Among Thieves

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Finn and Kozlowski emptied their pockets into bins as they passed through the entrance to the Kennedy Federal Building and walked through the metal detector. It occurred to Finn as he gathered his belongings on the far side of the X-ray machine that, should the trends continue, he could soon expect to be frisked vigorously walking into the neighborhood grocery store.

They headed to the elevator and crowded in with a dozen others, many of them wearing bright plastic badges identifying them as federal employees. Most wore the long, bored expressions of civil servants enduring their own version of purgatory, forced to deal with forms filled out in triplicate by an angry, impatient citizenry all too eager to roll eyeballs and issue heavy sighs at the government’s inefficiencies. The only solace they found was in the occasional opportunity to really screw with the most obnoxious. It was cold comfort to them, Finn was sure, but he supposed it beat none at all.

The trip to the Gardner Museum had been helpful in orienting them, but it wasn’t enough. It gave them no leads. If they were going to have any hope of finding the paintings, they needed some inside information from the authorities, and there was only one way to get that.

“You’re sure your guy’s here?” Finn asked Kozlowski as the elevator door opened on the seventh floor and they stepped off into a fluorescent elevator lobby with stained, battleship-gray industrial carpeting.

“He said he would be,” Kozlowski said. “If he said he would be, he will be.”

Finn accepted it with a nod. Kozlowski had burned his share of bridges in his law-enforcement career, Finn knew. That was just a part of who he was-he didn’t suffer fools, and he had no political savvy. The pencil pushers and ass-coverers who often seemed to thrive in the world of bureaucratic law enforcement had hated him and ultimately succeeded in ending his career. But many of the others-the real cops-never lost respect for the man, and the respect of people like that was priceless. It provided contacts that made Kozlowski one of the most valuable assets to Finn’s practice.

Kozlowski had reached out to an FBI agent he had worked with in the late nineties trying to clean up the fallout from John Connolly’s relationship with Whitey Bulger. He and his contact had forged a friendship over long hours and heavy stress, and the friendship had stuck even after it was all over.

The sting of the Connolly affair was still felt by the Bureau, even down in Washington. But in Boston it was defining, and many speculated that the damage was enough to neutralize any effectiveness the feds could have in the city. John Connolly was an agent from South Boston who had risen through the ranks in the eighties and nineties, winning commendations and promotions from his campaign to shut down the Angiulo branch of La Cosa Nostra, which operated out of Boston ’s Italian North End, and ran the mob for the Patriarca family in Providence. With bust after bust over a ten-year period, Connolly brought the Italian-American mob to its knees with amazing proficiency, culminating with the 1986 RICO indictment of crime underboss Gennaro Angiulo and others.

Unfortunately for the FBI, Connolly had obtained much of his information from Whitey Bulger, who was acting as a high-level snitch, turning over information in dribs and drabs as suited his purpose. In exchange for the information, Connolly provided Bulger with protection, warning him of any ongoing investigations and tipping him off whenever the local or state authorities were closing in on him. He also provided information about state informants that allowed Bulger to protect himself by murdering those helping the cops to build a case. When the whole scam was revealed in 1994, it went nuclear. Connolly was arrested, tried, and convicted. In 2000 he was sentenced to twelve years in prison for his role in several of Bulger’s murder sprees. Before he was arrested, though, Connolly managed to get word to Bulger that everything was collapsing, and Bulger skipped town, one step ahead of the law, as always. Since then, Bulger had remained one of the most wanted men in America -second only to Osama bin Laden after 2001. Reports had circulated through the years that he had been spotted in London and Ireland, as well as in other parts of Europe, but he remained at large.

The Connolly affair did enormous damage to the FBI’s reputation in the Boston law-enforcement community. The state and local cops had been trying to make a case against Bulger for years, with various wiretaps and investigations. They had come close so many times, only to have Bulger seemingly outsmart them at the last instant. When it was revealed that the FBI was responsible for Bulger’s elusiveness, the normal festering interagency rivalries that are inevitable in law enforcement broke into open warfare.

In the wake of the scandal, Kozlowski had been assigned to work with the feds to wrap up certain aspects of the Bulger case, rounding up some of those within Bulger’s gang against whom cases could be made. The brass and politicians figured that if the local cops and the FBI could work together in closing those cases, it might help to repair some of the damage. They were partially right. Kozlowski had worked well with his FBI counterpart, and they had earned each other’s respect. Any additional benefit to the relationship between the enforcement organizations themselves had been minimal and short-lived. At an organizational level, there was no trust between the cops and the feds in Boston. Many suspected that there never would be again.

Finn and Kozlowski walked to the end of the elevator lobby and opened the door into a long hallway. The walls were white with long scuffmarks along them; it had been some time since they had last been painted. Kozlowski motioned to the right and headed down the hallway to a glass door at one end with the FBI seal stenciled on the window. He walked into a small waiting area; Finn followed. There was a desk with a receptionist in front of a door at the far end. She was young and pretty and wholesome, with a telephone headset perched smartly on perfectly combed light brown hair. She looked to Finn like Judy-the-Time-Life-Operator from late-night infomercials. Kozlowski walked over to her. “Tom Kozlowski,” he said. “I’m expected.”

She looked up at him with a neutral gaze; Finn wondered whether an FBI receptionist received any special training. She pressed a series of buttons and spoke into her headset. At least Finn assumed she was speaking. Her lips moved, but even standing in front of her he couldn’t hear a word she was saying. Perhaps that was the special training, he hypothesized. It was a neat trick in any case. She pressed a button again and looked up at Kozlowski. “He’ll be right out.”

“Thanks.”

Kozlowski walked away from the receptionist’s desk. Finn was tempted to loiter in front of her, perhaps catch her eye-he’d always had a thing for Judy-the-Time-Life-Operator-but Kozlowski beckoned him over. “I don’t want you to talk,” he said.

“Ever?”

“In there,” he said. “I’m tempted to leave you out here. This guy trusts me, but this is delicate. He’s gonna be a little hesitant to say anything in front of you as it is.”

“I’m not staying out here,” Finn said.

Kozlowski nodded. “I figured you’d feel that way. So you come in. But don’t speak. The more you say, the less we’ll get out of this. You understand?”

“Yeah,” Finn said.

Kozlowski frowned at him. “I’m serious.”

“I got it. No talking.”

Kozlowski looked at him for another moment or two before letting his gaze drop. If he’d had time to think about it, Finn might have been annoyed, but the door behind the receptionist’s desk opened and Kozlowski’s contact walked into the waiting area. He was a tall black man. Much taller than Finn had anticipated. Six-four, at least, and lean in an athletic way. He was a dominating presence. He looked around the room once before saying anything. Finn followed the man’s eyes with curiosity; Finn and Kozlowski were the only ones in the place other than the receptionist.

“Kozlowski,” he said. It seemed an acknowledgment and little more, but Finn had been around cops for long enough to recognize the code.

Kozlowski nodded but said nothing. It was like some strange Kabuki dance. Neither one had extended his hand. They just stood there looking at each other.

Then the agent looked at Finn. “Who’s this?”

“He’s Finn,” Kozlowski said. “Scott Finn, this is Special Agent Rob Hewitt.”

“Finn’s my partner,” Kozlowski said. Then, as an apology, “He’s a lawyer.” They passed through the reception area and walked into the back offices.

“So was I once,” Hewitt said.

“It’s curable?” Finn asked. He could feel Kozlowski’s glare, and he reminded himself not to speak.

Hewitt led them through a large open area overrun with cubicle dividers covered with gray industrial fabric. It resembled so many corporate offices Finn had been in over the years. There was a hush to the place, and men and women in business attire were hunched diligently over their computer screens. Missing was any of the clattering and mayhem that often broke out in local police stations. The FBI didn’t deal with anything so mundane; their targets were higher profile. The only obvious indication that he wasn’t in a bank’s back office was the fact that many of the men in their cubicles had their jackets off, and their shoulder holsters and guns were visible.

Hewitt brought them through the maze, around toward a long hallway, and into an interior conference room. They went in ahead of Hewitt and he closed the door behind them. They sat around the conference table. It was a cheap piece of furniture. “Okay, Koz,” Hewitt said. “You said you needed to talk to me. I’m here.”

“Yeah,” Kozlowski said. “Thanks for seeing me on such short notice.”

Hewitt shook his head. “No thanks needed. Ask what you need to ask.”

“It’s about the robbery at the Gardner Museum that happened back in ’90. You familiar with it?”

Hewitt was silent for a moment. “Sure,” he said slowly. “It’s the biggest art theft in modern history. Still unsolved. I’d have to be dead not to be familiar with it.”

“What’s the status of the investigation?”

Hewitt’s eyes narrowed. “Why do you ask?”

Kozlowski shook his head. “Can’t really get into that.”

“Can’t get into it?” Hewitt leaned back in his chair. He looked back and forth between Finn and Kozlowski. “That puts me in a little bit of an awkward position.”

Kozlowski nodded. “I understand that. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.”

Hewitt looked at the former cop for a moment before answering. Then he shrugged his enormous shoulders. “Truth is, I don’t really know. I hear bits and pieces from time to time, but it’s nothing more than rumor. You know how it is, Koz-it’s not my case, so I don’t have a whole lot of real information.”

“Whose case is it?” Kozlowski asked.

“Art Theft Program. It’s a relatively new division at the Bureau; they started it up in 2002. There are only ten agents or so. Scattered around the country, but they’re based out of the home office in DC. The division’s headed up by a guy named Angus Porter. He was a field agent up here in Boston back in the eighties and nineties. He used to dabble in a lot of the local stuff-organized crime, drug trafficking, the usual crap we all work on in satellite offices. But he got bit by the art bug. Boston was a major player in the stolen-art world, even before the Gardner got taken. A couple of years before, a guy actually plucked a twenty-million-dollar painting off the wall at the Museum of Fine Arts and ran out the door with it. There wasn’t any security at all. True story.”

“The guy got away with it?”

“For a while. The painting was eventually returned to reduce his sentence on another heist that didn’t go quite as well for him. But there were lots of stories like that back in the day. Angus started the process of pulling together information on the thefts and the movement of the paintings. Studied the fences, the transactions, took art classes-became a real expert. After the Gardner job he started lobbying the brass to start up a special division. It took him a dozen years, but they finally gave in and assigned him a half dozen agents and a budget. I’m sure he wanted more, but I gotta give him credit. After 9/11 we were so focused on the antiterrorism issues that I’m shocked he got anybody’s attention.”

“I’m surprised, too,” Kozlowski said. “Diverting any resources from antiterrorism to find lost paintings seems like a waste of manpower.”

“In principle, I don’t disagree,” Hewitt said. “But I’ve helped out on a couple cases, and you’d be surprised how big a business it is-and how tied in it all is to some other very bad things. Drugs. Terrorism. Extortion. It’s all related.”

“How so?”

Hewitt gave an ironic grimace. Finn figured it was the closest he ever came to a smile. “I could give you the basics,” he said. “But from the look on your face, you don’t want the basics. If you’re looking for the best information, the guy to talk to is Porter.”

“Do you feel comfortable calling him?” Kozlowski asked.

Hewitt thought about it for a moment. Then he stood and walked to the door. “I’ll do better,” he said.