls. When you are this age, you get three, four girls a week minimum, every week for three years.”
I laughed.
“Then I returned to France and I studied accounting, finance, and I started working for this guy. A wiseguy in Paris. I was twenty-five. I did things for him, and then I found out that he used my name as the president of his corporation. The business had many debts and I got into trouble because I was the president. This situation I could not handle—the only way out was to go into the life. Since I am accountant, this is what I do for them. I was very good, washing money, setting up foreign corporations in Luxembourg. You have one million euros and ten minutes later it is in another name, another country, another currency. You understand?”
“Yeah, sure.” He was a mob accountant.
“I was very good. I had a nice office near the Champs-Elysées. It’s good for a while. French and Italian wiseguys, some in Spain. We dealt in gold, ca
sh, diamonds, paintings, whatever you like. Then I saw some bad shit. The Russians and Syrians, sloppy. So, things happened and I know too much. I must leave France. If not, I am dead or in jail.”
I knew Laurenz had been arrested once in Germany and once in France on suspected currency violations, but freed after a few months. I also knew he was a wanted man in France for financial shenanigans. I didn’t bring any of this up. The way he was talking, I expected him to get around to it soon enough. I said, “So you came here?”
“Right, Florida, 1996. I come here with just $350,000 and I get lucky with real estate. First month here, I meet an asshole, a Swiss guy who is losing his condo in foreclosure. I go to the courthouse for the sale. Don’t get his condo but I get another. I pay $70,000 for a $400,000 penthouse in Aventura! You see, Bob, I understand the financial system, and it’s easy if you do. I also know the right banker, the one who will take a few dollars in his pocket when he gets the loan.”
I laughed at that. “The right banker.”
We checked the board and saw the flight had landed. A team of undercover agents was waiting inside the customs area to see if Laurenz’s friend had arrived with anyone else.
I said, “So what’s the plan when we meet your guy?”
“We take Sunny to lunch. We talk business. Sunny is a wiseguy. Not a big guy, but he knows people in the south of France, and I think these people will have the paintings you want. He is trying to move here. Sunny wants to be a player. He will try to impress you and say he can sell anything.”
“I’m only interested in paintings,” I said. “No drugs, guns, nothing like that.”
“Yes, yes, I agree,” Laurenz said. He leaned in and gently grabbed my forearm. “Listen my friend,” he said, “we are the sharks, you and me, and we have a small fish here who can lead us to the big fish. But these big fish, the guys with the paintings in France, are very bad guys. We must be serious. You must have the money. I will get the price down and then you and I will take our cut. We are partners?”
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