Master Thieves (5 page)

The thieves FBI agent Clark was talking about had a more ambitious robbery in mind. “These are serious people, and you've got to take them seriously,” he intoned ominously.

In speaking to the museum officials, he outlined several plans the FBI had vetted. The most credible, he said, involved targeting the museum during its Tuesday night concerts, held in the museum's largest single space, the Tapestry Room, which filled nearly one side of the museum's second floor.

“They're planning to set off a smoke bomb inside the Tapestry Room and, in the ensuing chaos, grab one or more of the
paintings that hang on the walls of your Blue Room or Yellow Room on the first floor,” Clark said.

The Yellow and Blue Room galleries were the easiest rooms to steal a painting from, since they were so close to the museum's main entrance, according to the handwritten notes of the Gardner officials during their meeting with the FBI. Raphael's
Lamentation Over the Dead Christ,
Royce's favorite painting on the desk on the second floor of the museum, was also in their sights.

“These are serious thieves,” Clark told Grindle, Hadley, and Hewitt. “They have the means and know-how to carry out their plan. You've got to take appropriate measures.”

“There's more,” Clark said, the Gardner officials by now on the edges of their seats. “They might dress up as police officers and demand late-night entry into the museum. Or disguise themselves as women who've run into some trouble outside of the museum and ask for help and to be let in.” And, perhaps most chilling of all, the pair may have a guard inside the museum who has provided them information—wittingly or unwittingly—about the security system.

“What should we be doing?” Grindle asked the agents. He had just come onto the job as the Gardner's security director and he knew, both in equipment and manpower, that the museum had a long way to go toward protecting its masterpieces.

“Well, first off, you'd better be putting more people on during those concerts,” Clark snapped back. “If I know them, these guys already know the ins and outs of this place better than the mice do.”

Grindle, Hadley, and Hewitt were shocked by what they'd heard. “Not sure whether it is a willing or unwitting (ac)complice,” read one of their notes from the meeting. Still, they had little understanding about how aggressive Royce and his pals in the Rossetti family could be in trying to pull off this score.

Clark didn't share with the Gardner team how the FBI had learned of Royce's intention to break into the museum. But even if they'd been asked, it's unlikely that Clark would have told them anything. Even though Clark had been associating with Royce and the notorious Ralph Rossetti for months, trying to buy valuable pieces of stolen art from them as the undercover FBI agent who eventually busted them that day outside the Italian restaurant in East Boston, it was FBI protocol to provide sufficient information only for potential victims to protect themselves. So Clark wasn't authorized to share the true seriousness of the threat to the museum. Had Clark divulged what he knew, it would likely have only increased the museum's concern about Royce's ingenuity as a master thief, and his associations with the Rossettis.

Maybe it was the wrong decision. Less than ten years later, the security staff at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum would come to wish they'd convinced museum trustees that radical changes were needed in the security system to protect the collection. The FBI had warned them, but the museum didn't make its biggest changes until it was too late.

______________________

For seven years
after being released from the state prison in 2007, Louis Royce stayed true to his pledge to the Massachusetts parole board to stay clear of involvement in any criminal conduct or consorting with his old pals in organized crime. But in June 2014 he was sent back to prison because of a parole violation—a teenager had complained to police that Royce had made unwanted verbal advances toward him at a Quincy playground. Although Royce disputed the youth's account and was not arrested, the report was forwarded to his parole officer, who immediately ordered his return to jail pending a hearing.

Royce rejected my urging that he contest the complaint before a parole board hearing. No, he said, and waived his right for a hearing and decided to stay in prison, believing that he had built up enough “good time”—the time that gets shaved off his original sentence for abiding by the terms of his parole while he was on the street—to be released without conditions in a month or two.

“Just leave it alone,” he wrote to me. “You don't know anything about prison rules.” Although I was convinced he was making the wrong decision, I had gotten to know Royce well enough over the years to know when he wasn't going to budge.

Royce had become more defensive in the wake of an attack he suffered about six months after he originally had been released on parole in 2007. He had been beaten up brutally inside a Quincy halfway house by another recent parolee. Typically, he first refused to press charges against his assailant or the halfway house, saying that doing so would be against his code never to snitch on another. But he relented after doctors had to perform two surgeries on his brain, and gained an $11,000 settlement from the company that owned the halfway house.

As I got to know Royce and we continued to talk about his criminal past, I became convinced that regardless of who had actually pulled off the heist and who was involved in stashing the artwork, the idea had begun with him.

By allowing me to tell his story, Royce calculates that doing so may assist in a recovery of the paintings, and if that happens he deserves a cut of whatever multimillion-dollar reward is given in exchange for their return. He still talks with friends in law enforcement, who tell him the FBI is convinced that the heist grew from his plan and was carried out by individuals within Boston's organized crime underworld. Most of all, Royce is convinced that among the few people who are still alive and know anything about who pulled off the robbery is
Stevie Rossetti, his old cohort whom he had told in the early 1980s of the museum's poor security.

“If it wasn't Stevie who ordered it, he passed the score on to someone who did,” Royce tells me. “The only others who might have known anything are Stevie's uncle Ralph, but he died in prison in 2008, and Richie Devlin. He was killed in a gangland shooting in 1994.”

Royce shrugs off the idea that the younger Rossetti, who is serving a forty-year prison sentence for participating in an armored car robbery, would give information to federal investigators to get a reduced sentence.

“Stevie's no rat,” Royce almost spits at me when I ask. “He's like me. He's loyal and his word is his bond.”

Still, when I press the issue, Royce writes to Stephen Rossetti asking if they can talk, but Rossetti never responds. That Rossetti wouldn't trust him upsets Royce but he receives even more disturbing news from another former member of the Rossetti gang. When Royce had been released from prison several months after the Gardner theft and returned to East Boston to try to find out who was responsible, Mark Rossetti, Stephen's cousin, alerted the FBI that Royce was asking questions about the Gardner heist.

As had happened to him when he was barely a teenager, when he learned that John Royce was not really his father, the revelation that a member of the gang to which he had shown such allegiance and loyalty had informed on him was crushing to Royce.

Royce would get a call from his parole officer, warning him that unless he wanted to be hauled back to prison on a parole violation, he needed to stay out of East Boston and away from all his past criminal contacts, including those with whom he had first discussed robbing the Gardner Museum. By 2007, what had once been a twinkle in Royce's eye had become the most notorious unsolved art theft in American history.

Chapter Two

They Knew Exactly What They Were Doing

I
n February 1989,
thirteen months before two men dressed as police officers drove up to the Gardner Museum, a block away a single guard was struggling to control the throng of people who were visiting a new exhibit on the second floor of Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. No one seemed to notice the two men with a baby stroller standing in front of the million-dollar Yuan vase enclosed in a glass case at the other end of the MFA gallery. And no one said anything as the men used a screwdriver to unhinge the top of the enclosure and remove the vase from its setting. Moving quickly, and without drawing attention, they then tucked the vase snugly into the stroller and walked out of the museum.

William P. McAuliffe knows firsthand the nightmare of what a security breach at a museum can bring—he owed his job as director of security at the MFA to that one in 1989.

McAuliffe took over as the MFA's security director soon after that daring heist, and right from the start he promised to get together with Lyle Grindle, the security chief of the Gardner Museum. Together they were charged with protecting some of Boston's greatest and most irreplaceable riches, and McAuliffe knew he would benefit if they compared notes. And because of the Yuan vase caper, McAuliffe knew all too well the hazards of screwing up.

He had known nothing about museum security before he applied for the job; he had spent his career in the Massachusetts state police. But he was a quick learner, having risen to second in command of the force, and quickly immersed himself in the intricacies of guarding priceless treasures. In short order he came to learn two important lessons: that a museum was most vulnerable at night, and that guards and night watchmen should always secure a supervisor's approval before making any decision.

Whether supervisor approval was required in the past is anyone's guess, but McAuliffe underscored it to the several watchmen who worked the overnight shift at the MFA.

The importance of the lesson was driven home in the predawn hours of January 15, 1990. The winding streets around the Museum of Fine Arts were quiet, empty, and, with the Boston police force having just wrapped up its safety detail for the first official Martin Luther King Jr. holiday commemoration, lightly patrolled. Suddenly two men dressed in Boston police uniforms showed up at the rear entrance of the MFA and rang the buzzer.

“Boston police—open up. We're looking for someone.”

A thirty-four-year-old who had been working the overnight watch shift for several years was alone manning the control room. Security at the MFA that night was heavier than usual since the museum was about to open a new exhibit of
Claude Monet's works, with dozens of his paintings on loan for the exhibit inside.

The night watchman could see clearly through the video security system that the men who had buzzed certainly looked like police officers, but he had his orders.

“I can't let anyone in,” he called back on the intercom. “We've got a new procedure. No one gets in after hours without the approval of my supervisor. I've got to find him and I'll get right back to you.”

“Hey, we're looking for someone,” the officer said impatiently. “Let us in!”

But the night watchman had already gone off to find his supervisor, William L. Miller, who was in a faraway gallery. It took them several minutes to get back to the rear entrance of the museum, and by the time Miller arrived, the police officers had disappeared. Except for filing an “incident report” the following morning with McAuliffe, nothing more was said of the strange episode. That is, until two months later, when Boston woke up to television news bulletins that the Gardner Museum had been robbed of several major works of art, hours after the city's next holiday, St. Patrick's Day.

______________________

In early 1990,
the two security directors kept their promise to each other to evaluate how secure the Gardner Museum was from theft or other catastrophes. Their tour was barely under way when, at the wooden security desk by the museum's employee entrance, McAuliffe pointed out what he saw as a major security flaw.

“Lyle, you don't have a secure control room,” McAuliffe said, clearly alarmed. “Everything is right out here in the open. You need to build a control room in a place that is secret from the public, a place that isn't vulnerable to attack.”

McAuliffe was right. Grindle had a suite of security controls: communication systems to connect the cadre of guards on patrol or on duty in the various galleries inside the four-story mansion; cameras watching activities at several places inside and outside the museum on a closed circuit television system, and taping those activities on a videocassette recorder; a motion detector that silently tracked the patrons as they entered and left the galleries—but they were all out in the open, and solely within reach of the lone guard who manned it. Even the main box that connected the building's fire alarm system was there.

Grindle understood perfectly well the problems McAuliffe had raised. He had been on the job at the Gardner for nearly a decade, since the early 1980s, and he was the museum's first full-time security director. In fact, security at the Gardner had been such an afterthought before he came on board that the man who held the job before him was also responsible for maintaining the grounds that surrounded the museum.

The Gardner was the first museum Grindle had worked for. A Maine native, he was a criminal justice specialist working for the consulting firm A.D. Little & Co., in Cambridge, where he'd been for more than a decade after a stint in the navy, when he heard about the opening at the museum. At the Gardner he was a no-nonsense boss and, reflecting his military training, a stickler for adhering to meeting schedules and reporting suspicious activity around the museum.

He was also known for coming down like a hammer on his team for infractions to his many rules, no matter how small. When the candy bars he'd put out for employees to buy for $1 began disappearing, he installed a hidden camera to stop the pilfering. Two security guards were caught on the video and both were suspended.

The job Grindle was hired to do, to protect the museum's priceless collection and make improvements in the museum's
security system, was a nightmare assignment. The mansion that housed the museum was built at the turn of the twentieth century, and while its Venetian palazzo architecture may have been stunning to view, the building had never undergone major renovations to accommodate new electrical, plumbing, or ventilation systems. And there was the matter of Mrs. Gardner's will, which worked against such renovations, as it prohibited the museum's trustees from altering the building's galleries in any significant way. If they did, the will stipulated, the museum would become the property of Harvard University.

For several years after being hired, Grindle acclimated himself by spending his days in an office in the museum's unfinished basement. When he finally had a proper office built, it was in the “carriage house,” separate from the museum's galleries, and its only security device was a telephone.

Grindle knew he had much to do to improve the museum's security. But once the FBI visited in 1981 and told him that members of one of Boston's toughest organized crime gangs were scoping out the museum for a theft, he attached a sense of urgency to his work.

“Bill, it's not like I've been sitting on my hands here,” Grindle told McAuliffe the day they finally did their walk-through of the museum. “I've made some progress, but it's not like I have all the money in the world. And I've got a board of trustees I've got to work through. Security is only one of the demands on them.”

Through much of the 1980s Grindle had pleaded with the museum's board of trustees for money to improve the mansion's security systems. It wasn't that the people who ran the museum—the seven-member board of trustees (all white men) and director Roland “Bump” Hadley—were unaware that it needed major renovations. But that all took money, and there was no plan in place to raise the money, or any fervent commitment by the trustees to come up with such a plan.

In the mid-1980s, the museum was operating in the red. There simply wasn't enough money allocated to accomplish even a fraction of what Grindle knew needed to be done, never mind the additional money for other improvements, necessary as it turned out, that he hadn't even imagined. Finally, in 1986, the board voted him a million dollars for various projects. But there was just too much to do, and every job was complicated by the age of the museum building itself.

Grindle lived in fear that the museum would suffer a catastrophic loss, not from a band of thieves but from a water leak that could not be shut off because of the antiquated pipes and plumbing that ran through the building, or a fire allowed to spread because, for a few years at least, there was no central fire alarm system, only a set of battery-operated units spread throughout the museum's galleries and corridors.

Frustrated by the begging and cajoling for money to improve security, Hadley had told Grindle at one point in the mid-1980s that if he was serious, he needed to raise the funds himself. So with the assistance of an intern, Grindle wrote letters to major corporations in and around Boston seeking the funds. He raised more than $50,000, and the money was used to install a new alarm system that alerted security staff to any fires or broken windows.

At the time the museum's collection was valued in the billions of dollars. Yet, like most museums of the era, and particularly the smaller ones, the Gardner had no insurance policy in place to protect it from the loss of any of its paintings or antiques. It was considered simply too expensive to protect against such losses. During those years the museum was paying less than $25,000 a year for a range of policies, including one that protected them from liability for patrons who might slip and fall on wet surfaces.

Frustratingly, Grindle found that it was overly costly to install the wiring needed for video and electronic surveillance
systems in a building constructed at the turn of the century and that was lit for the most part with gas lamps. The building even lacked central air conditioning and ventilation, which, even worse than being uncomfortable for patrons, was damaging the artwork. Many summer mornings Grindle would find some of the paintings “sweating,” showing beads of condensation from the heat and humidity that had built up inside the building overnight. In some of the hotter galleries he even resorted to ordering the windows thrown open and fans brought in to cool down the rooms.

“Four hot days in a row and it gets like a pizza oven in there,” Grindle told McAuliffe as they walked through the museum's venerable Blue Room. “Only our Tapestry Room, where we hold concerts, is air conditioned.” The room was cooled by a twenty-ton unit that they had installed years before on the roof of the building, Grindle explained.

A museum trustee for much of the 1980s agreed that the board was slow to recognize the need to raise more money to fund renovation projects.

“We were slow, I'll admit it, to deal with things like the climate control problem, insurance, security, and the lack of space,” Francis W. Hatch Jr. told me in an interview before his death in 2010. “But to us the main problem was Bump [Hadley]. He wasn't a good administrator and he didn't like anyone talking to us but him. And really, we never paid attention to him.”

By the late 1980s, Grindle was back hounding the board for more money. He had commissioned a study by the well-regarded security firm Steven R. Keller & Associates. They had recommended the same thing McAuliffe had stressed: a secured control room accessible only to those with a passkey. Keller also recommended dramatic improvements to the museum's communication system, among them maintaining a sophisticated video surveillance system that kept track of not
only every gallery, but also every wall in those galleries, and every corridor leading in and out of them.

But little financial help seemed to be coming. The museum was still barely scraping by on dividends and interest from Mrs. Gardner's investments to meet its $1.5 million annual budget. Certainly the money paid by patrons and visitors wasn't going to cover the bills. Having begun charging for tickets for the first time in 1977, the museum was collecting less than $400,000 a year even a decade later.

After the theft, the
Boston Globe
's art critic wrote a searing critique of the museum's failure to raise sufficient funds during the 1980s to care for deteriorating conditions. “The truth was, though, that the museum had been in trouble long before the robbery,” the article stated. “The Gardner had simply failed to keep up with standard late-20th-century museum practices. There wasn't even an adequate place for visitors to hang their coats, let alone a climate-control system to protect the museum's masterpieces from the extremes of Boston's winters and summers. The problem was a matter of money and management. The trustees, traditionally a self-perpetuating Brahmin board of seven Harvard-educated men, acted as if fund-raising were tantamount to begging. In the 1980s, when there was big money available for arts institutions, the museum didn't even apply for big grant money—at a time when the Gardner needed millions of dollars' worth of climate control and conservation.”

While not disputing any statistics in the critique, Anne Hawley, then the museum's director, defended the trustees' dedication to the museum and contended the article had been motivated by the
Globe
's anger in not getting preferential treatment in covering the theft. “First we were robbed, and then we were mugged,” Hawley told the
New York Times
after the
Globe
article came out.

In 1985, after years of his badgering, Grindle and other members of the museum's senior staff finally convinced the
board of the seriousness of his needs, not to mention the need to modernize the premises generally, and the museum hired a specialist in fund-raising to make recommendations. Caroline Standley, who had run a successful campaign for the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem on Massachusetts's North Shore, advised the board to reach out to well-to-do Bostonians who would certainly be willing to make annual contributions to a capital campaign for the museum.