The Gardner Heist Investigation In The Media (Part V)

Another detail came out with the Globe story about Security Guard Rick Abath’s footsteps being the only ones picked up on motion detectors in the Blue Room the night of the robbery was that Abath had also opened the side entrance to the museum only minutes before the robbers rang the buzzer to get in.

“Without naming a source Kurkjian said that “after 23 years of pursuing dead ends, including a disappointing search of an alleged mobster’s home last year, investigators are focusing on intriguing evidence that suggests the former night watchman might have been in on the crime all along — or at least knows more about it than he has admitted.”

This could not have won any friends within the investigation for Kurkjian. It flatly contradicted the publicity campaign the FBI would start only five days later, where the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts and the head of the FBI both said the identities of the thieves were known and the focus was on locating the paintings.  There was no mention of security guard Rick Abath during the March 18, 2013 press conference or in the press release from the same day. 

It would have to make it that much more difficult to get citizens and journalists thinking about billboards in Philadelphia, when an interview with the security guard, who is confronted with potentially damning new (to the public) details about the long ago case, might have people thinking about the whodunit aspect of the crime once again.  

Soon two of the biggest Boston crime stories in recent memory occupied the full attention of the region’s Federal investigators and the journalists who cover them. It began unexpectedly and tragically, just four weeks after the start of the FBI’s Gardner Heist publicity campaign. 

The first was the Boston Marathon Bombing on April 15, 2013, that killed three and wounded several hundred others including 16 who lost limbs. The second was the jury trial of Boston mob boss Whitey Bulger, which began on June 12, 2013 and like the Gardner Heist was not just a news story but a local saga.  After being on the run for run for almost 16 years, Bulger was captured in 2011 and went on trial for 32 counts for racketeering, money laundering, extortion, and weapons charges, and complicity in nineteen murders. 

On August 12, 2013 he was found guilty on 31 counts, including both racketeering charges, and was found to have been involved in eleven murders. Between the pre-trial buildup, the trial, guilty verdict and the sentencing in November, the FBI’s time with the media was pretty filled up with the Bulger Trial.

This national tragedy engaged the full undivided attention of the city for weeks but it did not have the same daily, soap opera type coverage for an extended period, the way the Bulger Trial did.

A few weeks after Bulger’s sentencing to life in prison on November 14, 2013, Gardner Museum Director Anne Hawley perhaps in an attempt to reignite interest in the Gardner Heist investigation did an interview and made a startling disclosure to Emily Rooney  an on the WGBH program Greater Boston:

"We also are being threatened from the outside by criminals, who wanted attention from the FBI, and so they were threatening us, and threatening putting bombs in the museum," "We were evacuating museum, staff members were under threat, no one really knew what kind of a cauldron we were in" said in the December 3, 2013 program.

In a profile written about Hawley and her tenure as head of the Gardner Museum, arts reporter fifteen months later, at the time of the 25^th anniversary Malcolm Gay wrote:

“Hawley endured death threats in the months immediately following the robbery. She twice evacuated the museum after bomb scares, and the FBI instructed her to take a different route home each night from work. ‘They scared me,’ said Hawley. ‘I wouldn’t go out of my house alone at night.’”

Five weeks earlier, when Hawley announced her retirement, she spoke with the same reporter, Malcolm Gay, about life at the museum in the aftermath of the robbery:
Amid heightened anxieties over security following the theft, Hawley evacuated the museum several times following bomb threats. The authorities instructed her to take a different route home every night from work, warning that her daughter was not to be picked up by anyone who wasn’t known to her school.

And yet none of this horror ever made it into the newspapers at the time, and the only thing specifically that has come out about the people responsible for the threats was that they  wanted the attention of the FBI.  There has been plenty of opportunity for Hawley to praise, her and the museum's protectors, the FBI, for their efforts during this second more prolonged crime spree against the Gardner Museum, which is conspicuous in its absence. 

Later on in that same December 3, 2013 broadcast when Hawley first revealed the threats she, the staff and museum endured, Emily Rooney also interviewed FBI Special Agent Geoff Kelly and asked him about the threats. 

Rooney:  Anne Hawley told us — we never heard that before — that right after the heist that there was all kinds of bomb threats and the museum was threatened. I never heard that. Explain that. What happened?

Kelley: “Certainly when you have a case of this magnitude, people are going to come out of the woodwork. That is what happened. That’s what happened shortly after the case.”

In an interview for the book The Gardner Heist, which came out in 2010, twenty years after the robbery, some of the criminal-contact targeting the Museum was briefly covered.  
 “You’re got the FBI. You’ve got other criminals calling you to negotiate a deal. You’ve got the press killing you because you let it happen.  People making bomb threats,” Museum Director Anne Hawley said to the author Ulrich Boser. Hawley lumped the FBI in with criminals, and an adversarial press, and without qualification.  

However, given the seriousness and the scope of it as described in the Boston Globe at the 25 year mark, why was it not reported at the time? If this was news after 25 years, it was news at 25 days. .

Anne Hawley had discussed these assaults and threats against the museum and its staff on five occasions publicly and, perhaps significantly, she refers to the people who did this as criminals, and not con artists, kooks, cruel pranksters or opportunists.  But the “out of the woodwork” remark, by Agent Kelly implies that all of the people who made the bomb threats or tried to make a deal for the paintings were, criminal scavengers and not the original criminal predators; people who were neither the Gardner thieves nor their associates.  

Anne Hawley never suggests that, however. In fact her statements suggest the opposite. “We didn’t know what kind of cauldron we were in,” she said. 

If you have crazy people making bomb threats you know what kind of cauldron you are in. It is a terrible but familiar cauldron reported upon regularly in the news media. 
  
But what kind of cauldron are you in when the FBI says that it is chasing down leads and yet there is someone who is so desperate to jump the queue, to speak with the FBI about the theft, that they are communicating threats?  And a week or a month later they are still making threats with the same motivations?

The New York Times reported in 1994 that, “the guards were told, ‘Tell them they'll be hearing from us,’ a possible allusion to a ransom demand, which never arrived. Was this one of the thieves making good on their word?   

Shortly after her retirement announcement, Hawley told WGBH Arts editor Jared Bowen: "
"There were several of us who had threats against us, 

People coming out of the woodwork does not adequately cover it, given the extent of the threats, or the targets experienced by the museum, and it does not address, at all, the purpose for the threats as stated by Hawley.  It is hard to comprehend how this would be kept secret for almost twenty years, and without any local law enforcement agency involvement, unless the calls were viewed by the FBI as at least potentially related to the historic March 18, 1990 robbery. 

Hawley had the opportunity a little over a year later to clarify or restate her experiences in the aftermath of the robbery when she went over the same experiences with the Boston Globe 15 months later, but did not.

These criminals wanted attention from the FBI. What kind of attention? Did they have information and could not get a call back. Even the Boston Police with tips were growing impatient. Perhaps the person was looking to use the paintings as the proverbial “Get Out of Jail Free" card as Myles Connor had done with the Rembrandt he stole from the Museum of Fine Arts on April 14, 1975. 

In fact, the ransom note the Museum received in 1994, which has never been publicly discounted, stated that this indeed was the purpose of the theft.

From Master Thieves by Stephen Kurkjian

“The letter writer stated that the paintings had been stolen to gain someone a reduction in a prison sentence, but as that opportunity had dwindled dramatically there was no longer a primary motive for keeping the artwork.”

Who had received a prison sentence that could not be reduced with the return of the Gardner paintings in 1994? Let’s see, Sirhan Sirhan, James Earl Ray, Charles Manson and darn few others? And those three had been in jail for decades. It certainly narrows the possibilities down considerably. And yet the note has never been publicly discounted. "We continue to take it very seriously." FBI's Geoff Kelly over a dozen years after it was received at the museum. 

It is such a specific and unusual detail to include in the backstory, that It could be an effort to authenticate by way of knowledge of the investigation. Maybe the ransom note writer knew or believed that the paintings had been offered in trade for a reduced sentence. 

The Globe article stated the threats against Hawley and the Museum occurred “in the months immediately” following the theft.   One criminal under investigation for a serious crime at the time of the Gardner Heist was a Boston native, then living in Tampa, Roderick Ramsay.

 At the time of the Gardner Heist Ramsay was a key witness “in absentia” (allowed under German law) against the ringleader of the longest running espionage conspiracies in the history of the United States, Clyde Lee Conrad.

Ramsay was arrested and jailed on June 7, 1990, the day after Conrad was convicted in Germany. He would stay behind bars for the next 14 year.  Ramsay had been under investigation since June of 1988 and  by the time of the robbery he had confessed to espionage and agreed to testify against Conrad. He had been given some open ended assurances of consideration for his cooperation, according to Traitors Among Us by retired Colonel Stuart A. Herrington.   

Here was someone who would potentially have been looking for a get out of jail free card at the time, and who would also potentially not be able to secure a deal with the paintings because of the seriousness of the charges he faced and the international setting of the charges.    

Conrad was a military retiree residing in Germany at the time of his arrest, which is why he had been tried in Germany. A great deal of effort had gone into making it possible for Conrad to be tried there. The United States also pressured the German government to give Conrad a long sentence.  The Germans had obliged, handing Conrad an unprecedented life sentence for high treason. 

Theoretically speaking the American public as well as the German public and authorities may not have understood had Ramsay received a light sentence, while Conrad received, and even the people Ramsay recruited into espionage, and whose involvement was far less, were later given much longer sentences. So Ramsay was someone who theoretically may have been looking for a get out of jail free, but he was also one of those rare individuals who was ineligible, perhaps unexpectedly so. 

Ramsay, a cab driver at the Orlando airport in the area of payphones, would have had ample opportunity and ability to telephone the museum.  It would be interesting to learn if the threats had stopped by the time Ramsay was in custody, ten weeks after the Gardner Robbery.  

I have no direct information linking Ramsay to harassing the museum, or robbing it but his predicament would seem to be more consistent with those actions at that particular time than other known criminals from the area.   

Though the arrest and courtroom drama played out in Florida, the coverage of Ramsay’s arrest for espionage in the Boston media, or lack thereof is arguably incomprehensible.  

Ramsay was a Boston native and attended Northeastern University for a short time before joining the Army.  FBI Agent Joe “Navarro testified that before joining the Army on Nov. 17, 1981, Ramsay had robbed a bank in Vermont and, while working as a security officer in a hospital, had attempted to break into a safe.”

Ramsay resumed espionage activities after he left the Army and returned to Boston, although somewhat half-heartedly (under pressure from Conrad) and not to a significant extent, he said. 

Still, both national wire services, UPI and the Associated Press reported that “Ramsay's last known contact with Conrad came in January 1986 in Boston, when his former boss gave him a small cow bell and told him that anyone displaying a similar bell was involved in the spy ring, the agent testified” at the same court hearing." Ramsay later moved to Florida where he was investigated, eventually arrested and prosecuted. 

Incredibly, the Boston Globe ran this exact Associated Press story but edited out the part about the spy meeting that had taken place in Boston four years earlier.

Ramsay with and without glasses

In addition, of the eight published photos of Ramsay I have seen of him from that time period, Ramsay is always wearing wire rimmed glasses. He was wearing the glasses when he was arrested, in his booking photo, in photos taken by news journalists taken outside of court, in his passport photo, in an illustration of his arrest in Psychology Today  In only one of the eight photos is Ramsay shown not wearing glasses.  And that single photo is the wire service photo which ran in the Boston Globe.

Given Ramsay’s ties to the area and the fact he had been involved in espionage activities in Boston, including a meeting with another notorious spy, it would seem to be the in the FBI’s interest, in the national security interest, to ensure that mass media in the Boston area were apprised of Rod Ramsay’s activities in the city and that would include a photo showing what he typically looked like when he lived in Boston.  

But while UPI did a story datelined from Clyde Lee Conrad's hometown of Sebring, Ohio, there was no local angle pursued or even acknowledged in the case of Rod Ramsay.

 And Boston was not only Ramsay hometown, but his crime town, his spy town, and the full extent of his criminal activities, and his threat to national security may not have been completely uncovered at that point or ever.