Priceless (38 page)

“What if these guys refuse to deal with Sean?” I asked. “What if they insist on working with me? What do we say then?”

“We tell them to take their business elsewhere,” Sean replied.

I laughed. “Seriously? What about leaning on them? Take control of the situation? Maybe make a veiled threat?”

“No threats, not me,” Sean said. “This special agent is not going to be on tape threatening anybody.”

Sean was more worried about covering his ass than protecting mine. I didn’t waste effort arguing with him.

Before I left to meet Laurenz in the lobby, I stuffed a handgun in each pocket. It was the first time in my nineteen-year career I’d carried a weapon while working undercover. But this situation felt different, and I’d already been threatened. The people I planned to meet weren’t looking to sell me a priceless piece of art; they wanted to know why they shouldn’t kill me.

As I stashed the guns, Fred shot me a look. I said to Fred, “If these guys start to fuck with me, I’m going to kill them.”

“Please,” Fred said. “Don’t shoot anybody.”

“I don’t want to shoot anybody—never have—but these guys have already told Laurenz that they want to kill me.”

That got Sean’s attention. “Are these guys that dangerous?”

“Yeah, they’re that dangerous,” I said. “Listen, Laurenz told me a story about one of these guys. He has a thing for knives. The guy cut himself the first time he met Laurenz to show how tough he was. Sliced his arm and sat there, letting it bleed, real menacing-like, blood dripping down. And he says to Laurenz, ‘I don’t have any problem with pain. This is what real life is all about.’ So yeah, Sean. A guy like that? I take him seriously.”

S
EAN AND
I met Laurenz in the lobby.

Before we entered the bar, Laurenz described the two would-be assassins waiting with Sunny for us. He called them Vanilla and Chocolate. Vanilla was the white one—long, stringy dark hair and a crooked nose. Chocolate was black, bald, and wore silver braces across his teeth. He was the one with the knife fetish and was built like a linebacker.

We met them at the bar and the six of us took seats around a corner table—Laurenz, Sean, and me on one side, Sunny, Vanilla, and Chocolate on the other.

Vanilla and Chocolate were large, but they were not stupid.
They treaded carefully, treating me with feigned respect. If I was who I claimed to be—a shady art broker with access to millionaire clients—the Frenchmen knew I could make them a great deal of money. It would be foolish to insult me before they got to know me. If, on the other hand, they concluded that I was a snitch or a cop, they could deal with me later.

Sensing their hesitation, I put them on the defensive. “Look,” I said aggressively, my hands under the table, inches from the hidden guns, “it’s obvious someone in France gave your guy up and now we’re all in trouble because of this. Your problem is in France.”

Chocolate said, “The FBI is involved in this. That’s not in France.”

I shot back, “Don’t you think I know the FBI is involved? They came to my house, woke me up, scared my wife to hell, asking us questions about Picasso and this guy and that guy in Paris. This is not good for business, having FBI agents showing up at my home. I’ve got a reputation.”

Chocolate wanted to know why my name had surfaced in Paris. How did the undercover French policeman know to use it to lure the Paris thieves?

I smiled and sat back in my chair. “A damn good question,” I said. “I’ve been wondering the same thing. I wish I knew.” I pointed to Sunny. “Maybe they’re tapping his phone. You know Sunny and I are working on all kinds of things.”

Chocolate asked about his arrested friends’ legal expenses for the Picasso charges. Would Laurenz help pay them?

Laurenz loved playing tough guy, but he knew there was but one correct answer if he wanted to stay alive.
“Oui,”
he said sharply. He looked away.

Problem solved, I moved my hands away from my pockets and changed the subject, introducing Sean. He stuck out his hand in greeting, but Chocolate and Vanilla just stared back.

Sean spoke gruffly, like a tough guy in a ’40s movie. “OK, here’s the deal. From now on,” he said, “you deal with me. You don’t talk
to Bob. I’m the one you contact for business. As far as you are concerned, I am the business. You go through me.”

Sunny and his French friends looked confused, as if to say, what the hell is this? Laurenz translated for them. Chocolate spoke rapidly in French to Sunny, and then turned to Sean.
“Non
, we deal with Bob, Sunny, and Laurenz—only.”

Sean shook his head. “You call me from now on or we’re done.”

Chocolate sputtered a small laugh. He said to Sean, “Who are you again?”

Fred’s lame game plan was falling apart. I cut in. “Call Sean. It’s good. Tell you what: Let’s cool off for thirty days and then we get back in touch, OK?”

Chocolate didn’t commit either way. He began talking with Sunny again in French. The waitress came by and Sean clumsily jumped to get the check. He shoved a credit card at her. What was his hurry?

Sunny and his friends stood and walked off, headed toward the beach. Laurenz, Sean, and I went the other way, toward the lobby and the valet stand. Laurenz remained uncharacteristically quiet until he and I were alone, back inside the Rolls. He started to open his mouth, but his cell phone rang. It was Sunny. They spoke in French and Laurenz began laughing.

Laurenz hung up, shook his head. “They say of your friend Sean, they say, ‘Who is this fucking guy?’ They say they wish to stuff him in the trunk of their car but they cannot because it is a rental and he is too big to fit.’ Sunny says they think he’s an idiot and they won’t deal with him.”

“What do
you
think?”

“He is a joke,” Laurenz said. “And I think he might be a cop.”

“What do you mean?”

“He is no wiseguy. This I know.”

“Why do say that?”

“He is a pussycat. He say, ‘Oh, you don’t deal with me, I walk away.’ Oh, I am so scared. A real wiseguy, he look you in the eye
and say very quietly, very calmly, ‘Fuck me? Fuck you. You tell me why I should not kill you today. Tell me now or you are dead before the day is over. Thank you. Good-bye.’ This is what the real wiseguy say.”

“Well—”

Laurenz floored the Rolls, rocketing away from the valet stand. “This guy Sean, he use green American Express card to pay the bill! A real wiseguy doesn’t use a credit card. He uses cash. Always, always! And he never takes a receipt! Never! Never!”

I didn’t know what to say. He was right.

Laurenz turned toward the causeway and downtown Miami.

After a few moments, he said, “I drop you at your hotel and then maybe I not see you again. Because if we had not done the deal on the boat, I would be thinking for sure you are a cop. But now”—Laurenz took his eyes off the road for a moment and squinted at me—“I don’t know if you are a cop and I don’t care. I am in fucking bad shape, OK? We are through.”

Laurenz stepped on the accelerator and cranked the radio.

He was out.

W
ITH
L
AURENZ GONE
, the Boston FBI office shut down Operation Masterpiece.

Wonderful, I thought. Bureaucracies and turf fighting on both sides of the Atlantic had destroyed the best chance in a decade to rescue the Gardner paintings. We’d also blown an opportunity to infiltrate a major art crime ring in France, a loose network of mobsters holding as many as seventy stolen masterpieces.

Our failure convinced me that the FBI was no longer the can-do force it was when I’d joined in 1988. The bureau was becoming a risk-averse bureaucracy like any other government agency, filled with mediocrity and people more concerned about their career than the mission.

The Art Crime Team, launched with such promise, seemed
headed for that fate too, roiled by constant turnover. We’d not only lost Eric Ives as unit chief, but our best prosecutor as well, Bob Goldman. Petty and insecure bosses in Philadelphia had given my best friend an ultimatum: Drop art crime and return to garden-variety drug and bank robbery cases or find another job. Goldman had called their bluff and quit, abruptly ending a twenty-four-year career in law enforcement. Perhaps worse, half of the original street agents assigned to the Art Crime Team had now moved on, looking to advance their careers. It was disheartening.

As I began my final twelve months as an FBI agent in the fall of 2007, I planned to finish up a few lingering cases, train an undercover replacement, and start thinking about my retirement party. I’d travel with Donna, visit my sons in college, attend my daughter’s high school recitals.

Then one afternoon that fall, my undercover cell phone buzzed.

It was Sunny.

Barcelona. January 2008
.

F
OUR MONTHS AFTER
S
UNNY’S PHONE CALL
, I
FOUND
myself in a frayed Barcelona hotel room, negotiating with his boss, Patrick.

Six of us crammed around a flimsy table and two single beds. Patrick and I sat on opposite sides of the table by an open window. Sunny and an undercover Spanish police officer perched on the edge of one bed. My muscle, the two FBI agents from Miami, still posing as Colombian drug dealers, lounged on the other bed.

A hidden camera in the ceiling fan recorded everything. A Spanish SWAT team waited next door.

Patrick, a lithe and cocksure Frenchman of Armenian descent, perhaps six foot three, sat a foot from my face, chain-smoking Marlboro reds. He was sixty years old, with close-cropped gray hair and a day’s white stubble on his chin. He kept his brown eyes locked on mine, patient and as focused as a sniper. His words came deliberately and in short sentences.

“We are older men, you and I,” Patrick said in French. “Money is nice, but liberty is very important.”

I’d hoped to bring along a French-speaking undercover FBI agent to translate, but the bureau hadn’t been able to find anyone
qualified. So the Spanish officer did the job. He moved from French to English and English to French with speed and gusto, but also with an unsettling lisp and effeminate voice that belied the tense negotiation. I could imagine the macho FBI agents watching on video in the next room, snickering at the incongruity.

I said, “I don’t want to go to jail either.”

“Yes, we know what is important.”

“So,” I said, hoping to get a confession on tape, “tell me about the robbery.”

Patrick was only happy to.

I
ALWAYS TELL
rookies that you’ve got to run down every lead. You never know which one will pan out.

Sometimes long shots pay off.

When Laurenz had dropped out of the deal, the agents at the Boston FBI office had thrown up their hands and closed the file. But the Miami division had not given up on Sunny; its agents opened a new investigation, Operation Masterpiece II, and lured Sunny back with the promise of a large cocaine deal. Soon, Sunny was calling me again to talk art.

At first, we spoke of the Vermeer and Rembrandt. But he also began to offer a second set of paintings—four works, including a Monet and a Sisley—stolen the previous summer from a museum in Nice. The two sets of paintings were held by different sets of gangsters, Sunny said.

I made it clear that I wanted the Boston paintings, not the Nice paintings. Sunny said I had to buy the Nice paintings first. It was a way to build trust, he said.

With the window to the Gardner paintings cracked open again, I had agreed and Sunny had set up the meeting in Barcelona to negotiate a price for the Nice paintings. I found it curious that Sunny chose Spain as a meeting spot—we knew from the wiretaps that the Vermeer was likely held in Spain.

I also figured we couldn’t lose. If Sunny was merely stringing me along about the Gardner paintings, we’d still recover the Nice paintings and help my friend Pierre solve a big art heist. On the other hand, if a deal for the Nice paintings led to a Gardner deal, we’d hit a grand slam.

Still, I approached the Spain meeting with extreme caution. I’d recently learned that a few weeks after our Florida hotel confrontation, Sunny had pulled an FBI informant aside and offered him $65,000 to have Laurenz killed.

I
N THE
B
ARCELONA
hotel room, I let Patrick spool out the details of his big Nice museum heist. He was proud of his work.

Patrick explained that he had picked a Sunday in August, the slowest visitor day of the week during the slowest month of the year. He’d chosen the apricot-and-cream-colored Musée des Beaux-Arts because it is set off the beaten tourist track, perched on a hill in a residential neighborhood. I knew that the Musée des Beaux-Arts shared something in common with the Gardner and the Barnes—it was the inspiration and former residence of a single patron of the arts, a nineteenth-century Ukrainian princess. The museum still held important works, though its once grand vista of the city’s Bay of Angels was now obscured by a forest of bland apartment buildings.

Patrick described his four accomplices as two close friends and two nobodies, gypsies. The five of them dressed in blue city maintenance jumpsuits and shielded their faces with either bandanas or motorcycle helmets. Security was a joke. No surveillance cameras. No alarms. The half dozen guards on duty were unarmed, pimply-faced kids. Pushovers, Patrick recalled. With their ill-fitting blazers and drooping khakis, the guards were perhaps the worst-dressed males in France.

Patrick said his crew was in and out in four minutes.

Wielding handguns, the thieves pushed open the glass door at
the entrance and ordered the guards and a handful of visitors to the floor. The gypsy henchmen held everyone at bay in the foyer as the others sprinted toward their targets. One thief ran through a sky-lit ground floor garden to a rear gallery, removing two paintings by the Flemish artist Jan Brueghel the Elder,
Allegory of Water
and
Allegory of Earth
. Patrick and an accomplice vaulted up sixty-six marble steps to the second floor, then scampered another thirty-four paces, past a Chéret mural and a Rodin rendering of
The Kiss
, to a room lined with Impressionist paintings, each hanging by a single hook. Patrick and his buddy lifted Monet’s
Cliffs Near Dieppe
and Sisley’s
Lane of Poplars at Moret-sur-Loing
and raced back downstairs. The thieves escaped by motorbike and blue Peugeot van.