Priceless (33 page)

“Good.”

I said, “Let me ask you—just so I’m clear, the paintings for sale are…?

“
Oui
, a Vermeer and a Rembrandt.”

“A Vermeer, huh?”

“
Oui,”
he said, and walked off.

A
NDRE RANG MY
cell phone a short while later.

“Now,” he said. “I’ve told this guy you deal in fine art, big, multimillion-dollar deals. You’re based in Philadelphia and we’ve done business, made a lot of money.”

It was the vouch.

“Excellent,” I said, “I appreciate it. So, he’ll call me?”

“
Oui,”
he said. “This guy, his name is Laurenz Cogniat.”

“You know him well?”

“Laurenz? He is a fugitive. An accountant for many years in Paris. Worked with organized crime. Money laundering. Very smart, very rich. Moved to Florida. Big house, big car, Rolls-Royce. Knows many people still, here in France, Spain, Corsica.”

“Can I trust him?”

The Frenchman laughed. “He is a criminal.”

“If he says he can get the Vermeer—”

“Let me tell you something about Laurenz,” the cop said. “I do not think he will lie to you about this. Laurenz is not a con man. He is an opportunist. He views himself as a businessman, a man who makes deals in the space between the black and the white. You understand?”

“Sure.”

“But this man Laurenz can be trouble if you try to control him too much,” Andre said. “Be patient. He will take you in many directions, but I think he will lead you to what you want.”

Miami. June 19, 2006
.

L
AURENZ DID NOT DISAPPOINT
.

Two weeks after we began speaking by phone, I flew to Miami to meet him. He took me for a ride in his Rolls, an FBI surveillance team in slow pursuit.

Laurenz wore a salmon Burberry dress shirt with a cursive
LC
monogram on his breast, blue jeans, brown sandals; and a gold Rolex Cosmograph Daytona. He was forty-one years old, trim, with short-cropped curly brown hair.

“Nice car. New?” I asked because I knew the answer—I’d checked his motor vehicle records—and was curious if he’d tell the truth.

Laurenz answered honestly. “A year old. I get a new one every eighteen months. I don’t like to drive a car with more than twenty thousand miles on it. Not good for the image.”

I admired the cherrywood console, running a finger across the frosted silver lettering,
PHANTOM.
I said what he wanted to hear. “Very nice.”

Laurenz nodded. “If it’s good enough for the Queen…”

I laughed, and realized I couldn’t tell if he was joking.

“Her Majesty drives one just like this,” Laurenz added. He spoke English fluently, but with such a thick accent that it sometimes
took an extra moment for what he said to register. “If you’ve never driven this car, you will never understand how smooth it is. You hear nothing outside. You speed up to seventy and you feel nothing. You go to one-ten and you feel like you are driving seventy. Everything is top of the line. The sunroof, the steering, the brakes. There are two DVD players in backseat. For many years, this was an old car for old people. But the new ones are magnificent. I have a guy who comes every month to do the leather. And a boy who washes the car every two weeks.”

He rapped the window with his knuckles. “Bulletproof glass. Custom armor-plated exterior. Four hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

“Impressive.”

He sniffed. “That’s the point.”

Laurenz steered the Rolls onto the Dolphin Expressway, headed west toward the airport. An irritating pop song played on the radio—all synthesizer and falsetto. Laurenz cranked it up. “Good sound, huh?”

I studied Laurenz and wished I’d been carrying a recorder. What my handling agents and supervisors would make of such banter! Two weeks into the Gardner case and the FBI agents involved were already falling into two camps—those who believed Laurenz might be able to deliver the stolen Boston paintings and those who were skeptical. I fell squarely in the middle, not yet ready to pass judgment, still working him. With undercover cases, especially art crime, you never know until you vet it out. Was Laurenz a fool? A con artist? The real deal? We wouldn’t know until I sized him up.

Clearly, Laurenz liked to talk about himself and I didn’t mind listening. It was an easy way to ingratiate myself with him, and so far, I hadn’t caught him in a lie. His claim that he was worth $140 million was impossible to verify because his holdings were scattered across Florida, Colorado, and Europe in a variety of names and corporations, and Laurenz seemed to spell his first and last names a variety of ways, probably on purpose. But our most basic checks of
public records showed that he was worth millions, if not tens of millions, of dollars, at least on paper. What really mattered was that the French police confirmed Laurenz’s connections to the Western European underworld, particularly gangs that dealt in stolen art.

Laurenz and I didn’t directly discuss my background on the phone. With the vouch from his friend in Paris—the undercover cop—it wasn’t necessary to talk about such things on an open line. After a few calls, Laurenz had asked me to fly down to meet him. He said he had a friend arriving from France, someone I should meet.

At Miami International Airport, Laurenz pulled the Rolls into the short-term parking and we walked toward the international arrivals terminal. We had forty-five minutes to kill and Laurenz bought two bottles of Fiji water.

I took a sip. “Looks like you’ve done all right for yourself. How long have you been in Florida?”

“Ten years. But I’ve lived all over the world. I speak seven languages.”

“Seven? How did you learn seven?”

“When I was younger, I was working for Club Med around the world. French Polynesia, Brazil, Sandpiper, Japan, Sicily.”

“What’d you do for Club Med?”

“Didn’t matter. I was twenty. Whatever they asked. Pool, beach, bartender, waiter. I was only thinking about eating, drinking and, you know, girls. When you are this age, you get three, four girls a week minimum, every week for three years.”

I laughed.

“Then I returned to France and I studied accounting, finance, and I started working for this guy. A wiseguy in Paris. I was twenty-five. I did things for him, and then I found out that he used my name as the president of his corporation. The business had many debts and I got into trouble because I was the president. This situation I could not handle—the only way out was to go into the life. Since I am accountant, this is what I do for them. I was very good, washing
money, setting up foreign corporations in Luxembourg. You have one million euros and ten minutes later it is in another name, another country, another currency. You understand?”

“Yeah, sure.” He was a mob accountant.

“I was very good. I had a nice office near the Champs-Elysées. It’s good for a while. French and Italian wiseguys, some in Spain. We dealt in gold, cash, diamonds, paintings, whatever you like. Then I saw some bad shit. The Russians and Syrians, sloppy. So, things happened and I know too much. I must leave France. If not, I am dead or in jail.”

I knew Laurenz had been arrested once in Germany and once in France on suspected currency violations, but freed after a few months. I also knew he was a wanted man in France for financial shenanigans. I didn’t bring any of this up. The way he was talking, I expected him to get around to it soon enough. I said, “So you came here?”

“Right, Florida, 1996. I come here with just $350,000 and I get lucky with real estate. First month here, I meet an asshole, a Swiss guy who is losing his condo in foreclosure. I go to the courthouse for the sale. Don’t get his condo but I get another. I pay $70,000 for a $400,000 penthouse in Aventura! You see, Bob, I understand the financial system, and it’s easy if you do. I also know the right banker, the one who will take a few dollars in his pocket when he gets the loan.”

I laughed at that. “The right banker.”

We checked the board and saw the flight had landed. A team of undercover agents was waiting inside the customs area to see if Laurenz’s friend had arrived with anyone else.

I said, “So what’s the plan when we meet your guy?”

“We take Sunny to lunch. We talk business. Sunny is a wiseguy. Not a big guy, but he knows people in the south of France, and I think these people will have the paintings you want. He is trying to move here. Sunny wants to be a player. He will try to impress you and say he can sell anything.”

“I’m only interested in paintings,” I said. “No drugs, guns, nothing like that.”

“Yes, yes, I agree,” Laurenz said. He leaned in and gently grabbed my forearm. “Listen my friend,” he said, “we are the sharks, you and me, and we have a small fish here who can lead us to the big fish. But these big fish, the guys with the paintings in France, are very bad guys. We must be serious. You must have the money. I will get the price down and then you and I will take our cut. We are partners?”

“You get me what I want,” I said, “and you will be happy.”

Sunny came through the doors a few minutes later, a short, plump man of fifty, his brown mullet matted from the long flight. He was rolling two large blue suitcases. We shook hands and headed outside, toward the Rolls.

As soon as we hit the fresh Florida air, Sunny lit a Marlboro.

W
E BEAT RUSH
hour and reached La Goulue, an upscale bistro north of Miami Beach, in about forty minutes.

The three of us sat around a white-linen tablecloth. Sunny ordered the seared calamari with basil pesto. Laurenz got the jumbo scallops. I tried the steamed yellowtail snapper. If nothing else, Laurenz knew where to get a good meal.

As we dined, Laurenz continued to dominate, talking, talking, talking. He dropped some names, presumed wiseguys in Paris. He talked about his new Jet Ski, and a sucker’s deal he was working on a condo near Fort Lauderdale. He also vouched for me with Sunny, making up a story, saying we’d met years earlier at an art gallery on South Beach. Sunny listened quietly, shoveling calamari.

Finally, Laurenz turned to me. “Sunny can get you many things.”

Sunny pursed his lips.

Laurenz said, “Bob is looking for paintings.”

“Yes,” Sunny said. “I’ve heard this.” He looked at his plate and continued eating. For now, I let it drop. Laurenz picked up the check, conspicuously laying his black American Express card on the table.

On the way back to the hotel, we stopped off at a cellular phone store and Laurenz bought Sunny a mobile phone. I memorized the number. We’d need it if we decided to tap it.

T
HE FOLLOWING MORNING
, the three of us met for bagels. As always, an FBI surveillance team hovered nearby.

When we sat down, Sunny asked to see our cell phones. “Please take out your batteries,” he said.

Laurenz laughed. “Why?”

Sunny said, “The police, the FBI, they can track you through your cell phone, even when it is off.”

“Oh, bullshit,” Laurenz said.

“No, it is true,” Sunny said. “I saw it on
24.”

“The TV show?”

“Just take them out.”

We did.

“All right,” Sunny said, “I can get three or four paintings. A Rembrandt, a Vermeer, and a Monet.”

“Monet or Manet?” I asked.

Sunny looked confused.

“Monet or Manet?” I said again.

“Yes,” he said, and I realized he didn’t know there was a difference. In a way, his ignorance led credence to his offer. He was just passing on names he’d been given. If he’d been playing me, he would have done enough homework to know the difference.

“These paintings are good,” Sunny said. His English was poor, but I could understand most of what he said. It was certainly better than my French. “The paintings were stolen many years ago.”

“From where?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “A museum in the U.S., I think. We have them and so for ten million they are yours. You can do that? Ten million?”

“Yeah, of course—if your paintings are real, if you’ve got a
Vermeer and a Rembrandt. Look, Sunny, my buyer’s gonna want proof. Do you have pictures you can send me? Proof of life?”

“I will see what I can do.”

T
HE CASE INCHED
through the summer.

At FBI offices in Washington, Miami, Boston, Philadelphia, and Paris, agents and supervisors expressed cautious optimism, exchanging e-mails and hosting conference calls. The French police fed us more information on Sunny and Laurenz, confirming their links to underworld art brokers. Authorities on both sides of the Atlantic arranged for wiretaps. I kept in touch with Laurenz by phone. He said Sunny was moving forward on the deal, slowly. I urged Laurenz to push him.

By early fall, we were moving toward an undercover buy in France. Eric Ives, the Major Theft Unit chief at Headquarters, began to arrange for a group of FBI agents to travel to Paris in mid-October for our first formal meeting with the French.

One morning after Labor Day, Eric called to chat.

“What do you think?” he said.

“What do I think about what, Eric?”

“Sunny, Laurenz, Boston.”

“I think it’s on,” I said. “That’s what I think.”

I
N THE FIRST
week in October 2006, on the eve of our first big FBI-French police meeting in Paris, I flew down to Miami to see Laurenz and Sunny.

We met in the late afternoon at Laurenz’s favorite haunt, a Thai-Japanese joint just off the 79th Street Causeway. Laurenz and Sunny were already there, phones on the table, batteries out.

I sat down and removed my phone battery. “
Ça va?
Good to see you, Sunny.”

“
Ça va
, Bob.”

I slapped Laurenz on the back and gave him a big wink. “Nice work, buddy. We’re going to celebrate tonight, right?”

Laurenz beamed. “Absolutely. Already doing it.” He pointed to the bowl of green tea ice cream, topped with whipped cream, Laurenz’s idea of a celebration. He held up a glass of water in toast. “To the next deal!”