Priceless (34 page)

I said, “Amen,
mon ami.”

Sunny cocked his head, confused—reacting just as we had hoped. The “deal” we were celebrating was a complete fabrication, one that Laurenz and I concocted the night before. It was part of our play, designed to impress Sunny.

Laurenz leaned close to Sunny and whispered rapidly in French. He explained that he and I had just completed an $8 million deal for a stolen Raphael. We’d each cleared $500,000, he said. Laurenz was a pretty good liar. Sunny nodded, duly impressed.

The fake deal was all part of an expanding wilderness of mirrors: I was playing Laurenz, and Laurenz thought that he and I were playing Sunny. I’m sure Laurenz had his own angles thought out. And Sunny? Who knew what really went through his mind?

Laurenz and I continued to banter about the fake Raphael deal until Sunny finally broke in, taking the bait. “All right,” Sunny said. “The paintings in Europe—we are ready. It can only be the three of us. We must work together to not get caught.”

“Of course,” I said.

“Yes, yes,” Laurenz said impatiently.

“Just the three of us,” Sunny repeated. “We’ll go to the south of France and…” He launched into a convoluted scenario for the exchange, one that included a series of rotating hotel rooms—the money in one room, the paintings in another, a human life as collateral in a third. With Sunny’s accent, I couldn’t understand every word, but it didn’t matter. We could clarify everything later. I just wanted to get things moving.

Sunny was quite clear on one point. “When you see the paintings, you will know that they are real. But once you see them, you
must buy them. So let me say again that you must be serious about having the money. You see the paintings, you must buy them.”

“I want to buy them,” I said. “Vermeer and Rembrandt?”

“Yes, yes, we have,” Sunny said. “The important point is not the money or the painting, but that we are all happy, all safe. Nobody wants trouble. Very important, from here on out, nobody gets involved in this except us.”

Sunny grabbed a napkin and took out a pen.

“Now,” he said, and he drew a triangle and scribbled a letter in each corner—
S, L
, and
B
. “This is Sunny, this is Laurenz, this is Bob. We are in this together. We cannot let anyone else in the triangle. This is all it can be, ever. This way, if anything goes wrong, we’ll know it’s one of us who betrayed.”

Paris. October 2006
.

T
HE TROUBLE BEGAN A WEEK LATER
,
JUST MINUTES
into our first formal Gardner case meeting with the French police.

An FBI supervisor from Boston—I will call him Fred—began with an impolitic demand. “Since we’ll be going along on the surveillances, we’re going to need to be armed.”

Fred spoke louder than necessary, clumsily enunciating every syllable. Just to be sure the French understood, he cocked his thumb and index finger in the shape of a gun. “So we need to take care of that, right off the bat.”

Fred liked to be in charge and because of the FBI’s sacrosanct protocols he was considered the lead supervisor on the Gardner case—back in 1990, the heist had been assigned to the Boston FBI’s bank robbery/violent crime squad, and Fred now led that unit. He’d been an FBI agent for seventeen years, but his expertise was SWAT and chasing bank robbers, not investigating art crime or running international undercover investigations. This was his first trip to a foreign country. It didn’t seem to occur to him that we were guests on someone else’s turf.

“We’re here to get our paintings back,” Fred said severely, as if
puffing up his resolve would help get the job done. “The people who have our paintings will be armed. So will we.”

It was such an outrageous thing to say that everyone else in the room—the six French police officials, six other FBI agents, and an American prosecutor—simply ignored it. Fred had been watching too many movies. As I knew from my experiences in Brazil, Denmark, Spain, and other nations, most countries don’t allow foreign police officers to carry weapons.

One of the FBI agents stationed at the embassy politely cut Fred off, directing the conversation back to the matter at hand, our joint American-French sting operation.

This first major meeting raised the stakes on both sides. The French police had gotten into the spirit and hosted the meeting at the new Musée du Quai Branly, which showcased artifacts crafted by the indigenous peoples of Asia, Australia, the Americas, Africa, and the Polynesian region. It was one of the most interesting and confounding museums I’d ever visited—designed with a jungle theme, a thicket of trees and grass on the outside, dark passageways and dimly lit displays on the inside. It was easy to lose one’s bearings.

The Gendarmerie lieutenant colonel chairing the meeting was Pierre Tabel, the chief of the national art crime squad. Andre, the undercover French police officer who’d provided me the initial tip, had spoken highly of Pierre, describing him as a rising star in the Gendarmerie, savvy with keen political instincts, a future general. The art crime job Pierre held was a sensitive one because the unit often became involved in international cases and investigations in which the victim was a celebrity, wealthy, or politically connected. Pierre understood that these cases sometimes called for discretion, or off-the-book methods in which the supervising magistrates agreed to look the other way.

Pierre and I had been talking shop over the phone since September, and I liked him. We’d built a tight working relationship, one I felt would be crucial to our success. I could immediately tell he was a good
supervisor—someone who encouraged his people to get things done, without micromanaging or throwing up bureaucratic barriers. He understood that art crime cases could not be handled like other undercover cases, and we agreed that the goal here was to rescue the Boston paintings, not necessarily to arrest anyone in France. Besides, he explained to me, the maximum penalty in France for property theft of any kind was a mere three years in prison.

When I had arrived at Charles de Gaulle Airport from Philadelphia the previous day, Pierre had picked me up, a gesture both courteous and shrewd. He intercepted me before I could speak with anyone else, including my FBI colleagues at the U.S embassy, and on the ride into the city we talked over the case. Based on my undercover work in the United States and Pierre’s phone tap and surveillance successes in France, we had agreed that Sunny and Laurenz would probably arrange for the sale of the Gardner paintings somewhere in France.

Pierre had cautioned that he would not be able to control every facet of operations in France. In a case with the potential for such huge headlines, he said, many supervisors from many agencies will want to play a role, claim credit, stand at the podium at the press conference, get their picture taken. “Everyone will want a piece of the cake,” Pierre liked to say. Pierre warned me that the SIAT undercover chief would probably now demand a major role. Because the undercover laws in France were so new, the SIAT chief often acted cautiously, and this sometimes placed him at odds with Pierre’s more adventurous art crime team. I warned Pierre about the FBI’s pecking order and protocols, and we agreed that turf wars and intra-agency rivalries on both sides of the Atlantic were going to complicate things.

Sure enough, at the French-American meeting that afternoon, the SIAT chief followed Fred’s speech with one of his own: He unilaterally announced that he planned to insert a French undercover officer into the deal. I explained that Sunny would probably resist adding a fourth person to the deal. I even sketched out the triangle
on a piece of paper and spelled out what Sunny had said: “It can only be the three of us.” The French SIAT chief replied that this was impossible. “There is a warrant for Laurenz in France,” he said, “and so he cannot come to France.” The SIAT chief added that he doubted I would be allowed to work undercover in France. The new French undercover law, he explained, was tricky.

“Sure, I understand,” I said, careful not to become engaged in an argument in front of such a large group. If what the SIAT chief said was true, it would mean that two thirds of our triangle—Laurenz and me—were barred from doing a deal in France. That sounded ominous.

The most encouraging news from the briefing came from the two supervisors running Pierre’s wiretap and surveillance groups. One said she was “ninety-nine percent sure” that the gang Sunny was speaking with held the Gardner paintings.

Pierre added, “On the phone calls, they talk in code to a person in Spain. But it’s easy to understand. They speak of getting apartments for someone named Bob. One they say is located on Vermeer Street. The other they say is on Rembrandt Street.”

“Do you know who Sunny is talking to?” someone asked.

“Yes,” the French surveillance supervisor said. “They are Corsicans, a group known to us.”
*
The French territory in the Mediterranean was infested with organized crime, and the national police officers were as unwelcome on Corsica as FBI agents are in Puerto Rico.

After the meeting broke up, Fred sauntered up to Pierre. I overheard the Boston supervisor again mention something about a gun and Pierre say, “I’m sorry, but…” I walked over to Pierre, pulling him aside to apologize.

“No problem,” Pierre said, and he lowered his voice. “I have my problems also. What my SIAT chief said about you not being able
to work in France? Not true. But he is a boss and I cannot make him look bad in front of the Americans.”

I shook my head. Too many chefs. Too many FBI offices. Too many French law enforcement agencies. Too many competing interests. It didn’t bode well for such a complex undercover operation, one that would require speed, flexibility, creativity, and risk.

Pierre seemed to sense what I was thinking and said, “Like I say, in this case, we’re going to have a lot of managers; everyone wants a piece of the cake.”

W
HEN WE RETURNED
to the United States, the case agent in Boston, Geoff Kelly, put together the necessary paperwork for a major undercover investigation, a seven-page form called an FD-997. He set the value of the Gardner art at $500 million, summarized the FBI’s extensive efforts to recover it since 1990, and laid out the undercover plan for a sting in France.

Geoff also gave the case a name, Operation Masterpiece.

A
FEW WEEKS
after the Paris meeting, Laurenz called to tell me we’d be buying the paintings in Spain instead of France.

For me, the change of venue was fortuitous. I’d made plenty of friends in the Spanish police during the Madrid case—their cooperation would be virtually assured. The medal the Spanish government gave me hung in my den. The richest woman in Spain owed me a favor.

“Fine, no problem,” I told Laurenz. “I love Spain.”

“Sunny wants to know if you want the ‘big one’ or the ‘little one’ first.” I didn’t know if he meant the diminutive Vermeer, which was worth much more, or the gigantic Rembrandt, which was worth less.

“I want them both, so it doesn’t matter,” I said. “What are we talking about? Madrid? Barcelona? Couple of weeks?”

Laurenz said, “I let you know.”

I called Eric Ives in Washington and gave him the good news. We put together a plan to travel to Madrid in ten days’ time. On the eve of the trip, Eric arranged a conference call between all the FBI offices involved—Washington, Paris, Boston, Miami, Madrid, and Philadelphia. The call did not go well.

Fred began by announcing that the trip to Madrid was canceled, catching everyone except the FBI agents in Paris by surprise. This particularly embarrassed our agent in Madrid, because he’d already spent a lot of time with the Spanish police securing SWAT, surveillance, intelligence, and undercover support. The Boston supervisor cited unnamed “security issues” in Spain, suggesting that the police there were not trustworthy.

What’s more, Fred made it clear he was furious that I’d been making arrangements without clearing every detail with him. “There are communication issues here,” he said. “We’ve got to be careful not to leave people out of the loop.” Fred chastised me for directly contacting the FBI agent in Madrid. I reminded Fred that Eric had already obtained Headquarters’ approval for me to make the appropriate contacts in Spain—and that I knew our man in Madrid from the Koplowitz case. Fred didn’t care. “Not your job, Wittman. I’m in charge.”

I backed off for now. I didn’t care if these guys barked at me. Whatever it took to move forward.

But I knew we’d never recover the Gardner paintings if we operated by committee.

After the conference call, I needed some air. I began wandering around the office, and landed at the desk of my friend Special Agent Jerri Williams, a twenty-four-year veteran and the FBI’s spokesperson in Philadelphia. She’d replaced Linda Vizi, who’d retired.

“You don’t look too good,” Jerri said.

I told Jerri about the conference call.

She frowned. “It sounds like the kind of turf-war crap we get whenever we deal with other agencies, not inside the Bureau.” She was right. The major federal law-enforcement agencies—especially
the FBI, DEA, IRS, ATF, and Immigration Customs Enforcement—almost always wrestled for control of joint investigations; the public would be surprised to learn how often different law enforcement agencies hid things from one other, or tried to squeeze each other out. Jerri said, “Not getting much help from headquarters?”

“I’m trying, but…”

“Yeah, well, you know Boston isn’t going to give up a case like this.”

My concern only grew in the weeks that followed, as I found myself spending a great deal of time juggling calls between Eric in Washington, Fred and Geoff Kelly in Boston, and the agents stationed at U.S. embassies in Europe. Since I needed to verify what Sunny and Laurenz were telling me, I kept in close contact with Pierre, whose art crime investigators were wiretapping their phones. We agreed to check in every Thursday morning. On one of those calls, he warned me that his French bosses weren’t happy that the case might be shifting to Spain. They would fiercely resist the move.