Master Thieves (17 page)

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In January 1990,
Turner and another man drove up to a suburban home in Canton, outside of Boston, where they had heard the owner kept sizable amounts of cash. Dressed as a
deliveryman, Turner rang the doorbell and burst into the foyer when a woman opened the door. After first holding a gun to her head and then tying her up with masking tape, Turner and his accomplice robbed the house of $130,000 in cash and jewelry.

Then, two months after the Gardner heist, on May 18, 1990, Turner, Pappas, and a third gangster, Leonard DiMuzio, were arrested after breaking into a home in Tewksbury, a small town north of Boston. Even though the charges included possession of a handgun, and DiMuzio admitted the three were involved in the theft, Turner was sentenced to only sixty days in prison.

Although they got off practically scot-free after their arrest, the trio never worked again, and in March 1991 DiMuzio disappeared after visiting his sister in the hospital. Several months later his body was found, stuffed into the trunk of his car, dead from multiple gunshots to the head.

Police were without clues in both the Canton robbery and DiMuzio's murder until April 1992, when state police arrested Merlino and Pappas—but not Turner—for cocaine trafficking. With past criminal records, both Pappas and Merlino realized they faced serious time if they were convicted, so they decided to cooperate with investigators.

“I am in fear of my life and the lives of my family,” Pappas wrote in an August 1992 note to Edward Whelan, a state police officer with whom he had prior dealings and held in high regard.

“Turner and DiMuzio pulled that Canton home invasion,” Pappas told Whelan when they finally met. “They pulled the heist at Cheers, too.”

Whelan was shocked. The September 1991 robbery at Cheers, Boston's iconic pub, had been front-page news but had remained unsolved. But the best was yet to come from Pappas.

“Turner shot DiMuzio,” he finally said to the trooper. “He was angry that DiMuzio had given the cops details of his part
in the Tewksbury break-in, but most of all because he'd held out on his share of the money stolen in the job.”

Although Pappas outlined a laundry list of offenses, he made no mention of Turner being involved in planning or carry­ing out the Gardner Museum theft.

Merlino was trying another avenue to avoid going to jail on the 1992 cocaine trafficking charges. Through a lawyer, he reached out to Turner to try to recover the stolen Gardner paintings. The lawyer, who asked not to be identified, said he believed the authorities would be willing to drop the charges against Merlino if he could deliver the stolen artwork.

Turner promised to try. But days later, he called the lawyer back. “I was close but someone got spooked,” Turner said. “The best I can tell you is that they were in the basement of a church in South Boston.”

There were nearly a dozen churches within South Boston's borders. Searches turned up nothing and Merlino was stuck, left to serve a short sentence in state prison on the cocaine trafficking charges.

Pappas, whose father had been shot to death in a gangland shooting in 1981, suffered a far worse fate than Merlino. In November 1995, less than a month before he was to testify against his old buddy Turner on the home invasion, Pappas walked into the home of his girlfriend's parents with his arms filled with grocery bags for Thanksgiving dinner.

Two men burst into the breezeway of the house just as he got there. Their faces were covered with ski masks and they fired eight bullets into Pappas, including two into his mouth. Screaming, his girlfriend called Braintree police, who found Pappas still alive but with blood everywhere.

“I didn't see who did it,” Pappas told them, his speech garbled from the blood in his mouth. Gasping for air, he said, “There were two guys.”

Pappas's girlfriend was in hysterics, and she said to the cops, “He told me David Turner did this to him.”

“How do you know it was Turner, Charlie?” Braintree police sergeant Karen MacAleese asked Pappas.

“I know he did this because I'm testifying against him next week.”

EMTs were swarming around, and they rushed Pappas into a waiting ambulance. Lieutenant Paul Frasier, who had known Pappas from his many prior scrapes with the law, jumped in.

“Who did this to you, Charlie?” Frasier asked him.

Pappas opened his eyes and recognized Frasier.

“Go fuck yourself,” he hissed, and closed his eyes for the final time. He was dead before they reached the hospital.

Just a few hours later, Turner, looking sharp in fresh clothes, was approached in front of his home by several Braintree police officers who told him they wanted to talk to him about Pappas's killing.

“If you've got any questions for me I'm willing to hear you out, but you've gotta call Martin Leppo first.” This was probably the first that the Braintree police knew that Leppo, a well-known criminal defense lawyer in the area, represented Turner. Turner could now be added to at least a half dozen individuals such as Robert Guarente, Stephen Rossetti, Myles Connor, Louis Royce, Dicky Joyce, and William Youngworth, whom Leppo represented who were considered suspects or at least having information on the Gardner theft at one time or another. “If we have any questions for you, we'll find you on our own, don't worry,” one of the officers responded.

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The shooting of a prospective witness
in a criminal trial sent shock waves through Massachusetts law enforcement. Massachusetts Governor William Weld, who had been a US attorney and head of the Justice Department's Criminal Division, decried the lack of state resources to adequately protect such witnesses.

With the principal witness dead, Martin Leppo pressed to have Turner's trial go forward. But if Pappas's death wasn't enough, at the next court hearing state prosecutors revealed that another key witness, the woman who had been held captive at gunpoint while the Canton home was ransacked, was too afraid to testify. To top it off, a state police captain testified that Turner's friends had approached her boyfriend at a nearby mall and threatened to kill him if she testified.

“He was very scared,” she said. “He had no doubt if I testified he would be killed.”

She never did, and the charges were soon dropped. Turner, who had denied the charges that he was responsible for the home invasion, had again beaten the rap and was set free. The furor soon died down and, as with his father before him, no one was ever prosecuted for Charles Pappas's murder.

But the heat brought down on Turner from these repeated close encounters with the law had an effect all the same. After the charges were dropped in 1995, Turner went straight.

Besides, the mob had figured out that there was a new way in Boston to make huge amounts of money, quickly and legally: through contracts related to the Big Dig.

Originally predicted to cost the federal government $2.8 billion, the Big Dig was a major construction project intended to place underground the major artery that cuts through the center of Boston, and build a new tunnel to Logan Airport beneath Boston Harbor. Due to unforeseen problems and delays, the project's budget was ballooning to $14.6 billion. Turner and Stevie Rossetti, his mobster friend from East Boston who had
served prison time for bank robbery and conspiracy, decided to get in on the bonanza. Both established trucking companies and during the mid-1990s landed more than $20 million in contracts from the state Department of Transportation.

But even with all that money on the table, the chance of making millions through a quick and dirty score had too much appeal for both men.

Carmello Merlino, having served his time for cocaine trafficking, was working on a new criminal opportunity out of his Dorchester radiator shop. A parolee named Anthony Romano Jr. who had come to work for his repair shop said an armored car headquarters in nearby Easton was ripe for hitting. Romano had a friend who was a guard on the inside and was in total control of the headquarters on Sunday mornings. There was as much as $50 million ready for the taking, he assured Merlino.

But Anthony Romano Jr. didn't happen to secure his job at Merlino's shop by accident. He had been placed there by an FBI agent, David Nadolski, after he'd assisted Nadolski in recovering three priceless Bibles and a fourth book stolen from the Adams National Historic Site in Quincy. It wasn't long before Romano reported back that Merlino was discussing the Gardner Museum paintings, and his interest in recovering them.

Merlino wasn't interested in their value; rather, he wanted to gain the release of someone out of jail this time. The $5 million reward that the Gardner was offering for information that led to the recovery of the artwork was just icing on the cake.

The talk about the Gardner case became so frequent that Merlino didn't blink when two FBI agents, including Neil Cronin, who was assigned to the Gardner recovery case, showed up repeatedly in 1998 to remind him of the agency's interest in getting the stolen masterpieces back.

After one of the meetings with the FBI agents, Merlino told Romano that if the deal went awry for any reason, the younger
man would be suspected as the weak link and Merlino would make sure Turner killed Romano as well as his daughter.

An air of inevitability hung over the garage that Merlino could facilitate the paintings' return. So strong was this perceived probability that Cronin's supervisor in the FBI's Boston office visited Anne Hawley, still the Gardner's director, in September 1998 with some good news: The FBI now knew who had stolen the paintings, FBI supervisor W. Thomas Cassano told Hawley. While he didn't provide any names, her notes of their conversation quote Cassano as saying, “One is in jail, one is on the street, and one is dead.”

Reports quickly spread among the trustees that the thief who had died had suffered a drug overdose soon after the theft. The one in jail was actually also thought to be dead, killed by members of the mid-Atlantic mob of which he was a low-level member. Little was known of the third individual, the one who was still on the streets, except that he had masterminded the theft.

In the ensuing years, the thief who died of a drug overdose has been rumored to be George Reissfelder, a low-level hood who'd migrated into Merlino's gang in the 1980s after being released from prison—with the help of legal representation by John F. Kerry, before he became US senator from Massachusetts and Democratic nominee for president—for a murder and robbery he was later absolved of.

No clues to the Gardner robbery were found after a search of Reissfelder's apartment, but his brother and sister later told investigators that they recalled seeing a painting that looked much like the Edouard Manet
Chez Tortoni
hanging in his bedroom. The painting had been banged out of its frame when stolen from the Gardner, and Reissfelder had hung the painting in his bedroom in a new frame.

“I may not be able to tell you if a painting hung in a museum or was bought at Wal-Mart, but I could tell that one
in George's room was something beautiful,” says his sister, Donna Reissfelder Mauras, who now lives in Tucson, Arizona. “But I told George that the frame he had the painting in didn't fit at all. It was a golden frame, too frou-frou, for a painting of a man like that one was.”

There were several other clues that drew investigators to look at Reissfelder. Chief among them was his face: Long, narrow, and more youthful-looking than his age of forty, Reiss­felder looked like the older of the two thieves in the police sketches. Also, Reissfelder and Turner were friends, having hung out together at Merlino's Dorchester auto-repair shop. Robert Beauchamp, who met Reissfelder while serving time in Massachusetts state prisons, said Reissfelder and Turner visited him several times in prison in the eighteen months after the Gardner robbery and before Reissfelder died in July 1991.

“George wouldn't tell me what it was, but when he came by himself, he did say he had done something with Turner,” Beauchamp said.

Although the Massachusetts Department of Correction refuses to release records of the visits, investigators confirm Beauchamp's account that Reissfelder and Turner visited him together.

While the case implicating Reissfelder in the Gardner robbery is circumstantial at best, the information on him that Beauchamp and Reissfelder's relatives gave investigators was sufficient to get a few warrants. On that basis they conducted complete searches of three of the houses he or his relatives lived in, but found nothing.

There's no doubt, though, that what Reissfelder had in his possession was important to Merlino, whose automotive repair shop Reissfelder visited often in the months before his death. The morning he was found dead in his apartment building, it was Merlino and an associate who summoned the
Quincy Fire Department when they were unable to gain entry to the unit on their own. Maybe it was to buy cocaine to feed his growing addiction that drew Reissfelder to Merlino's garage, or maybe it was to meet with other cronies including Turner, Pappas, and Guarente, whom law enforcement often found there and whose names have been associated with the Gardner theft, but many answers died with Reissfelder when he overdosed that summer day.

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Merlino's four-year sentence
in state prison for cocaine trafficking out of his garage didn't stop his strategizing on how to get his hands on the stolen masterpieces.

An FBI investigative report written July 21, 1998, quoted Romano, its undercover informant, as telling the agents that Merlino had told him he had seven of the Gardner paintings and was working out a deal with criminal defense lawyer Martin Leppo to have them returned to the museum. Leppo was drawing up a plan, according to Merlino, that would ensure immunity from prosecution for possessing stolen property as well as an equitable plan to divide up the $5 million reward the museum was offering.

At least $1 million would go to Youngworth, which was only fair considering he would have been instrumental in getting the artwork returned. According to Merlino, Youngworth had the paintings after Myles Connor, who was off to serve a ten-year sentence in federal prison, placed them in his safekeeping.