Master Thieves (15 page)

Luisi was later released when his conviction was overturned on appeal, but whether he had spoken about the Gardner paintings with Gentile and mob leaders in Philadelphia could not be determined, as he did not return phone calls. As of this writing, he is said to be working on a book about his religious experiences.

And while Gentile is adamant that he never had possession of any of the Gardner paintings, it is easy to understand what leads investigators to believe he is lying. The FBI had
found the list of the stolen paintings, handwritten on a sheet of typewriter paper inside the
Boston Herald
for March 19, 1990, reporting on the Gardner heist. In all, the amounts listed that the paintings could fetch on the black market added up to almost $8 million.

It was such a compelling piece of evidence tying Gentile to possible possession of the artwork that it was cited by assistant US attorney John Durham at one of Gentile's federal court hearings in Hartford. I wanted to know why Gentile would draw up such a list if he wasn't planning on selling the paintings on the black market.

Sitting in his living room, in his modest suburban Hartford home, Gentile told me a story too convoluted and complicated to be false, and the account was corroborated by an associate, who had been involved in the theft of a Rembrandt from a Worcester art museum in the 1970s, who went on to tell me the list had been drawn up by him, not Gentile.

Chapter Seven

At the Center of the FBI's Web

D
uring the mob's heyday
in Boston, between 1970 and 1985, just about every criminal in the city believed that the return of a valuable stolen artwork could shorten a prison sentence or even make it go away. Even though the authorities delivered far less, that's what mobsters believed. And one of those hoods, Florian “Al” Monday, knew his way around stolen masterpieces better than most. In 1972, he engineered the heist of a Rembrandt and three other pieces from the Worcester Art Museum, but after a guard was shot during what was a seemingly foolproof plan, and a panic ensued among his co-conspirators, Monday was convinced to turn the artwork in.

For those in a legal bind, especially those who face prosecution for white-collar crimes, the return of a piece of stolen art offers the hope that prosecutors will be willing to give them a break at trial or in sentencing, or even consideration if they're already behind bars. The Gardner case was no different.

After the Gardner Museum theft, Monday, with his host of underworld contacts, reached out to anyone who would listen with a simple proposition: If enough money could be raised, he knew people who knew people who could facilitate the return of the paintings. He was so convincing, in fact, that then–US senator John F. Kerry wrote a letter urging others to assist him, and the US attorney for Massachusetts wrote to Monday assuring him of immunity from prosecution if his dealings put him in contact with any criminals.

This Hollywood-style deal-making is the sort that has lain just beneath the surface of the Gardner case from almost the beginning, and it's also what makes the investigators' work so frustrating. Too many of these insiders are lying, and every thief promises more than he can deliver, whether it's money or concrete evidence of the existence or even whereabouts of the Gardner paintings.

It's also just the sort of situation to attract people like Monday and Paul Papasadero, a sign painter and amateur artist from the working-class town of Milford, not far outside of Boston. In 2001, they approached Robert Gentile with a proposition: Two lawyers from western Massachusetts were being investigated for fraud and they had intimated that they were willing to pay dearly to broker the return of the Gardner paintings, believing it would win them special consideration from the prosecutors in their case.

“Whatever it takes, Paulie says these guys are willing to pay it,” Monday said.

This wasn't the first time Monday had tried to broker the return of the Gardner art. Several years before, in 1997, he'd heard through the grapevine that Bobby Guarente, the convicted bank robber and Boston underworld figure, had a connection to the stolen pieces. He tried to reach Guarente but nothing ever came of his attempts. Now he was willing to try again.

Papasadero knew Gentile could reach Guarente, so he—or Monday, depending on whom you believe—approached Gentile and asked for Bobby Guarente's phone number.

“If Guarente can come up with a photograph of one or more of the stolen paintings, I'll pay him $50,000, no questions asked,” Papasadero told Gentile.

“These are valuable paintings,” Monday, a withered, white-haired man who looks more like a shuffleboard champ than an art thief, said he told Gentile when they met. He explained some of the history of the pieces—to deaf ears, he thought—and he wrote out on a blank piece of paper what people might be willing to pay on the black market for the individual items. At the top he wrote the names of the most valuable two: Vermeer's
The Concert,
$4 million, and Rembrandt's
Storm on the Sea of Galilee
, $2 million.

Gentile was excited. This was easy, he thought. He called Guarente and told him about Monday's offer.

“Sounds good,” Guarente told him. “I'll contact this guy when I've got the photographs.”

Thinking Guarente would be directly contacting Monday and Papasadero, Gentile was surprised to get a letter from Guarente just a little while later with photographs inside. He called Papasadero, who raced over to Gentile's house that night. Instead of $50,000, however, he brought only $10,000. Regardless, he hardly got his money's worth.

When Papasadero opened the envelope, he found that Guarente hadn't taken photographs of the original paintings. Instead, he had gone to a library and found an encyclopedia reference to the Gardner theft and took photographs of the images showing the stolen paintings.

“I don't know why Bobby [Guarente] wanted to get me involved in something like that, but the guy, Papasadero, just threw the photographs back at me and walked out,” Gentile said. “I
can't blame the guy. He didn't get anything like what he was looking for.”

The list Monday drew up showing what each of the thirteen pieces of Gardner artwork might bring on the black market would come back to haunt Gentile. It was that list, which he kept folded into a
Boston Herald
newspaper from the day after the theft, that was found during the raid of Gentile's home in May 2012 among the junk in his basement. Without any mention of its origins, leaving reporters at least to believe it had been drawn up by Gentile, the federal prosecutor used the list to seek a long prison sentence against Gentile and raise suspicions of his connection to the Gardner heist.

_______________________

For at least three years
before the FBI's March 2013 announcement, Richard DesLauriers, the agent in charge of the investigation into the Gardner heist, had been looking into the ties between Gentile, Bobby Guarente, and David Turner, a middle-class Boston kid who'd found his calling in life as a mob soldier, as the key to solving the case.

As outlined by federal investigators and sources, the triumvirate was responsible for organizing the theft and then stashing the artwork all these years. This had all come together for the FBI after Guarente's sixty-three-year-old former wife, desperate for money, saw one of the billboards the FBI had put up on the roads leading north out of Boston asking for tips on the Gardner robbery. “Help us recover the stolen pieces and we'll pay you $5 million,” the billboards announced, tantalizingly.

Forget those millions,
Elene Guarente thought when she saw them. She just needed $1,000 to fix the radiator in her car. One way or another, she figured the best way of getting
her hands on the money she needed was to talk about what her late ex-husband had once shown her.

In the early 1990s, as they settled into their new homestead in Madison, Maine, Bobby Guarente had shown Elene a painting of a woman sitting in a rocking chair with her head turned to the side. Although she later said she told investigators and a grand jury that they didn't look like either of the two paintings stolen from the Gardner Museum in which women were seated in chairs, Rembrandt's
Lady and Gentleman in Black
and Vermeer's
The Concert
, she remembered how proud Guarente was of the painting.

“Isn't it the most beautiful thing you've ever seen?” he'd asked her, taking it out of a heavy-duty rolling tube. “Do you have any idea of how much it's worth?”

“I wouldn't give you ten dollars for it,” she'd fired back. “It's all so gloomy. I don't want it hanging up here in our house.”

Guarente used the Maine home as his weekend residence and during the week stayed with a friend outside of Boston. He was a frequent visitor to an auto repair garage that his longtime friend Carmello Merlino operated in Dorchester, and out of which Merlino ran a number of criminal enterprises, including dealing cocaine.

In late 1997, Merlino began talking at his garage about the possibility of being able to recover the Gardner paintings and, according to an undercover informant, made it known that Bobby Guarente was among several individuals who could make the recovery happen. Guarente and Merlino had served time together in Massachusetts prisons with legendary art thief Myles Connor while he was completing a twenty-year sentence after he'd pleaded guilty to involvement in multiple Boston-area bank robberies in 1969.

But Guarente's move to Maine did not cut him off from his criminal associates. According to Maine state police reports
from the early 1990s, Guarente was being investigated for drug trafficking in Massachusetts and Maine, and criminal associates from Boston, such as David Turner and Stephen Rossetti, were frequent visitors to his Maine home for weekend hunting excursions.

An FBI report attested to Guarente's involvement with organized crime figures. During the battle for control of Boston's underworld in the 1980s and '90s, he was aligned with Frank “Cadillac Frank” Salemme. Guarente was designated by his bosses to make it clear to Richard “The Pig” DeVincent, whom he knew from prison in the early 1980s, that he needed to stop associating with a rival gang seeking the same power. DeVincent did not heed Guarente's advice and was shot to death in 1996, an execution witnessed by Guarente and a member of the Rossetti crime gang, according to the FBI. Guarente was quoted by an informant as saying that another witness's gun had jammed in shooting DeVincent and that “it was a good thing my gun was working properly.”

By this time, Guarente had gotten involved in a major drug trafficking network, bringing cocaine up from Philadelphia and distributing it out of a house he was renting in Waltham, making it possible that through this network word was received in Philadelphia that paintings stolen from the Gardner Museum were for sale in the early 2000s.

The FBI refuses to say how they put this together—whether it came from an informant or was picked up on a wire. But there is no doubt that Guarente was associated with the network, selling for established buyers and looking for new ones, using cocaine supplied via Philadelphia.

A thirty-one-page affidavit described Guarente's involvement: An individual who owed Guarente $70,000 from previous cocaine purchases agreed to go undercover for the Boston office of the Drug Enforcement Administration in an investigation of Guarente.

On numerous occasions, over a six-month period beginning in August 1997, the informant paid thousands of dollars to Guarente for cocaine deliveries. Some of the deals took place in Maine, though most were completed in and around Waltham, Massachusetts.

Guarente told the informant that his partner in the operation was Robert C. Luisi Jr., a made member of the Philadelphia mob, and that he spent some of his time collecting on debts owed to Luisi. Although he was not named in the affidavit, which framed the indictment against Guarente, Robert Gentile, the man the FBI believes last had possession of the stolen Gardner paintings, later acknowledged in interviews with me that he worked for Guarente and Luisi at their Waltham hideout and even drove Luisi to some of his meetings in Philadelphia.

But Gentile denies knowing that cocaine was being trafficked out of the residence. He says his purpose there was solely to run high-stakes card games that Guarente allowed at the house, as well as to cook for the players and associates.

“No one knew how to run a card game, so that's what I did for them,” Gentile told me.

If Guarente had access to the stolen Gardner paintings, he certainly had a pressing reason to tell federal authorities about it. Immediately after his arrest for cocaine trafficking in March 1998, Guarente told DEA investigators that he was willing to cooperate with their investigation. On being questioned about Luisi's role, according to the affidavit, “Guarente admitted he was aware that Luisi was involved in the large-scale distribution of cocaine.”

Days later, though, Guarente notified the DEA he was no longer interested in cooperating. He was sentenced to five years in prison, and released on probation in August 2002. He returned to Maine and his wife, Elene. At some point in the next year or so, according to Elene's account, Guarente
decided to put together a lunch in nearby Portland with his old friend Bobby Gentile and Gentile's wife. It was after that lunch, Elene says, that Guarente handed over the paintings to Gentile.

Elene's story implicating her late ex-husband and Robert Gentile is the most detailed account of what happened to the Gardner paintings. She testified before a federal grand jury in Boston in 2010, giving details consistent with what she originally told Geoff Kelly, the FBI's lead agent on the case, and Anthony Amore, the museum's security chief, at her home in Maine.

But what was apparently never told to the grand jury—or Kelly and Amore—was an account given me by Guarente's best friend in Maine, Earle E. Berghman. Several years before Elene told authorities that her late husband had held onto the Gardner paintings, Berghman tried—without success—to make the same connection.

According to Berghman, about a year after Bobby Guarente's death in 2004, he was approached by Guarente's daughter and told that she recalled her father owning a painting that was similar to Rembrandt's
Storm on the Sea of Galilee
. “In fact, she told me that Bobby had it hanging in the living room of the house he lived in with her,” Berghman said. “I'm telling you and you can mark my words, Bobby Guarente is at the center of this web.”

Berghman, as it turns out, knew Guarente well. While he says they got to know each other hanging out and hunting in the woods surrounding their homes in central Maine, the state police had their eyes on them and other associates. According to Maine state police reports, the pair were under investigation for interstate drug trafficking in 1991. Among the associates was James Marks, a low-level hood, who was shot to death outside his apartment in Lynn, Massachusetts, in February 1991. Marks must have picked up some information about the Gardner case before he was killed, as he told his girlfriend at
the time that he had hidden some valuable stolen items in the space above their ceiling. Nearly twenty years later, in 2010, that information was relayed to the FBI, which searched the crawl space—without success.