Steaming, I printed out a copy and walked it over to my direct supervisor in Philadelphia, Mike Carbonell. Mike and I were the same age, though he’d been with the FBI a decade longer. Mike held the same job in Philadelphia as Fred did in Boston—supervisor of the bank robbery/violent crime squad.
When I walked into Mike’s office gripping Fred’s slanderous EC, it marked the first time in a decade I’d come to a supervisor for help. I was used to fixing my own problems.
“You need to read this,” I announced.
He closed the folder on his desk and took the document. To say that Mike uses foul language is like saying Rembrandt painted a few self-portraits. By the time he got to page two, the expletives were flying—“Holy shit … He put all this bullshit in a goddamn EC? … What the fuck?”
I asked him what he thought I should do.
But Mike wasn’t done venting. “In twenty-eight years, never seen anything like this….”
I told Mike that I’d made a call to France and had learned that the remarks Fred cited had been made in jest.
“Well, then it’s obvious what’s happening,” he said. “You’re on the cusp of solving a huge case and these guys want to cut you out.”
“What should I do?” I repeated.
“You’re the one whose ass is on the line. You know going undercover is always voluntary. It’s up to you. You still comfortable going undercover with Fred or the guys in France who are running the operation? You trust them with your life?”
“No.” The quickness of my answer surprised me.
I asked Mike about getting the case transferred from Boston to a supervisor in Philadelphia, Miami, or Washington.
“Doubt it,” he said. “You know the drill. Nobody in Washington wants to risk pissing anyone off.”
Mike, who was nearing retirement, didn’t care if he made enemies. He forwarded his anger up the chain of command. And, in a rare move, Headquarters ordered Fred’s EC deleted from the FBI system.
Ultimately, senior officials in Washington convened a come-to-Jesus meeting at Headquarters to hash out the differences and try to salvage Operation Masterpiece. The result: I was now permitted to resume conversations with Laurenz. But I was ordered not to speak to Fred, and presumably he was ordered not to speak with me. Left open was the question of whether I could work undercover in France or Spain—and, even if we could get permission, whether I would work with Fred.
After the Washington meeting, we returned to the job at hand, trying to come up with ways to shore up my backstory, ways to convince the sellers that I was a high-end art broker, a player, not a cop. We came up with several ideas to solidify Sunny’s and Laurenz’s confidence in me. Under one scenario, the three of us would travel to Los Angeles, party, and bump into a Hollywood starlet who often helps the FBI. The celebrity would recognize me, stop to chat for thirty seconds, and leave the impression that she and I once did a deal together.
We didn’t end up doing the L.A. gig. Instead, we came up with a better way to ingratiate myself with them: I’d involve Sunny and Laurenz in two painting “deals,” one in Miami, one in France—and in each case, I’d bring Laurenz and Sunny along as my “partners.” As I had with Josh Baer in Santa Fe, I’d lead them to believe that we were partners in crime. Both deals, of course, would be fake, American and French undercover operations. In the U.S. deal, I’d sell forged paintings to undercover FBI agents posing as Colombian drug dealers aboard an undercover FBI yacht in Miami. The French deal would be similar, except that I’d sell fake paintings to French undercover agents in Marseilles.
I laid out the plan in a long e-mail to everyone involved. At the end, I wrote, “I caution everyone involved that in order to make this work we need complete cooperation and advocacy. Ladies and gentlemen, we all have to be on the same page on this.”
Once I got the green light, I started making preparations. I called Washington and arranged to borrow a sack full of diamonds and a half dozen Krugerrands from an FBI forfeiture evidence vault. I called Miami to lease the yacht and dug up a bunch of fake paintings for the first sale—six forgeries seized by the government long ago, imitations of works by Degas, Dalí, Klimt, O’Keeffe, Soutine, and Chagall. The Miami division agreed to supply a cadre of undercover FBI agents to help.
When everything was squared away, I called Sunny and Laurenz.
The call to Sunny was easy. I told him I needed his help as muscle. He was so eager to make some cash, he said yes, no questions asked.
I approached Laurenz differently. He didn’t need money and he didn’t fancy himself a man of muscle, so I played to his weakness—he was so rich and so bored that he’d developed an odd passion for danger. He was an adrenaline freak. Laurenz loved to Jet Ski, sky-dive, snow ski, and make outrageously risky real estate deals. So when he balked at joining me on the yacht deal, I teased him about his manhood.
“I’ve known you for a year now, Laurenz,” I said. “You certainly talk a good game, drive a Rolls and all, but the truth is I’ve never seen you in action. And we’re talking about doing a $30 million deal together. Let’s just say I’d like to see how you handle something like this before I commit to something like that.”
“OK, OK, I do it with you, Bob,” he said. “But I can’t do it next week.”
“Why not?”
“Going on vacation.”
I bit my tongue. “Skiing again?”
“Hawaii.”
LAURENZ WASN’T THE only one headed to Hawaii.
Just as we geared up for the Miami yacht operation, my best ally in Washington, Eric Ives, was transferred to Honolulu. The move was unrelated to the Gardner case, simply part of the routine FBI rotation of young supervisors around the country every three years. But it was a huge loss. During the Gardner investigation, Eric repeatedly stood up to turf-conscious supervisors. On his final day, he even sent an e-mail imploring them to give me the space I needed to do my job.
The FBI did not replace Eric. It left his position as chief of the Major Theft Unit open, creating a vacuum. Many months later, things turned worse. The FBI reorganized its operations and eliminated the Major Theft Unit, scattering its programs to other sections. The Art Crime Team was reassigned to the Violent Crime Section, where it instantly became a low priority, eclipsed by the FBI’s bread-and-butter duties, like catching kidnappers, gangsters, drug dealers, bank robbers, and fugitives.
Inside the bureaucracy, the Art Crime Team lost its juice.
WITH LAURENZ ON vacation, the Miami/Marseilles boat stings remained on hold. But my supposed colleagues in France stayed busy.
On a Thursday call with Pierre, I learned that the French SIAT undercover chief and a Paris-based FBI agent now planned to try to squeeze me out and run the operation entirely in France. The same SIAT chief who’d once told me it was impossible for Laurenz to enter France now planned to sneak him in and do the deal without me. I was dumbfounded. It was one thing for the Boston supervisor to try to tell a street agent like me what to do, but it was quite another for an American colleague in Paris to conspire against me with a foreign police officer.
I told Pierre about Fred, his crazy EC, his rants, and the Washington meeting. I told him about losing Eric as unit chief and how it would hurt the FBI Art Crime Team. Pierre and I talked about the Miami boat deal, and when I mentioned that it would be delayed for three weeks because Laurenz was going on vacation in Hawaii, Pierre burst out laughing.
“What’s so damn funny?” I asked.
“My guys in Paris, your guys in Paris, Fred in Boston, Laurenz off sunning himself at the beach when you want to do a deal, losing your friend Eric from Washington,” he said. “Everyone is giving you the banana to slip on.”
THE NIGHT BEFORE the Miami yacht deal, I brought the six fake paintings to Laurenz’s house. Sunny helped me carry them inside.
The three of us sat under palm trees by the pool and smoked cigars, steps from the dock and Laurenz’s beloved Jet Skis.
I laid out the plan—the s
ix paintings for $1.2 million. Laurenz tried to act cool, but I could tell he was excited. I doubted Laurenz ever got his hands dirty; he paid others to do it. Sunny sat quietly and smoked, sipping a bottle of Evian. When I finished, I asked Sunny if he had any questions.
“Non, I am OK,” he said. “I have my insurance. Got my gun.”
“No, no weapons,” I said. “If they pat us down on the boat, it’ll insult our hosts. I’ve never done a deal with a gun. Never needed it.”
Sunny laughed. “And I’ve never done a deal without one!” Sunny turned to Laurenz. “Tell Bob what Patrick said.” Patrick was one of their contacts on the French Riviera.
“He wants to sell us about ten paintings,” Laurenz said. “There is a Monet and I think others. He will send pictures. He says they are worth forty million euros and he wants six million.”
“What’s that in dollars?” I said. “Ten million?”
“Mmm, maybe more like nine,” Laurenz said. “You interested? With these guys, you don’t screw around. Once you agree to buy the paintings, you must follow through.”
“Or?” I said, acting dumb to try to provoke a reaction.
Sunny scoffed and stood, agitated, pacing, and speaking rapidly in French. Laurenz translated: “We must be entirely serious. We do not want to go to war with these people. They are stone-cold killers. They killed my best friend. He was driving in his car and the assassin pulled up at a light on a motorcycle and shot him. We are dealing with loosely organized gangs. Maybe two hundred guys in all, in France, Spain, Serbia, Corsica. Different gangs have different caches of paintings. Some of these guys have been in prison for years, and have been hiding the paintings, waiting out their sentences. Some paintings are badly damaged because they’ve been taken from their original frames. One of the big Rembrandts you seek is badly damaged. Our friend Patrick is going to try to get it repaired.”
Alarmed, I interrupted Sunny’s spiel. “No, no. Tell him not to do that. It might make it worse, decrease the value. Let me get the professionals to do that. I know some guys.”
I told Sunny I’d think about buying the Monet, but I really wanted the Old Masters, especially the Vermeer and the Rembrandts.
Sunny was adamant. “First, you must take what they offer.”
WE DID THE Miami yacht deal the following afternoon.
We drove the six paintings to the harbor in Laurenz’s new platinum Rolls. Sunny and I carried them onto the undercover yacht, The Pelican. We cruised Miami Harbor into the late afternoon, watched the undercover bikini babes dance and eat strawberries, and I “sold” the fake paintings to the fake Colombian drug dealers for $1.2 million.
The Colombians paid me with a phony wire transfer and with the diamonds and Krugerrands from the FBI vault. When we left the boat, I tossed the small sack of ten diamonds to Sunny and gave Laurenz a few of the gold coins. “For your help today,” I said.
Sunny held the sack aloft and said, “Dinner’s on me.”
We drove to La Goulue to celebrate. On the ride up Miami Beach, Sunny seemed more interested in talking about the drug dealers and the bikini girls than the painting deal. While on the boat, he said, he’d talked to one of the Colombians about a possible cocaine deal.
“I don’t know about those guys,” Sunny said. “I don’t know them. Maybe they are cops.”
“Yeah, be careful—I don’t know them well either,” I said, trying to play it cool without discouraging him from considering the drug deal. “You don’t want to be messing around with drugs anyway, Sunny. You make more money with art. But hey, man, if you like drugs, that’s up to you. Maybe you know drugs better. And those guys, I know their money is good. But that’s all you. I don’t want any part of it.”
“Mmm,” Sunny said. “I don’t know.”
I dropped it, unsure if he would take the bait. The cocaine angle, created by the Miami agents, was designed to develop several opportunities in the Gardner case. At a minimum, we hoped it would allow us to introduce Sunny to more undercover FBI agents, men he might grow to trust. We could wait to see how the Gardner case was playing out and, if appropriate, bust Sunny on a serious drug charge and try to flip him—threaten him with a very long prison sentence unless he agreed to help us recover the Boston paintings. Also, we believed that a drug scenario might create a safety valve for use in an emergency. If we needed to make a sudden arrest of one of the Gardner conspirators, here or in France, we could always deflect blame to one of Sunny’s new drug buddies, plant the idea that one of them was a snitch.
By the time we arrived at the French restaurant, the three of us were talking about art again, not cocaine. We discussed the plan to helicopter into Monaco, and whether Patrick, Sunny’s French connection, could meet us there. I suggested that this would be a lot easier if Patrick and his partners simply flew to Florida to meet with us. Then we could hash everything out. Laurenz liked this idea and Sunny said he would call Patrick.
Then, out of the blue, Sunny asked me if I liked Picasso. When I said sure, he asked me if I’d heard about the recent heist in Paris, the theft of two paintings valued at $66 million from the apartment of Picasso’s granddaughter. I told him I had. Laurenz and Sunny smiled slyly.
Our meals arrived and Sunny said, “We eat. We talk business later.” We spoke of family, Jet Skis, Laurenz’s Hawaiian vacation, and the deal he got on his new platinum Rolls-Royce. We never returned to the Picassos.
Everything seemed copacetic. The bill came while Laurenz was on a phone call and Sunny used the opportunity to politely excuse himself and slip away, sticking Laurenz with the check.
* * *
IN MAY, BOSTON and Paris launched a new paperwork salvo.
It was a clever setup to push me out and began with an EC from Boston to Paris. On the surface, the questions seemed innocuous enough: Given the “Bob is a cop” suspicion, did the French police believe that my undercover identity had been compromised? Could I safely travel undercover to France to meet with the people offering to sell the Gardner paintings?
The answer from Paris: While there was no direct evidence that my cover was blown, the Paris office noted that “a significant degree of danger will exist” if I worked undercover in France.
I studied the two documents and shook my head. Of course an international undercover operation would pose “a significant degree” of danger! You didn’t need to be an FBI agent to know that. But in the risk-averse culture of the FBI, I knew that a memo like that would set off alarm bells and flashing yellow lights. Everyone was now on notice that I might be hurt or killed in France, and no supervisor wanted that on his record, especially when we’d all been warned in writing.
No one was directly saying I couldn’t remain on the case and work undercover in Paris, but the vibe was chilling. My supervisors in Philadelphia got on the line with Fred and his bosses, then with the FBI supervisors in Paris and Miami. Afterward, my Philadelphia bosses told me that the atmosphere had grown so toxic that Boston didn’t even want me to play a consulting role. The internal strife was so intense that it now jeopardized the case and the safety of the agents involved, including me. My Philadelphia bosses advised me to withdraw from the Gardner investigation. Reluctantly, I agreed.
But how to tell Laurenz and Sunny without ruining the case?
I kept it short, sweet, and as close to the truth as possible. It was nice working with you guys, I explained, but my boss has lost confidence in me and wants someone else to step in. I told them I could no longer take their calls.
Hysterical, Laurenz left me voice mails and sent several unsettling e-mails, rants that revealed desperation and vulnerabilities he had never displayed in person.
“Good evening!” Laurenz wrote in one e-mail in broken English and peppered with capital letters and exclamation points. “I am very sad. I am really in a difficult situation tonight. Why doing all the risks, my life, my future, my time? For nothing! Why? I was thinking we could really get these paintings and now I know it is just an illusion? Why? Why
? I REALLY NEED SOME EXPLANATIONS. Good night! Sweet dreams!”
I felt compelled to reply, but did so with an incredibly bureaucratic, cover-your-ass e-mail, one that conveyed the warmth of a corporate customer service representative. “I understand your concerns and questions and have relayed them…” I felt awful, but I didn’t have a choice.
Laurenz responded in minutes. “It’s ridiculous! I am spending/investing a lot of money and now you throw me a DOG BONE? Be nice? Talk to someone else? No! The only person I will talk to is BOB! ONLY BOB! I don’t trust anyone else.”
I let the FBI offices in Boston and Paris know about the e-mails and calls and they were not pleased. In short order, they sent a request to my boss in Philadelphia, demanding all recordings and investigative notes of my contacts with Laurenz. The memo read like a subpoena.
It marked the lowest moment in my FBI career since December 20, 1989, the night of the accident. I began growing irritable, sleepless. I tried to hide it from the kids, but Donna bore the brunt of my frustration. She understood I was one year from retirement, and encouraged me to fight for my reputation.
Few inside or outside the FBI knew of my despair. On the surface, everything seemed fine and my success as the FBI’s top art-crime sleuth only grew. That summer, I recovered the original, hand-edited manuscript of Pearl Buck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Good Earth. The press conference was well attended, but as I took my usual place, out of sight behind the television cameras, I couldn’t help feeling hollow.
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