Master Thieves (12 page)

In addition, Wittman says, Fred—who had never before traveled to a foreign country on official business—was quick to offend his French counterparts on a trip to France, seeking to assert the FBI's control of the case even though many
of the dealings were to take place inside that country. Despite Wittman's pleas, FBI officials refused to wrest control of the investigation from this supervisor because of the historic reluctance of those at FBI headquarters to overrule the decisions of the agency's local supervisors.

Wittman described his frustrations investigating the lead, which he described as the best the FBI had gotten in the Gardner theft, in his 2010 autobiography
Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World's Stolen Treasures.

“Bureaucracies and turf fighting on both sides of the Atlantic had destroyed the best chance in a decade to rescue the Gardner paintings,” Wittman wrote. “We'd blown an opportunity to infiltrate a major art crime ring in France, a loose network of mobsters holding as many as 70 stolen masterpieces.”

More recently, Wittman stood behind his criticisms voiced against the FBI's tradition of tightly guarding its investigations and refusing to share control or information with local agencies.

“If anything, I've gotten more convinced that the Bureau needs to open up with other federal agencies as well as local and state law enforcement,” Wittman says. “To close itself off to the intelligence, expertise, and resources that exist elsewhere just to be in control of the investigation makes no sense, whether you're talking about the Gardner case or any other one that has been as drawn-out and complicated as it has.”

Part III

The Feds

Chapter Five

Eight on a Scale of Ten

O
n the anniversary
of the Gardner heist, typically, Anne Hawley would release a statement underscoring what the loss of the thirteen pieces meant to the art-loving public and, likewise, plead for their return and ask that whoever might be holding the paintings keep them in dry, climate-controlled surroundings. In other years, the FBI would mark the anniversary of the theft without much more than a press release or perhaps an interview with the special agent in charge of the Boston office, emphasizing that the case was still under investigation.

But this time was different. The day before the twenty-third anniversary in 2013, the FBI called a press conference to announce the progress it had made in its investigation of the Gardner heist. In the days leading up to the event there was a definite uncertainty among those of us who had been
following the case about what to expect. I made my usual calls, but no one seemed to know what day the event would be held, or even where. Some sources said it would take place at the FBI's office in downtown Boston; others said it would be at the museum itself.

Then a previously helpful investigator, with whom I had been sharing information on the case for what seemed like ages, suddenly distanced himself from me. When I heard that some of the brass within the FBI were considering having the press conference at FBI headquarters in Washington, DC, I tracked down my source and pressed him.

“On a scale of one to ten, what number would you give to the importance of what they're going to say tomorrow?” I asked him, almost desperate for any tidbit of information.

“Eight,” he said flatly, then hung up.

He had plenty to compare it to. Long before the midnight theft at the Gardner Museum shocked the world, Massachusetts had seen more than its share of art heists. Undoubtedly, because of the unusually large number of museums, galleries, libraries, and private homes that were graced with rare beauties, or maybe because of the shockingly poor security in those places, police and federal agents had chased dozens of such thefts.

In the 1970s, only four years apart, Rembrandts were stolen on three occasions: twice from Boston's Museum of Fine Arts and once from the Worcester Art Museum. Six paintings, on loan from Harvard's Fogg Museum, were stolen from the home of Harvard president Derek Bok and his wife, noted author Sissela Bok, while they slept in 1976.

Three years before that, three Jackson Pollocks, valued at an estimated $1 million, were stolen from the Cambridge home of a Harvard professor. One of the Pollocks was recovered three years later when George S. Abrams, the lawyer for the professor, found similarities between the break-in at his
client's home and a robbery nearby in which the robbers were caught. Spurred by the detective work of Abrams, himself a respected art collector, Cambridge district judge Arthur Sherman made a deal with the robbers: Return the Pollocks and get a more lenient sentence. One of the Pollocks suddenly showed up a short time later. (A second one showed up years later when the holder sought to get it officially authenticated as a Pollock, and the third remains missing to this day.)

Shortly thereafter, nine paintings, including works by Monticelli, Gainsborough, and Maxfield, were stolen from the Brockton home of the industrialist H. James Stone in May 1977. Then, less than a year after that, six masterpieces, including a Rembrandt, an El Greco, and a Bruegel, were stolen from a Cohasset residence. Remarkably, those last six were recovered the next year in an abandoned Dorchester parking lot after the owner refused to pay the ransom.

Despite the steady stream of thefts, these losses were treated with chilling nonchalance by law enforcement. As Daniel Golden reported in 1989 in the
Boston Globe Sunday Magazine,
only two police officers in the US investigated art thefts full-time: one in Los Angeles and the other in New York. The FBI, which is called in on all thefts of goods worth $50,000 or more, does not have a single agent concentrating solely on art. By contrast, Italy's art theft unit has eighty agents and has recovered 100,000 items since 1970.

“Very little police manpower is devoted to investigating art theft,” Constance Lowenthal, director of the International Foundation for Art Research in New York City, told Golden at the time. “Police departments don't realize that it's different from stealing a television. You have to have a certain vocabulary and knowledge. [It]'s a billion-dollar problem getting very little attention.”

Golden's article, ironically published about a year before the Gardner heist, carried a clear warning that museums,
especially those the size of the Gardner, were in peril. The value of art in the 1980s hanging in galleries and homes around the US, but especially in well-to-do Boston, had skyrocketed, but law enforcement had shown little ability or inclination to protect the pieces.

Unfortunately for the Gardner Museum, things didn't really start to change until after they were so audaciously robbed. Museums of all sizes realized they too had been operating with inadequate security in place. People like Steven Keller, the Florida-based museum security specialist hired by the Gardner, found business booming, as museums rushed to install state-of-the-art equipment to improve their surveillance and alarm systems.

“No one would admit it, but there was a common sentiment amongst Boston's museum set after seeing what had happened at the Gardner Museum. ‘There but for fortune . . . ‘” Keller now says, thinking of how vulnerable his clients were before they called him.

The capabilities, not to mention the interests, of law enforcement changed dramatically in the years after the Gardner theft. Lawmakers, too, got in on the act. Edward M. Kennedy, the senior senator from Massachusetts at the time of the heist, whose grandfather had been a personal friend of Isabella Gardner, offered museum director Anne Hawley his considerable political help after the theft. By 1994, he had offered an amendment to federal law, expanding the FBI's jurisdiction to prosecute theft of art and other cultural antiquities from museums, and increasing the maximum sentence convicted art thieves could face, from six to twenty years.

In turn, the FBI created an art theft squad, concentrating solely on the crimes. The seven agents currently assigned to that squad have participated in numerous undercover operations aimed at striking as such thefts are being planned and attacking the attendant fencing operations.

Perhaps if such a force had been in place in 1984, the squad—or a consultant working with them—would have taken more seriously the 1984 theft of four original paintings worth $40,000 from a gallery in Hingham, Massachusetts. On that occasion, the owner, Patricia Jobe Pierce, was beaten when she resisted two thieves who walked off with the paintings. Although Pierce was hospitalized as a result of the attack, and the local police investigated the theft as a legitimate one, the FBI considered the assault part of an elaborate fraud. Among the four stolen paintings was one by Edmund C. Tarbell that Pierce had bought back from a customer after she complained it was a forgery. The feds turned their attention to Pierce, suspicious that she had arranged the attack and theft. Outraged, Pierce hired a private investigator, a well-respected Boston police detective, who corroborated that the theft was legitimate and that the injuries Pierce had suffered were real.

Using family connections that Pierce had with then–vice president George Bush, Pierce and the private detective then flew to Washington and met with FBI director William Webster to complain about the handling of the case, and about the FBI agents in Boston. Webster promised to look into the case, but neither the detective nor Pierce ever heard anything more about the matter, and the case remains unsolved to this day.

Eerily, the sketches of the two thieves that a police artist made from Pierce's description look remarkably like the sketches of the two men who, disguised to look like police officers, pulled off the Gardner theft, with one similarly described as taller than the other, and the smaller man more swarthy in appearance than his accomplice.

“I can't tell you it's the same two men,” says Pierce now. “But I do believe if the FBI had made more of my case, given it more publicity, maybe people at the museum would have been more careful, more on guard.”

There may be a similar problem with the way paintings are transported and sold. In 2006, a man named Charles “Bill” Hofmann was hired by David Rieff, the son of writer and activist Susan Sontag, to transport several storage units in Kingston, New York, filled with artwork and other personal items belonging to Sontag and her former husband following their deaths, to storage space in New York City. Working alone, Hofmann could have helped himself to far more expensive pieces, including signed original photographs taken by Sontag's close friend, Annie Leibovitz, but the painting he took a fancy to, an eighteenth-century portrait of a stuffy-looking British nobleman, happened to catch his fancy. So, rather than placing the piece in the back of the truck with the dozens of other pieces, Hofmann placed it behind his driver's seat and simply brought it home.

In March 2007, Hofmann brought the painting, by old English master Allan Ramsay, to Sotheby's in New York, which, like all reputable auction houses, claims to do a rigorous job of making sure the purported owners of the 10,000 such pieces it sells annually actually do own the pieces.

Even when pressed on the Hofmann case, a Sotheby's spokesperson and its lawyers contend that because of the rigorous protocol it maintained, the auction house still has never sold a stolen painting. In addition to mandating paperwork that proves an individual owns the painting he or she is seeking to auction, the one step that Sotheby's—as well as every other gallery and major auction house—takes before putting any piece up for bid is to check with the Art Loss Register. With offices in both London and New York, the Register maintains a database with the identities of more than 100,000 paintings and other works of art that owners have listed as stolen. Sotheby's maintains that the auction house checked with the Art Loss Register to determine if the Ramsay was listed as stolen. Of course, since Rieff was unaware
that the painting was missing, it was not listed in the database of stolen pieces.

Remarkably, Hofmann's lack of documentation didn't stop Sotheby's from accepting it for auction. As a work by an English master, it was decided that the best place for the painting,
Portrait of Lock Rollinson of Chadlington,
would be offered for sale by Sotheby's London office. Sotheby's catalog for sales that day, June 4, 2007, provided an asking price of $30,000–40,000 and described the piece as being in fine condition for a work that had been painted circa 1770.

The canvas has been lined. The painting is stable and is in need of no further attention. Examination under ultraviolet light reveals a thick varnish which obscures a clear reading. There is evidence of some repaint along the lower right hand portion of the painted oval. There is evidence of some retouching in the sitter's face. It is not possible to penetrate the varnish layer with ultraviolet light, but there would appear to be evidence of older retouching in the background and in the sitter's face.

Hofmann attended the auction—it was his first trip overseas—with his mother, and he was excited as the first bids on the painting came in. But just as quickly, a final bid of $47,000 was soon accepted and it was all over. After Sotheby's took its customary cut, Hofmann was mailed a check for about $34,000.

Hofmann used the money to make repairs to his home, also adding a back deck.

I approached Hofmann not long after the auction, after learning how easy it had been for him to steal the painting and fence it through Sotheby's. He maintained that Sotheby's never pressed him for paperwork after he had told them that the painting was a family heirloom and he had no documentation
to prove it. Also, he said that he had gotten possession of the painting legitimately; Rieff had told him for doing such a good job in transporting the artwork and antiques to New York City he could take any piece he wanted.

But Rieff denied that claim, and in March 2011 a federal grand jury indicted Hofmann on two counts of transporting and selling a stolen item. He pleaded guilty to the charges the following year. Hofmann was placed on probation for three years and ordered to make restitution of $34,200 to Sotheby's for bilking them into selling the piece he had stolen.

_______________________

The night before
the FBI's press conference, I couldn't sleep. I tossed and turned, trying to figure out what was going to be said, and wondering if a recovery was about to be announced. What startling development were the FBI and the museum going to share that I had missed in my reporting on the case for the
Boston Globe
for more than a decade?

The basic elements of what had happened the night of the theft—who might have been involved and, more important, where the paintings might be—were always kept confidential. Making such details public could jeopardize the investigation; that was the FBI's familiar refrain. But in March 2013 there was a sense that the FBI might be ready to provide something more, or perhaps even something definite, about what it had discovered.

Richard S. DesLauriers, the special agent in charge of the FBI's Boston office, did not disappoint in his announcement. In a gray pinstripe suit, with a bright yellow tie and his rectangle, wire-rimmed glasses pressed firmly to his temple, and flanked by US attorney Carmen Ortiz and the three investigators who had worked the longest on the case, DesLauriers declared that the FBI knew who had committed the robbery,
knew the trail taken to hide at least some of the masterpieces, and even that an attempt had been made in 2002 to sell the pieces in Philadelphia.

My contact had been right. DesLauriers' seven-minute statement on Monday morning, March 18, 2013, at FBI headquarters in Boston was a bombshell. For the first time in the twenty-three-year history of the investigation, the FBI was providing the details of what the hard work of its investigators had yielded and, perhaps even more important, what still needed to be done.