The Gardner Heist Investigation In The Media (Part VII)

"To Do" Calendar of a Theory

Feb 26, 2015 Field test it on the road

There was a prelude to the widespread coverage of the Gardner Heist 25^th anniversary in late February. Gardner Museum security chief, Anthony Amore along with the FBI’s lead agent in the Gardner Heist investigation, Special Agent Geoff Kelly met with a storied and respected reporter of the Gardner robbery, former Boston Herald reporter and editor Tom Mashberg, now working for the out of town but nationally influential New York Times.

“Investigators were anticipating a wave of interest, and possible criticism, on the eve of the robbery’s 25th anniversary,” Mashberg revealed. After “twenty five years of theories,” as the headline read, and virtually nothing else, the investigators put forth their latest, four years in the making according to Mashberg, but with a lineage dating back to 1997, and a cast of wise guys all dead or choosing long stretches of hard time over freedom and the potential for millions of dollars in reward money for cooperating.

“The assumptions that he [Amore] and the FBI special agent now overseeing the case, Geoff Kelly, were forming [in 2011] then became their active theory of the heist,” he wrote. 

Fourteen months earlier however, in December of 2013, in a BBC broadcast, Geoff Kelly expressed a very different view, that the thieves had run out the clock on the statute of limitations and were thus untouchable. 

Interviewer Alastair Sooke: The FBI now believe they know who broke into the Gardner that night in 1990 but there are no immediate plans to arrest their suspects. 
Alastair Sooke: What's happened to them?
Geoff Kelly: I can't say that.
Interviewer: But they're not in jail, right?
Geoff Kelly: I can't say about where they are at this time.  Because the statute of limitations on that actual theft expired in 1995. So if somebody were come forward tomorrow and say that they were involved in the Gardner Heist there is nothing that we could do to prosecute them.

Interviewer: So they got off?

Geoff Kelly: Absolutely

Meanwhile, even without any planned FBI press conference, or a formal observation of any kind by the Gardner Museum, on the looming anniversary date, and without any new breakthrough or particularly noteworthy news, the Boston Globe showed determination to mark the occasion of the anniversary.

Still the city’s “paper of record” then, it ran ten articles of various kinds about the Gardner Museum, in the ten days leading up to the fateful anniversary, seven of which were Gardner Museum robbery related.

And while the 2013 Gardner Heist anniversary, with its publicity campaign launch was very much rigidly focused, on the stolen paintings and their recovery, Kelly and Amore had prepared to take on the whodunit question in 2015 as well.

In a PowerPoint presentation Amore and Kelly included two suspects, George A. Reissfelder and Leonard V. DiMuzio, Mashberg reported, both long dead, one murdered and one a drug overdose victim, within a couple of years of the robbery. 

There were three things that pointed to Reissfelder being the culprit in the Powerpoint, according to Mashberg who saw it.  The first was his car, a 1986 red Dodge Daytona. According to the article, it was “the same model of car that several witnesses have said they spotted idling outside the Gardner on the night of the break-in.” 

This was new information.  In The Gardner Heist by Ulrich Boser, from 2010, the car is described as a hatchback, and in the then just released Master Thieves by Stephen Kurkjian, it was a dark hatchback. The Dodge Daytona is technically a hatchback. When you open the car from the back end, you can see clear through to the dashboard. But the Daytona has more of the slanted lines of a Chevy Camaro, than the breadbox on wheels look of the best-selling automobile in the eighties, Ford’s hatchback, the Escort. And anyway a hatchback is not a model, it is a type of sedan made by over a dozen manufacturers in the eighties. 

The Daytona’s red was a bright red. It was a car that strove to be noticed. Not the kind of car you would want to drive around at 3:00 a.m. with eleven stolen Gardner Museum paintings inside.  

In addition, the car is NOT the vehicle that was in the Gardner Museum surveillance video from the night prior to the robbery. The FBI has well aware of the video by then and had been studying it for well over a year before the 25^th Anniversary.  It was released to the public five months later on August 6, 2015.  

George Reissfelder’s was a hard road. He was a long time drug addict who had spent half his adult life in prison, for a crime he did not commit. He was 51 years old at the time of the robbery. The two guards said the thieves were in their late twenties to early thirties.  How does someone with that background get mistaken for someone twenty years younger, by two young adult men, the more trusted one, a 27 year old and with a Master’s Degree?

 

Between Reissfelder who spent 15 years in state’s prison and DiMuzio, described as a “skillful burglar,” neither knew, it seems, how to hot-wire a car and so they used Reissfedler’s distinctive red Daytona. At least that was what investigators were contending.
  

DiMuzio was a Marine Corps Viet Nam vet, also involved with drugs, and allegedly involved with organized crime, yet he too, at nearly 43, was somehow mistaken for a man ten years younger.  

The latest theory also contradicted Anthony Amore’s view from five years earlier, shared with Tom Ashbrook, host of WBUR and NPR's "On Point," that one of the thieves “was probably a rookie. He was a younger guy.” 

How would these old guys have connected with Abath or overheard something at a club or party that the young guards at the Gardner would be attending? 

Nineteen years after the fact, two members of Reissfelder’s family  said that they had seen Manet’s Chez Tortoni, hanging in his bedroom in a Quincy, MA apartment three months after the robbery, the article stated.  

But in Master Thieves, which came at the same time as the New York Times article, one of those family members, Reissfelder’s sister, would only say that painting hanging in her brother’s bedroom was “something beautiful.”  

From that point to over two years later no one had gone on record to say the thieves are suspects, or even that they look like the police sketches.  

Tom Mashberg wrote: “Mr. Kelly showed me that Mr. Reissfelder and Mr. DiMuzio closely resembled police sketches of the two men who had entered the museum.”

Mr. Kelly did not tell him that. He showed him that. At that point it would have been well within Tom Mashberg’s professional prerogative to have shown Special Agent Geoff Kelly something, the door, and refused to do the article.  

March 17, 2015  Give it a back story

By the day before the anniversary, March 17, 2015,  a few weeks later, however, the next story about the FBI’s theory, which appeared in the Boston Globe, the FBI’s theory had gained a completely false bit of provenance and authenticity. It began:  

“The FBI is so confident it knows who stole $500 million worth of masterpieces from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum , it has repeatedly touted its theory in recent months with PowerPoint presentations at libraries, colleges, and museums.”

In fact neither anyone in the FBI nor Anthony Amore from the Gardner Museum had made any PowerPoint presentations or Gardner Museum art crime related public appearances since before Thanksgiving, over four months earlier. If that was the measure of confidence, the FBI was not very confident at all. Their theory had not withstood the questions and scrutiny of a sometimes skeptical public “at libraries, colleges, and museums” even once, as the Boston Globe had reported.  

“I think there is an overwhelming amount of evidence supporting our theory as to who did it," Kelly said, without naming any reasons, suspects by name, or making any reference to the PowerPoint, in that Boston Globe article.
 

Only two maybe three journalists had seen the PowerPoint, or that is the number of journalists who reported about its contents:  Amore’s Stealing Rembrandts co-author Tom Mashberg the Boston Globe’s Shelly Murphy and Howie Carr of the Boston Herald. 

Carr may or may not have seen the PowerPoint presentation. He wrote knowingly about it, but since he was writing about it for the California news website Breitbart, wrapped in a take-down of former Secretary of State John Kerry, then Carr getting a look at the PowerPoint over local dailies like Carr’s own Boston Herald, or the Patriot Ledger might have been problematic.

A Herald reporter and a columnist for over three decades, as well as a radio talk show host for nearly twenty years, Carr’s Breitbart story ran eleven days after the anniversary date of March 18, 2015. It stated that:

“The FBI announced last year that it had ‘solved’ the crime, but has steadfastly refused to officially confirm the identities of Reissfelder and DiMuzio. But this month, on the 25th anniversary of the crime, the Boston FBI office produced a power-point presentation for the media hinting broadly that they robbed the museum.”

Despite all of his years in Boston journalism Howie Carr was a rookie at Gardner coverage. He had not heard that in this one particular case, the Gardner Museum Heist, that identifying the robbers does not in any way constitute “solving the crime.” The sole focus and standard of solving is predicated solely on the return of the stolen paintings.

 

And not just any “media” saw the PowerPoint. Only a few handpicked individuals in the media were invited to see it. There was no press conference.  A business associate of Amore, Carr never claimed he had seen the PowerPoint, but Amore appeared with Carr at one of his Night of Crime shows a few days after the anniversary, on March 21, 2015 in Marlboro, MA, a week before the Carr article ran.  

March 18, 2015 Spray it, but don’t say it.

On the same day of the anniversary, the same day the Boston Globe falsely reported in the lead paragraph that the FBI and Amore had “repeatedly touted its theory in recent months with PowerPoint presentations at libraries, colleges, and museums, that same day, Amore in an interview with WGBH News, when was asked about the theory, he backed away from it.

WGBH:  “There have been reports over the weekend and in the New York Times naming these individuals, has that changed the nature of the investigation at all?”

  

Amore: “In the recent interview that you referred to if you read it very closely nobody really named anybody. The New York Times article provides conjecture based on a theory that was presented to the reporter.  So again in that interview we didn't name the two people. Those are the two the reporters surmised from the information.”

The Globe’s Shelly Murphy, in the anniversary story did point out the age disparity between what was said by eyewitnesses to the robbery and Reissfelder’s age. And where in Mashberg’s story in the Times, offered barely anything to justify DiMuzio being a suspect, Murphy did not mention him at all.

March 18, 2017 Modify and reiterate  

Yet exactly two years to the day later, on the 27^th anniversary, Shelly Murphy along with Stephen Kurkjian reported:  

“The theory, outlined by the FBI in a PowerPoint presentation a couple of years ago, is that Merlino’s associates, George Reissfelder and Leonard DiMuzio, who both died in 1991, were involved in the theft, along with David Turner and possibly others.“

So there were three newspaper stories about the case from three separate journalists and none mentioned long-time suspect David Turner or “possibly others.”  Why did Tom Mashberg only write of two suspects? Why did Howie Howie Carr report the case was “solved” and that Reissfelder and DiMuzio were the robbers with no mention of Turner? 

If it were newsworthy that Turner and DiMuzio were involved, why wait two years? Why not report it when the original article was written? Verily, this phantom of a PowerPoint carries a heavy load and for a long duration.

Gardner Museum chief investigator Anthony Amore denied at the time the PowerPoint was released, that this was the investigators’ theory, but only “a conjecture based on a theory and since then no individual has ever named either of these two as a suspects.”  

The Boston Globe though, two years later was now for the second time legitimizing “the theory,” as something that actually exists in the public domain, as a social contract, or understanding, between the FBI and the public concerning the “whodunit,” about what happened in the biggest property crime in the United States, at the Gardner Museum in 1990. 

But it has never been in the public domain. It is squirreled away somewhere out of view and with no signature affixed to it.  A social contract that the Boston Globe  itself had inaccurately legitimized the first time by reporting a sharing by and vetting with the public of the theory which never occurred and that no one involved in the investigation (or out of it) will go on the record of, with an endorsement.   

Then in this same newer article describing this theory, one of the investigators who presented it says,  “What we’re hoping for are facts, as opposed to theories,” effectively cutting off  further discussion or challenge to their own theory.  After twenty seven years, unless you see someone hold up The Concert  and yell “lookie here I got me a Vermeer!” there are no facts apart from a theory.”  

Trump's tweets, Clinton's emails, the FBI's PowerPoint, yes there are many ways to transmit and present information these days that did not exist at the time of the Gardner robbery, but PowerPoints do not create themselves. 

The medium is not the message, neither is it the messenger. It is a conveyance, not a source. The two investigators who introduced this theory to only a small number of handpicked members of the media both refused when offered the opportunity to sign on to it.  

In the original March 17, 2015 Globe story, Murphy wrote: “The illustrated whodunit, featuring crime scene photos from the March 18, 1990, heist, points to a local band of petty thieves.”

And another article five months later, when the surveillance video was released in the Globe also stated: 

An FBI PowerPoint presentation that offers its theory of the case suggests that a number of suspects were involved in the heist, most of whom are dead. They include George Reissfelder, of Quincy, who died of a cocaine overdose in 1991 at age 51; and Leonard V. DiMuzio, of Rockland, who was 42 at the time of the heist and was found shot to death in East Boston in 1991.

PowerPoint presentations only a couple of journalists are allowed to see do not offer anything.  “Illustrated whodunits” do not point. 

PowerPoints do not point at people. People point at PowerPoints.  

Unlike Reissfelder, no one has ever explained why Leonard DiMuzio, a Viet Nam veteran of the Marine Corps and unsolved homicide victim should be a suspect.  The New York Times reported only and without attribution that DiMuzio, was a skillful burglar who had long been involved with the Merlino gang.  Reissfelder was a con man, a bad check writer who liked to imagine, pretend to others, he was a tough guy gangster. Neither had a reputation as a robber, although an FBI informant said DiMuzio, after he was already dead, was involved in a Canton home invasion with David Turner.

 

Turner and DiMuzio were both arrested following a Tewksbury burglary exactly two months after the Gardner Heist.  You would think these two would have better things to do or would be laying low so soon after the Gardner Heist if they were involved. Why were they not suspects who were questioned at the time? Why not Reissfelder with his Red 1986 Daytona?   

As much as the FBI might like to get people to focus on the lost art, the public is very much interested in the whodunit component of the story. Reporter Howie Carr reported the case “solved” without the recovery of any paintings because people in authority told him DiMuzio and Reissfelder were the robbers.

By installing dubious placeholder-suspects with ginned up authenticity in the public square where the actual robbers belong, the FBI is cutting itself off from a potential motherlode of information. Even if the robbers are not known to the FBI’s satisfaction, they are still cutting off interest and curiosity in the mystery of the case which would lead to greater attention and could generate more leads.  

This represents the opposite of crowd sourcing, it is crowd squelching; diverting any interest in the crime and the criminals, and it is considerable, to the recovery of the stolen paintings, all the way to the point of asserting that finding the paintings and finding the criminals are mutually exclusive, combined with the disinformation of phantom presentations, with phantom PowerPoints. about phantom suspects, concerning the actual robbers and robbery.