The Art of the Heist

Thirteen

As my profits from the bank robberies grew, collecting came to serve a practical purpose, solving the problem of what to do with my growing fortune. For obvious reasons, conventional investments were out of the question. By putting my money into art and antiques, I turned my dirty cash into legitimate goods. And not only that: my knowledge of the market enabled me to make a killing in the process. It was a near-perfect system. I loved fine art; I made a lot of money buying and selling it; and I loved the thrill of bank robbery, which helped fund my investments.

Martha accompanied me to many of these auctions and soon became an expert in her own right. Eventually I was able to send her to auctions in my place when a show or some other commitment kept me from going myself. By this time we had been together for well over a year and were completely committed to each other. But despite this fact, and despite her involvement in the auctions, I was careful not to tell Martha too much. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust her; to the contrary, I didn’t think for one second that she would betray any of my secrets. But I was realistic about the position I could put her in by telling her the truth. I didn’t want to see her called to the stand someday, forced to decide between obeying the law and perjuring herself for me.

As far as Martha knew, my financial successes were due entirely to the wise decisions I made as a collector, not a totally implausible assumption given my considerable expertise. Still, Martha was a very bright woman, and she likely had her suspicions. If she did, she didn’t say so.

As I scouted more museums, I soon recognized that my growing collection could serve another, possibly even more lucrative purpose than merely being a de facto bank account. Recalling my experience at the Boston Children’s Museum several years earlier, I quickly realized that my best course of action would be to get to know the museums and their staff as a knowledgeable collector.

Whereas in the past no one had given the name Myles Connor a second thought, I knew my notoriety would now make it difficult for me to pass myself off as a benevolent and merely curious art enthusiast. If I was to gain the trust of museum staff, it would have to be as someone other than myself.

Realizing this, I set about creating an alternate identity for myself. Combining my middle name, Joseph, with a variant on the first initial of my first name, I settled on the alias of Michael Joseph. But for what I had in mind, a mere pseudonym would not be enough of a cover. My background would have to be sufficiently convincing as well.

Most people are suckers for titles. Barring count or duke, both of which are far too flashy for the persona I had in mind, the one title that I knew would inspire universal awe and respect was doctor. But a doctor of what? Posing as an M.D. was out of the question, as I would never be able to survive intense questioning on the subject. History and art were equally risky, given the fact that so many people who worked in museums had Ph.D.’s in one or even both of these subjects.

After evaluating all my options, I finally settled on psychology as the best choice for my field of expertise. Several of the classes I’d taken at Norfolk had been in psychology, so I had a fair grasp on the basics. Beyond this, it seemed, the subject lent itself quite easily to the work of a good bullshitter. For my alma mater I chose Harvard. As long as I was reaching high, I figured, I might as well aim for the stars.

As impressive as my academic pedigree and my connections were, I knew my collection would be the real door opener. To understand why this was the case, it helps to know a little something about museum culture in general. Most museums, especially small ones, live and die by the generosity of individual collectors. No only do the Dr. Josephs of the world contribute large sums of money to institutions whose work they deem worthy of supporting, but they also can be counted on to bequeath their collections to these same institutions.

By now, my personal collection of Japanese weapons alone rivaled that of almost any museum in the country. Any museum, of any size, would have been foolish not to cultivate a relationship with someone like me. But for small museums especially, a bequest of the sort Dr. Joseph was in the position to give could have a huge impact on the status of the institution.

Over the course of the next few weeks I made the rounds of a number of small museums in New England, bringing along my best pieces for show-and-tell, introducing myself as Dr. Michael Joseph, respected collector of Asian art and antiquities. Soon, like farmers escorting a fox into their henhouse, one curator after another walked me through his collection, proudly pointing out the most valuable items.

One of the first museums I hit using information I’d gained as Dr. Joseph was in western Massachusetts. For a number of reasons, I am still not at liberty to identify the institution, except to say that it was a highly specialized regional museum of respectable size. There was nothing in its collection that appealed to me personally. By then my own collection was far more impressive. But one of my many connections in the underground art world had an outlet in Europe for exactly the kind of pieces the museum specialized in.

Recognizing an opportunity to make a tidy profit, I set about devising a plan to rob the place. Built specifically as a museum, the building presented an imposing façade. It also boasted impressive perimeter security. But even the best security system has its Achilles’ heel. During a visit as Dr. Joseph, I’d observed that one of the third-floor windows on the back of the building appeared not to be alarmed. It was here, I decided, that we would make our entry.

Because the heist was shaping up to be a straightforward case of breaking and entering, I decided to send several of my crew members to do the job for me. Paying them generously with the proceeds from my latest bank robbery, carefully describing the layout of the museum and exactly which pieces I wanted, I dispatched three of my associates.

Fortunately, my suspicions about the third floor proved to be correct. Using a painter’s ladder, my friends climbed up the side of the building, popped the window, and let themselves inside. Working off the shopping list I’d given them, the crew filled three duffel bags before exiting through the same window. As at the Children’s Museum, logistics meant they could take only relatively small pieces. But despite this constraint, the men made off with tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of valuables. Since I had already paid them for their work, the take was pure profit for me.

For the most part, my meticulous planning paid off when it came time to carry out our heists. But not every job went smoothly. One of the few museums in New England whose collection of Japanese arms and armor came close to rivaling my own was the George Walter Vincent Smith Museum in Springfield, Massachusetts. Opened at the very end of the nineteenth century by Smith and his wife, both avid art and antiquities collectors, the museum was designed to resemble an Italian villa.

The museum housed a number of impressive collections, including works of the classical and Renaissance periods, a stunning collection of Middle Eastern rugs, and a number of early American oil paintings. But the Smith Museum’s Asian art collection-which included many fine examples of Japanese art and armor from the time of the samurai; Japanese ivory carvings, lacquers, and ceramics; the largest collection of Chinese cloisonné in the Western world; and an elaborately carved Shinto shrine-was of particular interest to me.

Disguised as Dr. Joseph, bringing several of the most valuable swords in my collection along for show-and-tell, I visited the museum and introduced myself to the staff. As was inevitably the case, they were thrilled to make my acquaintance. One of the curators offered to show me around.

As we toured the building I noted with chagrin that the museum had a good perimeter security system. Determined to find a way around it, I spent the next several days and nights observing the comings and goings of the staff. I soon discovered that the museum employed only one nighttime security guard. If two or three of us could hide inside the museum until after closing time, I decided, we could easily overpower the guard and have the run of the place.

I quickly set my plan in motion. My first step was to come up with a suitable cover for myself. For obvious reasons, this was one museum visit I could not make as Dr. Joseph. Nor could I risk being recognized as Myles Connor. Finally, I settled on disguising myself as an old man. If it had worked with Al Dotoli, my closest friend, I figured it would work with the museum staff. Next, I enlisted the help of a friend from Walpole named Billy Oikle, who readily agreed to participate in the robbery.

On the afternoon of the heist the two of us arrived at the museum well before closing time. We purchased tickets without incident and went inside, strolling the galleries as if we were ordinary visitors, making our way toward the Asian art galleries.

Two of the more impressive items in the museum’s collection were a pair of massive bronze Japanese temple guardians. I had taken special note of the statues on a previous visit, not only because of their beauty but because they were easily large enough to conceal two grown men. As closing time neared and the galleries emptied of visitors, Billy and I slipped behind the bronzes to wait.

As we crouched behind the two enormous statues, I felt a frisson of excitement, that Aladdin-in-the-cave feeling all over again. It was all I could do to keep myself from being distracted by the overwhelming amount of art and antiques so close by. But I managed to focus on the task at hand until, about an hour later, we heard the sound of the guard’s hard-soled shoes on the marble floor.

He paused for an instant at the entrance to the gallery, the beam of his flashlight raking the dark room. Then he started walking again, passing just in front of our hiding spot. I nodded at Billy, and the two of us rushed forward, tackling the guard, sending his flashlight skittering across the floor.

As a rule, museum guards are not heroes. Who can blame them? They certainly don’t get paid enough to risk even minor injury doing their jobs. This man was no exception. After a brief, instinctive struggle, he quickly surrendered. Not that he had much choice in the matter. Using rope we’d brought along specifically for that purpose, Billy and I quickly had the guard’s hands and feet tied.

“Good evening,” I said, showing him my Walther, but keeping my voice as even as possible. I’ve always found that calm-and, inversely, panic-is contagious. It’s a lot easier to get someone to do what you want when they’re not terrified. “You’re not going to do anything stupid, are you?”

He shook his head.

“Good,” I told him. “And we’re not going to hurt you.”

With the guard immobilized, Billy and I headed off to gather our booty. We hadn’t gotten far when I heard a faint knocking sound.

“What the fuck is that?” I wondered out loud, stopping to listen more closely, motioning for Billy to do the same.

We both froze. For a moment everything was quiet; then the knocking came again, louder this time, more insistent. It was someone pounding on the front door.

I rushed back to where we’d left the guard.

“You expecting someone?” I asked, waving the 9 mm in front of his face. I hadn’t observed anyone coming and going when I’d watched the place.

He flinched. “I-I’ve got a buddy who comes by to visit me sometimes,” he stammered, genuinely scared. He hesitated a moment, than added, “Guy’s a cop.”

I turned to look at Billy, who had turned white as a ghost.

“Fuck the score!” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

I couldn’t have agreed with him more. In an instant we were off and running, sprinting for the back door. Needless to say, we left the George Walter Vincent Smith Museum empty-handed.

Not all of my museum thefts were as dramatic as the Springfield heist or as profitable as that first contract job. In fact, many of the pieces I took during this period were small items I stumbled across in museum archives, pieces I felt a special affinity for. Don’t get me wrong, many of the items I took were valuable-a quality sword guard could, at the time, fetch upward of $25,000 at auction. But for the most part I took only things I really loved.

The thefts themselves were uncomplicated. Left alone in the archives to “study” a certain piece or collection of pieces, I would secrete the items I wanted in a briefcase or coat pocket. My actions hardly seemed wrong. Stealing from a museum archive is a lot like robbing your grandmother’s attic. The pieces I took would, I reasoned, not even be missed by overburdened museum staff. I, on the other hand, loved and appreciated them. I wasn’t the first collector to have succumbed to this temptation, and I certainly wasn’t the last.

Though my motives for visiting museums as Dr. Joseph were far from pure, I truly enjoyed meeting people who shared my passion for collecting. The time I spent talking to curators and other museum staff, many of whom I came to regard as friends, was always stimulating and often highly educational. There was one institution in particular, a relatively large and highly respected regional museum that I will refer to here only as the “Bartlett Museum,” where this was especially true.

The more I got to know the staff at the Bartlett Museum, the more I liked them. They were, without exception, a truly dedicated group of people, deeply attached to their collection. Where greed, or at least self-advancement, was clearly the motive of so many of the curators I came in contact with, the Bartlett staff appeared genuinely to relish the opportunity to meet and talk with anyone who shared their interest in art.

There was one man in particular, a young, up-and-coming curator named James Letsky, with whom I developed a particularly close friendship. Letsky’s specialty was Asian art, and I learned a lot from our lengthy discussions on the subject.

Partly out of loyalty to Letsky, and partly out of respect for the museum’s staff, I made the decision not to take anything from the Bartlett’s archives. But I continued to visit the museum on a regular basis.

Though Letsky had swallowed my Dr. Joseph act hook, line, and sinker, there was one staff member at the Bartlett who clearly had not. An old battleship of a woman whose glasses hung from a chain around her neck to rest on her cashmere-clad bosom, Philippa Lear was one of the museum’s senior curators, specializing in Chinese ceramics. Lear made no pretense about her feelings for me, which swung between extreme suspicion and outright loathing.

“She doesn’t like me very much, does she?” I asked Letsky one day after we’d run into her in the hallway outside Letsky’s office and she’d greeted me with one of her signature dismissive sneers.

“What, Philippa?” Letsky replied, brushing the question off. “She hates everyone.”

But the very next day, when I was alone in the archives studying a beautiful example of a Kamakura-period tanto blade, I looked up to see Lear watching me. She caught my gaze and held it for a moment. Then, slowly, she smiled at me. It was not a friendly expression, not in the least. It was, without doubt, a warning. Then her lips closed over her gray teeth and she turned her back on me, her glasses swinging across her chest.

As I spent more time in the archives, it soon became clear to me that someone was stealing from the museum. Letsky had a list of various items that were missing from the inventory. Ironically, the pieces were the kind of things I would have chosen: sword guards and small porcelains. Philippa Lear no doubt must have thought I was the culprit, but I was not. Over the course of several months of observation I determined that the thieves were most likely two janitors who had unfettered access to the archives.

It’s a testament to my respect for the Bartlett that I made the decision to tell Letsky about my suspicions. It was the only time in my life when I have turned on a fellow criminal. But in this instance my loyalty to the museum and the art it housed outweighed my loyalty to the thieves. Still, I was relieved when, for lack of any hard evidence, the men were merely reassigned to a different area of the museum.

Incredibly, not long after the incident with the janitors I was offered a position as an assistant curator of Asian arts at the Bartlett. It was a huge honor. Had the situation been different I would have jumped at the opportunity. But under the circumstances I clearly could not accept. Dr. Joseph could not have withstood the scrutiny of the hiring process. Someone, no doubt Philippa Lear, eventually would have proven me a fraud, a discovery that I’m sure would have brought her substantial satisfaction.

Several years later, when I was very publicly indicted for a number of crimes, I immediately thought of Philippa Lear and the pleasure she must have gotten seeing my picture on the TV news and having her suspicions confirmed. At the same time, I felt a twinge of guilt for Letsky, who must have been horrified to discover that he had been harboring a notorious art thief-though I’m happy to report that his association with me didn’t harm his career in any way. He went on to become the director of the Bartlett and, during his tenure, oversaw the museum’s significant expansion. Today, the Bartlett is regarded as one of the finest institutions in the country.

Years after my involvement with the Bartlett, I would learn that I was not the only art thief with a soft spot for the museum. In the early 1990s a Pennsylvania history professor and lover of antique porcelains was convicted of pilfering the archives of a number of museums into which he had been welcomed as a scholar. Unable to bear seeing beautiful works of art languishing in dusty basements, the professor stole items he considered especially precious. He then donated them to the Bartlett, where he knew they would be cared for and exhibited.

As my collection of Japanese swords continued to grow, I became interested in having my swords officially documented. Because false signatures have been a major problem during certain eras of sword production, documentation is very important to any serious collector. A sword that has been judged to be authentic by one of the two major Japanese sword study associations, the Nihon Bijutsu Token Hozon Kyokai (NBTHK) or the Nihon Token Hozon Kai (NTHK), can easily be worth ten times as much as an unauthenticated sword.

The judging process, or shinsa, is extremely rigorous and tightly controlled. Experts closely examine every aspect of the weapon, including the distinctive hamon, and rate the sword according to its aesthetic appeal, workmanship, and historical significance. They then issue papers, or origami, attesting to the sword’s various attributes.

Though I had no doubts about the authenticity of my swords, I knew that having a shinsa performed on my entire collection would have a huge impact on its value. Accomplishing this, however, would be no small feat. Shinsa are very rarely performed outside of Japan, and then normally only in conjunction with special events.

Knowing my best chance lay with the NTHK-without exception, the NBTHK conducts its shinsa only at the Japanese Sword Museum in Tokyo-I contacted the organization directly to request a judging. Along with a written description and photographs of my extensive collection, which I knew would impress the potential judges, I made a generous cash offer for their services.

As we all know, money talks. In this case, it must have made a persuasive argument. I soon received word from the NTHK that they would be sending over a katana expert, Joshi Nakamura, and his team to evaluate my swords. I was elated, and quickly began making plans for Nakamura’s arrival.

Nakamura’s visit was a huge coup for me, not only because of the effect his shinsa would have on the value of my collection but also because my association with him added greatly to my credibility with museums. Having promised James Letsky that I would introduce him to the esteemed judge, I dutifully brought Nakamura to the Bartlett.

Letsky eventually returned the favor by introducing me to a number of curators and directors from museums outside of New England. These connections allowed me-or more precisely, Dr. Joseph-access to the archives of some of the most highly respected museums in the United States and Canada.

Over the course of the next several months, disguised as Dr. Joseph, I visited a number of these institutions, including the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Like any good visitor, I never left without a souvenir. Only my mementos didn’t come from the museum gift shops.

I chose my keepsakes carefully. They were, by necessity, small and discreet, compact enough to slip under a coat or into a small bag. From the Smithsonian I took an important tanto blade; from the Royal Ontario Museum an intricately decorated sword guard, or tsuba; from the Met a beautiful Persian jambiya, or dagger, with an intricate carving of Marco Polo on the hilt.