Priceless (32 page)

The mystery of the Manet is like most Gardner clues—intriguing but ultimately useful only to the countless armchair detectives in the bars and salons of Boston and the art community.

T
HE THEFT SHOCKED
Boston and the art world, but it shouldn’t have.

As the value of artwork, from Impressionists to Old Masters, rose steadily at auction houses from the early sixties to the late eighties, so too did the pace of art crime, especially in New England. The thieves began slowly, targeting the region’s many colleges. Schools made prime targets because, as the thieves soon discovered, they held valuable but poorly guarded art and artifacts donated decades ago by long-dead alumni—Hudson Valley School paintings, ancient coins, rifles from the Revolutionary War. If a painting vanished from the walls of the English Department reception room, embarrassed college officials assumed it to be a prank or the work of the town delinquents, not the work of a growing cadre of Boston burglars who found it easier to steal art from a college or a mansion than to rob a bank. Emboldened by success, these thieves expanded their horizons and targeted museums. The most successful New England art thief was Myles Connor, who would become one of a number of Gardner suspects. Beginning in 1966, Connor burglarized the Forbes House Museum, the Woolworth Estate, the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, the rotunda of the Massachusetts State House, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. By the late 1980s, museums had begun to recognize the threat, but moved slowly to address it. When a new director was named to lead the Gardner in 1989, she ordered a review of her museum’s security measures. It was not completed before the 1990 crime.

Hundreds of FBI agents and police officers investigated the Gardner theft, and as the years passed, the mystique and mystery of the heist only grew. Investigators navigated a growing thicket of speculation, one fueled by a cast of characters featuring con men, private detectives, investigative journalists, and wiseguys—all chasing a reward that would climb to $5 million.

No lead went unchecked. Detectives and agents searched a trawler in the harbor, a city warehouse, a Maine farmhouse. When a pair of tourists visiting a Japanese artist’s home spotted what
they believed to be
The Storm on the Sea of Galilee
, an FBI agent and a Gardner curator dashed to Tokyo. They found a fine copy, but no Rembrandt.

Every now and then a con man approached the media and the media bit. One got face time on
60 Minutes
, the other on
Primetime Live
. The con artist who appeared on ABC claimed to be working with Connor, and he repeatedly teased the U.S. attorney’s office in Boston, claiming he could return one of the paintings within an hour, if paid $10,000 and granted immunity.

One newspaper reporter didn’t just investigate the story. In 1997, he became part of it. Under the blazing headline “We’ve Seen It!,” the
Boston Herald
reported that one of its star journalists, Tom Mashberg, was led blindfolded to a Boston warehouse in the dark of night, and shown a curled, badly damaged canvas that resembled
The Storm on the Sea of Galilee
. Mashberg’s source later sent him photographs of the Rembrandt and paint chips supposedly of seventeenth-century vintage. Although an initial analysis suggested the chips were authentic, further tests by the government showed they were not.

Shady mob links to the Gardner heist surfaced repeatedly, and most drew breathless press coverage across Boston. Four times in the space of a decade, the papers reported, a wiseguy with alleged ties to the Gardner case died under suspicious circumstances. When two more reputed mob associates were arrested for conspiring to rob an armored car, they alleged that FBI agents had set them up as part of a scheme to win the paintings’ return. As all of this mob-Gardner speculation swirled, alleged Boston mob boss Whitey Bulger—a man the media identified as a prime suspect in the Gardner case—fled the United States on the eve of his arrest for unrelated murders.

Almost every new twist and detail from the Gardner investigation made the papers and the eleven o’clock news—from the dead, indicted, and fugitive mobsters to the false sightings in Japan. The
Herald
reporter recounted his story for a national audience in
Vanity
Fair
and inked an option for a movie deal. Harold Smith, a respected private art detective, was featured in a well-received documentary film about the heist.

Even the normally tight-lipped FBI joined the fray, feeding the hype. For a story marking the anniversary of the crime in the mid-1990s, the lead FBI agent in Boston gave an on-the-record interview—highly unusual for a street agent working an active case. He told the
New York Times
, “I can’t imagine a whodunit as nightmarish as this, considering the pool of potential suspects. It’s mind-boggling.”

Mind-boggling, perhaps. Frustrating, for sure.

And then, in 2006, sixteen years after the crime, after all the false leads and con games, the FBI received a credible lead.

That tip landed on my desk.

Paris, June 1, 2006
.

A
LITTLE
OVER A CENTURY AFTER
G
ARDNER WON
T
HE
Concert
at auction in Paris, I traveled there to give a lecture. And to follow up on the hot tip.

Each year, the men and women who supervise the world’s undercover law-enforcement operatives convene in a major capital. The conference goes by a secret name as bland as Universal Exports.

The agenda includes lectures on crime trends, updates on important international legal developments and treaties, and presentations on successful operations—war stories told by undercover agents on famous cases. In the spring of 2006, the group invited me to give a lecture on the Rembrandt sting in Copenhagen. I flew to Paris with an old Philadelphia colleague, Daniel DeSimone, the FBI’s unit chief for Undercover and Sensitive Operations. We looked forward to meeting and socializing with our counterparts, making the kind of personal connections that can be invaluable during international investigations. The undercover group planned a Seine dinner cruise and a behind-the-scenes tour of the Paris Opera, the venue immortalized by Renoir.

During one of the luncheons, I introduced myself to DeSimone’s counterpart in Paris, the chief of the French undercover unit called
SIAT. The SIAT chief was busy hosting the conference, shaking lots of hands, making small talk, but when we met, he arched an eyebrow.

He put down his glass of red wine. “You’ve of course heard what we heard about these paintings?”

We spoke in vague, veiled terms. There were a lot of people around. But I knew he was referring to the tip that the French had just passed to the FBI: Two Frenchmen living in Miami appeared to be trying to broker the sale of two stolen masterpieces. One was a Rembrandt, the other a Vermeer. The world was missing only one Vermeer—the one from Boston.

“You should meet the officer who received the tip.”

“I’d like that.”

“Good. He works for another department, but I will find you his mobile number.”

I
MET THE
SIAT contact at the tourist entrance to the Louvre, outside the large glass pyramid.

We spied each other easily in the thick crowd of tourists in T-shirts and shorts—we were the only ones wearing suits. He was a grizzled Police Nationale officer who worked the busy undercover art crime beat in Paris. He was heavyset with a leathered face and narrow blue eyes, and introduced himself as Andre. We shook hands and laughed at ourselves: two hotshot undercover art sleuths meeting in coat and tie at France’s best-known museum! Andre and I strolled away from the mob in the warm sun, tossing back and forth the names of cops and museum chiefs we both knew.

Three minutes later, we were turning right on the cobblestones, following the sidewalk through one of the great arches and out of the palace complex. We crossed Rue de Rivoli and its cheap souvenir shops, moving north up Rue de Richelieu. I was eager to dive in, start peppering him with questions about the Gardner tip. But this was his town, his tip. I let him lead.

After two blocks, the crowds thinned. We kept walking, and Andre said, “You know in France, we have two different national police departments, the Police Nationale and the Gendarmerie Nationale?”

I did, but treaded carefully, having heard about the rivalries. “Kind of a complicated arrangement, huh?”

“
Oui
. There are important differences and it is important for you to understand.” Andre laid it out for me: The Gendarmerie, created during medieval times, is an arm of the Defense Ministry.
*
Their officers carry themselves with military bearing and discipline, and are deployed mostly in rural regions and the ports, but by tradition the gendarmes also keep a strong presence in Paris. The Police Nationale, created in the 1940s, is an arm of the French Interior Ministry. The force focuses mostly on urban crime. Andre worked for the Police Nationale.

“Sometimes the Police Nationale and Gendarmerie investigate the same case, compete, and this gives us headaches,” he said.

There was one other important nuance I needed to know, Andre said. “You must understand SIAT.”

SIAT was a division of the Police Nationale created in 2004, the same year the French repealed a decades-long ban on the use of evidence obtained by undercover officers. During the ban, France had used undercover officers sparingly, but in an informal, no-paperwork-involved manner, often with a wink and nod from the local magistrate. Back then, each unit in the Gendarmerie and Police Nationale had used their own people to go undercover. When the law changed and the SIAT was created, many undercover officers had transferred to the new unit. But some veterans, like Andre, had stayed where they were. They found the rule-heavy SIAT culture and configuration too bureaucratic and turf-conscious to be effective. Andre was warning me that SIAT would insist on running the show if this case involved any undercover operations inside France.

“Who runs the art crime team?” I asked.

“Complicated also: It is under the jurisdiction of the Police Nationale, but for political reasons the chief is always a Gendarme.”

“How’s the chief?”

“This one we have now is very good, very smart,” Andre said. “He would rather return an important statue to a church or a painting to a museum than put a man in jail. The problem was that Sarkozy, before he became President of France, was the Minister of the Interior and he didn’t agree. He was very much about law and order. For the Police Nationale, Sarkozy cared only about results—arrests, arrests, arrests. Sarkozy cared only about the statistics. He wanted to show he is fighting the criminals.”

“Sounds like the FBI. We’re not wired to recover stolen property, art. We’re wired to count convictions in court because that’s how you’re measured. We’ve got guys so cynical they call cases and convictions a ‘stat.’ We have arguments over which FBI office gets credit for the ‘stat.’” I smiled at Andre. “You have your Police Nationale-Gendarmerie-SIAT issues, we have our own problems.”

“Yes, I have heard this, though I thought all this changed after 9/11.”

“That’s what everyone thinks, but it’s probably only true in terrorism cases,” I said. “When it comes to everything else, not much has changed.” The FBI remains a largely decentralized law enforcement agency, divided into fifty-six field offices spread across the country. Each of these fifty-six field offices operates as its own fiefdom. Once a field office begins an investigation, it rarely cedes its turf. The FBI’s investigatory protocol is sacrosanct: Absent extraordinary circumstances, investigations are run and supervised by the agents in the field office in the city where the crime was committed—not by anyone at headquarters. “The case we’re talking about now is being run out of Boston because the paintings were stolen from Boston.”

“The FBI agents in Boston are experts in art crime?”

“No. Bank robbery. SWAT, that kind of thing.”

Andre cocked his head, confused.

“That’s the FBI, my friend,” I said. I didn’t want to go into too much detail because Andre still seemed to be sizing me up, deciding how much to tell me about the Florida tip. So I did not explain that despite my expertise, Eric Ives’s enthusiasm from headquarters, and the Art Crime Team’s worldwide successes, the Gardner case would almost certainly remain under the control of the Boston office. I would work for them. In theory, Headquarters could overrule a field supervisor or wrest a case away from a field office. But in reality, that rarely happened. It would be viewed as an insult to the field office supervisor and create a blot on his record, a slight he and his friends would never forget. The FBI is a giant bureaucracy—middle-management supervisors are rotated to new jobs every three to five years, between the field offices and Washington. This dynamic makes supervisors at Headquarters reluctant to make waves. The supervisor you cross today may become your boss tomorrow.

“But don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’ve been doing this a long time and never had a problem with that sort of thing. I just do my cases.”

We kept walking, crossing another busy boulevard.

The Frenchman said, “You know, Bob, you must be subtle in art crime. It is important to use discreet methods, sometimes methods that are not illegal but not by the book. Our chief understands that in some situations you have to be subtle.”

I nodded.

The French cop stopped on the sidewalk and looked me in the eye. “These are dangerous people, the guys who have your paintings. Corsicans. I’m going to put you in touch with someone in Florida.” Andre said his French contact in Florida did not know he was a cop, and that he had discreetly used the man’s information in the past. “All very quietly, you understand?”

“Of course.”

“I will give him your number in the U.S. What name will you use when he calls?”

“Bob Clay, art broker from Philadelphia.”