Factual Errors in Last Seen Podcast Episode 7
1. CONNOR: “Bobby was a
typical, Italian crook.”
Nobody is a typical Italian crook.
2. “I wouldn't call him a mobster because mobsters are what you associate
with organized crime. He wasn't that kind of a crook.”
Bobby Donati was that kind of crook: ““Revere police Detective Lt. William Gannon said that the body of Robert A. Donati, 50, of Revere, was found in his Cadillac on Savage Street in Revere by an officer on routine patrol about 1:25 a.m. Donati was a reputed associate of Vincent Ferrara, who is awaiting trial in Boston on federal racketeering charges. Donati, meanwhile, was said to be making collections from bookmakers and loansharks on Ferrara's behalf. Originally from East Boston, Donati had a lengthy criminal record involving arson, armed robberies and the theft of securities from the Boston Stock Exchange. Source Boston Globe September 25, 1991.
3. RODOCLICO: “Myles
Connor was a rock star. His band was called Myles Connor & The Wild Ones. He
headlined clubs around Boston, and opened for big names, like Roy Orbison and
Chuck Berry.”
Myles Connor was not a rock star. He played in
clubs around Boston but never in Boston, or Cambridge. The only documentation
of his music career that ever appeared in the Boston Globe was in advertisements
by the Beachcomber for show-dates for Connor and his band on weeknights. There
are no mentions of his opening for bigger acts, real rock stars, like Roy Orbison
and Chuck Berry.
4. HORAN: “Connor was a
Renaissance criminal.
There has not been a “Renaissance criminal” in 400
years. What would a “Renaissance lawyer, or doctor, or Renaissance bus driver
be? Calling Connor Renaissance criminal
is a badly phrased euphemism for a hardened criminal:
“Myles Connor is one of these guys who committed
every type of crime you can imagine. Make a list. Brainstorm on crimes. He can
check off every box. Sold drugs, stole drugs, robbed grocery stores, banks,
homes, armored cars, implicated in the murder of two teenage girls. You name it.
he's done it, a real bad guy. Anthony Amore 11/12/14 Time 45:00
Also a con man and a Gardner heist huckster: “Every
single person who said they could get the paintings back, one of them is Myles
Connor, who's come forward and said it, they're all charlatans and that's
nicest word I can use for them. Hucksters. —Anthony Amore Anthony Amore Weston Library 10/29/13 Time:
1:24
5. HORAN: “And he says
the question of who he [Myles Connor] would and wouldn’t steal from was all
down to a personal code. A kind of thief’s honor system.
There is no such thing as a thief’s honor
system, and that certainly is not reflected in the violent criminal career of Myles
Connor. He is a “Renaissance criminal,” but
one with an “honor system”?
6. HORAN: “It was a crime spree
in the mid-1970s that solidified his reputation as someone who could outfox law
enforcement.
HORAN: “ Myles Connor did four long stretches
in prison totaling over 25 years in five decades. His internal organs were
badly injured when he shot a state trooper and the police fired back hitting
him “several times,” Connor wrote in his book, with his “shoulder taking the
worst of the damage.” Connor was in prison for all but less than three years of
the 70’s.
7. HORAN: “Which, brings
us back to that parking lot in Cape Cod, where Connor was nabbed with the five
stolen Wyeth paintings.”
“Connor was caught with four stolen
Wyeth paintings, not "the five." Three by N.C.
Wyeth, one by Andrew Wyeth and a
reproduction of another Andrew Wyeth painting.”
8. CONNOR: “And he said, ‘We've
got you now, Connors. It'll take a Rembrandt to get you out of this.’ I said, ‘You
know, you're right.’ And so then I set my heart on getting a Rembrandt.”
This is just one of at least three versions of the story Connor has told about what motivated him to steal the Rembrandt at the
MFA.
In “Stealing Rembrandts,” by Amore and Mashberg,
it was only well over a year later, when he was trying to figure out a way to
avoid prison time, that he and a family friend in law enforcement came up with the
idea of stealing a Rembrandt: “
"I said, 'for Chrissakes, John, what will
it take to get me off? A Rembrandt? And Regan told me, 'That just might do it.'"
In his own book Connor swears John Regan said
to him ’Face it Myles, nothing short of a Rembrandt could get you out of this.’ I
swear these are the words he uttered.”
9. HORAN: “On a sleepy
Monday — April 14, 1975 — Connor launched what sounds like a paramilitary
strike on Boston’s MFA. Connor says there were three vehicles with eight armed
men, one with a machine gun.”
“Two
unknown white males armed with 9 mm semi-automatics.” Boston Globe April 15, 1975. Also a Boston Globe review of Connor's book in 2009 by Shelley Murphy said of Connor's MFA Heist: "They pistol-whipped a guard who tried to stop them and escaped out a rear door," and nothing about a machine gun, and advises that: "The book is clearly shaded by Connor's version of the truth." The April 16, 1975 Boston Globe reported that shortly after 12:30 p.m. Monday, one of the robbers held an unarmed guard at gunpoint while another lifted the oil and wood panel off the wall." It is hard to know what was so sleepy about an early afternoon crime in the largest city in New England, four days before a two days visit by President Gerald R. Ford to kick off the county's Bicentennial celebration.
10, CONNOR: “As the exit
was made down the front steps there was a phalanx of guards that came rushing
down.”
Boston Globe reported just two guards responding
to the theft before the thieves left the building.
11. CONNOR: “And there was
a guy with a machine gun, brrrrr. Let the machine gun go off. They went right back.”
There was no machine gun. “As the thieves
fled to a waiting car, the armed man fired three shots, hitting no one but
adding a movie-scene flourish to what was then thought to be the most expensive
art heist in American history.”
12. CONNOR: “The guy would
not let go of the painting. The guy ran up to the back of the van and latched
onto the painting.”
They left the scene “in a black and gold Oldsmobile or Buick” Boston Globe April
14, 1975 afternoon edition.
13. HORAN: Don’t shoot the
guard,” Connor said. One of them smashed him in the head with the butt of a gun.”
"The guard tried to stop the
men as they ran toward the turnstyles inside the entrance and one of
them clubbed him with a pistol butt." Boston Globe April 15, 1975
14. HORAN: “There was just one problem,
as Martin Leppo recalls. On March 18, 1990, Connor was serving a long federal
sentence for drug trafficking.
Not true. “After months of allegedly selling
about $500,000 in stolen 17th Century paintings by ''old masters'' and other
antique artifacts to an undercover federal agent, authorities said Myles Connor
Jr. was arrested Wednesday night when he allegedly sold the agent a kilogram of
cocaine. Connor was charged with transporting stolen property and possession of
a controlled substance with intent to deliver.”
Leppo was not Connor’s lawyer for these charges
in Illinois.
The
recollections of an 87 year old confident of Myles Connor, concerning something
that happened 30 years earlier, of which he had no direct involvement, is what
the Boston Globe and WBUR consider being worthy of the term “deep dive” into
this historic case?
15. HORAN: “He [Myles Connor] was in prison in Lompoc,
California.
He was not. According to newspaper accounts and
his own book, Connor was in the Sangamon County
Jail in Springfield, IL awaiting sentencing, not serving a long sentence, according
news stories at the time and his own book. His sentencing was delayed twice
after the Gardner heist. Connor and his cohorts had plenty of opportunity to try and initiate a
deal.
16. LEPPO: “When the Gardner
was hit, Myles became the No. 1 suspect. Did he orchestrate it? And so forth
and so on. So that was number one.
That was not "number one." Connor had been in
jail in Illinois for over a year before the Gardner heist. The FBI didn't even try to talk to Connor: “We've made no
attempts to speak with Myles Connor. FBI Supervisory Agent Edward Quinn. "He has not been requested to meet with the FBI Connor’s defense
attorney Boston Globe 5/13/90. He was not the number one suspect.
17. CONNOR: “How I'm 100
percent sure that they [David Houghton and Bobby Donati] did it was because David Houghton, who was longtime
friend of mine, flew all the way from Logan Airport to California just to tell
me: “‘We've done with. We did it. And we got a bunch of paintings, and we're gonna
use a couple of these paintings to bargain you into a reduced sentence.’"
The Mensa member, Myles Connor, doesn't even
know what state he was in when Houghton supposedly told him he and Robert
Donati robbed the Gardner Museum to get him out of prison.
From Connor's 2009 book, page 285, In the Fall of
1990 I was transferred to federal penitentiary in Lompoc, CA." Also in his
book he says that "several weeks later [of March 1990] I received an unexpected
visitor, David Houghton... "David's visit was the last time I heard from
either man [David Houghton or Robert Donati]." So that means Connor's
visit with Donati was in Illinois. It would have to have been several months
later for him to have been in Lompoc, CA.
18, HORAN: “He settled on
one that was on loan to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: "Portrait of Elisabeth
van Rijn,” Rembrandt’s sister.
It is not the artist’s sister.
19. The
correct name of the painting is “Portrait of a Girl Wearing a Gold-Trimmed
Cloak,”
A “proposed identification for the sitter is
Rembrandt’s younger sister Elisabeth (Lysbeth). However, Rembrandt executed
this painting in Amsterdam and Lysbeth apparently spent her whole life in
Leiden.”
“The same model appears in two other paintings
that Rembrandt executed in 1632: “A Young Woman in Profile with a Fan in
Stockholm, and Bust of a Young Woman in a Cap in a private collection in
Switzerland…The presence of these four paintings featuring the same model by
Rembrandt, and his workshop makes it highly unlikely that Young Girl in a Gold-Trimmed
Cloak was a commissioned portrait. Interestingly, the same model, in a nearly
identical costume, appears in two of Rembrandt’s history paintings from the
early 1630s: “as Europa in The Rape of Europa, in the J. Paul Getty Museum, and
as the woman (Esther?) in the Old Testament scene in Ottawa.
“Portrait
of a Girl,” once believed to be a rendering of Rembrandt’s sister, inspired the
facial types of many of Rembrandt’s heroines in the early 1630s.
