The Sword AND the Stone (Part Four)
Blog Table of Contents
 |
| FBI and Worcester Police with the recovered paintings from 1972 Worcester Art Museum Heist |
The 1972 Worcester Art Museum Heist was a perfect success from a law enforcement standpoint. The stolen paintings: Rembrandt’s St. Bartholomew, Pablo Picasso’s Mother and Child, and two works by Paul Gauguin, The Brooding Woman and Head of a Woman, were quickly recovered by the FBI together with the city of Worcester police, and all of the perpetrators, were identified, apprehended and convicted, including the mastermind, Florian "Al Monday, who was given a prison sentence of nine to 20 years.
Like the Worcester art museum heist and really any theft or robbery, with the Gardner Heist law enforcement had two missions: to recover what was stolen, and to bring those responsible to justice. As thieves flee the crime scene with what they have taken, catching the criminals and recovering the art are one and the same. But that typically changes, often quickly, with the passage of time.
As stolen art recovery expert Robert Wittman said about the possibility of Whitey Bulger knowing anything when he was captured in 2011: "From my experience, stolen pieces like this get moved around a lot to avoid detection,” Wittman said. “Whatever he [Whitey Bulger] knew from years ago is going to be outdated now.”
In this twofold mission, the FBI has certainly demonstrated a great deal of interest and exerted monumental effort in attempting to recover the stolen artwork, from the Gardner Heist. The search has taken them to Japan, Corsica, South America, Ireland, France, Connecticut, Maine, Florida, Reno, Nevada, New York City and likely other places too.
In addition, Robert Wittman, in his book Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World's Stolen Treasures by Robert K. Wittman, with John Shiffman, does indeed detail an elaborate and concerted undercover operation conducted by the FBI to get some of the Gardner Paintings back in 2006-2007.
Over the years there have been countless news accounts of search warrants executed, charges filed, attorneys hired, informants wired, even people targeted, then sent to prison for other crimes in an effort to recover the stolen Gardner artworks.
A low level organized crime figure, Robert "The Cook" Gentile has said he was "set up," then later said he was "framed" over the stolen Gardner Paintings. At the age of 80, Gentile had spent four of the previous five years of his life in prison on drugs and weapons charges.
During their 2001 trial, prosecutors said David Turner, Carmello Merlino, Stephen Rossetti, and William Merlino planned to rob the armored car facility in Easton on Feb. 7, 1999, using a grenade, a semiautomatic rifle and handguns. Attorney for two of the men, Turner and Merlino claimed the FBI were behind the idea for the robbery, that they initiated it to entrap Turner and Merlino, whom they believed knew the whereabouts of the stolen Gardner Museum art.
While the courts ruled that the case did not meet the legal standard of entrapment, there was a two-part story about the Loomis Fargo caper, in Boston Magazine called "The Set Up." The robbery attempt was known to authorities from the beginning and thus doomed fro the start.
"Ms. Hawley said she thought the F.B.I. did not work the case aggressively or skillfully enough at first, and the new book [The Gardner Heist by Ulrich Boser] concurs" the New York Times reported in 2009.
Very little evidence supports the widely belief that the FBI made a diligent effort to apprehend the criminals, and there is much that suggests that they did not. Efforts that appear to be attempts to catch the thieves, in the case of David Turner nine years after the fact for instance are really at their heart efforts to recover the paintings. Turner was arrested for a burglary with a firearm two months after the Gardner Heist. If had been questioned about the Heist back then it surely would have made it into his appeal that he was entrapped because he was a suspect in the Gardner Heist.
Nor did the FBI ever make claims or vows to catch the criminals. "The bureau has circulated unidentified fingerprints from the crime scene worldwide by computer, the Boston Globe reported in 1994, and continues to hope for a match. "We will investigate forever," said Brien O'Connor, the assistant US attorney on the case. But no one from the FBI has ever made such a statement related to the catching of the criminals. What should have been a two pronged attack was from the beginning has been a one pronged focused exclusively on the return of the stolen masterpieces.
Reviewing the case as the statute of limitations approached, the Boston Globe reported on December 16,1994 that: "Almost five years after the $300 million theft, the FBI has received 2,000 tips, chased down leads that pointed everywhere from South American drug cartels to the Irish Republican Army, administered dozens of lie detector tests, and even gathered 40 international experts for an art theft symposium at FBI training headquarters in Virginia,"
Tips, leads, lie detector tests, a symposium, none of this really points directly at an effort to catch the bad guys. In fact, while verbal descriptions of the thieves made there way into the Boston Globe on the same day a Rembrandt was stolen from Boston's Museum of Fine Arts in 1975, no verbal description, of the thieves, aside from the police sketches appeared in the Boston Globe until over four years later about with a headline about how the statue of limitations on the heist was about to expire.
"Almost five years after the $300 million theft, the FBI has received 2,000 tips, chased down leads that pointed everywhere from South American drug cartels to the Irish Republican Army, administered dozens of lie detector tests, and even gathered 40 international experts for an art theft symposium at FBI training headquarters in Virginia,"
Tips, leads, lie detector tests, a symposium, none of this really points necessarily at an effort to apprehend the bad guys.
The FBI's claim to have received a lot of tips is credible but there was, after all, a one million dollar reward, now ten million, immediately offered by the Museum, (not the FBI). The opportunity for a sentence reduction too, in exchange for the paintings had some precedent within the criminal underworld, especially in the Boston area thanks to the robbery of Boston's Museum of Fine Arts of a Rembrandt by Myles Connor in 1975.
The FBI had no publicity campaign, or community outreach designed to generate these tips. And, regrettably, none of the tips that came in of their own accord, translated into an arrest, or a recovery of the art. Tips related to the possibility of art recovery have been publicized and reported about, but next to nothing related to chasing down suspects who might be involved.
As early as two months after the Heist, the FBI was publicly demonstrated they were more intent on monitoring suspects than engaging or questioning them. On May 14, 1990 in a front page story in the Boston Globe it was reported that:
"Law enforcement sources said that the suspects' movements are under close scrutiny by federal agents, including one suspect who was under surveillance during a recent arrival at Logan airport..." "Noting that they frequently traveled from city to city, investigators are keeping a close eye on the suspects movements in and out of the city." Since it was on the from page of the city's largest newspaper, a covert surveillance operation can be safely ruled out. One possibility is that authorities were trying to disrupt any planned, meeting, transaction, or movement of the paintings, an effort consistent with art recovery and not making an arrest.
It was also known from the beginning of the investigation that Abath let someone into the Museum the night before the Heist, something he never told investigators according to Anthony Amore, although they might very well have known if they looked at the surveillance tape which they collected from the Museum at the time of the robbery. Amore who says he has access to the files said that it was news to him that there had been an unauthorized visitor in the Museum the night before the robbery although the then head of the FBI Vincent Lisi said that FBI agents who investigated the case had been aware of the video for years.
Abath opened the Museum door against the museum's established protocol minutes before the thieves were buzzed into the building. And buzzing the robbers in and then stepping away from the security desk where he could activate an alarm that would notify the police that there was a problem at the Museum were both violations of the Museum's security protocol.
Abath's descriptions of the thieves was significantly different from the other guards, who had been called in to work the night shift last minute when the guard scheduled to work called in sick and more which has been covered in other blog posts. His trip to Hartford in a borrowed van to attend the Grateful Dead concert is suspicious given the ordeal he claimed to have gone through starting with the early morning hours of the very same day.
"In 80 to 90 percent of high end art theft, we see indicators of inside help," retired FBI art theft expert Wittman said. The thieves clearly had more inside information than you could glean from a casual conversation, Ulrich Boser, author of The Gardner Heist believes. The thieves "knew how to disable an alarm system and how to remove the videocassette [operating behind a locked door] from a hidden camera that had recorded their presence, investigators reported.
It seems someone who worked at the museum or had worked at the museum previously knew who the culprits were and even Abath himself acknowledged in 2013: “I totally get it. I understand how suspicious it all is.” when evidence gathered at the time of the robbery became known to the public.
If Abath totally gets it, when presented with the evidence, which the FBI knew about in the first week of the robbery, then surely the FBI got it too. There was strong reason to be suspicious of Abath. And even if he were not a suspect, but just a key eyewitness who had a clear close-up view and dialogue with the thieves, it would naturally generate follow up interviews to see what else he remembered, as well as new questions to ask based on emerging evidence and theories.
But in an excerpt from a book he was writing, Pandora's Laughter posted online, Abath said he was left completely uncontacted by investigators for nearly two decades: "I was standing on Main Street outside of Amy's Bakery on a sunny November day in 2007 because that's where I told the FBI I'd meet them. After 17 years of not hearing a word from the people charged with the task of solving the Gardner Museum Robbery, they popped up. They wanted to talk."
Was waving Abath through a phantom toll booth out of the Gardner Heist investigation for the first 17 years of it an example of what Gardner Museum officials meant about not being "aggressive" enough?
Any serious effort at catching the bad guys would have Abath at the center of it or least as a starting point until questions about his actions that day were answered to investigators satisfaction. A quarter of a century later that still had not happened.
As early as two months after the Heist, the FBI was publicly demonstrated they were more intent on monitoring suspects than engaging or questioning them. On May 14, 1990 in a front page story in the Boston Globe it was reported that:
"Law enforcement sources said that the suspects' movements are under close scrutiny by federal agents, including one suspect who was under surveillance during a recent arrival at Logan airport..." "Noting that they frequently traveled from city to city, investigators are keeping a close eye on the suspects movements in and out of the city." Since it was on the from page of the city's largest newspaper, a covert surveillance operation can be safely ruled out. One possibility is that authorities were trying to disrupt any planned, meeting, transaction, or movement of the paintings, an effort consistent with art recovery and not making an arrest.
In March of 2013, just a week before the kickoff of the a social media campaign to get the paintings back, the Boston Globe reported: "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.
Intriguing? Perhaps. But none of the information in the article or since then that has been made public about Abath was new evidence. It was old evidence from 1990 that had been pubic knowledge since 2009. The main evidence reported in the article was about how only security guard Rick Abath's footprints were picked up by motion detectors, in the Blue Room where Manet's “Chez Tortoni was from the wall on the night of the robbery.”
The motion detector information was reported about in both Boser's book in 2009 and Wittman's a year later and if there were renewed interest in the "intriguing evidence" was not mentioned at the launch of the largest social media campaign to date about the Gardner Heist the following week, on the 23rd anniversary of the crime, on March 18, 2013
It was also known from the beginning of the investigation that Abath let someone into the Museum the night before the Heist, something he never told investigators according to Anthony Amore, although they might very well have known if they looked at the surveillance tape which they collected from the Museum at the time of the robbery. Amore who says he has access to the files said that it was news to him that there had been an unauthorized visitor in the Museum the night before the robbery although the then head of the FBI Vincent Lisi said that FBI agents who investigated the case had been aware of the video for years.
Abath opened the Museum door against the museum's established protocol minutes before the thieves were buzzed into the building. And buzzing the robbers in and then stepping away from the security desk where he could activate an alarm that would notify the police that there was a problem at the Museum were both violations of the Museum's security protocol.
Abath's descriptions of the thieves was significantly different from the other guards, who had been called in to work the night shift last minute when the guard scheduled to work called in sick and more which has been covered in other blog posts. His trip to Hartford in a borrowed van to attend the Grateful Dead concert is suspicious given the ordeal he claimed to have gone through starting with the early morning hours of the very same day.
"In 80 to 90 percent of high end art theft, we see indicators of inside help," retired FBI art theft expert Wittman said. The thieves clearly had more inside information than you could glean from a casual conversation, Ulrich Boser, author of The Gardner Heist believes. The thieves "knew how to disable an alarm system and how to remove the videocassette [operating behind a locked door] from a hidden camera that had recorded their presence, investigators reported.
It seems someone who worked at the museum or had worked at the museum previously knew who the culprits were and even Abath himself acknowledged in 2013: “I totally get it. I understand how suspicious it all is.” when evidence gathered at the time of the robbery became known to the public.
If Abath totally gets it, when presented with the evidence, which the FBI knew about in the first week of the robbery, then surely the FBI got it too. There was strong reason to be suspicious of Abath. And even if he were not a suspect, but just a key eyewitness who had a clear close-up view and dialogue with the thieves, it would naturally generate follow up interviews to see what else he remembered, as well as new questions to ask based on emerging evidence and theories.
But in an excerpt from a book he was writing, Pandora's Laughter posted online, Abath said he was left completely uncontacted by investigators for nearly two decades: "I was standing on Main Street outside of Amy's Bakery on a sunny November day in 2007 because that's where I told the FBI I'd meet them. After 17 years of not hearing a word from the people charged with the task of solving the Gardner Museum Robbery, they popped up. They wanted to talk."
Was waving Abath through a phantom toll booth out of the Gardner Heist investigation for the first 17 years of it an example of what Gardner Museum officials meant about not being "aggressive" enough?
by Kerry Joyce
