Master Thieves (19 page)

Rossetti, too, was worried about what a long prison sentence might mean for him and, before the trial took place, he got word to Turner asking for a significant favor: Would Turner acknowledge in court that it was his idea to bring an arsenal of weapons, especially the hand grenade? Rossetti faced a longer sentence than the others because he had already been convicted of a bank robbery, and had served a long prison sentence for it. He had a wife and son now, and did not want to serve the rest of his life in jail.

Turner made no such admission during the trial and Rossetti was correct that his past conviction would bring a heavier sentence. In 2002, after the entire crew was convicted of robbery and conspiracy charges, Rossetti was sentenced to more than fifty-three years in federal prison. Turner was sentenced
to thirty-eight years. Both sentences were longer by thirty years because of the hand grenade they'd brought.

But Turner was not done with the courts. He spent the next five years appealing to either have his conviction overturned or be granted a new trial. His principal argument was still that the government had entrapped him into joining the robbery scheme to force him to provide information on the missing Gardner paintings.

The appeals court upheld his conviction and denied his request for a new trial in August 2007. In its twenty-seven-page opinion, the court found that his two prior convictions involving weapons possession and robbery, in 1989 and 1990, and his deep ties to Merlino cast a shadow on his claim he was a total innocent to the robbery scheme.

Evidence at his trial showed that Turner had been sufficiently involved in planning the robbery, including casing the headquarters to make sure the insider was cooperating, to nullify the argument that he had been coerced into the scheme.

“Turner engaged in additional surveillance of the target, ran an additional dry run with the ‘insider,' stated that the group should shoot it out with police if stopped, expressed concern that his Tahoe was bugged, commiserated with Rosetti [sic] about the intense impatience one feels while waiting to begin a planned robbery, and expressed concern that he and Merlino should not be seen together because people know that when they are together something illegal is going to happen,” wrote Appeals Court Justice Jeffrey R. Howard.

It must have been a rude awakening for Turner. But he wasn't done. The US Supreme Court hadn't heard his argument and he filed another appeal there, again stressing that the FBI had set him up to squeeze him to assist in recovering the Gardner paintings.

But within six months of the appeals court decision, Turner received word that the US Supreme Court had refused
to consider his case. They denied his appeal without giving any opinion as to why.

The past had finally come back to haunt the man the
Boston Globe
had once tagged “the Teflon gangster of the South Shore” of Boston.

For someone who had been arguing for nearly a decade that he had been wrongfully set up by the FBI, the Supreme Court's opinion must have been devastating to Turner. Perhaps it was sufficient to make him reconsider his lifelong stance of never cooperating with law enforcement investigators. What is certain is that two years later, in March 2010, he wrote to Robert Gentile, a man he had met casually only once or twice before, and asked him to help recover the Gardner paintings—a remarkable turn for someone who claimed to have no knowledge of the Gardner heist and no inclination to work with the FBI for any reason.

Turner's Boston lawyer, Robert M. Goldstein, says Turner did indeed write the letter, but said it was only at the FBI's insistence.

“Yes, he suggested that Mr. Gentile cooperate with the investigation, but it was only because he [Turner] did not want to put himself in a position of being charged with obstruction of justice,” Goldstein said.

Goldstein refused to say whether Turner was writing a book about his possible involvement in the Gardner theft, as has long been rumored, or whether he had sought from federal authorities an immunity agreement or even release from prison for his assistance in recovering the paintings. Regardless, such assistance would hardly be enough for Turner, who is not scheduled to be released from prison until he is nearly sixty years old, after his boyish good looks have faded.

To gain his release Turner would have to do more than tell the authorities how he robbed the Gardner. He would have to get the masterpieces back on the museum's walls.

Part IV

A New Theory

Chapter Nine

Rethinking the FBI Case

F
or all its existing notoriety,
the Gardner Museum heist is close to attaining still another superlative: the longest unsolved art theft on the FBI's Most Wanted List.

Of the FBI's list of “top ten art crimes,” only the 1969 theft of a Caravaggio from an Italian chapel is older than the Gardner heist. And the loss of the Caravaggio in that case, estimated at $20 million, pales next to the $300 million–$500 million value placed on what was stolen from the Gardner Museum that cold March day in 1990. If the Caravaggio ever comes back, the Gardner heist will be number one in every sense.

Although hopes for a recovery ran high in 2013, after the announcement by the head of the FBI's Boston office that agents knew who had pulled off the theft, the statement, which was in fact made to try to gain the public's help, has led to no breakthrough. Instead, the likelihood of returning the paintings to their still-empty places within the museum seems as
remote today as it did in 2010, when the lead FBI agent on the case told me that “in the last twenty years, and the last eight that I've had the case, there hasn't been a concrete sighting, or real proof of life.”

Of course, it hasn't been for lack of trying. The FBI has committed tremendous manpower and forensic resources to the case. Even more, it has tried to be creative in coming up with outside-the-box approaches to appeal to those who may know the whereabouts of the artwork, while making clear repeatedly that the statute of limitations on the actual theft ran out in 1995, so the two thieves and anyone who might have participated in the heist cannot be prosecuted.

To those who possess the stolen artwork, federal prosecutors have been equally reassuring: If the pieces are brought back, they have said over and over again, those holding them will not be prosecuted for the outstanding crime of possession of stolen property. And if the pieces are in similar condition to when they were stolen, the holders would be eligible to claim the museum trustees' $5 million reward.

“Short of giving them a ride to the museum, I'm not sure what else we could offer them,” former US attorney Donald Stern, who oversaw the investigation for eight years, told me. “This is a no-brainer. It baffles me why they weren't returned long ago.”

As for the investigators who have worked the case over the years, two scenarios have been offered as to why the underworld thugs suspected of involvement in the theft and subsequently hiding the art have remained mum, with one being far worse than the other.

In the first, the artwork was hidden—buried even—and the few people who knew where it was stashed have since died. That possibility is considered credible among the street investigators, who realize that knowledge of a theft is tightly held information within the Boston underworld.

Among the Rossetti gang, whose fifteen or so members are believed to have engaged in dozens of robberies, large and small, in the two decades between the early 1970s and mid-1990s, only those who engaged in the actual heist—and its boss, Ralph Rossetti, or his nephew Stephen—might know who did it.

“We were all responsible for coming up with our individual scores,” Louis Royce, the Gardner aficionado and member of the Rossetti gang, told me. “Everything had to be cleared by Ralph, or Stevie if Ralph wasn't around. But I didn't want the others knowing what I was up to. It only increased the chances of someone squealing on me if they got caught in something they were doing.”

And considering their dangerous line of work, the thieves could have met an untimely death, leaving the artwork in its mysterious hiding place, with perhaps no one left alive with knowledge of the whereabouts.

There's also the distinct possibility that the thieves, in a panic when they learned that their heist had triggered a massive FBI investigation, with forty-five agents assigned to the case at its height, decided that the best thing to do was to get rid of the evidence, destroying the artwork in their desperation.

Two men who traded often in stolen goods have taken very different positions on that possibility.

“It all depends on the circumstances they were in,” said William Youngworth. “You're not dealing with stable people who are making decisions in a rational way.”

According to Youngworth, the bigger the score, the bigger the scare. And of course, the Gardner was the biggest score of them all.

But Louis Royce, considered by the FBI to be one of Boston's most able thieves, said he and his criminal cohorts never destroyed anything they had stolen, or even threw it away, unless it was a weapon that could tie them to a murder.

“We don't throw anything out, not even the cork of a wine bottle,” said Royce, who says he was responsible for dozens of break-ins of homes, jewelry stores, and banks during his criminal career, and who ran a secondhand shop that specialized in stolen goods. “You never know what's going to be valuable tomorrow.”

As for the FBI, it places little if any credence in the theory that the artwork was destroyed. Its belief is that the pieces were hidden and, regardless of why, those who are holding them refuse to turn them in.

_______________________

The Boston Marathon bombing
and manhunt, coming so closely on the heels of the FBI's press conference in March 2013, with the promising leads it offered and its appeals to the public for help, effectively stalled the Gardner investigation. Shortly after the bombing, Richard DesLauriers left the FBI and took a job in private industry, leaving sole responsibility for the Gardner case to special agent Geoff Kelly and Gardner security chief Anthony Amore.

DesLauriers stopped responding to inquiries I made about his statements, but Kelly, in a one-on-one interview, added a few specifics to DesLauriers' account: The plot had been hatched in the Dorchester auto body shop where Carmello Merlino, David Turner, and Robert Guarente congregated. And after the theft, Guarente had passed the artwork on to Robert Gentile, the Manchester, Connecticut, hood whose house and surrounding yard investigators had vigorously searched in May 2012.

These names were familiar to me, from the work I and others had done at the
Boston Globe,
but further reporting I had done on their roles gave me pause as to how convincing
their involvement in the case might be. Consider some of the evidence we've already seen:

David Turner knew how vulnerable the museum was to a theft through his association with the Rossetti crime gang of East Boston and their man Louis Royce. But the belief that Turner was one of the two thieves seems wishful thinking in light of the credit card receipts I found, showing him in Florida in the days before and after the theft. Perhaps he arranged the theft but did not participate—but then who were his operatives? And how and why would he have coordinated with them while away when the theft could just as well have happened some other day, when he was in town? In any case, Turner's resemblance to the police sketches created at the time of the theft was one of the most compelling pieces of evidence against him. If he was in Florida when the heist happened, this point is irrelevant. Also, Turner was unable to put his hands on the stolen artwork in 1992 when he sought to negotiate with the authorities to gain the release of his crime boss, Carmello Merlino, and closest friend, Charles Pappas, who had been jailed for cocaine trafficking.

Then, nearly a decade later, when authorities pressed Turner to come up with the stolen artwork after he was arrested along with Stevie Rossetti for participating in the scheme to hold up an armored car headquarters, he swore he knew nothing about the whereabouts of the paintings.

Turner is now serving a thirty-year prison sentence. Despite speculation that he might be writing a book about his involvement, he has been behind bars for over fifteen years without any such documents surfacing.

Bobby Guarente is the swingman in the FBI's account. Elene Guarente, his widow, testified to a federal grand jury in 2010, according to one source, that she saw her husband pass several paintings to his cohort Robert Gentile sometime before Guarente died in 2004. Yet in the several telephone interviews
I have had with her she has insisted that she saw her husband pass only one painting to Gentile, and that one did not appear to be any of those stolen from the Gardner Museum. She said she did not recall telling the grand jury that her husband had given more than one painting to Gentile.

With her approval, federal authorities conducted a thorough search of the farmhouse in Madison where her husband lived while in Maine. They found nothing.

And then there's the time she and an old friend of Guarente's approached a lawyer in Boston in 2005 with paint chips that Guarente's daughter, Jeanine, provided, saying they came from the missing Gardner masterpiece
Storm on the Sea of Galilee
. The tests were negative. As a result, the Guarente connection rests on the accounts that were secondhand or could not be corroborated with physical evidence.

As for Robert Gentile, he had every reason to assist the FBI when they approached him in 2010. Although he denied any knowledge of the location of the stolen artwork, his mobster ears perked up when he heard about the $5 million reward. In fact, he went so far as to sign a contract with his lawyer's firm to share a healthy chunk of the reward money if something did develop.

Gentile's life had been spent in search of a big payday, and if the FBI believed his old friend Bobby Guarente had some inside knowledge of the theft and disposal of the artwork, then he was willing to play along with them. But when agents pushed for him to assist David Turner, who attempted to connect with Gentile from federal prison, he hesitated out of concern that it might place him in danger.

Gentile's problems really began, though, when he broke off those discussions completely after agents suggested he introduce an undercover G-man to Turner's underworld cohorts in the hope that the agent might locate a clear path to the artwork. Frustrated, the FBI dispatched an undercover informant to the used car lot where Gentile was working to buy prescription
drugs from him. After spurning the overtures at first, Gentile relented. He was soon indicted on—and pleaded guilty to—related charges.

At sentencing a federal prosecutor suggested openly that Gentile had information on the stolen Gardner paintings that he was not sharing with investigators and asked for a stiff sentence of nearly five years in prison in an effort to entice him into talking. But US district judge Robert N. Chatigny rejected the recommendation, ordering Gentile to serve just another year beyond his time already served.

Gentile stayed mum and since being released from federal prison in early 2014 hasn't assisted the authorities or the museum in its quest to regain its stolen paintings. He's bitter over his treatment by the federal investigators after he declined to cooperate with them.

“They ruined my life,” Gentile told me, contending that federal efforts to nab him as a drug dealer would never have happened if he had continued to cooperate on the Gardner case. “All because Elene Guarente told them something that they knew wasn't true.”

Even two retired FBI agents involved in the investigation dismissed major segments of the sketchy account DesLauriers and Kelly have made public about the Gardner case. Robert Wittman, who worked undercover investigating art thefts for most of his twenty years as an FBI agent, cast doubt on the certainty of the information that the Gardner paintings had been offered for sale to Philadelphia mobsters in 2002.

Wittman said the FBI art theft task force that he worked for during those years was assigned to the FBI's Philadelphia office and his own desk was located “within feet” of the agency's organized crime unit.

“I find it inconceivable that that unit would have picked up word of such a conversation and they're not telling us in our unit about it,” Wittman told me.

In light of all this, I had a host of questions I wanted to ask DesLauriers. Unfortunately, he demurred, saying that having retired from the Bureau, he did not want to say anything without FBI approval that might imperil the ongoing investigation.

The FBI, for its part, declined all my requests for interviews.

But another agent, who had worked on the investigation into the criminal activities that Merlino operated out of his Dorchester garage, found it difficult to imagine that members of the same crew had any real connection to the Gardner case. The now-retired agent, who asked not to be identified, said that while the informant picked up much talk by Merlino and others about the possible whereabouts of the Gardner paintings, “it was all bluster.”

“If these men at any time knew where those paintings were, they would have turned them over in a heartbeat because of the $5 million reward,” the agent said.

As for DesLauriers' claims at the 2013 press conference?

“I imagine that it was a convenient story to tell to get more people to pay attention,” the retired agent said.

This made perfect sense as I struggled to understand why the FBI had provided such scant—and, as it turned out, debatable—details of its investigation. Regardless of what Des­Lauriers and Kelly had said about what the FBI investigation had uncovered, in the end it didn't matter how strong their case was regarding the involvement of Merlino, Turner, Guarente, or Gentile. Merlino and Guarente were dead, and Turner and Gentile had both gone to jail after rejecting offers from the FBI to make deals for what they knew about the paintings.

The ultimate goal of the investigation now was not to prosecute anyone for the theft or for hiding the artwork. Accurate information—hard evidence—was needed for arrests and criminal court cases, but with the statute of limitations having run out, no such prosecutions are part of the plan.

The purpose of the 2013 press conference and DesLauriers' sensational, if unspecific, assertions were to draw maximum public attention to the special website the FBI had established to show what the thirteen stolen pieces looked like. Most people might know immediately what Rembrandt's
Storm on the Sea of Galilee
or Vermeer's
The Concert
looked like if they happened upon them in the attic or the trunk of a long-lost relative. But what about the eleven less-recognizable pieces, such as Manet's portrait or the five Degas sketches?