Priceless (37 page)

I told Sunny I’d think about buying the Monet, but I really wanted the Old Masters, especially the Vermeer and the Rembrandts.

Sunny was adamant. “First, you must take what they offer.”

W
E DID THE
Miami yacht deal the following afternoon.

We drove the six paintings to the harbor in Laurenz’s new platinum Rolls. Sunny and I carried them onto the undercover yacht,
The Pelican
. We cruised Miami Harbor into the late afternoon, watched the undercover bikini babes dance and eat strawberries, and I “sold” the fake paintings to the fake Colombian drug dealers for $1.2 million.

The Colombians paid me with a phony wire transfer and with the diamonds and Krugerrands from the FBI vault. When we left the boat, I tossed the small sack of ten diamonds to Sunny and gave Laurenz a few of the gold coins. “For your help today,” I said.

Sunny held the sack aloft and said, “Dinner’s on me.”

We drove to La Goulue to celebrate. On the ride up Miami Beach, Sunny seemed more interested in talking about the drug dealers and the bikini girls than the painting deal. While on the boat, he said, he’d talked to one of the Colombians about a possible cocaine deal.

“I don’t know about those guys,” Sunny said. “I don’t know them. Maybe they are cops.”

“Yeah, be careful—I don’t know them well either,” I said, trying to play it cool without discouraging him from considering the drug deal. “You don’t want to be messing around with drugs anyway, Sunny. You make more money with art. But hey, man, if you like drugs, that’s up to you. Maybe you know drugs better. And those guys, I know their money is good. But that’s all you. I don’t want any part of it.”

“Mmm,” Sunny said. “I don’t know.”

I dropped it, unsure if he would take the bait. The cocaine angle, created by the Miami agents, was designed to develop several opportunities in the Gardner case. At a minimum, we hoped it would allow us to introduce Sunny to more undercover FBI agents, men he might grow to trust. We could wait to see how the Gardner case was playing out and, if appropriate, bust Sunny on a serious drug charge and try to flip him—threaten him with a very long prison sentence unless he agreed to help us recover the Boston paintings. Also, we believed that a drug scenario might create a safety valve for use in an emergency. If we needed to make a sudden arrest of one of the Gardner conspirators, here or in France, we could always deflect blame to one of Sunny’s new drug buddies, plant the idea that one of them was a snitch.

By the time we arrived at the French restaurant, the three of us were talking about art again, not cocaine. We discussed the plan to helicopter into Monaco, and whether Patrick, Sunny’s French connection, could meet us there. I suggested that this would be a lot easier if Patrick and his partners simply flew to Florida to meet with us. Then we could hash everything out. Laurenz liked this idea and Sunny said he would call Patrick.

Then, out of the blue, Sunny asked me if I liked Picasso. When I said sure, he asked me if I’d heard about the recent heist in Paris, the theft of two paintings valued at $66 million from the apartment of Picasso’s granddaughter. I told him I had. Laurenz and Sunny smiled slyly.

Our meals arrived and Sunny said, “We eat. We talk business later.” We spoke of family, Jet Skis, Laurenz’s Hawaiian vacation, and the deal he got on his new platinum Rolls-Royce. We never returned to the Picassos.

Everything seemed copacetic. The bill came while Laurenz was on a phone call and Sunny used the opportunity to politely excuse himself and slip away, sticking Laurenz with the check.

*    *    *

I
N
M
AY
, B
OSTON
and Paris launched a new paperwork salvo.

It was a clever setup to push me out and began with an EC from Boston to Paris. On the surface, the questions seemed innocuous enough: Given the “Bob is a cop” suspicion, did the French police believe that my undercover identity had been compromised? Could I safely travel undercover to France to meet with the people offering to sell the Gardner paintings?

The answer from Paris: While there was no direct evidence that my cover was blown, the Paris office noted that “a significant degree of danger will exist” if I worked undercover in France.

I studied the two documents and shook my head. Of course an international undercover operation would pose “a significant degree” of danger! You didn’t need to be an FBI agent to know that. But in the risk-averse culture of the FBI, I knew that a memo like that would set off alarm bells and flashing yellow lights. Everyone was now on notice that I might be hurt or killed in France, and no supervisor wanted that on his record, especially when we’d all been warned in writing.

No one was directly saying I couldn’t remain on the case and work undercover in Paris, but the vibe was chilling. My supervisors in Philadelphia got on the line with Fred and his bosses, then with the FBI supervisors in Paris and Miami. Afterward, my Philadelphia bosses told me that the atmosphere had grown so toxic that Boston didn’t even want me to play a consulting role. The internal strife was so intense that it now jeopardized the case and the safety of the agents involved, including me. My Philadelphia bosses advised me to withdraw from the Gardner investigation. Reluctantly, I agreed.

But how to tell Laurenz and Sunny without ruining the case?

I kept it short, sweet, and as close to the truth as possible. It was nice working with you guys, I explained, but my boss has lost confidence in me and wants someone else to step in. I told them I could no longer take their calls.

Hysterical, Laurenz left me voice mails and sent several unsettling e-mails, rants that revealed desperation and vulnerabilities he had never displayed in person.

“Good evening!” Laurenz wrote in one e-mail in broken English and peppered with capital letters and exclamation points. “I am very sad. I am really in a difficult situation tonight. Why doing all the risks, my life, my future, my time? For nothing! Why? I was thinking we could really get these paintings and now I know it is just an illusion? Why? Why? I REALLY NEED SOME EXPLANATIONS. Good night! Sweet dreams!”

I felt compelled to reply, but did so with an incredibly bureaucratic, cover-your-ass e-mail, one that conveyed the warmth of a corporate customer service representative. “I understand your concerns and questions and have relayed them…” I felt awful, but I didn’t have a choice.

Laurenz responded in minutes. “It’s ridiculous! I am spending/investing a lot of money and now you throw me a DOG BONE? Be nice? Talk to someone else? No! The only person I will talk to is BOB! ONLY BOB! I don’t trust anyone else.”

I let the FBI offices in Boston and Paris know about the e-mails and calls and they were not pleased. In short order, they sent a request to my boss in Philadelphia, demanding all recordings and investigative notes of my contacts with Laurenz. The memo read like a subpoena.

It marked the lowest moment in my FBI career since December 20, 1989, the night of the accident. I began growing irritable, sleepless. I tried to hide it from the kids, but Donna bore the brunt of my frustration. She understood I was one year from retirement, and encouraged me to fight for my reputation.

Few inside or outside the FBI knew of my despair. On the surface, everything seemed fine and my success as the FBI’s top art-crime sleuth only grew. That summer, I recovered the original, hand-edited manuscript of Pearl Buck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning
novel
The Good Earth
. The press conference was well attended, but as I took my usual place, out of sight behind the television cameras, I couldn’t help feeling hollow.

F
OR A FEW
weeks, I followed orders and didn’t call anyone involved in the Gardner case. But I couldn’t stop Laurenz or Pierre from contacting me.

One afternoon in mid-July, Laurenz sent me several e-mails I couldn’t ignore.

Attached to each e-mail was a photograph of a Picasso painting beside a week-old copy of a Paris newspaper. I instantly recognized these “proof of life” pictures as the paintings stolen from Picasso’s granddaughter’s apartment—the ones Sunny and Laurenz had mentioned offhandedly at the restaurant a few months earlier. Laurenz wanted me to buy them.

I didn’t respond, but I let my supervisors know. Soon, Pierre was calling from Paris.

“You know of the Picassos stolen in Paris?” he said. “I have now seen the e-mails.”

“Right,” I said, cautiously.

“There is more,” Pierre said. I knew Pierre was tapping many phones, including Sunny’s, and his team was doing its best to monitor any calls Laurenz made to France. “On the wiretaps, Sunny and Laurenz are talking to these bad guys who have the Picassos about selling the paintings to our undercover man, Andre. And on the phone, they say that Andre can be trusted because he works with a man named Bob in Miami. And I do not think there is another Bob in Miami who they are talking about.”

“Probably not, no.”

I shook my head as I untangled the logic of the situation. At the beginning of the Gardner investigation, Andre had vouched for me to Laurenz, leading him to believe that Andre and I had worked together as shady art dealers. But now that Laurenz and Sunny believed
the three of us had actually committed a major crime together—the “sale” on
The Pelican
—the vouch had doubled back on itself. Sunny and Laurenz were now telling the thieves that Andre could be trusted because
Bob
could be trusted. Yes, Laurenz was annoyed with me because I’d pulled out of the Gardner deal, but he still believed I was trustworthy. After all, we’d done business together and no one had been arrested. What could be better evidence of my criminal credentials than that?

“So, this has created a problem because of the Boston case,” Pierre said. “Your friends Fred and the others at FBI, they ask us to wait. To not take the paintings right now. You understand why?”

“Yeah, I do.” The moment Andre and his fellow officers completed their sting in the Picasso case, making arrests, the thieves would know that someone involved was actually an informant or an undercover cop. Suspicion would likely turn to Andre and perhaps to his American partner, Bob, the man whose bona fides Sunny and Laurenz had used to convince the thieves to work with Andre in the first place. If that happened, it might ruin any chance of using Laurenz and Sunny to recover the Gardner paintings.

I also understood Pierre’s dilemma. He couldn’t let $66 million worth of Picassos slip away. If word got out that he had failed to recover the artwork as a favor to the FBI, it would create a scandal and probably scuttle his career.

So I offered Pierre a suggestion: When you make the bust, pretend to arrest your undercover police officer. That way the thieves won’t know who betrayed them. At a minimum, it will buy us time.

Pierre liked the idea. “You are a good chess player,” he said, and promised to make it happen.

Incredibly, Pierre’s orders were not carried out during the Paris sting—the French SWAT team failed to arrest their undercover officer with the thieves. Worse, during an interrogation, another French policeman confirmed to one of the thieves that the buyer was in fact an undercover agent. It didn’t take long for the thieves in Paris to make the link from Andre to Laurenz and to me.

Pierre called and apologized profusely for the screwup. It wasn’t intentional, he said, and I believed him.

Unfortunately, the consequences were immediate and severe.

L
AURENZ CALLED IN
a panic a few days after the Picasso sting.

“They want to kill me! They want you! You and me! They want to assassinate us both!”

I told him to calm down and start from the beginning. Associates of the Picasso thieves were in Miami with Sunny, he said, demanding answers from Laurenz and money for the thieves’ legal bills.

“I was at the Blockbuster,” Laurenz sputtered. “You know I go every Tuesday for the new releases? They follow me there and they want to put me in the car and take me away. I told you these guys don’t fuck around.”

“How’d you get away?”

“I saw them from inside the Blockbuster and have my wife call 911 and when the police come I go out to talk to them.”

“Smart. Where are you now?”

“A hotel. The Loews. They take my dogs here.” Laurenz loved his two mutts, took them everywhere. He began bragging about the size and cost of his suite, and I let him prattle on. I needed time to think.

I wanted to know more about the goons threatening Laurenz. For one thing, they might lead me to the missing Gardner paintings. For another, they were threatening my life. But I had to find a way of stepping in that would be plausible to Laurenz and remain in character for Bob Clay. Here I held an advantage: Laurenz didn’t know that I knew he had floated my name as Andre’s partner to the Picasso thieves. As far as I ought to know, the French thieves had never heard of me.

So I said, “Laurenz, back up a second—you said they want to kill me, too. Why would they want to kill me? All I did was look at e-mails you sent me. I was never in this deal.”

Laurenz fell into the trap, and blamed Sunny. “Sunny said to them that you are a partner with Andre, and that we can trust Andre because we trust
you
. So now they want to know where you live. They want assassinate you because you are responsible for their friend being in jail.”

I exploded. “What the—? Why would Sunny say that? Never mind! Who do these guys think they are? I want to meet them! You set it up!”

Laurenz called back the next day. We’d meet the two Frenchmen at the bar at a luxury hotel in Hollywood, Florida. In three days.

T
HE
O
P
P
LAN
for the hotel meet was a compromise, hashed out by committee. As one FBI employee later handwrote across the coversheet of his after-action report, it looked like “a total clusterfuck.”

Given the circumstances, I was officially brought back on to the case, but Fred made it clear the move was only temporary. He insisted that I use the meeting to introduce his undercover agent from Boston into the mix. The agent who would replace me was named Sean, and he often played a Boston mobster. I was instructed to vouch for Sean, to explain that he was taking over for me on the Gardner deal. I doubted it would work. Sean was a nice guy, but he didn’t know anything about international art deals. Besides, the Picasso case had already spooked the Frenchmen—this was the point of the meeting. It seemed like the worst possible time to get them to start dealing with a complete stranger.