Master Thieves (9 page)

Meanwhile, Youngworth refused to give investigators, museum officials, or Mashberg any details about how he got his hands on the stolen Rembrandt. He cryptically suggested to Mashberg in a note that his connections inside Boston's underworld, specifically his ties to the Rossetti gang in East Boston, had played a role, not to mention that Youngworth's sister had dated a member of the gang.

The note was confusingly worded and has long been scrutinized for information. It stated in part: “You have to remember the Salemme's visitation power had to be endorsed by NY. Had it not been, NY would have taken the whole as they are now going to and so I don't know power. . . . But Bobby D. was
about a centimeter away from being made. And they clipped him. They were all rough. Not one of them were made. Richie D. recruited that crew in Walpole, with exception of Ritchie Gillis and he is first cousin to the Rossettis. And that's how he got in.”

Here's one way of interpreting what the note said: The New York underworld had given Frank Salemme, whom the Rossetti gang reported to, approval for Youngworth to be allowed to take Mashberg to see the painting. Those New York mobsters were now going to take possession of the paintings. Donati had been killed just before he was to be inducted as a made member of the mafia. The crew, presumably who pulled off the Gardner heist, had been put together by Richard Devlin, another member of the Rossetti crew, while serving time in Walpole prison. Richard Gillis, a cousin to the Rossettis, had been an original member of either the Rossetti gang or those who had pulled off the robbery.

But Youngworth went on in the note to stress that Mashberg needed to be extra careful in dealing with anyone in the Rossetti gang. He told of his involvement with the heist of a truckload of oriental rugs in Manchester, New Hampshire, in 1981, which had ended with Rossetti gang members shooting two of the truck drivers. Youngworth told Massachusetts state police that hours after that shooting he and his best friend had been summoned to meet with several involved in the robbery. While riding together with his friend Jeffrey White and Youngworth, Rossetti gang member John J. Jozapaitis pulled out a gun and shot White in the head, killing him. White's sin—that he knew too much about the Manchester truck robbery, had to die because he was weak and that this was a good opportunity to do it.

Although that murder had taken place nine years before, it left Youngworth scared and suspicious of both those in the criminal world and those in law enforcement.

So, ever cantankerous, Youngworth balked at telling the FBI what he knew about the Gardner heist, saying he wouldn't trust the investigators until they demonstrated they were willing to grant him his list of demands.

Still, the FBI discovered the location of the Brooklyn warehouse where the viewing of the purported Rembrandt masterpiece had taken place and raided it several months later. They found nothing in the unit Mashberg described, nor anywhere else in the storage facility.

With the heat getting more intense, Youngworth hired veteran criminal lawyer Martin Leppo to handle the negotiations with federal officials. But every time Leppo gained a concession, Youngworth would balk and instead rail that he was being set up. Finally, out of frustration with Youngworth, US attorney Donald Stern announced that he wouldn't engage in further talks with Youngworth, or anyone else for that matter, unless they brought forward hard evidence of access to the paintings.

“We have not yet been provided the kind of concrete and credible evidence one looks for in this case,” Stern told reporters. “With all due respect, it's not credible and concrete just because I read it in the newspaper.” Nonetheless, at one point in the fall of 1997, federal officials flew Connor to Massachusetts so he could meet with Youngworth in a room separated by a glass partition. Under law, Youngworth could not visit Connor in prison because Youngworth was also a convicted felon.

“There have been no negotiations—and there won't be—about what law enforcement might or might not be willing to do until there's some showing that we know what we're dealing with,” Stern went on. “We want to have some confidence that what we're dealing with are priceless works of art—not the work of a bull artist.”

Challenged to step up, Youngworth soon gave Mashberg a vial containing numerous small paint chips for delivery to
the FBI. Youngworth contended that the chips came from
The Storm on the Sea of Galilee.
He also delivered twenty-five color photographs purportedly of the painting and the second Rembrandt stolen in the heist,
Lady and Gentleman in Black.
The verdict came less than a month later in separate public statements from the museum and federal investigators. The chips had not come from either of the two Rembrandts, and the photographs were not what Youngworth claimed they were, read a statement from Stern and Barry Mawn, head of the FBI's Boston office.

“We have conclusively determined that the paint chips were not authentic,” the museum said.

However, neither statement mentioned another interesting finding of these tests: that the pigmentation and layering of the chips indicated that they had come from a seventeenth-century painting, the time period during which Rembrandt had worked. These tests were confirmed again recently by leading experts who said they could not rule out the possibility that the chips came from the stolen Vermeer, a contemporary of Rembrandt.

Of course, considering that he had operated an antiques store in Allston, Massachusetts, it could have been relatively easy for Youngworth to get his hands on paint chips of the right vintage. What's less clear is how he would have been able to get ahold of such a good replica of
The Storm on the Sea of Galilee
that it could have led a veteran reporter such as Mashberg to believe it was the real thing, if in fact it wasn't. Replicas of paintings can be obtained, but considering that the two men had met just a few weeks before the viewing, it is difficult to imagine that Youngworth could have arranged to have such a replica produced in such a short time.

But Anthony Amore, the Gardner's director of security, believes what Mashberg saw was a fake.

“Based on what I've learned about the structure of
The Storm,
and its well-varnished canvas, however, I lean toward
it's not being the Gardner's painting,” Amore wrote in the introduction to a book he co-authored with Mashberg about stolen Rembrandts.

The canvas of
The Storm
had been coated with varnish and lacquer often during its existence, so the idea that it could have been rolled up in any way, much less placed into a cylindrical tube and then removed from the storage unit as Mashberg reported, seemed almost impossible to him.

Mashberg, now a freelance journalist for the
New York Times
and other publications, has a mixed response. “Given how much I respect Anthony's opinion, I have to think now that it was a replica. But given the tests showing that the chips did come from Rembrandt's era, and the fact that I was on the same trail as the FBI seventeen years ago, I still think that the stolen paintings were in play in 1997.”

As for Youngworth, while it is difficult to have sympathy for anyone who exaggerates and dissembles as much as he did, he too can be seen as a victim in this story. After his repeated attempts to persuade the authorities that he had the paintings failed, and left without anything to bargain away with the prosecution, he stood trial and was convicted of possessing a stolen vehicle. During his subsequent yearlong prison sentence, his wife, Judith, died of a drug overdose.

Still, Youngworth, who now lives modestly with his son in western Massachusetts, knows all too well the financial lure of the recovery of the stolen Gardner masterpieces. In 2001, he worked with his brother-in-law to produce copies of the stamp-size, self-portrait sketch of Rembrandt that had been among the pieces stolen from the museum.

A Rhode Island businessman facing federal prosecution for tax fraud whom Youngworth subsequently approached believed he could get authorities to postpone charging him if he could convince them he was working on recovering the Gardner paintings. In a late-night meeting in the parking lot
of a Springfield restaurant, the businessman paid Youngworth $250,000 in cash for the sketch. But it was soon determined to be a forgery and the businessman was convicted of the tax evasion charges and sentenced. His claims that Youngworth had defrauded him of $250,000 were never pursued.

If Mashberg did see the Rembrandt in that warehouse in Brooklyn, he remains the only reporter to see any of the stolen pieces since the 1990 heist.

Chapter Four

Anne Hawley's Burden

F
rom the first moment
that spring morning in April 1994 that she opened the envelope containing a typewritten letter rather than the typical scrawled note, Gardner Museum director Anne Hawley knew what she had in her hands was something different. Though unsigned, the two-page letter was written with a command of legal terms, as if it had come from a lawyer, and conveyed a knowledge of the Gardner theft that only museum insiders and the FBI knew at the time.

The line “the perpetrators were not dressed as police officers, as reported by the press, but were dressed as security guards” immediately caught her attention.

“I have been asked to participate in a rather touchy issue that is of prime importance to your facility,” the letter went on authoritatively. “The issue is the safe return of the missing art treasures.” The thirteen pieces were all still together, the
note said, and, most comforting for Hawley, who had worried constantly that they were not being well cared for, they were “stored in archival conditions to preserve them.”

The letter touched off a frenzied two-week pursuit to commence negotiations for returning the artwork, and for Hawley at least, represents the most hopeful time of the twenty-five years she has spent trying to recover them. For a few weeks in 1994, she believed the nightmare of the Gardner heist might soon be over.

Hawley, who had been on the job only six months when the heist took place 1990, has weathered the frustrations of the investigation longer and perhaps more deeply than anyone else in Boston. While the federal investigation has involved the best efforts of five US attorneys, more than a dozen chiefs of the Boston FBI office, and three special agents in charge of the probe, the one person who has suffered the loss most is surely Anne Hawley.

For the then-forty-six-year-old Hawley, who had sought the position in the hope of restoring the Gardner to its turn-of-the-century brilliance, and who had neither the inclination nor the ability to solve crimes, she soon added that most high-profile responsibility to the long list of duties her job entailed.

Hawley had been told almost immediately after the heist that, in such high-end cases, if an arrest and recovery isn't made in the first few days, it was normal for years to pass before safe return of the missing artwork could be negotiated. But now, four years after the theft, hope of a safe return was exactly what she had in front of her.

The letter writer stated that the paintings had been stolen to gain someone a reduction in a prison sentence, but as that opportunity had dwindled dramatically there was no longer a primary motive for keeping the artwork. The best option for everyone involved, the letter said, was to negotiate a return of the pieces to the museum.

“All parties do want a resolution to everyone's satisfaction,” Hawley read expectantly. “You get the collection and they get the money and immunity from prosecution.” The writer stated that he did not know the identity of the men who had stolen the artwork, but instead was dealing with a third person who had approached him to carry out the negotiations.

Also, to underscore the importance of taking him seriously and dealing with him immediately, the writer stated that the artwork was currently held in a “non–common law country.” As such, if any of the pieces were sold to someone, likely for a significant price, that buyer might have a legitimate claim that he or she now owned the piece, regardless of the fact that someone else had stolen it from the museum.

And, the writer went on, two key factors needed to be dealt with before any return could be gained: First, a ransom amount had to be agreed on, and second, the representative and his clients had to be assured that the FBI would not seek to arrest them during negotiations.

There would be no bargaining over how much he wanted the museum to give him for safe return of the paintings, either. In total, the writer estimated the value of the artwork to be $260 million. He wanted $2.6 million for their return. The $2.6 million would be sent to a designated offshore bank account at the same time the artwork was handed over, the letter stated.

Not unreasonable,
Hawley thought as she read the terms. While at the time the museum had posted a reward of $1 million for the paintings' return, it would soon up the ante to $5 million, the largest announced reward for the return of any masterpiece.

But negotiating their return without involving law enforcement would of course be far trickier. With that in mind he proposed a unique idea: To show him that the museum was interested in negotiating, it should ask the
Boston Globe
to include the numeral one in front of the decimal point for
the value of the dollar against the Italian lira in the currency column it ran inside the Sunday business pages.

Hawley finished reading and was astonished and excited. The letter had the right mix of authority and caution for her to be convinced it was real. That morning, after more than four years of dealing with fraud artists and fakers who claimed they could facilitate the return of the artwork only to have her hopes dashed, Hawley felt she was finally dealing with someone who had something.

She quickly referred the letter to the FBI's Boston office, who immediately contacted
Globe
editor Matthew V. Storin, asking if the paper would be willing to go along with the plan outlined in the letter.

“I saw it as a community-service decision,” Storin said later. He was unwilling to list an inaccurate value for the lira, but Storin said he would add a numeral one prominently in the exchange rate listings. First, though, he extracted an agreement from Richard S. Swensen, the FBI's agent in charge of the Boston office, to pledge to tell the
Globe
first if its efforts led to the recovery of the paintings.

Swensen agreed, and the following Sunday, May 1, 1994, the numeral one appeared in the middle of the row that listed the official exchange rate for the Italian lira. Several days later a second letter, this one postmarked May 3, 1994, was in Hawley's morning mail. Like the earlier one, it looked as though it had been written on an electric typewriter and it was unsigned.

At the urging of the FBI and Gardner director Anne Hawley, the
Globe
agreed to drop the numeral 1 into the middle of the currency box that ran in its Sunday Business section, May 1, 1994, showing an anonymous letter-writer that the museum was willing to enter into secret negotiations for the return of the stolen artwork.

The letter began on a hopeful note: The placement of the numeral inside the currency box showed the writer the museum was interested in negotiating.

But then the bad news:

“I am also fully aware of the massive alert that the federal, state and Boston authorities went on last Friday afternoon” seeking to make an arrest while the negotiations commenced.

“I think it important to say right now that you have a choice, that is you may be able to apprehend a low-level participant who has been kept in the dark or you can recapture the entire collection intact. YOU CANNOT HAVE BOTH.”

Hawley was dumbfounded. She had impressed on Swen­sen and others at the FBI her hope that the letter writer was legitimate and that everyone needed to follow his instructions to the letter. That word had filtered down to the handful of agents who were directly responsible for the case.

“We were told to stand down by Swensen, and that's exactly what we did. No calls were made, no one was interviewed,” says one agent working the case at the time.

However, he said, that word may not have reached everyone inside the Bureau. Agents in the Boston and New York offices were working feverishly to track down the letter writer's identity, the agent said.

“There was no complete stand-down,” the agent admitted. “Far from it.”

As a result, the letter writer said he needed time to evaluate his options. While those who held the stolen artwork needed money and might be willing to reconnect with the museum, he was worried.

“The onerous penalties related to this venture make me extremely wary of everything,” he wrote.

If he decided it was impossible to continue negotiating, he would provide the museum with “a few solid clues where you can apply pressure to get the collection.”

But no clues were forthcoming. Hawley never heard from him again after that.

“I was heartbroken with how it turned out,” Hawley remembered even a decade later, the sting still in her voice. “Finally, I felt I was dealing with someone who knew something, who could get us somewhere, and just as quickly it disappeared. It was heartbreaking, really.”

_______________________

Although it may have been
the biggest disappointment, and the closest Hawley feels the museum has yet come to recovering the stolen art, the episode with the anonymous letters was not the only time she became emotionally involved in the investigation only to be let down in the end. In fact, she and trustee
Arnold Hiatt even met in a New York hotel room with William Youngworth, the ex-convict who had driven Tom Mashberg to a deserted warehouse, and who on more than one occasion raised expectations that he could facilitate the return of the paintings. Like Hawley, Hiatt was convinced that Youngworth could be trusted, and gave him $10,000 to advance his efforts.

She also pleaded with then-senator Edward M. Kennedy, the state's most powerful politician, to spur the FBI in its investigation, and suggested to William Bulger, president of the State Senate and a personal friend, that he ask his brother, James “Whitey” Bulger, the notorious Boston gangster arrested by the FBI in 2011 after years of eluding them, if he knew who might have pulled off the heist.

And after years of frustration, Hawley had a surprising bit of inspiration: If the FBI couldn't succeed in getting her paintings back, she reasoned that maybe the pope could help. So in 1999 the museum reached out to Bishop William F. Murphy, head of the Catholic diocese on Long Island, in the hope of convincing Pope John Paul II to issue a papal appeal for the paintings' return. Particular mention was made that one of the works was Rembrandt's seascape portraying Christ calming his disciples as their boat made its way through a storm-tossed Sea of Galilee.

The pope never stepped in, however. Vatican officials said such intervention would lead to other unconventional requests.

One option Hawley hasn't tried is using the Internet and social media to maximize awareness of the specific pieces that are missing and encouraging the public's involvement in the search. Crowdsourcing—in this case, reaching out to the public in helping solve crimes—has even been credited in at least two major manhunts in Boston recently.

This strategy famously brought Whitey Bulger to justice in 2011, after the FBI made a public appeal that focused on Catherine Greig, Bulger's girlfriend. Greig was recognized by a
neighbor near the couple's Santa Monica, California, hideout, who phoned in a tip.

Having the public's assistance with an investigation was also instrumental in the arrest of one of the so-called Boston Marathon bombers, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, in April 2013. Less than an hour after releasing Watertown residents from a full-day lockdown following an overnight shooting that killed one of the two brothers allegedly involved in the bombing, a resident found a trail of blood that led to Tsarnaev, hiding beneath the tarp covering the pleasure boat parked in his backyard.

Still, the museum has not pressed government, business, or community leaders to issue public appeals for assistance in the Gardner case.

“They have to be somewhere” is a common refrain investigators hear about the missing paintings. Many members of the public, particularly in neighborhoods with a lot of criminal activity, where the artwork might thus be stashed, likely are wary of dealing with the FBI or law enforcement in general. Yet it surely would be easier to gain their trust through appeals by people they know, such as community leaders or even celebrities.

The effectiveness of such campaigns recently has been seen more and more, digital marketing and research companies have found. Well-run initiatives have been able to tap the power of people: from the mapping of a gold mine in Ontario, Canada, that led to the discovery of 8 million ounces of gold to offering unique ideas to improve public education.

“The concept of using social media tools to leverage the people and networks connected to Boston to uncover the secrets of the Gardner heist and the missing masterpieces is a no-brainer,” says John Della Volpe, CEO of SocialSphere, a digital marketing and research company in Cambridge. “Worst case, the world learns about Rembrandt's only seascape, best case
some of the world's most valuable art is returned to its rightful owners, the community of Boston.”

Pierre Tabel, former head of the art theft unit established by the French national police, says his unit benefited greatly from the public's assistance and support in their efforts to recover stolen paintings. The 1985 theft of nine Impressionist paintings from the Marmottan Monet Museum in Paris was considered a “national disgrace” for France. Spurred by the public's outrage, his superiors were constantly urging him to waste no resources to recover the paintings, which were returned in 1990.