Priceless (25 page)

Ten stories below, we could see the pool, surrounded by a bevy of topless bathers. G whistled. Motyka took his turn. Our fun lasted only a moment. A supervisor came running in from the surveillance room next door. Cut it out, he said. We’re getting this all on tape!

Candela arrived a few minutes later. On time!

“Bonsoir,”
he said brightly, bearing a rectangular package wrapped in black plastic. He shook hands with Motyka, G, me, and the Spanish undercover agent, the guy with the revolver hidden in his pants.

Candela eyed the open gym bag on the bed brimming with bank notes.

He crossed and dug his hand inside. Instantly, he said, “This looks like only half of it.”

“Euros,” Motyka explained. “It’s easier than dollars.”

Candela kneeled on the bed, closer to the money. “It’s fine. I can take some bills out?”

“Of course, take your time.”

He started to count the money. He pocketed a 20-, a 50-, and a 100-euro note from the bag, saying he needed to check to see if they were counterfeit. I stole a glance at the Spanish undercover officer. I could tell he was thinking he was going to end up 170 euros light.

Finally, Candela finished his tally. He stood and nodded.

Motyka spread his arms and smiled. “I showed you the money. You know we are serious.”

“Oui, mais … un moment, s’il vous plaît.”
He took out his cell phone, punched a number, and cupped his hand as he spoke. He moved toward the door, leaving both the money and the package on the bed.
“À bientôt,”
he said. He’d be right back.

The Spanish undercover agent looked at me, confused.

“His package was a decoy,” I explained. “He’ll be back.”

Three minutes passed. Candela returned, huffing, as he lugged a second package in plastic through the doorway.

“Now,” he announced. “We can be more relaxed.”

For show, I put on a pair of gloves before unwrapping the painting. “This is beautiful, amazing design.” I wasn’t lying. The fine brushstrokes showcased Brueghel’s special skills, the way he depicted movement in pre-surrealist form, naked demons dancing around a cauldron as St. Anthony reads his Bible. Even after four centuries, the colors—magenta, crimson, ivory—remained vibrant. It was truly a masterpiece.

Candela agreed, but for different reasons. “Yes, it’s one of my favorites. You can see people fucking.
Il faut jouir de la vie
—one must enjoy life, no?”

He started rambling, talking about the sale of the first set of paintings, sold to a Colombian drug dealer. “They paid in euros, a huge amount of small bills.”

I engaged him as I studied the painting in my hands. “Huge quantity, huh?”

“Phew, yeah. They filled the whole back of an SUV.”

Everyone laughed.

I walked the painting to the darkest corner of the room.

Candela followed, interested in my examination. “Four hundred and fifty years old,” I said, whistling. “Painted on board, not canvas.”

Candela nodded. He, of course, didn’t have any doubts about authenticity, and seemed to be dropping his guard. “It’s good to verify the merchandise because you might imagine that we could be
putting copies out there—make ten copies and sell to ten different people.” As he hovered, he bragged about his exploits. “I make things happen. I’ve been robbing banks and taking things from museums for eighteen years and I’ve never been caught.”

“No kidding?” I sounded impressed.

He laughed. “Everyone knows it’s me. When the paintings are stolen, they arrest me but don’t have proof. The papers were saying it couldn’t be me! I could not pull off a job this big. This”—he pointed to the painting—“is the proof and would be the end for me. That’s why I was afraid to come with a big painting.” He looked around the room and then focused back on me. I was still hunched over the painting. “So,” he said, “you are happy?”

“Mmmm.”

Candela kept jabbering, and offered to hire me. “You work for me and I’ll pay you really, really well.”

I kept my eyes glued close to the painting.

He tried again. “I’m going to have four van Gogh and one Rembrandt in September.”

This got my attention. “Really? Four van Gogh?”

“I haven’t taken them yet.” As he said it, I saw the Spanish agent pick up the phone. I inched toward the bed with the Brueghel.

I turned to the undercover Spanish cop and gave the code word. “It’s real.”

He spoke into the phone.

In seconds, the connecting door swung open and a team in black riot gear swinging automatic weapons roared in. Candela cried out and the men in black piled on top of him, throwing punches into his soft midsection. Shielding the Brueghel with my body, I leaped out of the way and rolled to the side of the bed, yelling,
“Bueno hombre!
Good guy!
Bueno hombre!
Don’t shoot!”

Flat on the floor, I winced as the Spaniards pummeled Candela.

Downstairs, the Spanish police converged on Flores, who was waiting with nine paintings in the back of an SUV. Later, the police
would recover the rest of the paintings at the Colombian drug dealer’s beach house.

M
OTYKA AND
G flew home, but I stayed behind to help create a cover story to protect the source.

I would be identified as an FBI agent, but the two “bodyguards” in the hotel room with me—Motyka and G—would be Russians named “Ivan” and “Oleg.” In the chaos and confusion of the takedown, the cover story went, the police mistakenly arrested me, allowing Ivan and Oleg to escape. The police planned to leak this story to the local media.

When we finished with the paperwork and cover story, I wandered into the sultry Madrid evening and caught up with Donna for a few minutes from my cell phone. After a few blocks, I found a bench and sat down. I unwrapped a Partágas cigar and lit it.

I puffed and watched a couple stroll by a newsstand. I thought about what tomorrow’s headlines might say. I also recalled that Koplowitz had willed the paintings to the state. Someday, these works by Goya, Foujita, Pissaro, and the others would hang in the Prado, the country’s most prestigious museum. I felt a calm sense of satisfaction.

I thought about how the case might be received back home. I was sure it would make a splash, both inside the FBI and in the media. The Madrid case would mark a new chapter for me and for the FBI’s art crime effort. I could feel it. I was sure that from now on, we could go anywhere, anytime in pursuit of priceless cultural treasures. We could deploy even when the stolen property wasn’t American. We could lend a helping hand across oceans and nations—and be welcomed.

I kicked back on the bench, stretched my legs, and soaked up the moment. I sat there until the embers on the fine Cuban cigar singed my fingers.

Raleigh, North Carolina, 2003
.

T
HE UNMARKED BUSINESS JET PIERCED THE POWDER
blue Carolina sky.

The FBI director’s plane is reserved for the bureau’s most sensitive missions. With a top speed of 680 miles per hour and a bank of secure radios, phones, and satellite connections, the Cessna Citation X can fly the director or the attorney general coast to coast in four hours. It is the jet the FBI uses to scramble its elite hostage rescue team and fly government experts to crime scenes at a moment’s notice. On occasion, the FBI deploys the Citation X for the secret rendition of terrorists.

Inside, I sprawled in one of six large leather chairs, sipping a Coke, across from my partner, Jay Heine, and our supervisor, Mike Thompson. The fragile cargo we guarded was strapped to the seat next to mine, snug inside a custom-built three-by-three-foot wooden box. Its appraised value was $30 million. We flew in silence.

A small computer screen embedded in the cherry wood bulkhead projected our arrival time in Raleigh. We were ten minutes out.

In a few hours, we would present our boxed cargo to the U.S.
marshal in Raleigh, concluding a case in which we’d used an undercover sting to recover a seminal document of American history, a parchment stolen as a spoil of war more than a century ago.

Inside the box, we carried one of the fourteen original copies of the Bill of Rights—so valuable because it was the sole surviving copy missing from government archives.

The jet banked gracefully to the left and we began our descent. I glanced out the oval window and spotted the Confederate-gray dome of the North Carolina state capitol, the scene of the crime.

N
ORTH
C
AROLINA’S COPY
of the Bill of Rights was no “copy.”

On September 26, 1789, a clerk of the First Session of the United States Congress took a quill pen to fourteen sheets of vellum. On each page, he crafted in large calligraphic hand identical versions of a proposed “bill of rights,” a series of amendments to the Constitution adopted just days earlier by the Senate and House of Representatives. The presiding officers of the chambers, Speaker of the House F. A. Muhlenberg and Vice President John Adams, signed each of the fourteen copies. On orders from President Washington, the clerk sent one copy to each of the thirteen states for consideration. The final copy remained with the new federal government.

The proposal Washington sent to the thirteen states was a working document, one that contained twelve proposed amendments, including the ten amendments most Americans associate with the Bill of Rights—freedom of religion, the right to due process, the right to trial by jury, etcetera. The two amendments that did not make the original cut were administrative, related to congressional pay raises and apportionment.

Remarkably, the twelve proposed amendments fit on a single sheet of parchment thirty inches high.

In early October 1789, Governor Samuel Johnston received North Carolina’s copy. Upon ratification of the Bill of Rights by the states, including North Carolina, the ten amendments to the Constitution
took effect immediately, without additional paperwork. Thus, the fourteen original copies of the parchment with the twelve proposed amendments became the document we now recognize as the Bill of Rights—the one on display at the National Archives and commonly sold as a souvenir in tourist shops.

In North Carolina, the state’s copy of the Bill of Rights and Washington’s transmittal letter were immediately treated as historical documents, and a legislative clerk placed them in a strongbox. The records did not find a permanent home until 1796, when the state finished construction of the State House in Raleigh. North Carolina’s new capital, like Washington, D.C., was a planned city—ten square blocks that rose from a former plantation and were modeled after the cityscape in Philadelphia. Although the State House burned in 1831, aides hustled nearly all of the records out in time to save them. When North Carolina completed construction of a new three-story, cross-shaped granite State Capitol in 1840, it filed the most important historical documents in the offices of the secretary of state, treasurer, and State Library, and in alcoves next to the State Senate. Generally, these records were folded in half, bundle-wrapped in plain paper, secured with twine, and placed in pigeonhole cabinets with doors. According to the most likely account, the file containing the Bill of Rights was stored in the first-floor offices of the secretary of state, inside a vault, inside a locked box.

There the historic parchment remained, apparently undisturbed, until the final hours of the Civil War.

O
N
A
PRIL
12, 1865, three days after Lee surrendered to Grant and two days before Booth shot Lincoln, Sherman gathered 90,000 troops on the outskirts of North Carolina’s capital.

At midnight, Governor Zebulon B. Vance locked the Capitol doors and fled on horseback.

He left a letter for Sherman with the mayor: Promise not to sack and burn Raleigh, and Confederate troops will abandon the city.
“The Capitol of the State with Libraries, Museum and most of the public records is also in your power,” the governor wrote to Sherman. “I can but entertain the hope that they may escape mutilation or destruction in as much as such evidence of learning and taste could advantage neither party in the prosecution of the war whether destroyed or preserved.” The Union troops who received the letter on the city’s outskirts made no promises, and the Confederates retreated anyway.

Sherman’s soldiers not only ignored the governor’s entreaties, they also violated their own rules of war. The occupying forces ran right over Army General Order 100, Articles 35, 36, and 45, as if they hadn’t heard about them, which they probably hadn’t. Issued by President Lincoln on April 24, 1863, these articles of war marked one of the first modern edicts protecting cultural heritage during conflict: “Classical works of art, libraries, scientific collections or precious instruments, such as astronomical telescopes, as well as hospitals, must be secured against all avoidable injury, even when they are constrained in fortified places whilst besieged or bombed … In no case shall they be sold or given away, if captured by the armies of the United States, nor shall they be privately appropriated or wantonly destroyed or injured…. All captures and booty belong, according to the modern law of war, primarily to the government of the captor.”

The tens of thousands of Union troops who streamed into Raleigh that day commandeered nearly every building, private or public. The Capitol itself did not fare well. Sherman’s troops ransacked the Legislative Records Room and soldiers scrawled graffiti on Capitol walls. The Union provost marshal occupied the governor’s two-suite office in the building, and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of troops wandered through the finest building in Raleigh, to attend meetings or simply sightsee. “The interior of the Capitol presented a scene of utmost confusion,” a soldier later recounted in an unofficial history of one Union regiment. “Bound legislative documents and maps lay strewn about the floor of the library. The museum rooms were in even worse plight.”

When North Carolina officials returned months later, they found a mess—and several of the state’s most cherished documents, including the Bill of Rights, were missing. A furious state treasurer complained fruitlessly to Washington: “This capture was rapacious and illegal, as I think, and consequently impolitic.”