Priceless (21 page)

T
HE
R
OCKWELL PAINTINGS
were stolen on February 16, 1978, only hours after they were feted as the new star attractions at a Minneapolis gallery.

The party, at a gallery called Elayne’s in an affluent Twin Cities suburb, was well attended, despite the single-digit temperatures and a half foot of frozen snow on the ground. The owners, Elyane and Russell Lindberg and their daughter Bonnie, mingled with more than a hundred guests, sipping champagne and munching white sheet cake. Dozens of paintings for sale lined the walls, but the star attractions were a Renoir seascape and seven Norman Rockwell originals. The Lindbergs owned two of the Rockwells, a matching pair called
Before the Date/Cowboy
and
Before the Date/Cowgirl
. The two pieces were among the last of the artist’s works to grace the cover of the
Saturday Evening Post
. The five other Rockwell paintings were on loan, four of them from Brown & Bigelow, the Minnesota calendar company that had printed the Boy Scout calendars illustrated by the artist for more than a half a century.

The police report on the crime was sketchy: The party wound down around 10 p.m. The Lindbergs cleaned up, carefully activating the alarm and locking up. Then, at 12:50 a.m., a Pinkerton security guard making rounds discovered the back door to the gallery open, the deadbolt punched out, the phone and electrical lines severed. The distraught Lindbergs and police hustled to the crime scene to find the seven Rockwells and the Renoir gone. The invisible thieves left behind two clues: a pair of garbage bags and a size-ten footprint in the snow. Not much to go on.

The early days of the investigation were rich with mostly useless tips, with the public flooding Minneapolis police and FBI agents with leads. The primary focus fell on three unidentified white men said to have been acting oddly during a visit to the gallery on the day of the crime. The scruffy-looking trio hadn’t looked like art aficionados—at least, not your typical Norman Rockwell fans—and Russ Lindberg said he’d heard them argue in whispers over the value of the Renoir and Rockwell paintings. As the men left in a
dirty white 1972 Chevy Impala hours before the reception, the suspicious gallery owner jotted down their license plate number. The FBI and police put out an all-points bulletin on the car. In a Teletype to headquarters a week later, an FBI agent reported little progress. “Whereabouts of current owner of vehicle negative to date, as it has been sold three times in the past month…. Investigation negative for any possible information.”

The FBI kept at it. Special agents from FBI divisions in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Chicago, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, and Detroit worked dozens of leads. They scoured prison phone records at Folsom State Prison in California, tracked a gang of burglars from New York City making their way west through northern states, and interrogated a Chicago-area burglar with a passion for stealing valuable postage stamps.

Over the next twenty years, the Rockwell heist drew intrigue, excitement, and dead ends. The Lindberg family fielded repeated calls from people who claimed to have the paintings. In the late 1970s, an undercover FBI agent and Elayne Lindberg flew to Miami to meet a Cuban art dealer who falsely claimed to know a Japanese diplomat willing to sell a few of the stolen paintings. In the 1980s, a Detroit man engaged in months of negotiations with prosecutors and FBI agents, then suddenly vanished. At one point, a Minneapolis man caused a few hours of hysteria and hope when he called Russell Lindberg, claiming he’d found one of the paintings. But when Lindberg showed up, he realized the man was a fool. What the man believed to be a Rockwell original was nothing more than a $10 canvas print.

By the late 1980s, agents in the FBI office in Minneapolis wanted to forget the case and move on. Insurance companies compensated the three owners for their losses—the Lindbergs, for
Cowboy
and
Cowgirl
, a Minneapolis family for
Lickin’ Good Bath
, and Brown & Bigelow for
The Spirit of ’76, She’s My Baby, Hasty Retreat
, and
So Much Concern
.

Although ownership of the stolen paintings officially passed to
the insurance companies at settlement, Bonnie Lindberg continued to pursue all of the Rockwells, conducting her own investigation. She publicly criticized the FBI for dropping the case, and the bureau remained stoically silent. Lindberg spent a decade chasing leads that probably came from con men. Her efforts cost tens of thousands of dollars and earned her nothing but frustration.

But in late 1994, curators at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, received a curious letter from a man who identified himself as Jose Maria Carneiro, a Brazilian art dealer based in Rio. Carneiro offered to sell
The Spirit of ’76
and
So Much Concern
, for “a fair price.” The curators declined, but they passed the letter to Lindberg.

The FBI in Minneapolis also received a copy of the letter, but the Rockwell case had long been closed.

T
HE CASE WAS
so old that I didn’t even know it had existed when I got a call in January 1999 about suspicious Rockwells for sale in Philadelphia.

George Turak, an honest broker and a longtime source, told me that a Brazilian man had hired him to sell two Rockwell paintings on consignment,
She’s My Baby
and
Lickin’ Good Bath
. Turak said his research showed the paintings were stolen from Minneapolis in 1978. I confirmed this with a simple Internet search followed by a call to the Minneapolis FBI office, and an agent there briefed me on the heist. He also told me about the five remaining missing paintings. Intrigued, I went to Turak’s gallery and seized the two paintings.

Within days, the agent in Minneapolis called back with important news.

It turned out that Bonnie Lindberg had followed up on the 1994 letter from Brazil and that she’d partnered with a local television station, KARE 11, to document her dealings with Carneiro. The two-part exclusive would be running in a few weeks—the station was holding it to air during February sweeps. A few weeks later,
after the series aired, I received a tape. For the FBI, it was a public relations disaster.

“Tonight,” the anchor intoned, introducing the story, “new information on a case long ago abandoned by the FBI. It’s a case where no arrests have been made and no paintings ever found—until now.”

Part One of the series recapped the 1978 theft and retraced the family’s detective work. “Bonnie Lindberg runs the gallery today,” the reporter said, “and she’s been the lead investigator in this case after the others walked away, after the FBI gave up, when literally no one seemed to care.” The reporter continued, “It’s amazing what Bonnie did on her own, following leads on four continents, crisscrossing the U.S. as well, a wild ride of faxes and phone calls…. In the last three years, all leads began to lead to Rio, leads the gallery says were rejected by the FBI.”

Part Two of the series began with Lindberg unwrapping a large package she’d just received in the mail from Brazil. Inside, she found
Before the Date/Cowgirl
, and she grew emotional as she held it. Next, the cameras followed Lindberg to Rio to negotiate the purchase of the companion painting,
Before the Date/Cowboy
, from Carneiro. During the visit, Carneiro also showed off
The Spirit of ’76
, which hung prominently in his home, as well as
So Much Concern
and
Hasty Retreat
. The reporter said of Carneiro, “He says he’s done everything properly to purchase the paintings, and that appears to be true. There are certificates from the Art Loss Register in New York and London, verifying that the paintings are not stolen…. And while he’s willing to let the paintings go, he wants his money back first, three hundred thousand dollars.”

The TV report presented a somewhat misleading picture, omitting several relevant facts, including that Lindberg had agreed to pay Carneiro $80,000 for the
Before the Date
pair. Also, because my recovery of the two Rockwells in Philadelphia did not fit the reporter’s neat narrative, he mentioned the FBI’s role only as a brief afterthought, as if it were nothing. What’s more, KARE 11 failed to
report that Bonnie Lindberg, so tearful on camera, had already visited New York auction houses, where she’d been told the
Before the Date
pair would fetch her $180,000. (Apparently, Lindberg was unaware that the Elayne Gallery had received an insurance settlement and therefore no longer owned the paintings; in purchasing the paintings from Carneiro, she believed that she was recovering what was rightfully her family’s property.)

The February 1999 news series concluded with a flourish—flashing images of
The Spirit of ’76, So Much Concern
, and
Hasty Retreat
, juxtaposed with a grinning Brazilian art dealer, the beach at Ipanema, and a reporter’s authoritative TV voice.

“So the question remains. What will it take to bring the Rockwells back to their rightful owners? … Carneiro knows that possession is nine-tenths of ownership, and he has that pretty much locked away in Brazil—Rockwell, our Boy Scouts and our flag.”

O
N THE MORNING
of September 11, 2001, I was at my desk by eight thirty, flipping through a file of Rockwell correspondence from the FBI agent at the U.S. embassy in Brazil.

It was eighteen months after the KARE 11 broadcast. By then, we had endured more than a year of the kind of diplomatic and bureaucratic delays that threaten every international case, and our Rockwell investigation was entering a new phase. With a new U.S.-Brazil mutual legal assistance treaty in place, the Brazilians had finally approved our request to question Carneiro. Hall and I were making last-minute preparations for a trip to Rio in late September or early October.

A few minutes before nine o’clock, a colleague hustled into the squad room, breathless. “Anyone got a television?”

I plugged in my four-inch black-and-white portable and aimed the antenna at a window. Crowded around the tiny screen, seven of us squinted at the burning World Trade Center, and saw the second plane hit the second tower. Within the hour, a supervisor was ordering
us to go home, pack enough clothes to last three days, and stand by for orders.

Donna met me at the door. “How long will you be gone?”

“They say three days, but…”

By the next morning, I was on my way to Ground Zero.

I
CALLED
H
ALL
as I sped up the New Jersey Turnpike, red lights flashing. We knew the Rockwell case would have to wait. Each of us expected to be busy for a while performing our secondary, or “collateral,” jobs. He was a commander in the Navy Reserves, assigned to an intelligence unit that specialized in terrorism, and he was guessing he’d be called up soon.

My collateral duty was working with FBI colleagues in times of the greatest mental stress. I was coordinator of the FBI Employee Assistance Program in the Philadelphia division, responsible for the psychological well-being of more than five hundred employees and their families.

It was solitary, sensitive, and confidential work, a job I had volunteered for following my acquittal at the Camden courthouse in the mid-1990s. I tried to help anyone struggling in our office—whether with drugs, alcohol, cheating spouses, difficult bosses, or serious medical problems. Colleagues came to me and unloaded horrific stories—about children or spouses killed, arrested, or dying of some dreadful disease. I did a lot of listening. I wasn’t a shrink and didn’t pretend to be. My primary credential was empathy. I knew what it was like to face trauma, the death of a good friend, and the stresses of a years-long fight to avoid prison. Hopefully, if nothing else, I stood as an example of perseverance. I could look a desperate person in the eye and honestly say, “Stay strong. The worst thing you can do when you go through a traumatic experience is to lose your faith that you will survive. Have no doubts: It’s painful, and that’s normal. You will get through this. Whatever you do, do not give up.”

I didn’t enjoy reliving my own trauma, and I never publicly
discussed the accident. But I volunteered to become the bureau’s EAP counselor in Philadelphia because I thought it was the best way I could give back to an agency that had refused to give up on me.

Although the work was fulfilling, there was a dark side I hadn’t considered—experiencing firsthand the shock that victims’ families suffer. When an agent died, the FBI often sent me to notify the family. At funerals, I was tasked to discreetly escort elderly and young family members. When the Washington, D.C., sniper killed a Philadelphia man, I had to physically restrain a child who erupted in fury when I arrived at his doorstep to deliver the sad news. After jobs like those, I started to see in the victims’ families the specter of Donna and our kids.

Witnessing so much death and heartbreak posed psychological risks for an undercover agent. Working undercover is a mental game and you can’t let yourself become distracted by fear or emotion. For many years, I volunteered for a program called C.O.P.S. Kids, part of Concerns of Police Survivors, and its participation in National Police Week in Washington, which culminates with a wreath-laying ceremony for fallen officers. One year, as the ceremony wound down, I saw a nineteen-year-old son in a wheelchair and his mother struggling up a hill toward the Washington Monument. I strolled over to help and we began chatting. The young man was a paraplegic, an accident victim. His older brother and father, both police officers, had died in the line of duty in one year. As we moved up the hill, the son suddenly grabbed my arm and began screaming and crying. “Never get hurt! Promise me you’ll never get hurt.” I held it together until the drive home. By the time I crossed the Maryland-Delaware state line, I started shaking and crying. I never returned to National Police Week. I couldn’t take it anymore. When I worked undercover, I couldn’t afford to have scenes like that floating in my head.

I arrived at Ground Zero late on the afternoon of September 12.