Priceless (36 page)

I called Eric Ives in Washington. I told him about Fred’s call and my new marching orders.

“That’s ridiculous, Bob,” he said. “Let me see what I can do.”

I knew it wouldn’t be easy for Eric. To overturn anything Fred had done, he’d need support from his bosses in Washington, who’d have to be willing to confront Fred’s bosses in Boston. Unfortunately, supervisors in Washington are typically reluctant to confront supervisors in the field. They don’t like to make waves, especially when it pits a veteran supervisor like Fred against a younger man like Eric. The FBI is very much an old-boys network.

Street agents have a saying that explains this mentality:
Mind over matter. The bosses don’t mind and the agents don’t matter
.

*    *    *

O
F COURSE
, L
AURENZ
called me the next morning.

I told him I might have to fade out from the deal for a while. A family medical emergency, I said. I kept it vague. I told him I might introduce him to a colleague.

Laurenz exploded. “Bob, what the fuck are you talking about? The deal, it is with the three of us. You, me, Sunny. You can’t drop out. You have $30 million parked in the bank. I’m yelling at Sunny, telling him it is costing you $150,000 a month in interest and we have got to get moving, that you want to buy the Boston paintings. So what the fuck am
I
supposed to do now?”

“It’s family, Laurenz,” I said. “I’ve got a family problem. I don’t know what to say.”

Laurenz cursed again, screamed something at me in French, and hung up.

T
HE NEXT EVENING
, shortly before midnight, Laurenz called me back. He was ebullient, and acted as if our previous conversation had never taken place.

He boasted that he’d just closed a $20 million real estate deal in Colorado, and now planned to buy the Gardner paintings in France on his own, and then sell them to me afterward. He spoke more rapidly and forcefully than usual. I wasn’t even supposed to be taking his calls, but it sounded like we were on the verge of a breakthrough. I just listened. Laurenz said he planned to travel to Paris and that the French undercover cop Andre, the man who’d introduced us, would be arranging the sale.

The day after Laurenz’s caffeinated call, Fred phoned. Before I could tell him about Laurenz’s call, Fred began chatting about the latest plan. He said the French undercover cop Andre had told Laurenz that he would use his underworld contacts to sneak him into France, and that Laurenz and Sunny would buy the Gardner paintings in France on their own, then sell them to me.

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “Laurenz told me about it last night.”

Big mistake. Fred went nuts. He started shouting. “You spoke with Laurenz! You’re not supposed to talk to him!”

“Fred,” I said.
“He
called me.”

When Fred calmed down, he started talking about a series of more meetings, maybe in Miami or Paris or Boston or Washington. But by now, I wasn’t really listening. I was seething. We were weeks away from solving the biggest property crime in American history, going up against Corsican mobsters to recover a set of long-lost masterpieces. Fred seemed more worried about protocols, meetings, and protecting his turf.

Soon, Fred was busy deploying that timeworn bureaucratic weapon, the memo. Inside the FBI, such memos are called “Electronic Communications,” or ECs, because they are sent e-mail-style through the Bureau computers to each addressee. About a week after our heated call, Fred penned an outrageously slanted EC, one that not only presented a lopsided version of the way Operation Masterpiece had unfolded but raised questions about my integrity. The most damning section included a claim by a French participant that I planned to delay the Gardner sting until after my retirement in 2008, so that I could claim the $5 million museum reward for myself. It was a preposterous allegation. FBI agents aren’t eligible for rewards for cases they’ve worked, even after they retire. Everyone knows that.

Steaming, I printed out a copy and walked it over to my direct supervisor in Philadelphia, Mike Carbonell. Mike and I were the same age, though he’d been with the FBI a decade longer. Mike held the same job in Philadelphia as Fred did in Boston—supervisor of the bank robbery/violent crime squad.

When I walked into Mike’s office gripping Fred’s slanderous EC, it marked the first time in a decade I’d come to a supervisor for help. I was used to fixing my own problems.

“You need to read this,” I announced.

He closed the folder on his desk and took the document. To say
that Mike uses foul language is like saying Rembrandt painted a few self-portraits. By the time he got to page two, the expletives were flying—“Holy shit … He put all this bullshit in a goddamn EC? … What the fuck?”

I asked him what he thought I should do.

But Mike wasn’t done venting. “In twenty-eight years, never seen anything like this….”

I told Mike that I’d made a call to France and had learned that the remarks Fred cited had been made in jest.

“Well, then it’s obvious what’s happening,” he said. “You’re on the cusp of solving a huge case and these guys want to cut you out.”

“What should I do?” I repeated.

“You’re the one whose ass is on the line. You know going undercover is always voluntary. It’s up to you. You still comfortable going undercover with Fred or the guys in France who are running the operation? You trust them with your life?”

“No.” The quickness of my answer surprised me.

I asked Mike about getting the case transferred from Boston to a supervisor in Philadelphia, Miami, or Washington.

“Doubt it,” he said. “You know the drill. Nobody in Washington wants to risk pissing anyone off.”

Mike, who was nearing retirement, didn’t care if he made enemies. He forwarded his anger up the chain of command. And, in a rare move, Headquarters ordered Fred’s EC deleted from the FBI system.

Ultimately, senior officials in Washington convened a come-to-Jesus meeting at Headquarters to hash out the differences and try to salvage Operation Masterpiece. The result: I was now permitted to resume conversations with Laurenz. But I was ordered not to speak to Fred, and presumably he was ordered not to speak with me. Left open was the question of whether I could work undercover in France or Spain—and, even if we could get permission, whether I would work with Fred.

After the Washington meeting, we returned to the job at hand, trying to come up with ways to shore up my backstory, ways to convince the sellers that I was a high-end art broker, a player, not a cop. We came up with several ideas to solidify Sunny’s and Laurenz’s confidence in me. Under one scenario, the three of us would travel to Los Angeles, party, and bump into a Hollywood starlet who often helps the FBI. The celebrity would recognize me, stop to chat for thirty seconds, and leave the impression that she and I once did a deal together.

We didn’t end up doing the L.A. gig. Instead, we came up with a better way to ingratiate myself with them: I’d involve Sunny and Laurenz in two painting “deals,” one in Miami, one in France—and in each case, I’d bring Laurenz and Sunny along as my “partners.” As I had with Josh Baer in Santa Fe, I’d lead them to believe that we were partners in crime. Both deals, of course, would be fake, American and French undercover operations. In the U.S. deal, I’d sell forged paintings to undercover FBI agents posing as Colombian drug dealers aboard an undercover FBI yacht in Miami. The French deal would be similar, except that I’d sell fake paintings to French undercover agents in Marseilles.

I laid out the plan in a long e-mail to everyone involved. At the end, I wrote, “I caution everyone involved that in order to make this work we need complete cooperation and advocacy. Ladies and gentlemen, we all have to be on the same page on this.”

Once I got the green light, I started making preparations. I called Washington and arranged to borrow a sack full of diamonds and a half dozen Krugerrands from an FBI forfeiture evidence vault. I called Miami to lease the yacht and dug up a bunch of fake paintings for the first sale—six forgeries seized by the government long ago, imitations of works by Degas, Dalí, Klimt, O’Keeffe, Soutine, and Chagall. The Miami division agreed to supply a cadre of undercover FBI agents to help.

When everything was squared away, I called Sunny and Laurenz.

The call to Sunny was easy. I told him I needed his help as
muscle. He was so eager to make some cash, he said yes, no questions asked.

I approached Laurenz differently. He didn’t need money and he didn’t fancy himself a man of muscle, so I played to his weakness—he was so rich and so bored that he’d developed an odd passion for danger. He was an adrenaline freak. Laurenz loved to Jet Ski, sky-dive, snow ski, and make outrageously risky real estate deals. So when he balked at joining me on the yacht deal, I teased him about his manhood.

“I’ve known you for a year now, Laurenz,” I said. “You certainly talk a good game, drive a Rolls and all, but the truth is I’ve never seen you in action. And we’re talking about doing a $30 million deal together. Let’s just say I’d like to see how you handle something like this before I commit to something like that.”

“OK, OK, I do it with you, Bob,” he said. “But I can’t do it next week.”

“Why not?”

“Going on vacation.”

I bit my tongue. “Skiing again?”

“Hawaii.”

L
AURENZ WASN’T THE
only one headed to Hawaii.

Just as we geared up for the Miami yacht operation, my best ally in Washington, Eric Ives, was transferred to Honolulu. The move was unrelated to the Gardner case, simply part of the routine FBI rotation of young supervisors around the country every three years. But it was a huge loss. During the Gardner investigation, Eric repeatedly stood up to turf-conscious supervisors. On his final day, he even sent an e-mail imploring them to give me the space I needed to do my job.

The FBI did not replace Eric. It left his position as chief of the Major Theft Unit open, creating a vacuum. Many months later, things turned worse. The FBI reorganized its operations and eliminated the Major Theft Unit, scattering its programs to other sections.
The Art Crime Team was reassigned to the Violent Crime Section, where it instantly became a low priority, eclipsed by the FBI’s bread-and-butter duties, like catching kidnappers, gangsters, drug dealers, bank robbers, and fugitives.

Inside the bureaucracy, the Art Crime Team lost its juice.

W
ITH
L
AURENZ ON
vacation, the Miami/Marseilles boat stings remained on hold. But my supposed colleagues in France stayed busy.

On a Thursday call with Pierre, I learned that the French SIAT undercover chief and a Paris-based FBI agent now planned to try to squeeze me out and run the operation entirely in France. The same SIAT chief who’d once told me it was impossible for Laurenz to enter France now planned to sneak him in and do the deal without me. I was dumbfounded. It was one thing for the Boston supervisor to try to tell a street agent like me what to do, but it was quite another for an American colleague in Paris to conspire against me with a foreign police officer.

I told Pierre about Fred, his crazy EC, his rants, and the Washington meeting. I told him about losing Eric as unit chief and how it would hurt the FBI Art Crime Team. Pierre and I talked about the Miami boat deal, and when I mentioned that it would be delayed for three weeks because Laurenz was going on vacation in Hawaii, Pierre burst out laughing.

“What’s so damn funny?” I asked.

“My guys in Paris, your guys in Paris, Fred in Boston, Laurenz off sunning himself at the beach when you want to do a deal, losing your friend Eric from Washington,” he said. “Everyone is giving you the banana to slip on.”

T
HE NIGHT BEFORE
the Miami yacht deal, I brought the six fake paintings to Laurenz’s house. Sunny helped me carry them inside.

The three of us sat under palm trees by the pool and smoked cigars, steps from the dock and Laurenz’s beloved Jet Skis.

I laid out the plan—the six paintings for $1.2 million. Laurenz tried to act cool, but I could tell he was excited. I doubted Laurenz ever got his hands dirty; he paid others to do it. Sunny sat quietly and smoked, sipping a bottle of Evian. When I finished, I asked Sunny if he had any questions.

“Non
, I am OK,” he said. “I have my insurance. Got my gun.”

“No, no weapons,” I said. “If they pat us down on the boat, it’ll insult our hosts. I’ve never done a deal with a gun. Never needed it.”

Sunny laughed. “And I’ve never done a deal without one!” Sunny turned to Laurenz. “Tell Bob what Patrick said.” Patrick was one of their contacts on the French Riviera.

“He wants to sell us about ten paintings,” Laurenz said. “There is a Monet and I think others. He will send pictures. He says they are worth forty million euros and he wants six million.”

“What’s that in dollars?” I said. “Ten million?”

“Mmm, maybe more like nine,” Laurenz said. “You interested? With these guys, you don’t screw around. Once you agree to buy the paintings, you must follow through.”

“Or?” I said, acting dumb to try to provoke a reaction.

Sunny scoffed and stood, agitated, pacing, and speaking rapidly in French. Laurenz translated: “We must be entirely serious. We do not want to go to war with these people. They are stone-cold killers. They killed my best friend. He was driving in his car and the assassin pulled up at a light on a motorcycle and shot him. We are dealing with loosely organized gangs. Maybe two hundred guys in all, in France, Spain, Serbia, Corsica. Different gangs have different caches of paintings. Some of these guys have been in prison for years, and have been hiding the paintings, waiting out their sentences. Some paintings are badly damaged because they’ve been taken from their original frames. One of the big Rembrandts you seek is badly damaged. Our friend Patrick is going to try to get it repaired.”

Alarmed, I interrupted Sunny’s spiel. “No, no. Tell him not to do that. It might make it worse, decrease the value. Let me get the professionals to do that. I know some guys.”