Priceless (35 page)

I didn’t bother to ask Pierre why the French would object. It was obvious. If the bust went down in Spain, the big press conference would be held in Madrid and all the accolades would go to the Spanish police, not the French.

P
IERRE’S BOSSES NEEDN’T
have worried.

Shortly after Sunny returned to Miami in late November 2006, Laurenz called to let me know that the plan had changed once again: Sunny was now offering all eleven Gardner paintings in France, not Spain.

“How much would you be willing to pay?” Laurenz asked.

“Thirty million,” I said. It was the standard black market price, five to ten percent of open market value.

“Cash?”

“If I buy them inside the U.S., yes,” I said. “Otherwise, wire transfer.”

Laurenz asked if I could put together some financial statements to prove we were serious, that we had access to thirty million.

“Shouldn’t be a problem,” I replied.

“Magnifique,”
Laurenz said. “If you can get the money and can get me into France, I think we can have the paintings in six days.”

This was, of course, extraordinary news. The money wouldn’t be a problem. Thirty million was just a number—a big number, yes, but ultimately just a number—money temporarily moved from one account to another. We weren’t talking about flash money, cash on the street. The $30 million would never leave the bank.

I let Pierre know. “I think we’re coming to France.” I ran through the latest details.

“Good, good,” Pierre said. “Do you think we’ll be able to use our undercover man?”

“Don’t know yet,” I said, dodging the question. “Any luck on waiving Laurenz’s warrant? Looks like we’re gonna need him in France.”

“Working on it, my friend, working on it.”

W
HEN
I
FLEW
into Charles de Gaulle for our second big American-French meeting in late November 2006, Pierre picked me up again. We were late and Pierre used his blue lights and siren to part the morning traffic.

On the ride downtown, Pierre let me know that counter forces were at work. “You missed the nice dinner we had last night—Geoff and Fred, and your boys from the embassy.”

What the hell? I was groggy from the overnight flight and figured I’d misunderstood. “Dinner?”

Pierre grinned. “Just games, my friend,” he said. “Office politics. They came a day early to see us without you. I think they are scared of you.”

Pierre caught my frown. “Don’t worry, we took them to a cheap place,” he joked. “Tonight, we will eat much better.”

Pierre dropped me at my hotel, but the room wasn’t ready. I showered in the fitness center, and when I came out I saw a welcome sight, Pierre chatting with Eric Ives from Washington. Eric, the art crime unit chief, was fuming because he had just learned that he, too, had been excluded from Fred’s secret American-French dinner.

The briefing convened in a stark conference room inside a modern Defense Ministry building. Pierre began with an overview and quickly turned to his surveillance chief. She reported that Sunny had been spotted meeting with known Corsican mobsters on a street corner in Marseilles and that in wiretapped conversations he spoke of “frames for Bob.”

We wrestled next with the thorny issue of how to get Laurenz inside France. The top French police official in the room insisted that the decade-old warrant against Laurenz for his financial crimes could not be lifted. The French warrant, he added, was valid in virtually every country in the European Union, so Laurenz couldn’t travel to Spain, either. But, the senior French official wondered aloud, what if we allowed Laurenz to enter France under a fake name with a fake U.S. passport? The Americans looked at each other. It was a possibility.

Afterward, I pulled Pierre aside. “Why did your bosses all of a sudden come up with a way to let Laurenz inside France?”

He replied with a small smile, “Because they worried that you were going to take the case to Spain. They want the arrests to be in Paris.”

Things finally seemed to be coming together. When I got back to my hotel, I called Laurenz and told him to be ready to fly to Paris on a few days’ notice. I wanted to move quickly, I said. My buyer was eager to get going. He had cashed investments to rustle up the $30 million and it was now sitting in the bank, not earning much interest, and while we dickered, he was losing money. Laurenz said sure, he was ready and eager to do the deal—so long as it didn’t interfere with his big ski vacation in Colorado.

“So maybe we do this in January, after the holidays?”

Stunned, I didn’t know how to react. So I simply said, “Where you headed, Vail?”

“Crested Butte. Just sold a complex there—kept a condo for myself.”

As I sat on the bed and digested the Laurenz conversation, rubbing my temples in bewilderment, an FBI agent from the embassy called. He said the bureaucrats were balking at the plan to furnish Laurenz with a fake U.S. passport. But the agent had come up with a new idea: What if we did the deal in Monaco? We could fly Laurenz from New York nonstop to Geneva, then charter a helicopter to fly him over French airspace to tiny Monaco, the independent principality on the Riviera. Since neither Switzerland nor Monaco belonged to the European Union, the French warrant wouldn’t apply.

Hmm, I thought. Not a bad idea, not bad at all.

W
HILE WE WAITED
for everyone in Paris, Boston, Washington, Marseilles, and Miami to resolve the administrative and political issues in the Gardner case, Eric and I planned a quick side trip—an undercover mission to rescue treasures stolen from Africa.

Our plane to Warsaw left early the next morning.

Warsaw, December 2006
.

I
N
Z
IMBABWE
,
THEY HAVE A PROVERB
, “A
COWARD HAS
no scar.”

When I received a tip that five national treasures stolen from a major Zimbabwe museum might be in Poland, Eric didn’t hesitate when I proposed an undercover mission to rescue them. He didn’t care that there was no American connection, or that we were in the midst of the Gardner case. Eric understood that it was the right thing to do, and that it would earn the FBI goodwill in two countries. Besides, the flight from Paris to Warsaw is just two hours and twenty minutes.

The Polish case was a model international investigation—completed in just three weeks, from initial tip to hotel sting, involving governments on three continents but minimal manpower and precious little paperwork. The longest meeting in the case was the hour-long briefing we held with the Polish SWAT team in Warsaw. They were the nicest group of bald-headed, bull-necked knuckle-draggers I’ve ever met. They even laughed at my jokes.

“The name of this case,” I said, “is Operation KBAS.”

“What’s KBAS?” someone asked.

“Keep Bob’s Ass Safe.”

One of the first things we all agreed on was a media blackout. Because of the Gardner case, I wanted to keep a low profile in Europe, and the Polish police hoped to prosecute the case without using an undercover FBI agent as a witness at trial. As I understood it, the Polish police planned to keep every trace of FBI involvement quiet. Publicly, at least, Eric and I were never there, and neither was my FBI colleague from Philadelphia, John Kitzinger.

Our target was a Polish man named Marian Dabuski. On the Internet, he’d advertised for sale three Zimbabwean headrests, or
mutsagos
, and two Makonde helmet masks. When an honest dealer in Denver saw the offer, he tipped me. The headrests were sculpted concave pedestals, about a foot long and six inches high, and used as a sort of hard pillow during religious ceremonies: A worshiper would lie on his back, his neck supported by a headrest, close his eyes, and enter a Zen-like state in which he’d try to communicate with the dead. The headrests dated to the twelfth century, were crafted by the nomads of Zimbabwe, Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania, and looked a lot like the priceless artifacts I’d viewed at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. One of the headrests Dabuski advertised online matched one stolen the previous year at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Harare. In that theft, a middle-aged white man who looked remarkably like Dabuski had walked into the museum during the day, ripped four headrests and two helmet masks from a museum wall, and run out the front door. A guard chased him into the street and cornered him, but as the two began to tussle, people in the Harare crowd mistook the black guard for the criminal and began to beat him. The white thief slipped away with his loot.

I contacted Dabuski by e-mail—I said I was an American IBM executive based in Budapest, looking to expand my collection of African artifacts. He agreed to meet me in the lobby bar of the Marriott Hotel, across the street from Warsaw’s Palace of Culture and Science. He and his wife showed up an hour late, but bearing three skull-sized boxes.

We went up to my room, which was wired for pictures and
sound. The Polish SWAT team was in the room on the left, and the commanders, including Eric and John, watched via video from the room on the right. As the Dabuskis unwrapped the masks, I pretended to closely study the craftsmanship, but I was really looking for the museum’s serial numbers, etched just beneath the underside of each mask’s chin. One had no telltale marks, but on another I noticed an odd smudge. It looked like brown shoe polish and it seemed to be concealing something. When I made out part of a number, perhaps a “3,” bleeding through the polish, I knew these were the stolen masks. I agreed to their offer, $35,000 for the two masks and three headrests, and I gave the go-code.

Given my near disaster with the failing hotel key cards in Denmark, I tried a different approach in Warsaw. A member of the SWAT team simply knocked on the door, and I acted annoyed. “Who the hell could that be?” I grumbled. When I opened the door, the Poles yanked me out, rushed in and arrested the Dabuskis, throwing them on the floor and slapping black hoods over their heads. The police, following through on their plan to erase my role in the case, then put on a big show that in all the confusion I had somehow escaped.

Two surprises followed.

At checkout, the Marriott bill for the three rooms I’d booked on my Robert Clay credit card came in $800 higher than expected. It seemed that my friends from the Polish SWAT team had helped themselves to the minibars in the rooms, cleaning out all the liquor after I made my escape. Half amused, half annoyed, I paid the bill, knowing I’d face days of extra paperwork coming up with a way to justify the expense.

The second surprise came a few weeks later, after I returned to Philadelphia and the Gardner case.

I got a call from the FBI agent stationed at the U.S. embassy in Warsaw. He said that a Polish prosecutor, a man clearly in the dark about what really went down, had called with a request.

That conversation had gone something like this:

FBI agent in Warsaw: “How can I help you?”

Warsaw prosecutor: “Well, we’ve arrested a Polish man named Dabuski at the Marriott in Warsaw for trying to sell African artifacts to an American.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes, but the American got away and we’d like your help tracking him down.”

“Sure, I can try. What’s his name?”

“Robert Clay.”

The FBI agent didn’t miss a beat. “OK,” he told the prosecutor, “I’ll get right on it.”

Philadelphia, January 2007
.

F
RED
,
THE
B
OSTON SUPERVISOR
,
REACHED ME ON MY
cell phone late on a Sunday afternoon. I was home watching the NFL playoffs with my boys.

It was two months after our Paris meeting. While things remained promising, we were still waiting for the bureaucrats to clear Laurenz’s fake passport, approve the Monaco scenario, or come up with some other plan.

I knew that Fred had been complaining about me to Eric Ives in Washington. He was angry that I’d been speaking directly with Pierre in Paris and that I’d warned every FBI official involved that if we didn’t move swiftly, we’d lose our opportunity to buy the paintings. Fred believed I was usurping his role.

On the call, I grew uneasy as I detected a trace of satisfaction in Fred’s voice. Then he said, “We’re hearing that Sunny thinks you’re a cop. So this changes everything, Wittman. We’re gonna have to ease you out of this—insert one of my guys or the French UC.”

Fred was quick to presume his tip was accurate. “How do you know Sunny thinks I’m a cop?” I asked.

“From the French,” he said. Presumably from their wiretaps.

“Whoa, hold on a sec, Fred,” I said. “This doesn’t make sense. I
spoke with Laurenz last night and he and Sunny are still in. I’m not surprised to hear Sunny worrying that I might be a cop. Hell, he might be talking about it on the phone to see if we react—just to test me and see if his phone was tapped. He’s paranoid about everything. Remember the triangle he drew?” Criminals are always probing each other to figure out if this guy or that guy might be a snitch or an undercover agent. It’s normal. I’d heard such talk during most of my long-term undercover cases. I’d heard it in Santa Fe, Madrid, and Copenhagen. Yet in the end, each time the criminal had succumbed to greed and followed through with the deal.

Fred made it clear he hadn’t called to debate. He’d called to give me marching orders: I was on my way out.

“From now on,” he said, “the French are going to deal directly with Laurenz. They’ll use their guy in Paris”—Andre, the undercover cop—“to deal directly with Laurenz.”

“Wait, I can’t talk to Laurenz?”

“Right now, no.”

“Fred, how’s that supposed to work? He’s gonna call me. What do I tell him?”

“We’re working that out, gonna have some meetings.”