The Art of the Heist

Twenty

Now that the Rembrandt was in my possession, I had absolutely no intention of standing trial for my role in the theft of the Wyeth paintings. But I was not yet ready to make a deal.

Knowing the seriousness of the charges against me, I was realistic about the fact that whatever bargain I struck with the U.S. attorney’s office would probably involve some prison time. At the very least there were weeks of negotiating to be done. Summer was coming and the thought of spending it at Walpole or on the sweltering top tier of the Charles Street Jail while Marty Leppo and David Twomey hammered out the details of a deal did not appeal to me. Unfortunately, with my trial date quickly approaching, the only way to avoid this fate was by skipping bail and going on the lam.

In preparation for this inevitability, I had asked a friend to rent an apartment for me down in the wealthy South Shore beach community of Cohasset. This was where I went after dropping the painting off at Charlie’s house.

On April 23, the day the trial for my role in the Wyeth thefts was scheduled to begin, my attorney arrived at Judge Cafferty’s courtroom on the twelfth floor of the old U.S. courthouse at Post Office Square. I had purposely not told Marty about the Rembrandt or my plans for it, or the fact that I had no intention of standing trial for the Wyeth thefts, and he fully expected to find me waiting for him. Needless to say, neither he nor the judge was amused by my absence.

Marty pled my case, begging for extra time, making frantic phone calls from the pay phone outside the courtroom, trying without success to track me down. I felt bad about leaving Marty hanging like that, but it had to be done. Despite Marty’s efforts, Judge Cafferty quickly ran out of patience and declared me in default. I was officially on the run. It wasn’t the first time in my life, and it wouldn’t be the last.

Technically speaking, the Rembrandt theft had made me an instant millionaire. I spent the summer of 1975 playing the part.

The town of Cohasset proved an ideal place in which to lie low. It was just close enough to the city that I could keep abreast of developments in my case, but far enough away in both distance and income bracket that it wouldn’t be crawling with Boston cops. The apartment I’d rented was on tony Jerusalem Road, in a large castlelike structure that had once been the home of a Boston business tycoon.

Once her classes ended, Martha came to stay with me. By then she was well aware of the fact that I had jumped bail on the Wyeth charges and was a fugitive, but I did not tell her about the Rembrandt. I can’t speak for Martha, but I suspected that she knew we would not be together much longer. As a result, our time in Cohasset had a bittersweet quality to it. We spent nearly every waking moment together, often at the beach.

Billy Irish drove down daily from Boston with news and provisions.

“I ran into Al Dotoli,” he told me one afternoon. “He says the FBI’s got a fucking camera on the telephone pole outside his house. And that Bernie Murphy’s been to visit him a time or two.”

I wasn’t at all surprised to hear this. Because Al was my personal manager and my closest friend, everyone assumed he knew where I was. It was the same when I’d been on the run nearly ten years earlier. Then, the cops had practically camped out at Al’s house. Besides, I knew Murphy and two other agents had shown up at Martha’s house the day after Judge Cafferty had declared me in default, and tried to intimidate her. She’d told them to get lost. I had every confidence Al would do the same.

Boston cops may not have been able to afford beach homes in Cohasset, but there was another, potentially more dangerous segment of the population that could. One morning while Martha and I were walking on the beach, she stopped to coo over twins who were out for a ride in their stroller. As she leaned down to admire the babies, I exchanged small talk with the father.

It wasn’t until we were walking away that I realized the man I’d just been talking to was one of the Channel 7 news anchors. I passed several sleepless nights after that, but luckily the reporter must not have recognized me. Nothing ever came of our meeting.

With the exception of this one unsettling incident, life on the South Shore was uneventful-perhaps too much so. By August my Griffith was begging to be driven and I was itching to get away from Cohasset. As the summer drew to a close I grew more and more reckless, driving up to Boston to go to clubs or visit friends. I’m sure there was a part of me that wanted to get caught. I’ve never been able to withstand boredom, even-or especially-when the alternative is danger.

During one of my trips to the city I went to see Bobby Donati. I hadn’t seen Bobby since I’d jumped bail, and I certainly hadn’t told him I’d been involved with the MFA heist. But he knew me well enough to be sure I’d had a hand in the theft. I could tell as soon as I got there that he was dying to ask me about the painting. Of all my friends and associates, Bobby had the most knowledge of and greatest appreciation for fine art. The fact that I had actually touched a Rembrandt meant something to him.

“So how did it feel?” Bobby asked finally, with a devilish glint in his eyes.

“How did what feel?” I asked, feigning ignorance.

“You know. The Rembrandt.” He was whispering, though there was no need to: we were entirely alone. “How did it feel to hold it in your hands?”

I winked at him. “I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”

He smiled. “Sure you don’t.” He suddenly changed the subject. “You ever think about knocking off the Gardner?”

“The Gardner Museum?” I asked, taken slightly aback by the abruptness of the question.

He smiled again.

Founded at the turn of the twentieth century by the unconventional socialite for whom it was named, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum was one of the gems of the Boston art world. Its small yet incredibly well-regarded collection of European and Asian art had all been hand-picked by Mrs. Gardner, who was one of the early twentieth century’s foremost art patrons. For such a small institution, the museum boasted a surprising number of outright masterpieces, including Titian’s stunning “Rape of Europa” and Rembrandt’s darkly beautiful “Storm on the Sea of Galilee,” the only seascape the Dutchman ever painted.

Unless one was interested in using them as leverage or stashing them in an underground lair, these renowned works were far too recognizable to steal. But there were plenty of smaller, less flashy pieces to choose from as well.

“Sure,” I told Bobby. At that point in time, there weren’t many museums in New England I hadn’t contemplated robbing.

“What do you say we pay it a visit one of these days?”

I shrugged. “Why not?”

Less than a week later Bobby and I found ourselves strolling through the lush courtyard garden at the center of the faux Venetian Renaissance palazzo that housed the Gardner Museum.

“You know, she designed this place herself,” I told Bobby. “She thought art should be an intimate experience.” In fact, Isabella Gardner had been one of the first major art patrons to espouse this point of view. To this end, she had purposely designed the museum to feel like a private residence.

“I heard she could throw one hell of a party,” Bobby mused, looking around at the building’s ornate inner façade, a series of windowed galleries towering three floors above us.

I smiled, thinking about Isabella’s legendary gatherings. Her contempt for convention-and the trappings of class-had been scandalous at the time. Rumor had it she’d even posed naked on more than one occasion. I’d always thought she and I would have been fast friends.

“Let’s go see the Titian,” I suggested.

After walking back through the garden, we climbed up to the third floor and made our way to the Titian gallery. True to Isabella’s style, the rooms were crammed with all manner of precious antiques: Chinese mat weights and porcelain vases shared floor space with early American furniture; the walls were covered with canvases and prints; even the wallpapers were works of art, rich velvets and silks stamped into exotic patterns. At first glance the placement of these items appeared utterly chaotic. But there was a meticulous method to Isabella’s madness, and it worked, like the bordello-red wallpaper in the Titian gallery, which perfectly evoked the lurid sexuality in “The Rape of Europa.”

“This one’s for me,” I said, standing before the painting.

Bobby laughed. “It’s kind of on the big side, isn’t it?”

At nearly eighty inches square, the canvas was totally unmanageable. But I wasn’t thinking in practical terms at the moment. We were window shopping, fulfilling some fantasy wish list that had nothing to do with practicality.

Next we went down to the second floor to check out the Dutch room. A rich, stately space with wood-beamed ceilings, a large, formal fireplace, and triple arched windows that looked out over the villa’s interior courtyard, the gallery could not have been more perfectly conceived to showcase the pieces it housed. The dark interiors and rich colors used by the Dutch painters contrasted splendidly with the gold silk wallpaper against which they were hung, just as Isabella Gardner had intended them to.

“How much do you think these are worth?” Bobby asked as we made a slow circuit of the room. “Just the Rembrandts.”

The Gardner’s Rembrandts, which included a self-portrait of the artist and the spectacular seascape “Storm on the Sea of Galilee,” were undeniably priceless. I hesitated to put an exact figure on them. “Millions,” I said.

Like most people, Bobby was drawn to the big, flashy stuff. But he was no amateur. He knew as well as I did how difficult a Rembrandt would be to sell on the open market.

“That Vermeer,” I said, pointing to a smaller oil painting of a girl playing the piano. “Now that’s a real gem. There are only a handful of Vermeers out there.”

As we strolled out of the Dutch room and into the adjoining tapestry room, Bobby suddenly stopped. “See that finial?” he said, pointing to a small bronze eagle atop a Napoleonic flagpole. “You’ve got your Titian; I’ve got that eagle.” He smiled to himself. “That’ll be my calling card: ‘The eagle has landed.’”

“I’ll remember that,” I told him.

Picking out Rembrandts and Titians may have been the stuff of fantasy, but Bobby had lit a fire in me concerning the Gardner Museum, and we began to talk about a heist in more concrete terms. Over the course of the next few weeks we made several trips to the museum to scout out the alarm system and identify the building’s vulnerabilities.

But on Friday, September 12, any plans Bobby Donati and I had for robbing the Gardner were put on indefinite hold.

That afternoon I drove up to Northampton to pick up Martha, who was back in school. We were on our way to have dinner at one of our favorite restaurants, in nearby South Hadley, when a team of FBI agents descended on us in the parking lot. As in Mashpee, they had taken no chances. There were at least a dozen officers, each with his pistol drawn.

“Myles Connor?” one of them asked.

“The one and only,” I answered.