He said, “Were my boys good to you on the way over?”
I nodded and said, “Here I am, so they got the job done.”
He leaned back for a moment, taking me in, sizing me up, a look of mild amusement on his bespectacled face. Then he said, “Jack, if you don’t mind me calling you Jack, you and I don’t know each other, but right now, we can do each other a whole lot of good.”
And with that, he leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, and he told me a story. What he neglected to tell me was how much bad we could do each other as well.
Chapter Three
T om Jankle reached into a manila envelope that had been sitting on the glass coffee table before him and pulled out a stapled sheaf of documents. He read them for a moment as I watched his eyes descend the page.
Finally, he looked up at me and said, “Whoa boy. This is one heck of a story.”
You don’t hear the word heck a lot these days, especially among street-wizened agents. But he looked like just the kind of person who might try to revive its usage.
He looked back down at the sheets for a moment, then again at me. “What do you know about the Gardner theft?” he asked.
He might as well have just pulled his gun from his holster and fired a round into the bare white walls of his office. He might as well have just kicked me in the gut, or opened up a percussion grenade on the drab gray carpet of this windowless room. The entire world stopped short for a flicker of a moment. My vision blurred, my thoughts derailed, all sound, all motion, all sensory perceptions, ceased to exist.
And then I replied, unsure how I even scraped the single word from the far corner of my brain and out of the depths of my throat, “Some.”
Forgive my drama, but the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum remains the largest art heist in the history of America, a brazen robbery undertaken in the dark of a Sunday night thirteen years before by a pair of men dressed in Boston police uniforms who knocked on the massive front doors of the stately old museum and said there had been a disturbance nearby.
Once inside, the two imposters proceeded to bind and gag the two security guards, then methodically cut eleven art treasures from their frames on the walls, including works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Manet and Degas. My tastes tend to run toward Five Dogs Playing Poker, but even I understood the import of this brazen act, and if I didn’t, then the estimated price tag on these so-called priceless treasures made it quite clear. Experts said they were worth something in the neighborhood of $300 million, which, as the gossip columnists who write the Traveler’s “Scene and Heard” column might say, is a very nice neighborhood indeed.
Most notable for the purposes of this conversation, the theft remained unsolved all these many years and so many thousands of infertile leads later. Nothing. Zero. Nada. Zip. When the two bandits were leaving the museum, one of them said to the bound guards, “Tell them they’ll be hearing from us.” But nobody ever had.
And now this. I had a very intense-looking lead agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation sitting across from me in the urgency of a September night saying he wanted to talk about the Gardner Museum.
“But what should I know?” I asked.
He pulled his big frame up from his chair with a groan and ambled over to a tiny, beat-up old refrigerator that I hadn’t previously noticed on the other side of his desk. He walked like he had just stepped off a horse.
“Beer?” he called out.
“Sure,” I replied. I had already had enough for the night, and didn’t want Augustus Busch impairing my senses any further, but to say no would have put me and him at a different place at a time I needed us to be nothing less than simpatico.
He came back with two bottles of Budweiser and absently handed me mine as he settled back into his seat. He took a long, thirsty pull, let out a quiet, pleasant sigh, and said, “I’d rather have a little bit of bourbon, but I’ve got work to do.”
I didn’t respond. He said, “We’ve had a pretty promising break in the case, but not enough of one to solve it.”
The refrigerator rattled in the corner, or maybe that was my heart. Somewhere down the hallway, a door slammed shut. Then he added, “May we speak off the record, and we’ll figure out what you can use when we’re done?”
Seeing as I didn’t even have so much as a pen and a piece of paper on me, I said, “Sure.”
“And I mean, off the record,” he added for emphasis.
“So do I,” I replied.
For the record, off the record, in the vernacular of the information industry, means that any information provided to a reporter is unusable for publication or broadcast unless completely and independently confirmed. Some reporters, maybe most reporters, confuse this simple fact, and believe that off the record actually means the information is usable just so long as they don’t identify the source of the information. They’re wrong. What they’re actually thinking about is “background” information, where a particular source will provide material on the condition of anonymity, meaning they are identified as, perhaps, an official familiar with the investigation. Two different things that most reporters can’t get straight, though Jankle seemed to know full well the difference. I liked him for that already, or at least respected him.
He leaned toward me in his chair, took another short sip of his Bud, and, with the bottle still in his hand, said, “We have new information that Toby Harkins is linked in some way to the theft. We’re in the process of trying to figure out how.”
And there goes another percussion bomb. There’s another round fired into the institutional-white wall. There’s that foot-in-the-gut thing again.
Toby Harkins, in point of fact, is one of the biggest thugs that Boston has ever known, a coleader of an Irish Mafia that terrorized huge swaths of this city by running drugs, loan-sharking money and killing a sickening number of people who dared cross its path. Jankle had pursued him for years, finally with success. But Harkins had vanished a year earlier, precisely one day before the United States Justice Department announced its indictments on a litany of charges too long to list here.
By the way, it’s also worth noting that Toby Harkins is the estranged son of the city’s sitting mayor, Daniel Harkins. More on that in a while.
I stayed silent, listening to the quiet buzz of the overhead lights and the gentle ticking of a clock on a distant bookcase. I wanted to see where Agent Jankle was planning to take me before I even tried to alter his course with any questions.
“Now I’m not saying he stole the damned paintings. Seems too delicate an operation for a guy whose idea of sophistication is putting a bullet into the back of people’s heads. But I am saying that he probably knows who stole them, and maybe he even has possession of them now.”
He fell quiet, taking another long gulp of his beer. When he set the brownish bottle back on the table, I watched the bubbles within explode from the middle and rise toward the surface, all festive, even if the mood wasn’t. When he didn’t speak again, I asked, “How do we know that?”
Notice the word we, as in We the people, as in, Jankle and I, or is it me and Jankle, or Jankle and me. No matter. It was another subtle attempt to bond, to show that we were on the same side of the line, and that information shared would reap mutual benefits.
Without hesitating, he said, “We intercepted some correspondence, or rather, we had a piece of intercepted correspondence provided to us, that in some way links Harkins to the paintings. Unfortunately, I can’t be any more specific than that.”
“We’re off the record,” I said, meaning, tell me more.
“I can’t be any more specific than that.” He stared back at me, blank, then picked up his beer. Mine sat in front of me untouched.
I asked, “How seriously are you treating this new information?”
“Very. We now have dozens of agents in this office, in Washington, and abroad, actively and aggressively looking into it. We’re anticipating that the thieves or their representative might be prepared to reach out to auth
orities to broker the return of the paintings. That’s the usual scenario in these kinds of cases.”
“Meaning for money?” I asked.
“Most definitely.”
“And where does Harkins fit into that?”
He shook his head ruefully and drained his beer. “We’re still trying to figure that out. He may be the broker, skimming a huge percentage of the profits. That would be his way.”
Admittedly, what he was giving me wasn’t a lot, but in the news biz, not a lot doesn’t always mean not enough. The journalistic processor that is my brain quickly kicked into overdrive, determining what I wanted to write versus what I could write versus what I needed to be able to write to get the information into print. And at that point, Jankle and I began the negotiation that precedes almost all source-driven stories of any worth. I borrowed a pad of paper, took down some notes and quotes, and when we arrived somewhere between his maximum offering and my minimum requirement, I stood up to leave.
As I gathered my borrowed belongings and pulled on my coat, I asked in as blasé a way as possible, “Why do you want this in print?”
Truth be known, the question was anything but casual. In the brokerage of information, everyone has an angle. Some people, often politicians and a few select investigators, just like the high of seeing their name or material in print. Others, natural pleasers, get off on befriending reporters, hoping that in some as-yet-unknown way, the relationship will ultimately pay dividends. Still others, those more vendetta-minded, liked to settle scores, and we provided a better forum than most to do just that. In this particular case, I harbored some suspicions that the frisky Feds were trying to spur an underworld war by putting information in play that Toby Harkins possessed several hundred million dollars in stolen treasures, or at least information on their whereabouts. With shootings or maimings or kidnappings come the endless possibilities of angry informants bringing information to federal investigators.
Not that I minded any of this. As in the law, motive in newspaper sourcing is interesting, though not necessarily important.
Jankle remained seated, and at this point, was taking a long slug out of my bottle of Bud, which I never touched. He put it down in front of him and looked up at me with newly tired eyes. He said, “Because right now, we don’t have much of a case. I’m throwing out a line, seeing what I can reel back in. Someone’s going to read what the Record has to write and they’re going to call the FBI tomorrow morning with something more than we already have.” Then, in a softer voice, “At least that’s what I hope.”
There was a moment of silence between us as I drank in just how bone-boring dry this office of his really was. The white walls were bare. The carpet was an institutional gray. His desk was only mildly cluttered. The chairs looked like they came from the waiting room of the Salvation Army. He was a man who cared about success, but not the trappings that go with it.
He added, “Jack, I can’t guarantee you how long this information will remain out of the public realm. The FBI in Washington could call a press conference on this and issue a statement at any time, including tomorrow. This is a high-profile case. There are a lot of agents and assorted supervisors who want some mug-time on the tube.”
I checked the clock on the wall—11:20 P.M.—and thanked him for his time. I declined the offer of a ride from his trained apes, jotted down his office phone number and headed for the door. It was, as they might say in journalism school, a killer story. I just didn’t understand yet in what way.
Chapter Four
I walked into the newsroom carrying nothing more than a couple of scribbled pages of quotes in my hand and one of the more intriguing stories of the year in my head. At the far end of the room, the crazy, zany lords of the copydesk were spending the last minutes of deadline gloomily searching stories for punctuation and grammar mistakes that would no doubt cheer them up. Otherwise, the main part of the newsroom sat still and barren, nothing more than the sickly green haze of so many quiet screen-savers waiting for tomorrow’s daily frenzy.
I sat at my desk in the middle of the room and immediately began typing. I had already called Elizabeth on my cell phone on the cab ride over and warned her that I might be a while, and not to go hanging around with Toby Harkins tonight. Just kidding about that last part. I think.
More important, I also called Peter Martin, he of the Red Sox tickets, and flagged him on the night’s events. As usual, he picked up the telephone on the first ring, regardless of the fact that it was after 11:00 and he was no doubt planning to be in his office by 7:00 A.M. the following morning, as he always was. Confident that my cabdriver could speak English as well as I could speak his native Ukrainian, I calmly told Martin what I had and from whom I had it. He simply said, “I’ll see you in the newsroom in twenty minutes.”
Martin was my editor back when I was an investigative reporter for the Record in Washington and he was the paper’s bureau chief. Since then, I’ve come back to Boston as a senior reporter, and in a recent and not uncontroversial shake-up, he became editor in chief. He’s a diminutive guy, even weaselly in the wrong light, perpetually nervous, always pale, someone whose idea of outdoor activity was opening the sunroof on his Hyundai as he drove to work on a sunny weekend morning. But the truth is, he had the journalistic heart of a lion tucked into the body of a tabby cat, and at this time, on this night, I was glad to have him here beside me. Thrilled, actually.
As I said, we were hard against the paper’s drop-dead deadline for what’s known in the business as the Sports Final, known as such because it carries scores from games all over the country, including the late-finishing matches on the West Coast, and is usually the paper’s last edition. It’s distributed to subscribers in the city and the close-in suburbs.
I jumped onto my computer and quickly banged out a first paragraph which read, “Federal investigators have intercepted key information that links Toby Harkins, the fugitive mobster and son of the mayor, with the 1990 heist of more than $300 million in treasures from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the largest unsolved art theft in American history.”
Okay, it’s not poetry, but given the considerable constraints, it makes an unmistakable point.
Second paragraph: “A key investigator, speaking last night on the condition of anonymity, said agents were trying to determine if Toby Harkins was himself involved in the actual heist and if he is currently aware of the whereabouts of the eleven paintings and two artifacts stolen from the museum by two bandits dressed as Boston police officers.”
And so forth, until I had a story that made it look, as these things tend to do, like I knew a lot more than I actually did.
I was typing so fast, concentrating so hard, that I never heard Peter Martin breeze into the room and right up to my desk, until he finally said in a voice just north of an alarmed whisper, “Holy fuck.”
He was reading over my shoulder, breathing quietly through his nose, not wanting to disturb me while I was on this obvious writing roll. He was one of the rare newspaper editors in this world who knew to never get in the way of a reporter on a good story. Others aren’t happy until they’ve left what they might describe as “their imprint.” In most cases, think of a goose shitting all over a dewy lawn.
A few paragraphs later, I took a quick break and pushed my chair back, rubbing my palms hard across my tired eyes. Martin continued reading the screen. He asked, “Tell me about the source again.”
The rules of the road in newspapering require reporters to reveal the identity of their anonymous sources to their editors. Some editors, the best editors, always ask. Others don’t. Martin’s an asker.
I rolled back up to the computer. “Tom Jankle. FBI.”
“Doesn’t get much better than that. He a regular kneeler at the altar of Jack Flynn?”
“No. Truth is, I can’t explain to you why he came to me, but he did. I was just sitting at the game minding my own business, or rather, the Red Sox’s business.”
Martin asked,
“You have any sense of how this is going to affect the Dan Harkins nomination?”
Good question. He was referring to the fact that the senior senator from Massachusetts, Herman Harrison, was at that very moment being treated for a cancer that was known to be taking over a body already worn down by too much booze and too little attention. In the inevitable event of Harrison’s death, the governor would appoint his successor to fill out the next year and two months of his term, until the next federal election. She had already leaked word that Mayor Daniel Harkins was her likely choice, though now, with more revelations about his son, she might reconsider.
“Don’t know,” I replied. “The mayor will keep denying contact, and his enemies will keep jabbing at him with it. Stay tuned.”
“You’ll mention this in print.”
I would.
“Keep writing,” Martin said. “I’ll warn the copydesk that we’re going to have to rip up the front page, and I’ll try to buy you some time.” With that, he literally jogged off to the populated part of the newsroom.
The man was beautiful, Martin was. Most editors these days dedicate themselves to what they commonly describe as “manicured news,” stories that are conceptualized by their dim-witted underlings in morning meetings, assigned to willing reporters, edited over the course of several days, and finally paired with an artistic photograph on the front page. Put them on something resembling a deadline involving unwieldy issues like anonymous FBI agents warning of underworld figures stealing priceless paintings, and they start frenetically paging through the latest issue of the Columbia Journalism Review for answers they’ll never find.
I finished, though you never really finish these stories; you just kind of acknowledge that you’ve run out of time. Martin returned. “Get up. I’ll edit you right here,” he said. And as I stood and paced the aisle, he sat in my seat, asked a couple of cogent questions as he read, made some small fixes in my story, and sent it on its uncertain way.
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