Master Thieves (22 page)

For an ex-mobster to receive such a ringing personal endorsement from a federal judge appears remarkable in retrospect, but in the decade since his release, Ferrara has made good on his pledge to stay out of trouble and avoid association with any of his past criminal cohorts. He lives a quiet life, sharing a condominium with his son on the outskirts of the North End, keeping in close touch with his four daughters and six grandchildren.

_______________________

During the week after
I got my surprise phone call, I had several conversations with the caller, who had personal knowledge of the talks between Donati and Ferrara. I also sought confirmation from Ferrara himself but, as he'd done to others who had approached him to talk since his release from federal prison in 2005, he declined to be interviewed.

“Why are you telling me this now?” I asked the caller. It was nearly twenty-five years after the theft, and ten years after Ferrara's release from prison, after all. There were several reasons, I was told, to come forward with the story. Not the least of these was the $5 million reward the museum was offering for the paintings' safe return; like everyone else in Boston, Ferrara certainly had an interest in that. And, I was told, he'd pledged to share the reward with Donati's son and other members of the Donati family. Ferrara would also lobby for the release—or at least a reduction in his long prison sentence—of David Turner, his old cohort in Boston's underworld, whom he felt had been set up by the authorities to find out what Turner knew about the Gardner theft.

Also, for someone who values greatly how he is viewed in the city of his upbringing, the caller said, Ferrara believed that facilitating the return of the artwork would go a long way toward improving his reputation.

Having checked my caller's information with several who know both men, including Elene Guarente and members of Bobby Donati's family, I decided to relay what I'd learned to the FBI. Special agent Geoffrey Kelly, the FBI's lead on the Gardner investigation for more than a decade, and Anthony Amore, still the head of security at the Gardner, agreed to see me. I had met both men numerous times in the past, but on each of those occasions it was me asking the questions and taking notes. This time it was different; I was doing the talking and Kelly and Amore took the notes.

For nearly an hour, I told them about my conversations with the caller, and the detailed information he'd provided about conversations between Ferrara and Donati. Specifically, I told them about the places my caller suggested Donati might have buried any stolen artwork, including the house he'd rented on Mountain Avenue in Revere, his mother's home in Everett, and the New Hampshire home his former wife was
living in at the time of the theft. I also offered one further opportunity: If the pair had any doubt about what I was telling them, my caller was willing to meet with Amore—though not Kelly—to answer any further questions he might have.

“Everyone knows I've never talked to the feds,” the caller had said, when I'd pressed him on why he would not meet with Kelly. “Besides, I don't want people speculating that I'm in some kind of trouble, because I'm not.”

I gave Amore the caller's cell phone number, but he never called him. Nor did he—or Kelly—return my subsequent phone calls when I tried to determine what they'd thought of the information I had relayed to them, and what, if anything, they planned to do with it.

Less than a month later, though, Kelly gave a clear indication of what he thought about the information I had passed on to him suggesting that Robert Donati had been instrumental in pulling off the theft from the Gardner Museum. In an exclusive interview with the Fox News local Boston outlet about the Gardner heist, Kelly made no mention of Donati as knowing anything about the Gardner heist. Instead, Kelly stressed that there had been “sightings” of the stolen artwork by individuals the FBI believed were worthwhile sources—clearly contradicting the story I'd told them. Kelly declined to identify the individuals in question, or say where the sightings had taken place.

_______________________

That the secret
of the greatest art heist in world history might rest within the dynamics of the Boston gang war has not been lost on Anne Hawley. Although the war between the Salemme and Ferrara/Russo gangs was a tremendous concern for law enforcement for more than a decade between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s, leading to more than a dozen killings and several
major trials, the Gardner theft was never raised seriously as a possible motive or even topic of inquiry in any of those cases.

“I just can't understand it,” Hawley thought as the years ticked by after the theft. “Here we have this gang war going on, with Whitey Bulger and all that making front-page news, yet no one ever gets questioned about the Gardner case.”

Hawley made her own approaches. In the late 1990s, after a federal judge had held hearings into the FBI's secret dealings with Whitey Bulger and other informants, she reached out to
Boston Herald
reporter Ralph Ranalli, who had covered them, and asked if any possible links to the Gardner case had surfaced. No, sorry, he said. When William Bulger, president of the Massachusetts Senate, made one of his frequent visits to the museum, she approached him. Would he be willing to ask his brother, Whitey, what he might know or be able to learn about the stolen artwork? Bulger never answered the question and changed the subject quickly.

Investigators, however, have long been intrigued that Whitey Bulger might have had something to do with the Gardner robbery, or known who was responsible for it. US attorney Michael Sullivan went so far as to ask Stephen Flemmi, Bulger's closest associate, who testified against him at his 2013 trial, if Bulger had any connection to the theft.

Flemmi told him that following the theft, Bulger had directed him to find out who was responsible. In effect, Flemmi told Sullivan, Bulger had told him “no one pulls off a heist like that in my territory without paying me tribute.”

Disgraced FBI agent John Connolly, who had handled Bulger as an informant, said that even though he was retired from the Bureau when the theft took place, he was asked by his old colleagues to see what he could find out from Bulger.

“It was the same thing,” Connolly said. “He wanted to know so he could get his percentage, but he couldn't find anything out.”

The FBI has persistently shown little interest in pursuing Donati as a suspect. Despite Donati's name being raised as being responsible, neither his sister nor his ex-wife had ever been questioned by authorities about his possible role. Nor did authorities ever search the Revere home Donati was renting at the time of his death for any signs of the paintings.

Instead, Kelly insisted that the FBI remained focused on three men who were “persons of interest” at the center of their investigation: Carmello Merlino, owner of the Dorchester auto body repair shop who had died in federal prison in 1998 after being convicted of attempted robbery of an armored car headquarters; Robert Guarente, the gangster who died in 2004 soon after his release from federal prison after serving a six-year sentence for cocaine trafficking; and Robert Gentile, the low-level hood who for years was close to Guarente and who has consistently denied he had any role in the Gardner heist or in stashing the paintings.

Regardless of their ties to the Gardner case, what does link Merlino, Guarente, and Gentile to the case is their affiliation to “Cadillac Frank” Salemme and his gang, who were not only fighting Vincent Ferrara for dominance of Boston's mob underworld. Both gangs also knew how vulnerable the Gardner Museum was to being robbed.

Bobby Donati was the guy in Vincent Ferrara's crew who had always had his eyes on the Gardner, mostly because of his longstanding relationship with Myles Connor, Boston's legendary art thief. Meanwhile, the Salemme gang knew about the woeful security guarding the Gardner's riches from members of the Rossetti family, who had of course learned of it through master thief Louis Royce.

Royce had told two people—Stephen Rossetti, the nephew of gang leader Ralph Rossetti, and Richard Devlin, an enforcer for underboss Salemme—about his days hiding out in the Gardner, of its poor security, and even how to rob the museum.

But although Stevie Rossetti had helped pull off the art heist from the home in Newton with his uncle and Royce in 1981, he'd told another associate who reminded him of Royce's tales of the Gardner's vulnerability while driving by the museum one night, “I'm not interested in art. That's Louis' score.” Most tellingly, though, Rossetti continues to serve a forty-plus-year sentence for participation in the armored car heist in 1999, when offering the authorities information on the Gardner investigation would clearly prompt them to reduce his prison term.

As for Richard Devlin, the second gang member Royce told about the museum's vulnerability, he was a brutal enforcer. Devlin had gone to jail for dismembering a Dorchester tough in 1972 and, once released, specialized in robbing armored cars. He was so active that in the mid-1980s the authorities put together a joint federal-state task force to crack down on the surge of armored car robberies he had inspired in New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts.

Devlin knew about the value of stolen artwork through his association with another gangster, Robert Wilson, who had at one point drafted Devlin's brother, also named Robert, to help him fence a Van Dyck masterpiece and twelve lesser-known paintings stolen in Providence in 1976 to a buyer in Tampa, Florida.

The buyer, however, turned out to be an undercover FBI agent, and Wilson, Robert Devlin, and a third associate were arrested, though ultimately only Wilson was convicted.

(Interestingly, the Van Dyck, which was by far the most valuable of the stolen artwork, disappeared as mysteriously as it appeared. There had been no testimony during the trial that reported from whom it had been stolen or how it had come into Wilson's possession. And four years after Wilson's conviction, the federal judge who sent him to prison approved a motion to return the Van Dyck painting to Wilson because
prosecutors had never established that the painting had been stolen. Daniel Grieco, Wilson's lawyer, said he doesn't recall having gotten the painting back from the FBI.)

Devlin's other brother, Frank, scoffed at the possibility that Richard Devlin might have been involved in the Gardner theft, though. “It seems a little above him after all the heinous stuff he was alleged to have done in his life,” he said. Frank Devlin was recently informed that his mobster brother had left what looked to be a diary in a bank's safety deposit box before his death. It had taken a decade to be turned over to the state.

“I might just have to open that diary up to see if there's any secrets about the Gardner heist or anything else in it,” Frank said with a chuckle, still clearly not believing his brutal brother had any involvement.

Devlin remained his dangerous self to the end. In fact, he was wearing a bulletproof vest when he sat in a car with Stevie Rossetti and Richard Gillis, another mob associate, watching a social club on Bennington Street in East Boston, one day in March 1994. The club was operated by forces that had once been loyal to Ferrara and Russo. At 9:30
p.m.
gunfire erupted at the three Salemme associates. When police arrived, they found Richard Devlin slumped behind the wheel of his 1994 Buick Skylark. He'd been shot in the head and was in critical condition; he died a few days later. Gillis suffered a bullet wound to the face in the encounter, but Rossetti escaped uninjured.

With Rossetti locked away and Devlin gone, Louis Royce's original confidants now seem improbable sources of good information on the Gardner theft. At their 2013 press conference, they called to the public for more tips. If they have a reason for choosing not to investigate Bobby Donati's old apartment for clues, they aren't saying what it is.

Afterword

I
'd been following the trail
of the Gardner masterpieces, stolen that dreary March night in 1990, for almost twenty years the day I found myself in Robert Gentile's living room, in the suburbs of Hartford, Connecticut. As I sat there across from him, it seemed at one key moment that the whole Gardner mystery might unfold before me.

Gentile, well into his seventies, still wore the leg bracelets that monitored his home confinement while he was on parole from his conviction for selling prescription painkillers to an undercover federal informant. He and I talked at length about how the FBI came to consider him the key figure in the abiding mystery of the Gardner masterpieces.

All the while, over a couple of pizzas I'd brought along from Regina's, his favorite pizza parlor in Boston, we were sizing each other up—me pressing him on the holes in his denials, and him seeing how much I knew and, I thought, trying to determine whether I could be trusted to be told something different.

Gentile has the look of someone who has worked with his hands: He spent much of his life laying pavement. His clothes, though old and worn, were by no means tattered. His face was fleshy and looked as though it belonged to a
man far bigger than his five feet six inches and more than two hundred–pound frame. But Gentile's eyes were large and expressive, especially when we talked about things he was eager to discuss, such as the unfairness of the FBI in believing Elene Guarente, when she told a federal grand jury that she knew her husband, dying from cancer, had given at least one of the stolen masterpieces to Gentile.

But why, I pressed him, had he agreed to assist the FBI in its recovery efforts if ultimately he had no real access to the paintings? That need for an honest answer seemed to get through to him as we wrapped up our first session, and he walked me slowly, with the help of a wooden cane, to his front door. The late afternoon sun was peeking through the living room's heavy drapes and he stopped and asked me, for the first time that afternoon, to shut off the tape recorder I still was holding in my hand.

What, he wanted to know, was he going to get out of the book I was planning to write? I sensed he was asking me a different question, though: What would happen if he decided to tell a different story? I told him I would be prepared to work with him, but it would have to be something different from the denials he and his lawyer had been giving in court and to the media. “If we're going to work together, you've got to be open with me about everything: how you got involved and what happened to those paintings,” I told him.

I could feel myself holding my breath. For about thirty seconds, Gentile thought about what I had said, his head held low. When he looked up, his eyes had gone dead, and it was obvious that the moment of reflection had passed.

“They [the feds] set me up and ruined my life,” he said flatly.

I left Gentile frustrated but with a better understanding of his three-year involvement in the Gardner case and why the FBI was so convinced he could lead them to one or more of
the masterpieces. Replaying the moment in my mind, I thought about why he hadn't taken the bait. There was money—potentially millions of dollars—to be had if he could facilitate the return of the paintings. And while I hadn't explicitly offered him a more immediate reward for his information, we both knew I was willing to try. So why not open up? Two reasons eventually occurred to me. He didn't want to be humiliated, and he was afraid for himself and his family.

If he did have possession of any of the stolen masterpieces but they had been destroyed in a hiding place he had made for them—in the ditch beneath the false-bottomed floor of his backyard shed—and he told the tale, he would face a lifetime of embarrassment for allowing the multimillion-dollar artwork to be ruined. Even with a $5 million reward on the table, this was no small thing to a man like Gentile. But perhaps more important, Gentile and his family would be vulnerable to whatever criminal gangs he may owe allegiance to.

I knew his family was paramount in Gentile's mind. During our talks, he constantly talked about his wife's ill health, and he aimed his utmost anger at the federal officials who had refused to release him from prison to visit his daughter before she died in 2013.

Before long it occurred to me that there was one person who might be able to get Gentile to open up: Vincent Ferrara, the former Boston mob leader I had been speaking to for several months through a shared acquaintance. I had reached out to Ferrara not long before I'd met with Gentile, in the hope of learning more about the battle for control of the Boston underworld after the death of Raymond Patriarca and the takedown of the Angiulo family in the mid-1980s. What I'd gotten, passed through our intermediary, was far more than I had expected: a detailed account of the underworld dealings between Ferrara's gang and “Cadillac Frank” Salemme's crew, as well as the confession made to Ferrara by Robert Donati, his
driver and close friend, that Donati had pulled off the Gardner Museum theft.

With or without Gentile, the pieces were starting to fit. Donati's confession had a ring of truth, not only because of the enormous detail involved, but because it also, finally, included a motive for the Gardner heist: Donati intended to exchange whatever masterpieces were stolen for Ferrara's release from prison, because Ferrara was the only person who could protect Donati in the then-raging war between the Ferrara and Salemme gangs.

But Donati never got his wish. With the heat more intense than he'd ever imagined after stealing the paintings, Donati hid the art, perhaps in the hands of his friend Bobby Guarente, hoping that one day he could still gain his friend's release. Instead he suffered a brutal death.

Now, with the $5 million reward in front of Ferrara—something he wanted to share with Donati's family—I could see a way that the return of the masterpieces might be brokered.

Although Ferrara had been living a quiet, law-abiding life since release from prison in 2005, he might be willing to meet and talk with Gentile, and provide him assurance that no harm would come to him or his family if he gave the authorities what they were looking for, namely the location of the masterpieces, even if they were now ruined.

I contacted the intermediary, who got back to me almost immediately. He was willing to put the request to Ferrara and ask him if he would meet with Gentile, but he envisioned a problem none of us could solve.

As a recently released federal prisoner, Gentile had to abide by certain rules. One of them prevented him from meeting with anyone who had been convicted of a federal offense. Only a federal judge, acting on the request of the FBI or another US law enforcement agency, could release Gentile from
that restriction. Despite what felt like the biggest break in the Gardner case yet, arranging a meeting between Ferrara and Gentile was not something I could accomplish. But it also felt like just the sort of meeting the authorities, especially those involved who have labored so tirelessly over the case, would want to see happen, if not encourage.

But it was up to the feds to arrange such a meeting. I had taken the matter as far as I could or should as a reporter.

Just like the Boston police, and many others who'd tried to help over the years, ultimately I had to cede jurisdiction to the FBI. Thus far, they had been unwilling to act on my information.

I had to stop there.

_______________________

After twenty-five years,
the biggest art theft in world history is still an open case. Despite the efforts of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, no one has been arrested and nothing has been recovered. In fact, there hasn't even been a single confirmed sighting of any of the thirteen stolen pieces. It is a disgrace that wouldn't be tolerated in European countries, where art is revered as a national treasure rather than collected by hedge fund managers and titans of industry.

How could two men disguised as police officers, but wearing what were obviously fake mustaches and private security uniforms that could have been bought at any army supply store, have pulled off such an extraordinary score? How could they have run roughshod through the museum's hallowed galleries, like hoodlums on an angry rampage, smashing glass facings from frames, cutting Rembrandts from their mountings, yet leave a Napoleonic banner unharmed after a long, futile effort to unscrew it from its encasement? And how could
a museum, containing gallery after gallery of masterpieces and priceless antiques, allow itself to remain vulnerable to such a theft after being warned in no uncertain terms that members of one of Boston's toughest gangs were plotting to rob it?

Enter a vulnerable museum in dime-store disguises, take the first things that look expensive, and walk out the employee entrance. In the end it was a simple plan, and it didn't take a master to execute it. All it took was a motive and a few friends in low places, just the kind of job that Bobby Donati was perfect for.

But the crime remains unsolved, and the artwork missing. Perhaps if traditional investigative work could not provide the key to a recovery, maybe a nontraditional approach could be successful. Even if Richard DesLauriers' 2013 press conference had left something to be desired in the way of convincing details of how the theft had taken place and where the paintings had been hidden, the FBI Boston chief said at least one thing I agreed with: What was needed in any renewed efforts to locate the missing masterpieces was, quite simply, more people looking.

Although the FBI and the Gardner Museum had spent millions trying to locate the artwork via traditional investigative work, what had been missing from the approach was the public's commitment to the effort. A “crowdsourcing” campaign could garner public awareness and commitment toward playing a role in recovering the art. There needed to be an effort to show the people of Boston, if not art lovers everywhere, that what was stolen in that March 1990 heist was as much our loss as it was the museum's.

Anne Hawley had issued eloquent statements about that loss on several occasions in the past, but they seemed to have been forgotten in just a few days' time. Richard DesLauriers had made his plea for the public's help in 2013, but in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing, which took place a
month after his Gardner press conference, it had been all but forgotten.

It did bring in a number of leads—which were dutifully investigated without success—before the public seemingly moved on. But still others are out there who have been looking.

One is a man named Howard Winter. Winter, a longtime Boston gangster in his eighties, and James Melvin, who turned seventy a few years ago, had a novel idea. Rather than try to take the glory for themselves, as William Youngworth and others seem to have tried, Winter and Melvin chose to seek information from their friends in the underworld about the stolen artwork, sharing the opportunity in the hope of achieving results.

Winter and Melvin insisted that what they were
not
offering to do was to go undercover for the authorities—they were not about to flip on any former associates.

Instead, they pledged to do their own detective work among their past associates—and new ones to whom they were directed—and make known this specific message: The paintings had been missing for far too long. Whatever the reason they had been stolen—to ransom someone out of jail, for a fire sale to an interested customer, for bartering a trade for illicit contraband like drugs, weapons, or stolen diamonds—it had long been satisfied. They needed to be back on the museum's gallery walls now and the deal being offered—the $5 million reward by the museum and no prosecution for possession of stolen property—was more than adequate.

The two worked diligently on the assignment for several years. Melvin flew to Canada, Florida, and California to meet with those he thought knew something or could help. Their work was interrupted, however, by another venture the pair got involved with: an attempt by both men to help a lawyer they knew avoid making high-interest payments on $100,000 he had borrowed from two businessmen. The statements Melvin and Winter made to the two businessmen were considered
extortion threats. Both men were indicted, pleaded guilty to the charges, and were put on probation in 2013. Winter was eighty-three at the time, and Melvin seventy.

But Melvin was diagnosed with a serious illness during this period, halting their efforts on behalf of the Gardner. In a recent interview, Winter said that Melvin's death, which came in early 2014, had robbed him of both his friend and his hopes his partner could help recover the stolen paintings. “Jimmy knew everyone, and there was no door that didn't open for him,” Winter said. “I thought we were making progress, good progress, but I guess it wasn't meant to be.”

Even if Winter's story does not have a happy ending, he is one more example of a shift in will for gaining the paintings' recovery. Because of the FBI's insistence that it is not interested in prosecuting those who might have possession of the artwork, the bad guys have joined the recovery effort. The agency has been successful in drawing out people like Howie Winter, Robert Gentile, Louis Royce, and others who believe the masterpieces belong back on the museum's walls for all of the public's enjoyment.

For now, though, Boston—and the rest of the art-loving world—is entering a second quarter-century without the Gardner masterpieces. The magic and the wonder that had captured the imagination of Louis Royce so keenly that he wanted to find a way to steal them has now turned—he like so many other notorious bad guys believes the paintings need to be returned to those galleries' walls.

A reminder of what their loss means to the city came to me recently as I stood on the steps of the Boston Public Library, which is located in the city center, Copley Square. The city's vibrancy can be felt here—as young and old rush in and out of the library—as can the city's history, with the square dating back to the Revolution and also the site of the two terrible terrorist bomb blasts that killed three people and injured hundreds at the 2013 Boston Marathon.