Master Thieves (10 page)

But such an outcry for public assistance has been largely absent from the pursuit of the Gardner paintings. Hawley has mourned alone what the loss of the artwork has meant to Boston and the public at large.

“The theft of these rare and important treasures of art is a tragic loss to the art world and to society as a whole,” Hawley said in a 2008 statement. “Imagine never being able to hear a performance of Beethoven's Fifth, read Herman Melville's
Moby Dick,
or listen to a Louis Armstrong jazz piece ever again. . . . The loss of these remarkable masterpieces removes a part of our culture essential to our society.”

_______________________

Whether out of desperation
or frustration or both, not all of Hawley's ideas for recovering the Gardner masterpieces have been well thought through.

In 2005, Hawley directed the museum to hire a British private investigator who had earned enormous success in tracking art theft. She was so impressed with the work that Jurek Rokoszynski, a former officer with London's metropolitan police force, had done in recovering two multimillion-dollar
paintings by nineteenth-century British landscape artist J. M. W. Turner stolen from an exhibit by the Tate Gallery of London that she convinced the museum to pay him almost $150,000 to help recover the Gardner pieces.

Hawley hoped that Rokoszynski would somehow be able to infiltrate Boston's underworld and find a connection who might lead him to the Gardner paintings. The problem was that while Rokoszynski (or “Rocky,” as everyone called him) was built like a man of steel and had the bravado to match, he had little of the needed wiles to convince anyone that he was a criminal. His heavy British accent, moreover, likely raised questions among Boston's Irish toughs.

So instead Rocky spent his time reading about the case, either in newspaper files or court records. Then he was introduced to John “Joey” Nichols, a youthful house thief who was about to be released from county jail and had written to the museum saying he knew what had happened to the stolen paintings.

“My parents knew someone, a former owner of a gallery in Boston who lives in Florida now,” Nichols told Rokoszynski. “He collects all sorts of art and he wound up with the paintings.”

Although skeptical at the outset, Rocky grew more intrigued when Nichols told him that his father knew Frank “Cadillac Frank” Salemme, a major organized crime figure in Boston, and had hung out with Carmello Merlino, whose Dorchester auto body garage was being investigated for possible ties to the museum heist. As a clincher, Nichols passed on to Rocky the name of the Boston gallery owner his father believed had possession of the paintings, Charles G. Martignette.

Martignette was known in the art world, but not for the Great Masters whose works were featured on the Gardner's walls. Instead, he specialized in pin-up art, the risqué
illustrations featured in numerous magazines catering to men in the decades before
Playboy
and
Penthouse
came into existence. An acknowledged authority in the field of American illustration art and internationally recognized as an author, dealer, appraiser, and collector of original artwork by America's great twentieth-century illustrators and artists, Martignette counted in his collection more than 10,000 works, the largest in the world. He co-wrote
The Great American Pin-up,
which, with 900 illustrations, was considered the bible of the genre.

Nichols was convinced that Martignette had gotten ahold of the stolen Gardner paintings through connections in the underworld and that he had been able to transport them to Belize, where he was planning to open an art gallery.

After months delaying Rocky from meeting with Martignette, Nichols settled on a plan: the two would fly on Rocky's tab to southern Florida to approach Martignette at his condominium in Hallandale. Nichols told Rocky that he had called Martignette beforehand and told him they were coming. He also told Martignette that Rocky had something to do with artwork, but not that he was from the Gardner Museum and on the hunt for the stolen paintings.

Once the pair arrived at a hotel a few miles from Martignette's home, Nichols delayed the meeting several more days. Rocky, impatient at best, began to fume at Nichols, who all the while drove up the hotel bill the museum was paying for with full dinners in the dining room and late-night drinking bouts at the bar. Finally, three days after arriving at the hotel, Rocky said he'd had enough.

“If you don't take me to see Martignette tomorrow, I'm going on my own,” Rocky told him.

“That won't get you anywhere,” Nichols told him bluntly. “The only way you'll get him to cooperate is if you let me talk to him first.”

The next morning the two men drove to Martignette's gated complex, arguing all the way over how the approach would take place.

“We'll go in together,” Rocky told Nichols. “You'll introduce me as from the Gardner Museum, and I'll take it from there. This has gone on long enough.”

“No,” Nichols insisted. “Let me go in first. I'll tell him you're in the car and want to come in and talk to him.”

Martignette seemed surprised to see Nichols when he knocked on the door. Nichols explained that he was working with the Gardner Museum on recovering their stolen masterpieces. It was just registering what was going on when Rocky came bursting through the door, shouting at Martignette.

“Okay, I know you know where our paintings are,” Rocky yelled. “Start talking now!”

Rocky was enormous. Martignette knew immediately he wasn't going to listen to anything he said, so he retreated and called the police.

Hallandale police captain Kenneth Cowley was one of the first officers to arrive on the scene. He found Martignette and Rocky shouting at each other at the top of their lungs. “I'm not too sure either knew what the other was saying,” Cowley remembered later. “The big guy had a pretty good British accent, but I did hear him shouting about getting his museum's paintings back. But it was Mr. Martignette's apartment, so I ordered the big fellow to leave, and we would straighten it out at the police station.”

A few days later, Cowley thought he had it sorted out after interviewing Martignette, Nichols, and Rocky.

“Nichols was telling the museum's investigator something that he had no evidence of: that Martignette had something to do with these stolen paintings and that they had gotten somehow to Belize.”

But Cowley said that Rocky refused to give up on his suspicions about Martignette, and intimated that he was going to try to interview Martignette again on his own.

“That was it for me,” Cowley said. “I told him that he was no longer welcome in Hallandale, and if he didn't leave immediately, I would be calling his employer.”

According to public documents, Rocky was paid about $150,000 by the museum for the eighteen months in 2005 and 2006 he spent trying to track the stolen artwork. Following his return to England, he assisted in making a documentary about better times: his work recovering the Turner masterpieces for the Tate Gallery.

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Years of frustrating recovery efforts
like the disappointments involving Nichols and Youngworth wore heavy on Hawley, and she gave up her lead role on behalf of the Gardner in pursuing the stolen paintings. In 2005, she hired Anthony Amore, a former US Transportation Security Administration agent, to maintain security at the museum while working closely with the FBI on its investigation.

Smart and indefatigable, Amore was able to develop a productive working relationship with the FBI and the US attorney's office, allowing him to work alongside agents and investigators on the tips that came in, while steeping himself in the leads that had not worked out in the years before he began working the case.

He also built a private database, including the details of hundreds of art thefts dating back to the early 1900s, in hopes it would provide clues to better understanding what happened in the Gardner theft. He combed old files, libraries, and books about thefts for such clues as what time of day the
theft took place, whether the thieves used force or trickery to gain entry, whether a weapon was used, whether the thieves had an inside connection, how many pieces were stolen, how long it took for the thieves to surface, and when they did, whether they revealed themselves to the museum itself or to an intermediary.

After years of legwork, Amore came to agree with Richard DesLauriers, chief of the FBI's Boston office, that the stolen artwork had found its way into the possession of Robert Guarente, a Boston hood who resided in Maine, and that after Guarente developed cancer in 2001, he turned over at least three of the pieces to his friend Robert Gentile of Manchester, Connecticut.

In 2010, Amore and FBI agent Geoff Kelly were the first investigators to interview Guarente's widow, who told them her husband had passed the stolen artwork to Gentile in the parking lot of a Portland, Maine, restaurant. Amore advanced Mrs. Guarente $1,000 from the museum to have her car fixed, the reason she'd decided to contact them about what she knew. Amore was also with Gentile in his prison cell following a search of his home, pleading with him to share what had happened to the paintings that investigators were sure Gentile had stashed away.

Gentile stonewalled: He maintained he knew nothing of the heist.

Amore appears to take such frustrating twists in stride, and he says he remains hopeful that a recovery will take place before too long. Even when a lead doesn't develop, Amore sees the bright side: “It's one less haystack we have to search to find the needle.”

With Kelly in the lead, Amore has participated in FBI searches of residences in Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts in search of the missing artwork. To this day, Amore says he speaks to Kelly daily about leads each is working
on, and they often conduct interviews related to those leads together.

Amore appeared with Kelly at a March 2013 press conference in which DesLauriers, then still head of the FBI's Boston office, made the dramatic announcement that they believed they knew not only who had carried out the theft but that there had been attempts to fence the artwork in Philadelphia a decade before.

Although his remarks were not as dramatic as DesLauriers', Amore said in a radio interview not long after the press conference that they indeed had made progress in solving the case. But within a month, Amore was failing to return phone calls from reporters seeking information about whether the bombshell announcement had produced new leads.

However, the lack of any significant developments hasn't stopped Amore from making public appearances to talk about the Gardner case and, even more so, to sell the book he co-wrote in 2011. Titled
Stealing Rembrandts: The Untold Stories of Notorious Art Heists,
it discusses several thefts of Rembrandts from individual museums and galleries over the years, but gives scant mention of the theft that Amore—and the world—is most intrigued by: the 1990 Gardner heist.

The brief mention the book gives to the Gardner case focuses on the alleged viewing of Rembrandt's seascape by Amore's co-author, Tom Mashberg, and blames the failure of leading to a recovery to the animosity between Mashberg's source, Youngworth, and federal investigators—not to the substance of Youngworth's information.

_______________________

Although it took place in Boston
and Governor Michael S. Dukakis was a close friend of the museum's director, neither
the Massachusetts state police nor the Boston police department was involved in the investigation after the preliminary review of the crime scene. Instead, the investigation has been controlled by the FBI and involved only a handful of special agents and their supervisors. But believing that the thieves would be taking the stolen artwork across state lines, the FBI asserted its jurisdiction over the case.

In the early going, the manpower was much greater. Within days of the heist, more than forty agents were assigned to the case, following up dozens of leads. One of the first that caused a scramble inside the museum was a bomb threat, apparently called in by a gang looking to get the FBI's attention. “We also are being threatened from the outside by criminals who want attention from the FBI, and so they were threatening us, and threatening putting bombs in the museum,” Anne Hawley said recently. “We were evacuating the museum, the staff members were under threat, no one really knew what kind of a conundrum we were in.”

Investigators needed to follow up on every lead, regardless how farfetched it appeared. One of the first leads the agents appeared to take seriously involved museum employees. The agents asked for the names of all older Italian women who worked stitching the tapestry and pieces of cloth at the museum, after a tip that a Boston gang member was related to one of them. The list was prepared but no connection was ever determined.

Two Boston cops assigned to the US attorney's office on organized crime investigations also were convinced they knew who had pulled off the theft. They had received a tip from a reliable contact that John L. Sullivan Jr., a South Boston amateur artist as well as a petty thief, had been seen around the Gardner Museum in the days leading up to the theft, and confirmed it through parking tickets.

But again, the jurisdiction belonged to the FBI, and entreaties to the agents to follow up on the tip fell on deaf ears, with one agent telling them “we've got dozens of suspects that we've got to chase down.”

Within three months, the number of agents assigned to the case had been drastically reduced. In fact, it went down to just one—Daniel Falzon, a young agent from San Francisco, where his father was a police officer. Boston was his first permanent assignment and the Gardner heist, understandably, was the biggest case he ever spearheaded. Although he could call for assistance from other agents, he did most of the legwork and all the decision-making on the myriad tips the FBI received.