Master Thieves (18 page)

Although Youngworth had backed out of a deal with the FBI to return the paintings himself, Merlino figured he had a way of convincing Youngworth to give up the artwork to
him. He was going to kidnap Youngworth's young son and hold him hostage until Youngworth, then in prison, decided to deal with him.

As this plan suggests, Merlino was becoming more and more desperate in trying to find ways to recover the paintings, and at the same time becoming more and more suspicious of the FBI. He refused to have any conversations on the phone or inside the garage, fearing it was bugged, and believing the agents had hired lip readers to decipher his conversations when he was outside.

The only person Merlino seemed to trust was Richard Chicofsky, a well-known FBI informant and local scam artist who prided himself on dealing with criminal associates and their lawyers, as well as federal investigators and prosecutors. In late 1997, over a two-day period, Romano watched as Merlino had conversations about the missing Gardner paintings with Chicofsky, Turner, Guarente, and Leppo.

“Those Gardner paintings are coming up more and more,” Romano told David Nadolski, his FBI handler, on New Year's Eve 1997. “I think this Chicofsky guy is the man in charge. He's going to get them back for Merlino.”

Since he was focused on Merlino's interest in striking the armored car headquarters, Nadolski brought the information to Neil Cronin, the FBI's lead agent on the Gardner theft at the time. Within days, Cronin and Nadolski arranged to meet privately with Chicofsky at the cafeteria of a Veterans Affairs clinic in Boston.

Everyone knew Chicofsky as “Fat Richie.” He weighed close to three hundred pounds but, like TV star Jackie Gleason a generation before, he maintained an air of sophistication with a preference for silk suits and men's cologne.

“Richie, we hear you're talking about the stolen Gardner paintings with Carmello Merlino,” Cronin said to him.

“I might be able to do something for you there,” Chicofsky told the agents. “But I need to know if you'll come through for me, if I do this for you.”

He went on to explain that he had become friends with a Chinese woman who might be facing deportation over an expired visa.

“You help me, and I might be able to help you with those paintings,” Chicofsky said.

“You mean you might have access to the paintings?” Nadolski asked him directly.

“Not me,” Chicofsky said. “Merlino is giving me hints that he's able to get his hands on them.”

Chicofsky asked the agents to go along with a scheme. He wanted to play along with Merlino and his plans for recovering the paintings but then trick him so that Chicofsky wound up with the paintings. That way he, and not Merlino, would get the $5 million reward.

Confused, Nadolski went back to Romano and asked him, “Tell me again, what's the relationship between these two guys? Who's got the paintings, Merlino or Chicofsky?”

Romano said it wasn't clear to him but his gut told him that it was Merlino who held the upper hand and Chicofsky was trying to con his way into Merlino's good graces. Cronin went back to Merlino and pressed him—did he have the paintings or not? Merlino said he didn't have them within reach but was working to locate them.

On being debriefed by Cronin, Nadolski shook his head in disbelief that the two aging con men were now trying to con each other over the missing Gardner paintings. He was glad he was not the case agent in the 1990 robbery, but instead was concentrating on the more straightforward matter of Merlino's plans for hitting the armored car headquarters.

But having Romano agree to assist him in doing whatever it took to infiltrate—and bring down—Merlino's operation
gave Nadolski an enviable weapon. If Romano, with his nervous manner and skinny arms marked with heroin tracks, was the picture of an ex-convict, then Nadolski, with a friendly demeanor and a no-nonsense professionalism, was the epitome of a federal agent. He had been in the FBI for more than ten years and was known for his ability to gain the confidence of informants.

A bond of friendship and trust slowly grew between them and for much of 1998 Romano, playing the role of the loser kid inside the Dorchester auto body shop Merlino used as the center of his criminal operations, reported back to Nadolski what he saw and heard going on there.

Totally unaware that Romano was working as an informant for the FBI, Merlino trusted him more and more. He pressed him on whether he knew anyone without a criminal record who might be able to land a guard's job at the Loomis-Fargo armored car headquarters in Easton. Once the friend had landed the job, Merlino said, he could put together a crew to rob the place of the $50 million he believed was held there during weekends.

The friend Romano found for the job was in fact an undercover agent the FBI had made ready for the role. He was prepared to start working at Loomis-Fargo and then slowly earn Merlino's trust. Nadolski told Romano that the only way they could go forward to target Merlino's scheme was if Romano agreed to play a bigger role, and wear a wire to secretly record his conversations with Merlino. According to an unpublished memoir Romano later wrote, Nadolski had been able to win over his trust by being honest with him about the perils of what they were doing and how he would be protected. But the prospect of a new life in the federal witness protection program also appealed to him.

“How many chances had I been given by my own father and messed up?” he wrote. “Dave thought a fresh start
would appeal to me, and he was right. I loved the idea from the start.”

Nadolski had his goal for the operation: If it worked, it would mean the two of them—the G-man and the ex-con who had been a lifelong heroin addict—would be responsible for the biggest undercover success in the history of the Boston FBI office.

Merlino began talking about the armored car score almost from the time Romano went to work for his auto body shop in late 1997. He soon drafted his nephew Billy into the plan, but still several more were needed to carry out the score. For the next year, Romano, who never graduated from high school and battled drug addiction for his entire life, tried to keep the FBI informed of what was going at Merlino's auto body shop, and the two biggest investigations being tracked inside it: the missing Gardner paintings and planning of a $50 million armored car heist.

The two cases came together in early 1999. Merlino put together the five members of the crew to carry out the robbery of the armored car headquarters—including “Hollywood” David Turner and Stephen Rossetti.

The FBI agents had gotten word from Romano the night before that the group was going ahead with the robbery plans. With Romano wearing the wire that secretly taped the conversation, the group had met at a pancake house a short distance from Merlino's garage to go over the final details.

Merlino was worried about the guards. “Just supposing whatever fuckin' freaky thing happened that these two motherfuckers or one of them can get up,” he blustered.

“He's not gonna get up,” Rossetti said. “I'll make sure these guys are secured.”

The guards, it was promised, would be tied with nooses that would tighten if they moved.

Turner said little, allowing Merlino and Rossetti to carry on about how they were ready to handle any surprise. Turner worried that if the police saw him and Merlino together, they might suspect they were up to something sinister. And he worried about the score itself. When robberies are under way, “a half hour feels like three hours,” Turner said. But he said he was ready if the need came to “throw down” with any police who tried to stop him.

Rossetti made up in bluster what Turner may have lacked. At one point, a night or two before the theft was to take place, Rossetti and Romano sat together in the back of Merlino's garage in a van that would be used in the robbery, going over the final details of the roles each would play.

An active member of his uncle's East Boston criminal gang, Stephen Rossetti was involved in armed robberies in the Greater Boston area in the 1970s and 1980s.

“Steve Rossetti so loves himself and his criminal prowess, the dude is off his chain,” Romano wrote later of the encounter. “The quiet, up and coming wiseguy, closely connected to New England mob boss Cadillac Frank Salemme, Steve could not shut up! Him and I were bonding back there in the mini-van.”

Rossetti's big concern was about the weapons he and Turner would be bringing to the heist—“equipment,” he called
it. Included in the arsenal was a Ruger Mini-14 semiautomatic rifle. At one point, in showing Romano how he would carry the rifle into the armored car headquarters, Rossetti put his hands on Romano's lower stomach, in the exact same place he was usually wearing his tape recorder.

Luckily, he wasn't wearing it that night.

“I was well aware that after all the recording I had done, all the meetings and phone calls with the feds, all the dry runs to Easton (the location of the warehouse), the whole investigation and probably my next birthday would have gone up in smoke if I had that recorder on me,” Romano wrote.

Turner focused on the details of the robbery and how it would proceed. There would be three vehicles—Merlino alone in a getaway car; Billy, his nephew, driving the van laden with the weapons and with Turner and Rossetti in the back; and Romano in his own van, which on the sign from his friend, the guard on the inside, he would drive inside the warehouse and fill with $50 million.

Eerily similar to the two “police officers” who had pulled off the Gardner Museum heist nine years before, Turner and Rossetti carried walkie-talkies and communicated with each other only through them. Also, Turner reminded the crew that once the theft was completed, they needed to make certain they found the device that captured their entry into the building and robbery, and, as took place at the end of the Gardner theft, took the recorded tape with them.

The morning before the robbery was to take place, Turner showed up at the garage to tell Merlino that he was “very excited” about the next day and that everything looked good. He then handed Romano a cell phone wrapped in a rag.

“Give this to your inside guy this afternoon,” he told Romano. “He's to use this to call you tomorrow morning, to tell you everything's okay on his end and we should do this.”

The crew would be waiting nearby in their three separate vehicles.

The day would begin with Turner driving his own car, a Chevy Tahoe, and meeting Rossetti before dawn so they could assemble the weapons. Then they would proceed together to Merlino's garage in Dorchester in Rossetti's smaller Honda. There they would load everything in one of the two vans.

The garage lot was empty when they first drove by. Concerned that they might be stopped driving a car loaded with weapons as they continued to search for Merlino, Rossetti and Turner drove back to Turner's Tahoe and transferred the guns into it. An FBI search of the vehicle later turned up five fully loaded semiautomatic handguns, and the Ruger Mini-14 semiautomatic rifle, fully loaded as well. Tucked in with all the weaponry were bulletproof vests, police scanners, masking tape, Halloween masks, and an explosive-fragmentation hand grenade.

Under federal law, presence of such an explosive during the commission of a crime allows a judge to increase by twice as much if not more the number of years on a prison sentence.

After dumping the weapons, the two men were unarmed as they continued to zip up and down Dorchester's backstreets in Rossetti's red Honda in a desperate search for the other members of their crew. They were totally unaware that Merlino and his nephew had already been arrested by Federal agents when they arrived at the garage earlier, and totally unaware that their every turn was being tracked by a surveillance team that included two agents in a small plane flying overhead.

They were close to abandoning their plan as they drove onto Morrissey Boulevard and neared a public skating rink that was quickly filling with fathers bringing their kids to morning hockey practice. Out of nowhere, two GMC Suburbans smashed into the Honda, running it onto the side of the
road. Agents surrounded the vehicle and Turner and Rossetti surrendered without a fight.

The pair were quickly taken under armed guard to the Brookline police station and placed in separate cells. Among the first people to approach them in their cells was FBI agent Neil Cronin. He reminded Turner that no one had gotten hurt and that no guns had been fired in the day's adventure. Everything could be forgotten if he helped recover the Gardner paintings, Cronin said.

As Turner would later write to another author, the FBI was convinced that he had a hand in the museum robbery and getting his cooperation to recover the missing artwork was at the center of the FBI's decision to allow the plot to rob the armored car headquarters to proceed.

“They think that I was the person who committed the (museum) robbery, which is false,” said Turner in the letter. “They thought that if I was facing serious charges, I would be motivated to help facilitate the return of the paintings. Well, they got the serious charges against me, and now I am going to die in prison.”