The Art of the Heist

Twenty-Nine

Throughout both murder trials, the intervening four and a half years in prison, and the months I’d spent on the run, Suzanne King had remained unflinchingly loyal to me. She was a welcome constant in my otherwise tumultuous life, and I had come to love her deeply. But life in Boston and her association with me had taken its toll on Susie.

Desperate to get out of Massachusetts, she moved to Louisville, Kentucky, to take a job working as a horse trainer and groomer at Churchill Downs. It was a dream job for Susie. But it was a hardscrabble existence, especially for a young woman. During her first year there she bunked in the tack room at the track. Eventually she was able to rent a small house in the country.

In the summer of 1986, after serving nine months of my year-long sentenced, I was paroled from the Norfolk County Jail. I was a free man, but I had little to return to. Despite the fact that a jury had found me not guilty of the murders, my original conviction in the Spinney-Webster case still dogged me. The family of Karen Spinney, especially her father, had been vocal in their anger over the second verdict. And the local media eagerly fanned the flames of their rage. One Boston Herald columnist had gone so far as to dub the panel of twelve men and women who’d found me not guilty “the World’s Dumbest Jury.”

Boston, the city that had once embraced me as its prodigal son, that had seen in me its own restless image, no longer wanted anything to do with me. The bank robberies and art thefts had been one thing; if anything, my outlaw reputation had only added to my allure as a rock and roller. But the murders were another matter altogether. My music career was finished.

With little to keep me in Boston, I decided to join Susie. In the fall of 1986 I moved to Kentucky, taking my son, Myles III, with me. I brought along a few of my more impressive pieces, including a number of Japanese swords of which I was especially fond and one of the Simon Willard clocks I’d taken from the Woolworth mansion over a decade earlier, but my collection was far too large to transport in its entirety. Most of it remained behind at the home of a family member.

I won’t lie to you: I hadn’t abandoned my life of crime entirely. Using some of my old connections and some I’d made in prison, I set myself up with a small import business, bringing wholesale quantities of cocaine from suppliers in Miami to dealers in Boston. Compared to Susie’s work at the stables, it was ridiculously easy money: two or three times a month I’d drive down to Florida, load the trunk of my car with kilo bags, and head north to Massachusetts.

All in all, our life in Kentucky was very good. We quickly acquired a small menagerie, including a mare named Candy Girl that Susie boarded at a neighboring farm. The horse world being what it was, most of the people we associated with had had their own brushes with the law or knew people who had. No one seemed overly concerned by my past. In fact, I made a number of friends who shared my criminal history.

One of these was a man named Dave Grant, who was the manager of the farm where Susie kept her horse. Grant had done time in the federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, on drug charges. After his release he’d spent several years in Alaska, eventually moving to Kentucky when, he claimed, he got tired of the long arctic winters.

That Grant had lived in Alaska after his prison stint should have been a red flag. I’ve since found out that the state is a popular destination for people in the witness protection program. I guess the feds figure no one will know who they are up there. Whatever the case, the idea of a hornet’s nest of informants freezing their asses off in the arctic gives me no small amount of satisfaction. At the time, however, I was unaware of this fact, and believed Grant when he said he had gone up to Alaska to work on the oil pipeline.

Grant was particularly interested in my collection, frequently dropping by the house, professing an interest in art and antiques, asking me questions about individual pieces. Always a sucker for anyone who shared my passion for antiquities, I happily obliged his curiosity.

Grant also took a liking to Myles III, eventually hiring him to work in his barn. Myles was not always easy to get along with-we would eventually learn that he suffered from an emotional problem, but at the time, though we had our suspicions, none of us knew how serious the condition was-and I was grateful for the kindness Grant showed him.

One day in the summer of 1988 Grant came to me for a favor. He had a friend, he said, who was looking to buy a small quantity of cocaine for personal use. By this time it was no secret that I was in the business. Thinking nothing of Grant’s request, I readily agreed, giving him the drugs that very night. He left my house with it and returned several days later with his friend’s payment.

What I didn’t know at the time was that Grant’s “friend” was actually a federal agent. A decade after their humiliation at my hands over the theft and subsequent return of the Rembrandt, the FBI had finally found a way to get to me.

Several months after the cocaine incident Grant again approached me, this time with a more lucrative proposal.

“I’ve got a friend who might be interested in that clock of yours,” Grant told me one night.

“The Simon Willard?” I asked, taken off guard by his unexpected proposal. Grant had asked me about the clock numerous times. Though I hadn’t told him exactly how I’d come by the piece, I’d given him a brief tutorial on its provenance and approximate worth. He had seemed duly impressed at the time.

Grant nodded. “We met up in Leavenworth. Guy’s a collector, like you. Very discreet, if you know what I mean. A family man.”

“He’s connected?” I asked, thinking it sure sounded like Grant was trying to tell me the guy was mobbed up.

“You could say that.”

“He’s in Louisville?”

Grant shook his head. “He lives up in Bloomington, Illinois.”

“What’s his name?” I asked.

“Tony Graziano,” Grant said. “But everyone calls him Big Tony.”

“Graziano, huh?” It wasn’t a name I recognized.

“His family’s big in Indianapolis,” Grant explained.

“Sounds interesting,” I mused.

Though I’d known Grant for some time, I didn’t yet trust him enough to enter into business with his so-called friend. But neither was I entirely uninterested in his proposition. I let the subject go, confident Grant would bring it up again.

It didn’t take long for him to do so.

“I just talked to my buddy up in Illinois,” Grant said when I went to pick up Myles III at his farm one afternoon. “You know, that guy I was telling you about: Big Tony. I told him about your clock. He’s willing to give you ten grand for it.”

The amount was much less than the clock was actually worth. But then, because of its size and history, the Simon Willard was an awkward piece to fence. All things considered, $10,000 was a fair offer. Still, it was a small payoff for what could be an awful lot of trouble. On the other hand, I had a number of big-ticket items I was looking to unload. If Grant’s friend turned out to be the real deal, I stood to make a lot more than ten grand off him.

“Maybe you could get us together sometime,” I told Grant.

After several weeks of back-and-forth Grant finally arranged a meeting. On December 5, 1988, I drove to Illinois with the clock in the back of my van. The next day Tony and I met at the Ramada Inn in Bloomington.

It was a fairly straightforward exchange. Tony gave me the $10,000 we’d agreed upon. In return I gave him the Simon Willard grandfather clock Bobby Donati and I had stolen all those years earlier from the Woolworth estate.

“There’s lots more where that came from,” I told him as we transferred the clock from my van to his.

“Oh yeah?” he remarked. “Dave said you’ve got quite a collection of Japanese swords.”

“Among other things.”

Tony nodded appreciatively. “I’ll be in touch.”

Not long after I returned to Kentucky, Grant once again approached me on his friend’s behalf. “It looks like you two have a lot more in common than your love of antiques,” Grant said. “Big Tony’s got a nice side business going with the college kids up there. Very lucrative, from what he says. He’s always looking for reliable suppliers.”

I know what you’re thinking: I should have smelled a rat. In hindsight, even I have trouble understanding why I took Grant’s bait. The truth is that I didn’t entirely trust him. But despite the not-so-subtle stench of rodent in the air I managed to convince myself that Grant wouldn’t double-cross me.

There comes a point when you have to take it on faith that your friends are who they claim to be; if you don’t eventually trust people, you’ll have a long, lonely life ahead of you. I’m the first to admit that this way of thinking has gotten me into trouble on more than one occasion. Still, I have few regrets.

Of these, my association with Stokes and Sperrazza is by far the greatest. In terms of the repercussions it had on my own life, my reply to Grant’s request is not far behind.

“Tell Tony I can get him whatever he wants,” I said.

Over the next several weeks, using Dave Grant as our intermediary, Big Tony and I laid the groundwork for what promised to be a highly lucrative business arrangement but was in fact an elaborate setup. Not content to simply bust me for the sale of the Simon Willard clock, Grant’s handlers at the FBI were determined to up the ante. Tony wanted drugs, Grant told me. Cocaine, mostly, in large quantities. But he made it clear that he would buy pretty much anything I brought him.

Getting my hands on the drugs was no problem. But the quantities Tony was talking about-several kilos at a time-represented a significant investment on my part, $24,000 for the first kilo alone. It was money I didn’t have. But while I was cash-poor, I had a small fortune tied up in my collection.

Learning this, Grant conveniently stepped forward with a solution: if I could offer Tony sufficient collateral, Grant suggested, he might loan me the cash I needed for my initial purchase. If Tony liked the pieces enough, he might even consider purchasing them.

On January 11, 1989, with the preliminary details of my partnership with Tony agreed upon, I set out for Illinois. I’d managed to procure a modest supply of pharmaceuticals-100 hits of LSD and a similar number of oxycodone pills-which I intended to sell to Tony. I had also brought along the two paintings I’d stolen years earlier from the Meade gallery at Amherst college: Pieter Lastman’s “St. John the Baptist,” which at the time was worth well over $150,000, and Hendrick Cornelisz van Vliet’s “Interior of the Nieuwe Kerk, Delft,” which was valued at a quarter of a million dollars. They were two of the more impressive pieces in my collection, and by far the most difficult to sell. If Tony had been able to fence the Simon Willard clock, I figured he might also be able to find a buyer for the paintings.

The following day Tony and I met at the Eastland Suites Lodge, an ugly, neo-Elizabethan faux-brick compound near the Bloomington airport, to negotiate the final terms of our arrangement. Much to my chagrin, Tony wasn’t interested in buying the paintings. But he agreed to loan me the cash for my initial purchase, on the condition that he hold on to the paintings until I repaid him, preferably in cocaine. Along with the loan, Tony also paid me $1,700 for the LSD and oxycodone.

On March 1, with $24,000 cash in hand, I flew to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, to pick up the kilo of cocaine I’d promised Tony. Less than a week later I was back in Illinois with the drugs. On March 7 Tony and I again met at the Eastland Suites. Only this time he hadn’t come alone. No sooner had I produced the kilo bag than my hotel room was swarmed by federal agents. “Big Tony” flashed his badge, and I was immediately placed under arrest.

Grant had been right about one thing: the deal had turned out to be profitable, just not for me. For his role in setting me up, Dave Grant was paid over $60,000 by the FBI. Though I knew Grant had orchestrated the Bloomington sting, it wasn’t until several weeks later that I realized the full extent of his betrayal. In an attempt to cover up the fact that he had brutalized his own wife, Grant told his handlers that Myles III had assaulted and attempted to rape her. It was a bald-faced lie. Grant’s wife and another witness eventually signed sworn affidavits saying it was Grant, not Myles III, who had assaulted her. But the accusation had been made, and it stuck.

It was a good thing I was in jail when I found out about the allegations. Had I not been locked up, I have no doubt I would have hunted down Grant and killed him for involving my son in his sordid dealings.

In November 1989, eight months after my arrest in Bloomington, I pleaded guilty to all the charges against me, which included possession of cocaine with intent to distribute and conspiracy to distribute. My adventure, begun all those years earlier on the high bank of the Union River, was drawing to a close. But my old life in Boston wasn’t finished with me quite yet.

In March 1990, while I was awaiting sentencing in the Bloomington case, federal agents came to see me at the Sangamon County Jail in Springfield, Illinois. Days earlier thieves had robbed the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and the FBI was convinced I knew who had done it. I had my suspicions, but I wasn’t about to share them with the feds.

I’d read about the heist in the paper, taking special note of the list of items taken, which included a bronze flagpole finial in the shape of an eagle. The finial was a piece that particularly puzzled investigators, given its relatively modest value and the time and energy it had taken to get it in the first place.

But it wasn’t a mystery to me. I knew exactly who’d stolen the finial: Bobby Donati. It had taken him nearly two decades since our initial visit to the Gardner Museum to make good on his plan to rob the place. But he had left his calling card, as promised: the eagle had landed.

Several weeks later my suspicions about Bobby’s involvement in the Gardner heist were confirmed when I received an unexpected visitor. David Houghton, my old friend from Milton, had flown out to see me, and he had some very interesting news. David had always remained close to my family, especially my mother. During my last stint in Walpole he’d cared for her as if she’d been his own flesh and blood. But I hadn’t seen much of him since my mother died.

“Did you hear what we did?” David asked excitedly. He was a big man, three hundred pounds on a good day, with a mechanic’s grease-stained hands, but the expression on his face was that of a young boy who’d just landed his first fish.

He glanced around the visiting room, then, confident that we were out of earshot of the guards and other prisoners, leaned across the table that separated us. “The Gardner,” he whispered. “That was us.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” I asked. That Bobby had something to do with the theft came as no surprise to me, but it had not even crossed my mind that David might have been involved as well.

“We’re gonna get you out of here, Myles,” he said. “Just like you did with the Rembrandt.”

As much as I appreciated my friends’ plan to once again bargain me out of prison, I found David’s visit unsettling. I couldn’t speak for Bobby, but David, at least, seemed entirely unaware of the difficulties involved in such a negotiation. The months I’d spent haggling with Regan and Twomey had been a delicate affair. Neither Bobby nor David had the connections or the savvy necessary to make a deal of such magnitude.

Holding the single Rembrandt had been one thing, but the Gardner haul was another matter altogether. The pieces Bobby had chosen were the kind of things people kill for. If rumor got out that Bobby or David knew anything about the whereabouts of the art, they’d be in real danger.

Unfortunately, my misgivings proved to be warranted. David’s visit was the last time I heard from either man.

The following summer U.S. District Judge Richard Mills sentenced me to twenty years in prison, more than double the sentence requested by the prosecutor in the case.

“You’re obviously a smart man,” Judge Mills told me. “Someone could write a book about you someday, but no one would believe it.”

In the fall of 1990 I was transferred to the federal penitentiary in Lompoc, California. Not long after, Bobby Donati was found stabbed to death in an automobile trunk, in what was obviously a mob hit. A year later, David Houghton died of a heart attack, leaving nothing behind but his 1988 Oldsmobile Delta and roach-infested house in Malden.

What happened to the Gardner art is a question that remains unanswered.

I have not been inside the Gardner Museum since the afternoon I spent there with Bobby Donati. For obvious reasons, I would not be welcome. But I know that, thanks to a clause in Isabella Gardner’s will stipulating absolutely no changes to the museum’s collection, the empty frames from which the paintings were cut that foggy March night still hang on the walls, mute witnesses to a crime that will, in all likelihood, never be solved.

In the Dutch room Rembrandt himself, captured in a self-portrait at the age of twenty-three, seems unable to look away from the blank space where his magnificent seascape once hung. His painted gaze is drawn to it, as are those of the thousands of visitors who shuffle past this spot each year. Among the 2,500 pieces of priceless art housed in the Gardner Museum, this is what they most want to see. Not the painting itself, but the puzzle of it, the thing that begs to be understood.

I, on the other hand, have a clear memory of the canvas as I saw it. The boat brimming with disciples riding the dark sea. The enormous white wave that threatens to engulf them all. The men trying desperately to wrangle the craft.

In the end, I suspect, this is how Bobby Donati and David Houghton must have felt, foundering in a storm of their own creation.