Master Thieves (16 page)

Berghman decided that the best thing for him to do was to seek legal advice, and he contacted Bernard Grossberg, a Boston lawyer who had ably represented his son in a criminal case. The three of them—Grossberg, Jeanine Guarente, Guarente's daughter from an earlier marriage, and Berghman—reached a deal: If Guarente was able to find out what had happened to the paintings, then the three of them would split whatever reward money was forthcoming.

From the outset, Grossberg was enthused by the prospect of a recovery, and he already had reason to suspect a connection between Guarente and the Gardner masterpieces. Grossberg had represented one of the four defendants in a federal criminal case that had just been completed, and Guarente's name had come up several times in the FBI files as being a possible link to the paintings.

“We need tangible proof to convince the museum and the FBI that what you're saying is a legitimate lead,” Grossberg stressed to Berghman and Jeanine Guarente. “You've got to come up with concrete evidence.”

Twice in a matter of months Jeanine produced what she claimed were chips she had collected from paintings her late father had at their home in Madison, Maine. Twice Grossberg presented them to Arnold Hiatt, a trustee for the Gardner Museum who had worked tirelessly to recover the paintings. But on both occasions the chips turned out to be fakes. In fact, the second batch turned out to have come from the edges of a magazine that someone had snipped off.

“I was very hopeful about this when the chips came,” Grossberg said. “Unfortunately, testing proved them otherwise, so all those hopes evaporated.”

The episode involving Guarente's daughter and Berghman—and the phony chips—was never made known to the FBI. In fact, both Grossberg and Berghman told me the FBI never questioned them regarding their interactions. And Hiatt says he thought so little of what they had to offer that he never passed on the information to the FBI or the museum's key investigator, Anthony Amore. Yet eight years later, the FBI was strongly suggesting that Guarente had been a central player in the stashing of the artwork

_______________________

Elene Guarente
was having a hard time financially after Robert's death. The Italian restaurant she had opened near her home in Madison, Maine, had closed and she was living on Social Security disability assistance. She had lost more than fifty pounds, she says from the stress, and on top of it all her car had broken down and it needed at least $1,000 in repairs.

Still, while she admits she needed money desperately, Elene denies she summoned the feds. Instead she is adamant that in March 2010, the FBI reached out to her, telling Elene that they wanted to talk to her about the Gardner heist and the missing paintings.

She wouldn't talk. Instead she reached out to Robert Gentile.

Gentile was her late husband's good friend. Guarente had told her Gentile would look after her if anything ever happened to her. She knew he would honor that.

“Bobby, I'm in need of money,” she began. “I know my husband gave you those stolen paintings. You need to come to Maine to talk to Earle Berghman. He's my soul mate. You two need to sort this out. If you don't come, I'm calling back the feds.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Gentile told her. “But I'll come.” She was his old friend's wife and he felt it was the right thing to do.

Berghman and Gentile met in a food court at a Portland mall. It was April 2010. Berghman didn't beat around the bush. He looked Gentile right in the eye and told him, “I know Bobby gave you those paintings.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Gentile shot back.

Berghman thought he was lying. Maybe this was what happened to the paintings that Guarente's daughter told him five years earlier she had seen hanging in her father's house—he had given them to Gentile. Gentile kept his head down as he denied Berghman's accusations. He wouldn't look him in the eye. Instead, he told Berghman that if Elene needed money, why didn't she call the Boston lawyer who had provided her late husband with a $30,000 loan in the late 1980s that he used to buy his first house in central Maine. Maybe he could help Elene out now, Gentile said he told Berghman.

And, Gentile told me, there was another reason he remembered the lawyer—Guarente had mentioned the lawyer's name to him in relationship to the Gardner paintings years before, and that Gentile thought the reference was serious enough that he passed the information on to the FBI.

He was right. Sometime in early 2010, Elene Guarente had summoned the FBI's Geoff Kelly and Anthony Amore, security chief for the Gardner, to her Maine home and was relaying her suspicions about her late husband, Gentile, and the stolen Gardner paintings.

This is what she told them: In the early 1990s, her husband showed her a painting shortly after they moved into the “white farmhouse” in Madison, Maine. They never spoke about the paintings again until 2002 or 2003, when her husband, who was then sick with cancer, told her they were taking a drive to
Portland to have lunch with his old friend Bobby Gentile and his wife, she said.

On their way home from the lunch, Elene told the investigators, Guarente had told her he had given three paintings to Gentile for safekeeping in Connecticut.

“My Bobby was sick then,” she recalled later. “He told me he wanted them left with someone who'd make sure they were safe and would be able to provide for me. He thought he could trust Bobby Gentile with that job. The next year my Bobby died and I never heard anything about it after that.”

“That's ridiculous,” Gentile practically spits back when told of the tale Elene Guarente shared. “I remember that lunch. But not because Guarente handed off any paintings to me. That's crazy. He didn't. What I remember most was that Elene ordered the twin lobsters. Two of them! And we were only having lunch!”

Chapter Eight

Hollywood Handsome

E
lene Guarente
wasn't the only one reaching out to Robert Gentile in recent years, asking for his assistance in recovering the stolen Gardner artwork. David Turner, who had been suspected from the earliest days of being involved in the 1990 heist, was doing the same thing from his prison cell in New York.

In November 2010, several months after first being contacted by Elene, Gentile received a letter from Turner, who was serving a thirty-year sentence in federal prison for trying to rob an armored car headquarters, reminding him that they had known each other through Guarente. Turner was hoping to help in the recovery of the Gardner paintings and asked Gentile if he would be willing to help him out by calling a former girlfriend of Turner's who was now living in Boston.

Initially, Gentile says, his gut told him to steer clear. But he was in a bind with the feds, trying to maneuver his way out of the bust for selling prescription drugs, and he knew
that helping to recover the Gardner pieces might just be his get-out-of-jail-free card.

So when Geoff Kelly, the special agent in charge of the Gardner investigation, asked Gentile to call the girlfriend as a favor to the FBI, he decided right away that it couldn't hurt his chances. Gentile was beginning to see the possibility that providing information or assistance that provided the federal agents with a lead to the recovery of the stolen artwork might also put him in line to collect some of the $5 million in reward money the museum had long made available. If dealing with Turner was part of what he needed to go through to help the feds recover the paintings, then so be it.

After a day or two of exchanging messages, Gentile finally spoke to the woman, in a phone call that was taped by federal agents. The girlfriend told Gentile that Turner wanted him to meet with two of his old friends from Boston, both ex-convicts with long prison records.

Gentile knew one of the two, Richard Gillis, who like Turner had long been associated with the Rossetti crime gang out of East Boston. Gillis was known as a tough guy. In fact, he'd survived being wounded twice in gunfights, the last in 1994.

Gentile thanked her for the phone call and said he would call her back to set up the meeting.

Kelly pressed Gentile to agree to the meeting, even suggesting that an agent accompany him. The agent, of course, would serve two purposes: He'd offer protection for Gentile, but he'd also try to make his own ties to the ex-convicts.

“You want me to help you put someone on the inside of a gang in Boston?” Gentile said to Kelly, balking. “I don't want to have anything more to do with any of this.”

Gentile walked out of the room and stopped cooperating with the FBI from that point on.

_______________________

David A. Turner
was so good-looking as a young man that his lawyer referred to him as “Hollywood.” But Turner was also extraordinarily reckless and manipulative, so much so that he had an affair with the lawyer's daughter-in-law, causing her to lose her husband and Turner to lose his lawyer. It was an unfortunate turn of events because Turner was starting to get into serious trouble.

By the summer that he graduated from high school, police were questioning Turner and his best friend about the murder of a social worker who was unlucky enough to offer them a lift from Provincetown to their home ninety miles away. A few years later, it was Turner's best friend who was murdered, and Turner himself was the prime suspect. Charles “Chewie” Pappas had been spilling to the Massachusetts state police about some of Turner's criminal exploits and was about to take the stand against Turner when he was shot to death.

But to those who grew up with him, Turner was anything but an evil kid. He was a standout on the football and ski teams, dated the beautiful daughter of the town's most prestigious political leader, and liked hanging out with friends at Sunset Lake, sipping beers and listening to The Clash deep into the night. Sure, he liked to raise a little hell—as evidenced by the quotes he left behind on his 1985 Braintree High School yearbook, “Better to burn out, than to fade away,” read one, from a Neil Young song; the other from Billy Joel, “Only the good die young”—but that wasn't so unusual.

Turner lost his father at thirteen, and sometime in the mid-1980s, before he had even graduated from high school, he met and fell under the influence of Robert Guarente, the old bank robber and mobster with ties to organized crime figures throughout greater Boston. It was a perfect match: Guarente liked how tough and aggressive Turner was—he soon began referring to Turner as “my kid”—and Turner liked how close Guarente was with serious mobsters.

Turner has emerged as a key figure in the FBI's connect-the-dots account of what happened to the Gardner masterpieces, and perhaps the architect of the actual theft. But the details of his ties to the heist are even more tenuous than those of Guarente and Gentile.

Turner has steadfastly denied that he has any knowledge about the theft, and continues to say he is not writing a book about his role in it, as it has been reported he is doing. He also swears that he isn't cooperating with the FBI in trying to figure out what happened to the stolen paintings, and that he was misquoted by an author who reported that Turner told him he should be on the cover of his book on the Gardner case.

Despite those denials, the FBI has suspected almost from the start that Turner played a role in the Gardner theft, and that he was in fact one of the two men disguised as Boston police officers who carried out the heist. Agents even went so far as to send his fingerprints to the FBI's lab in Quantico, Virginia, in the early aftermath of the heist but failed to come up with any match.

_______________________

Bobby Guarente
always told David Turner to keep his plans and exploits to himself and Turner took it to heart. As a result Guarente trusted him and wouldn't have thought twice about telling Turner how vulnerable the Gardner Museum was to theft, something Guarente would have learned from his family ties to Stephen and Ralph Rossetti, major figures in an East Boston crime gang. The Rossettis in turn had plotted a Gardner break-in with Louis Royce from as far back as the early 1980s.

Remarkably, Massachusetts state police had Turner under surveillance during the months leading up to and just after
the Gardner theft. But the crime they were investigating him for had nothing to do with art theft. Instead, Turner was being watched in connection with his suspected involvement in a widespread cocaine distribution network operating out of an auto repair garage shop in Dorchester operated by Carmello Merlino, a low-level mobster.

The surveillance, which lasted between 1989 and 1991, centered on the Dorchester shop and the handful of people, including Turner, who were implicated. On several occasions the police even tracked Turner's travels.

Under customary procedure, such an operation would have been a joint federal-state investigation, which would have brought more agents into the probe, and undoubtedly more surveillance of Turner and its other principal targets.

But this investigation had been funded by a separate grant to the Massachusetts attorney general's office, and involved only Massachusetts state police and local police officers, so there was no coordination with agents from the FBI or Drug Enforcement Administration. Might a greater surveillance force have prevented the Gardner heist by interrupting the conspirators in their planning stage, or even as it was being carried out? We can only speculate.

The surveillance, even though it was conducted randomly according to the availability of officers assigned to the trafficking case, produced several major coups, such as the recovery of the pizza box used for a cocaine delivery, and provided the physical evidence needed to indict both Merlino and Turner's high school friend Charles Pappas, who later wound up shot.

It also led to a rare miss: Officers on surveillance during the sting observed Turner as he carried a “Chinese vase” into the Boston office of a lawyer just eighteen months after the Gardner theft. Turner was not stopped and questioned about the vase, but a Chinese “beaker” was among the thirteen items stolen from the museum. Alfred A. Sollitto, the Boston lawyer,
later said in an interview that Turner, whom he knew socially, often brought him antiques he thought Sollitto might be interested in buying. But that day he had no interest in the vase and Turner took it away. He said he couldn't recall what the vase Turner showed to him looked like, but doubted it was anything valuable or had come from the Gardner heist.

The surveillance had been authorized by a Massachusetts judge on the basis of a sixty-four-page affidavit submitted by a state police officer summarizing the investigation into the cocaine ring. A confidential informant was quoted in the affidavit as stating that Pappas, Turner, and a third associate were “involved in the distribution of controlled substances and that (the informant) in 1989 was present with Pappas and Turner while they were in possession of what Turner and Pappas stated . . . was a kilogram of cocaine.”

The affidavit then quoted Turner as telling the informant he was going to drive his Corvette to Florida in March 1990—the month the Gardner theft occurred—“to pick up a large amount of cocaine and (return) to Massachusetts with the controlled substance.”

Perhaps Turner was using his involvement in the cocaine trafficking network to divert investigators' attention from his involvement in the Gardner heist, or perhaps he was involved in both schemes. The affidavit provides some tantalizing—if conflicting—clues.

After hearing from his source that Turner was on a cocaine run to Florida, a detective involved in the investigation called Turner's residence in early March 1990, days before the Gardner theft, and asked for him. A woman answered the phone and said that Turner “was on a mini vacation in Florida.”

While there, according to other investigative documents, Turner used his American Express credit card to pay for $645 worth of merchandise from a “Spy Shops” store in Miami Beach. Although there is no inventory as to what Turner
bought, the store, according to its advertisements at the time, specialized in electronic equipment that could monitor police calls as well as conduct surveillance or determine if a person was being targeted for surveillance.

That purchase was made on March 15, 1990, and the receipt shows Turner's signature. The Gardner theft would take place 1,500 miles away and less than three days later in Boston.

David A. Turner, now serving a long federal prison sentence for participating in an attempted armored car heist, has long been rumored to have been involved in the Gardner theft. A good friend recently said that Turner was writing a book about the case, but Turner denied that as well as any role in the heist.

Turner's credit card was next used on March 20—two days after the theft—at Dollar Rent-A-Car in Fort Lauderdale to pay the $530.94 charge for a rental car. Again, Turner's signature was used to sign the credit card voucher, though it also contained another person's Social Security number, which investigators say suggests someone other than Turner might have been using his credit card that day. I was unable to trace the Social Security number written on the receipt.

Regardless, it is certain that Turner was back in Boston at least a few days after the robbery. Public records show he appeared at a 9
a.m.
hearing at Quincy District Court, near his
Braintree home, and pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of driving while his license had been suspended three years before. He paid a fine and left the courthouse.

Certainly the composite drawing of one of the two thieves bears a strong resemblance to Turner, with his cocky smile and the mischievous cast in his right eye. The museum's night watchman, who spent the longest time with the two thieves and helped draw up the composites later, told me in 2013 that Turner did look like one of the pair.

While Turner denies he had anything to do with the theft, sources familiar with the FBI investigation confirm that Des­Lauriers had him in mind when he made the startling 2013 announcement that the FBI knew who had carried out the theft. Also, while Turner denied that he is writing a book about the theft, a close friend gushed about it as recently as 2013.

“David's decided to go ahead and write his story,” said Chris Ruggiero, Turner's longtime friend who speaks to him frequently on the phone. “He's going to reach out to [actor] Mark Wahlberg's company to see if they want to get an option on it.” Wahlberg grew up in Boston.

It would take a Wahlberg-like script to capture Turner's life, including repeated criminal offenses that, even when he was apprehended, rarely resulted in serious punishment. And in no period was he so criminally active as the months before and following the Gardner theft, raising again the questions of why and how he would have been involved in other robberies if he had just pulled off the largest single art theft in world history.