The Sword AND The Stone (Part Three)





When Gardner Museum Director AnneHawley openly challenged the integrity of the FBI’s Gardner Heist investigation  by saying: ‘Their investigation was possibly corrupted and compromised from the start,” in the July 2005 issue of Smithsonian Magazine, it came at the historic low point for the FBI’s Boston office.

 Two months earlier, in May of 2005 Boston FBI agent John J. Connolly Jr., was formally charged with a 1982 gangland slaying in Florida. It was Connolly, who tipped off James "Whitey" Bulger about a pending indictment that led to his fleeing the state, triggering a worldwide 16 year manhunt. At that point, Connolly was already serving 10 years in federal prison for protecting FBI longtime informants including  Bulger. 

 That same month the Boston Globe reported another Connolly informant, “Stephen ‘The Rifleman’ Flemmi, had said “in two recent depositions that he and Bulger paid more than $200,000 to their FBI handler, John J. Connolly Jr., while working as informants, and gave cash to five other FBI agents.”

Sure, Hawley had endured low points of her own, had faced dangers, mind boggling loss on the job, and various other trials by fire, including a skeptical media looking for answers, and a team of investigators who were something less than assuring and forthcoming about what they were actually doing to get the criminals who had robbed the museum and return the stolen art.

Still, the FBI’s public relations and legal crises could have served as an opportunity for Hawley, to show her appreciation for what the FBI had done for the Museum. After the Heist, the museum faced bomb scares  and other threats against museum staff.  There was also their dedication and professionalism throughout the investigation of the Gardner Heist over the course of 15 years, presumably, which she could perhaps maybe mention.  This low point for the Bureau might have been an opportunity to boost a friend and ally, a colleague in need, to show that the Museum and its director had its back.   

Instead, Hawley’s remarks to Smithsonian Magazine demonstrated a public breakdown of confidence between the Museum and the FBI; most certainly with the investigation’s initial stages and it was something less than a vote of confidence in the FBI's investigation moving forward.

 Hawley, if not a veteran of combat, then of something like it, as Director of the Gardner Museum at the time of the robbery, did step back a bit from her original statement, in the same article, but barely: 

 “While she praises Geoffrey Kelly as a diligent investigator and allows that the FBI’s Boston office has cleaned itself up, she has taken the remarkable step of inviting those with information about the Gardner theft to contact her—not the FBI.” 

 Later that same year, the Museum hired Anthony Amore as security director and “handed over the investigation’s day-to-day operations to him."

 But in both “The Gardner Heist” by Ulrich Boser from 2009 and Master Thieves by Stephen Kurkjian, and ever after, Hawley is consistently portrayed as fundamentally disappointed in the FBI’s handling of the case.  

“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” concurs. It points out, among other things, that the original agent in charge was only 26 years old.” the New York Times reported in 2009.  

Hawley had acquired her skepticism honestly.  Eight months after the robbery she was still on board with the Bureau.  The Christian Science Monitor quoted Hawley at that time saying:  “It's a very active case, The FBI ‘has told us they still have the same amount of manpower they did at the beginning. They want very much to crack it.”  This was actually not true, although, it was likely what Hawley had been led to believe. 

 In fact the number of agents assigned to the case had been drastically reduced. “Within three months, "it was down to just one, Daniel Falzon, a young [26 year old] agent San Francisco," Stephen Kurkjian wrote in Master Thieves,  and further on in the book wrote”  “’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.’”

The current Museum, security director, Anthony Amore, who works “closely with the FBI on a daily basis,” on the Gardner Heist and in the same month stated  that FBI agent “Geoff Kelly is my partner” has expressed the view that a lack of manpower may have held the investigation back:


During an interview on the Berklee Internet Radio Network on March 29, 2017  "Without getting into specifics, there are certain avenues of the investigation that might have been taken more aggressively early on that might have yielded results. That's my feeling. I could never prove that. But that's my feeling. There are different things that I think if they were followed up on immediately, but again I don't want to sound redundant. None of this is any type of criticism on the investigators at the time. They had tons of stuff being piled on them, tons of leads coming in, and other cases to do as well. This is hindsight speaking." 

In interviews however, "former Massachusetts governor Michael S. Dukakis, former Boston mayor Raymond Flynn, and retired state police head Thomas Foley spoke of their frustrations with the FBI having assumed total control of the investigation rather than drawing on the assistance of the Boston and Massachusetts state police," Stephen Kurkjian wrote in Master Thieves. If the FBI was shorthanded, then there were the Massachusetts State Police, and Boston Police Department, whose knowledge, manpower and experience could have been harnessed on behalf of the investigation. 

The FBI has also come under fire even from within its own ranks for its refusal to work with and get help from other agencies on the Gardner Heist. 

 Retired FBI Agent, Robert Wittman, the former Senior Investigator and Founder of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's National Art Crime Team, is quoted by  Stephen Kurkjian in his book Master Thieves saying that: “If anything, I’ve gotten more convinced that the Bureau needs to open up with other federal agencies as well as local and state law enforcement,” Wittman says. “To close itself off to the intelligence, expertise, and resources that exist elsewhere just to be in control of the investigation makes no sense, whether you’re talking about the Gardner case or any other one that has been as drawn-out and complicated as it has.”

Kurkjian attributes the FBI's unwillingness to reach out to other law enforcement agencies in an effort to reclaim the paintings to "a bureaucratic and a cultural sovereignty that the FBI long has held. This is a frequently recurring yet unsupported explanation in his book for this peculiar and not typical for the FBI, complete unwillingness to work with other agencies on a investigation in response to a high profile robbery of this kind.    
 FBI sovereignty has never quite taken this form. This is not simply a case" of establishing "sovereignty. It is an aggressively imposed and hotly defended monopoly, and far from being an outdated tradition,  it is without precedent in high profile cases for the FBI. 

Even well trusted and qualified people from the Gardner Museum itself have been told in no uncertain terms to back off, to stay out of the FBI's investigation, though the current Museum Security Director said on the Berklee Internet Radio Network on March 29, 2017 "The museum, in a rare show of real desire to get their art back, which I think is incredibly admirable, brought in a private investigative firm to make sure everything was followed up on.  It's important to have someone from the museum helping the FBI because there is perspectives they can give the bureau, that, you can't expect an FBI agent to know everything about every facility and every crime."

But In Master Thieves Kurkjian describe how the FBI resisted this initiative by the Museum. Gardner Museum trustee Francis Hatch Jr.,  a former  Republican Party nominee for Governor of Massachusetts, convinced the other trustees that the museum should  "hire a firm to investigate, and stay in touch with the FBI on its probe. IGI, a private investigative firm based in Washington begun by Terry Lenzner, who had cut his teeth as a lawyer for the Senate Watergate Committee, was put on retainer, and the executive assigned to the case was Larry Potts, a former top deputy in the FBI."

But "fearful that their authority was being undercut," Kurkjian suggest, "the FBI’s supervisors in Boston complained to US attorney Wayne Budd, who fired off a memo warning the museum that it faced prosecution if it withheld information relevant to the investigation. Hatch responded, saying in his letter that he was 'shocked and saddened' by Budd’s attempt to “intimidate” the museum.  Hatch also wrote that it cast “a pall over future cooperative efforts.” 

In a separate incident, the Gardner Museum Director Anne Hawley was also "threatened with the charge of obstruction of justice when pursuing privately a lead that promised to crack open the investigation."

 Certainly in undercover work, ongoing criminal conspiracies such as drug dealing, and other crimes in progress, where the perpetrators are unaware that law enforcement is in pursuit, then secrecy can be a vital consideration that takes precedence over  manpower and collaboration. But in the aftermath of a crime against life or property federal and other inter-agency cooperation is a logical hard and fast rule, not the exception. 

  “When artworks are stolen in Europe there is almost a national mourning as agencies pool resources and commit to finding the pieces,” Stephen Kurkjian said to a Providence Journal reporter in 2015. 

 An example from the art museum world in the United States is the 1972 Worcester Museum Heist in Worcester Massachusetts. When two of the armed robbers of the Museum identified Florian "Al" Monday as the mastermind, both an FBI agent and a city of Worcester police officer went to Monday's home to question him. After the painting were recovered a photo ran of both Worcester Police office and FBI agents together with the recovered art. 


Another bigger and more famous case was a robbery at JFK Airport in 1978, where armed robbers took $5 million in cash and $875,000 in jewelry, making it the largest cash robbery committed on American soil at the time.

The Lufthansa Heist  investigation was "led by the FBI and involved myriad other law enforcement agencies" including the Nassau County Police Department even though the JFK Airport is in Queens County, when one Sergeant from that department, Bill Buckley came upon something that ended up having him play a key role.


"Bill Buckley’s story begins a week after the heist, when investigators were desperately trying to find evidence against the people who committed the crime..."

 Sergeant "Buckley was subsequently ordered to work with the FBI. Unfortunately, he says, he was not paired with one of their best agents—instead, his new partner was a rookie." 

 And yes even though the FBI agent was less experienced and it was Sergeant Buckley's informant, that was central to their investigation, the FBI agent was put in charge. But the two officers from separate jurisdictions did work together. Buckley's efforts led to a big break in the case and he received a commendation for his role in the investigation.  



A more recent example is the Boston Marathon Bombing, response, investigation and manhunt, which occurred on April 15, 2013.  At 2:49 p.m. that day, two bombs detonated about 210 yards apart at the finish line on Boylston Street near Copley Square. 

"By 4 p.m., a dozen people gathered there around a single table including [Boston Police Commissioner Ed] Davis, Colonel Tim Alben of the State Police, the FBI’s [Richard] DesLauriers, US Attorney Carmen Ortiz, and District Attorney Daniel F. Conley. An hour later, the crowd had swelled to 100. And the officers kept coming: city, state, transit police; FBI; ATF. Ultimately, more than 20 law enforcement agencies would take part in the manhunt with more than 1,000 investigators working out of the third and fourth floors of the Westin alone," the Boston Globe reported. 

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