The Art of the Heist

Two

It was the adrenaline rush of art and theft that landed me in that jail and in that river. If you’d known me in the years leading up to 1965, however, you never would have predicted it. A man could write a book about himself and still not solve the puzzle of who he really is.

The easy answer is that I’m Myles Connor Jr., son of Myles and Lucy Connor of Milton, Massachusetts, grandson of Charles and Ruth Johnson of Winthrop, Maine, and Bill and Mary Connor of County Galway, Ireland. I was born on February 1, 1943, during one of the biggest nor’easters of that era, at Carney Hospital in Dorchester, Massachusetts, and grew up in Milton, home to the Baker’s chocolate mill and the Forbes Museum. Later in life I would become famous for robbing that museum, among others.

I would like to say my childhood was extraordinary, that acts of cruelness or deprivation made me what I am. But this is not the case. I grew up the younger of two children, in a loving home, in a town that smelled perpetually of warm cocoa and brownies. For the first thirteen years of my life we lived with my mother’s parents, in a middle-class neighborhood in Milton. My maternal grandfather, though by no means wealthy (his side of the family had fallen on hard times several generations earlier), was a direct descendant of Mayflower passenger William Brewster. He was an avid collector of art and antiques, especially antique weapons, and it is from him that I learned much of what I know about these things.

The education I received at my grandfather’s hands was not a formal one. Rather, art and the appreciation of it were constants in our home. He took great pride in his collection and loved to tell me about the individual pieces. When I was not in school I often accompanied my grandfather to the Museum of Fine Art in Boston. His encyclopedic knowledge of the pieces in the MFA’s collection never ceased to amaze me.

My paternal grandparents had come to Boston from Ireland some years earlier. According to family lore, my grandfather Connor’s emigration was not so much a choice as a necessity, a result of an unfortunate incident in which a local constable in County Galway was shot. If I inherited my wild nature from any one person, it would be him. During my childhood he and my grandmother lived not far from us, in South Boston, and I saw them regularly. Being good Irish Catholics, they dragged me to church every Sunday, a ritual that had little influence other than to make me forever skeptical of all organized religions. It’s something I regret to this day, as I am keenly aware of the solace religion brings to some. I have often felt cheated by my own lack of faith.

My grandfather’s outlaw nature had little influence on my father, who, like so many young South Boston Irishmen of his time, chose to become a police officer. I’ve encountered more than my share of cops in my life, and I can tell you from experience that not all of them are good men. Some are corrupt, using their power to their own benefit; some are even downright cruel. My father was neither of these things. Rather, he had an understanding of human nature and its frailties that made him deeply compassionate at heart.

If anything, he was fair to a fault, never persistent enough at getting arrests to be promoted to lieutenant. I know for a fact that there were times when he was pressured to twist the truth. I also know he never budged. Years later, when I was doing time at the state prison in Walpole, I met one of my dad’s perps on the inside, and the man still remembered the integrity with which my father had conducted himself.

Ironically, much of the trouble I got into later in life may be due to my father’s honest nature. I was not used to crooked cops, and in fact never imagined that the police I encountered might be any different from my father.

Like my grandfather, my father was a serious collector of guns, though he preferred modern firearms to antiques, specifically German guns manufactured after World War I. It was an interest I quickly came to share with him. Early modern guns are masterpieces in their own right. So precise are the workings of a well-made Walther or Browning that the weapon fairly floats in your hand. From an early age I accompanied my father to antique stores and flea markets.

At that time antiques collecting was not nearly as popular as it is today. There were some very good, and reasonably inexpensive, finds to be had. I spent every penny I earned doing chores and odd jobs at auctions and antique shops. By the time I was a teenager I had accumulated a substantial collection of my own.

Though I occasionally bought other pieces-I was especially fascinated by derringers-the majority of my collection consisted of antique Japanese swords, which I had come to regard not only as the finest weapons ever made but as true works of art in their own right, due to the incredibly complex process used in their creation.

Production began in the forge, where a rough blade was formed from a combination of two metals: a soft yet durable iron core, and a hard outer skin of steel that had been forged and reforged many times through a complex process of repeated heating, folding, and hammering. This ingenious method created a blade that was both incredibly strong-a result of the pliancy of the soft iron core-yet hard enough to take a razor-sharp edge thanks to the rigid steel shell.

Once the blade was finished it was subjected to a unique tempering process in which heat-resistant clay was applied to the entire blade. The clay was then scraped away only at the edge of the blade, allowing for intense tempering of the exposed area and resulting in a super-rigid edge capable of unparalleled cutting power.

Finally, the blade was painstakingly polished by hand and carefully evaluated.

As is often the case with intensely specialized crafts requiring the work of many highly skilled artisans, each step in the manufacturing process eventually evolved into its own unique art form. Perhaps the most notable of these was the hamon, or blade pattern. A ghostly visual effect created on the blade during the tempering process, the hamon marks the area of superhardened metal where the edge was exposed during tempering. Eventually, as swordsmiths realized that they could control this imprint, they created unique signature patterns to mark their work.

My fascination with these hamon, which are now considered art forms in themselves, not only drew me to start collecting Japanese swords as a boy but continues to inspire the collector in me today.

In addition to their common love for firearms, my father and grandfather also shared a deep interest in martial arts. My father studied jujitsu for some time. By the age of twelve I had followed in his footsteps and was taking judo classes at the Boston YMCA. I was also studying karate with a friend of my maternal grandfather, a Japanese gentleman named Watanabe. By the time I reached my early teens I had attained a modest level of proficiency and was sparring regularly with adults, a practice that no doubt contributed to my cockiness with law enforcement and other authority figures in the years to come. More interestingly, Mr. Watanabe introduced me to the fundamentals of Eastern philosophy, including the Shinto religion and the samurai code of Bushido.

Developed between the ninth and twelfth centuries from the original samurai moral code of conduct, Bushido, which literally means “way of the warrior,” united the violence of samurai life with the wisdom and serenity of Confucianism and Buddhism, stressing loyalty, mastery of martial arts, and, most important, honor to the death.

Bushido is perhaps most well known for its incorporation of seppuku, a ritual in which samurais who somehow failed to uphold their honor could regain it by performing ritual suicide. But what drew me to Bushido were the seven basic virtues it espoused: rectitude, courage, benevolence, respect, honesty, honor, and loyalty. It’s a code I have continued to study and adhere to all my life.

My burgeoning love of antique weapons and martial arts was matched only by my passion for rock and roll. I began singing and playing the guitar when I was twelve years old, and soon discovered that I had a real talent for making music. My first band, if you can call it that, consisted of me with a guitar and my friend Ronnie Castriano on drums. Ronnie came from Quincy, and his uncle was co-owner of the Reef, a popular nightclub in Revere. Though I would eventually go on to perform at the Reef and other clubs of its caliber, the venues Ronnie and I played in those early years were far less sophisticated.

One of the first clubs we played regularly, starting in the summer of 1957, was a place down in Nantasket called Al’s Spaghetti House. Al’s was little more than a boardwalk fry shack with a small stage. On summer weekends a local country band headlined there, drawing the weekend beach crowd. Ronnie had talked the owner into letting us play during the week, and we were soon drawing our own steady crowd.

Al himself was a dyed-in-the-wool Southie, a cantankerous Irishman who’d grown up just across the harbor from Boston and still had strong ties to the area, including his die-hard loyalty to the South Boston Chippewas. An amateur football team made up of off-duty Boston cops, firemen, and union tough guys, the Chippewas often came down to Al’s after games or practices. As you might imagine, there was a fair amount of alcohol consumed at these gatherings. But for the most part they behaved themselves, at least to the extent that drunk Irishmen can.

One night, however, the team was especially belligerent. When Ronnie and I finished our last set, at 2:00 A.M., the footballers weren’t yet ready to see the evening end. When we sat down at the bar to have our postshow Cokes (neither of us was old enough to drink at the time), things got nasty.

“You’re real good,” one of the Chippewas sneered, addressing Ronnie. “What are you, a faggot?”

Ronnie shook his head. “No.”

“You’ve got long hair,” the footballer commented menacingly. “You some kind of queer?”

“Yeah,” one of his teammates chimed in. “You Little Richard?”

I leaned forward to get a better look at the pair. Each man had at least a foot and a hundred pounds on me. Any sane person would have known better than to take them on, but years of martial arts training and sparring with adults had left me suicidally fearless. Besides, I figured, my sobriety had to count for something.

“Yeah,” I said, stepping around Ronnie. “And I’m Big Richard.”

The first Chippewa took a wild swing at me and missed. I ducked, returning the punch, hitting him hard, sending him sprawling backward into the arms of his buddy.

In an instant the bar erupted. Most of the patrons hadn’t witnessed the initial altercation and assumed that the beef was between the Southies and the locals. Suddenly everyone was in on the fight. One of the footballers jumped me, but I beat him off and made a break for the front door.

He followed me outside with two of his friends in tow. I managed to hold my own for a few minutes, keeping the threesome at bay, even downing one of the guys when he got close enough to hit. But soon the entire team was out on the sidewalk. Some of the Chippewas had brought their beer bottles with them and were throwing them at me. One hit me in the head and I felt myself go down. As I fell, I glanced up to see Ronnie sprinting past me, heading away from the melee. I hit the sidewalk hard, half-stunned, and felt a sharp blow to my ribs, followed by another and another, as the men gathered around to take turns kicking me.

I might have died that night, or at least been severely injured, if the cops hadn’t finally pulled up. It was probably the only time in my life I was happy to see the police.

The gigs at Al’s Spaghetti House provided us with steady employment during the summer months, but once the season wound down and the beach crowd went home, Ronnie and I were forced to look elsewhere for work. At the time, Milton high schoolers congregated on Friday and Saturday nights at a place called Canteen, which was part of a clubhouse for town residents located inside Milton’s Cunningham Park. It was the perfect venue for us, and we were soon playing there on a regular basis.

As our popularity grew, so did our band. By my sophomore year in high school we had gained a number of new members, mostly local kids like us who had taught themselves the rudiments of rock and roll and showed up at my house for jam sessions. Jimmy Gallagher and Chicky Goldberg were our bassists. Billy Fall and Johnny Egan played guitar. Pete Keenan and Dennis Hearn filled in on drums for Ronnie, who was less available during the school year. Trading on our onstage antics and the reputation I had earned in Nantasket, we dubbed ourselves Myles and the Wild Ones.

Our shows at Canteen were raucous affairs. At a time when the airwaves were dominated by buttoned-up instrumental groups like the Ventures, our style, which was heavy on vocals, was seen as wildly rebellious. With our sky-high pompadours and dapper smoking jackets, we put on quite a show, pounding out covers of Chuck Barry and Roy Orbison hits.

Eventually we caught the attention of Arnie “Woo Woo” Ginsburg, a well-known Boston radio personality and host of the beloved Night Train Show on WMEX. Myles and the Wild Ones eventually became part of Arnie’s record hop retinue and began to build a following. We quickly made a name for ourselves and were soon playing at record hops and social clubs in and around the Boston area.

Every good band needs a manager. In 1959 Arnie hooked me up with Ralph Ranzo. A slick talker with a closet full of sharkskin suits, Ralph owned a local record shop in Mattapan and handled a number of bands in the Boston area. With Arnie’s influence and Ralph’s help, Myles and the Wild Ones graduated from Canteen to more impressive venues like the Surf Club and the Reef, both in Revere. Ralph also introduced me to a number of musicians from the Berklee College of Music in Boston, most notably a talented saxaphonist named Emmett Lowe. Emmett joined the Wild Ones onstage and also accompanied me into the studio when I cut my first single, an original song I had written titled “Someone, Somewhere.” Emmett was a rare talent and eventually went on to play with James Brown.

The studio gig was a high point for me. Unfortunately, it was also the beginning of the end for Myles and the Wild Ones. By 1961 my original bandmates and I had started to go our separate ways. As we headed into the final years of high school, cars, girls, and even jobs demanded more and more of my bandmates’ time.

Later that year Andy Naggi, the owner of the Revere Beach Plaza, a boardwalk resort with hotel rooms on the second floor and a restaurant and music club, the Lewis Room, on the first floor, offered me a steady gig as a single. I jumped at the chance to earn a regular paycheck, and earn it I did. I played six nights a week from eight o’clock till two in the morning, with fifteen-minute breaks between sets. Still, the pay and working conditions were better than at the local A &P. Eventually I even talked Naggi into hiring my friend Dennis Hearn to back me up on drums.

Dennis and I were a huge hit with the audiences in Revere, but despite the fact that I was earning a steady living as a musician, I was entirely on my own when it came to managing my career. With the dissolution of the Wild Ones, Ralph Ranzo had lost interest in representing me, leaving me to fend for myself. But that was about to change.

One afternoon in 1962 Dennis and I were practicing at my house when there was a knock on the door. I opened it to see a tall, gangly fourteen-year-old kid standing on the front stoop.

“You’re Myles Connor,” he blurted out, as if he was face-to-face with Elvis.

“I know that,” I told him. “Who are you?”

“I’m Al Dotoli,” he announced. “And I want to learn to play the guitar like you.”

“Okay,” I agreed, taking an instant liking to the kid. I ushered him inside and we started our first lesson.

I would later learn that Al had been a fan for some time before he worked up the courage to come knock on my door. He’d heard my band play on a number of occasions, at the Christopher Columbus Club in Boston’s North End and at Canteen. He lived just around the corner from me in Milton, but I’d never met him because he went to the Catholic high school.

As it turned out, Al already knew how to play the guitar. His style just needed some fine-tuning. When I met him, Al was playing with a local British Wave band called the Druids. I taught him how to play my brand of rock and roll, and we quickly became friends. In return he proposed that I use the Druids as my new backup band.

I was skeptical at first. With their Beatles boots, Nehru jackets, and British musical style, the Druids seemed like a poor fit for me. But Al’s plan was ingenious. The Druids, he explained, would open for me as themselves. Then they’d run backstage and change into motorcycle jackets and dungarees, transforming themselves into a rock-and-roll band.

Al’s strategy worked brilliantly. Far from being a problem, the contrast in musical styles was a huge asset, broadening the appeal of both bands. On my nights off from the Lewis Room, we were soon playing shows at teen halls all over the Boston area. We eventually scored a steady gig at a place called Broadcove Teen Haven in Hingham, which was owned by a friend of my father’s, a fellow Milton detective named Jimmy Cox. In addition to backing me up and playing guitar for the Druids, Al also started playing bass for my shows at the Lewis Room. It was a grueling schedule, but I loved every minute of it.

Playing music and being onstage was exhilarating. But what I really enjoyed was the opportunity my music afforded me to defy the expectations of Boston’s rigid caste system. Centuries after its founding, Boston was a city that remained true to its English roots, a place where birth and breeding mattered. Boston in the 1960s was perhaps the most segregated city north of the Mason-Dixon Line. And not just in terms of race. People of different ethnicities and religions just didn’t mix. The borders of class and clan were not to be crossed under any circumstances. A Southie was always a Southie and a black always a black, no matter how smart he was or how diligently he worked. Neither Andover nor Harvard was knocking on any doors in Dorchester. Similarly, the mongrel son of a Milton cop was, and always would be, just that.

But the rules of rock and roll, at least as I wrote them, had no regard for these distinctions. In those early days we couldn’t afford to be picky. We would play anywhere, in any neighborhood, as long as there was a promise of a good crowd and a paycheck. Not surprisingly, our lax attitudes about social mores often got us into trouble.

Aside from being a talented musician, Al Dotoli was a natural entrepreneur. Even at fourteen, he had a head for the management side of the music business. Not content, as Ronnie and I were, to merely show up, play, and have a good time, Al had higher ambitions for the band, and was determined to start putting on shows himself.

The first concert Al put together on his own was at St. Agatha’s, a Catholic parish and elementary school in Milton. Wanting to make sure the event was well attended, Al launched an all-out advertising campaign, plastering the South Shore with posters. His tactics worked. By the time I arrived for the show the auditorium at St. Agatha’s was already overfull. Kids were lined up outside waiting to get in.

In those days, record hops and rock-and-roll concerts were often the scene of confrontations between rival gangs. Kids from Savin Hill in Dorchester or the East Milton townies came to a show like ours for one thing: to pay their dollar, get inside, and start a fight. Anticipating trouble, Al had hired bouncers to work the door and the floor. But despite his precautions, the atmosphere in the hall was tense from the start.

Aside from the Druids, Al had booked another local band, the Miltones, which was started by Jocko Marcellino, who would eventually go on to become the drummer for the band Sha Na Na. The Miltones opened the show for us at St. Agatha’s, and the Druids played second. After their set, Al ducked into the parish hall kitchen, which we were using as a makeshift dressing room, and quickly changed out of his Beatle boots and Nehru jacket and into his signature Wild Ones motorcycle outfit.

“It’s a great crowd,” I said as I watched him change. “We’re gonna rock ’em.”

Al nodded enthusiastically, then dashed back out onstage to introduce me, as he always did.

“Give it up for Myles Connor!” I heard him yell, fighting to be heard over the roar of the crowd.

If anything can compare to the high I get from being in an empty museum, it’s the feeling of stepping onstage before an audience. Any entertainer worth his salt knows exactly what I mean. As I took my place on the stage at St. Agatha’s that day I was euphoric. Evidently, my condition was infectious. When I started into my first song, a cover of Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman,” the crowd went wild, dancing and cheering.

But soon enough a fight broke out. Eventually the police were called.

I was so engrossed in my music that I didn’t notice what was happening until a uniformed figure strode onto the stage and grabbed the microphone from me. It was my father. Evidently he’d been trying to signal me to stop playing for some time and had finally given up and decided to take matters into his own hands.

“This is the third fight we’ve had here tonight,” he boomed, immediately silencing the crowd. “If we have any more disturbances, we’re going to shut this place down.”

What could I do? Grinning, I threw my arm around him. “Oh, Dad!” I said theatrically. The place erupted in cheers.

Eventually another fight did break out, forcing my father to make good on his threat. The fight continued outside and the fire department had to be called in to hose the crowd down. Luckily, Al managed to grab the cash box and sprint out the back door with our profits before that happened. It wasn’t the last time one of our shows ended in chaos, but it was certainly the most memorable.

Every rock-and-roll musician needs a persona. In constructing mine I took a cue from the name of my original band. With the money I earned playing music I bought a jet black 1955 Eldorado convertible. I quickly cultivated a reputation for wildness, drag racing or showing up to record hops and concerts riding a motorcycle Al Dotoli and I shared. One of my signature concert moves was to ride the motorcycle up onto the stage, hop off, and immediately start in on a rendition of “Good Golly Miss Molly” or “Johnny B. Goode.” To further my image I took to publicly demonstrating my karate skills.

I had always loved animals and kept any number of pets at my mother’s house. As the band gained popularity I took to collecting more and more exotic animals. One of my favorites was a Doberman named Gunner that I’d rescued from the experiment facility at MIT. With his sleek black coat and muscular physique, Gunner was a perfect mascot for the band.

Later, when I had moved out of my mother’s house and was living in a room over the Revere Beach Plaza, I bought a baby cougar from an exotic-animal dealer in New York City. At that time the laws about keeping exotic pets were much more lax. Sinbad, as I named the little cougar, lived in my room with me. I trained him to use a litter box and took him on regular walks around Revere. Unfortunately, he eventually outgrew the confines of my small home, and I reluctantly gave him away to a fellow animal enthusiast who had more room for the cat to roam. Years later, Sinbad became quite a celebrity in his own right when he starred opposite Farrah Fawcett in a famous commercial for the Mercury Cougar.

I’d be lying if I didn’t say that everything you’ve heard about rock and roll and women is true. It’s a universal rule that women love musicians. Before my eighteenth birthday I had more girlfriends than I could handle. Soon I also had a baby on the way. Not long after, I found myself standing at the altar of St. Mary’s church in Milton uttering the fateful words “I do.” A few months later my son, Myles, was born.

I can tell you from experience that being eighteen, married, a father, and a rock and roller is not necessarily the best combination. Victoria was a good woman, and I had genuine feelings for her. But our marriage was doomed from the start. I was, to put it mildly, hardly a priest. Though I have yet to know a priest who could have withstood a nightly barrage of willing young women with his celibacy intact. After just a few short years together, and with a second baby already on the way, Victoria and I separated.

The wonderful world of women wasn’t the only thing playing rock and roll introduced me to. It wasn’t long before I found myself traveling in the same circles as some of Boston’s biggest crime bosses. Today the Revere Beach oceanfront is abloom with million-dollar condominiums and espresso bars, but in the early sixties it was the Coney Island of New England, complete with an amusement park and a lively boardwalk scene. Weekend nights, kids from all over Massachusetts and beyond converged on the clubs along Revere Beach Avenue to hear local bands pay tribute to Elvis or the Everly Brothers.

Traditionally an Italian neighborhood, Revere was also where members of many of Boston’s organized crime families came to party. Some even owned clubs along the Avenue. The Lewis Room was a favorite hangout of area wise guys.

It’s hard to imagine a more unlikely set of friendships than those involving the son of an Irish cop and a bunch of Italian mobsters, but we had more in common than you might think.

There are four things the Italians value above all else: family, discipline, loyalty, and culture. In our shared passion for all four we were kindred spirits. The Italians were impressed by my knowledge of fine art and antiques and by my proficiency in martial arts. But more then anything, they recognized in me the kind of unwavering loyalty they demanded from their friends.

Though I am fiercely proud of my Irish heritage and deeply love my Irish family and friends, I felt more at home in the Italian clubs of Revere Beach than I ever had in the Irish bars of South Boston. Irish clubs are traditionally rowdy places. Our South Shore gigs were inevitably punctuated by name-calling and fistfights or, worse, by brawls like the one at Al’s Spaghetti House. But in the Italian clubs the atmosphere was always one of order and mutual respect.

As much as I enjoyed being part of the regular crowd at the Lewis Room, I quickly became intrigued by tales of what happened away from the club, of back-alley gun battles and bank robberies in broad daylight. I have always had a sore spot for authority, and the idea of thumbing my nose at the Man (as anyone of authority was known at the time) held no small amount of allure for me.

My transition from wild-child rock and roller to career lawbreaker didn’t happen all at once. My earliest crimes were on such a small scale that they didn’t seem like crimes at all, like the acquisition of weapons that were not necessarily legal. It wasn’t until my first successful museum robbery in 1965 that I began to think of myself as an actual criminal.

In the winter of that year the Forbes mansion in my hometown of Milton opened its doors to the public as the Captain Robert Bennet Forbes House Museum. A wealthy China trade merchant, the captain had spearheaded the expansion of U.S. trade with China during the 1800s, and he had a nice collection of Asian art to show for his efforts. Prompted by my interest in martial arts and Asian culture in general, curious to see inside the stately home I’d passed countless times as a boy, I decided to pay the museum a visit. It was an eye-opening experience, to say the least.

The Forbes collection included priceless Chinese porcelains along with precious paintings, early American silverware, and furniture of the highest quality and craftsmanship. And all of it was laid out as if the mansion was not a museum but still a private home. It was an unusual setup, the most interesting aspect of which was the obviously lax attitude about security. Unlike the collections in most other museums, the pieces in the Forbes Museum were not in glass cases or behind ropes but set out as if for daily use. The temptation was almost too much for me to bear.

I say “almost” because, despite the easy accessibility of the museum’s collection, to this day I’m still not sure I would have actively set out to rob the place if it had not been for the attitudes of the museum staff. The first time I wandered into the Forbes Museum, their contempt was palpable. Though none of them knew me, they could tell just by looking that I wasn’t one of them.

Milton was no different from Boston in its class snobbery. If anything, being a smaller town, it was actually worse. As the son of a policeman, I was presumed to possess neither the raw intelligence nor the breeding to appreciate something so refined as art or antiques. But unlike the majority of those who composed Milton’s working class, I refused to be intimidated into believing this was actually the case. To the contrary, I knew full well I was better than those who scorned me, and set out to prove it.

Over the course of the next few months I became a regular visitor to the Forbes Museum. I quickly confirmed what I had first suspected: that security at the museum was practically nonexistent. As far as I could tell, there were no alarms. After-hours security consisted of one guard, a young man who, I observed after several evenings of casual surveillance, consistently left the premises between seven and ten every evening, presumably to visit his girlfriend.

Robbing the place, I concluded, would be a piece of cake.

In my world at the time, a robbery like the one I was planning seemed not only unremarkable but to be expected. Compared to the stories I heard nightly from my friends at the Lewis Room, the idea of sneaking into an empty building in the middle of the night and stealing a few old artifacts seemed downright tame. Certainly there was no danger of physical harm. And the theft of a few items from those who obviously had so much hardly seemed objectionable. If anything, I convinced myself, there was a Robin Hood element to the crime. I wasn’t doing it for profit. I wanted the art, and I wanted the notch in my belt.

On the evening of the robbery I parked the van I normally used to haul my band’s gear from gig to gig a few blocks from the museum and made my way to the premises. It was early summer, and the lush canopy of maple and oak trees on the museum property provided convenient cover as I made my way across the lawn to the back of the building. Using a small pry bar I’d brought with me, I jimmied a basement window and slipped inside.

Once upstairs I proceeded to gorge myself on precious antiques. I took what I liked and wanted for myself, with little regard for resale value: several large Chinese vases, oil paintings, and a large silver platter that I eventually had to abandon on the lawn outside when it proved too heavy to carry. It was quite a haul. I made more than one trip out of the building, depositing my booty on the driveway, coming back later to pick it all up with the van.

The only problem was what to do next. Since the breakup of my marriage I’d been living in a small room over the Lewis Room. Realizing I couldn’t possibly store everything there, I decided to leave a large portion with Vicky, who was living in Quincy with Myles III at the time. It was not the best decision I would ever make. Not long after, Vicky and her new boyfriend suffered an attack of conscience and returned their portion of the stolen goods to the front lawn of the Forbes House late one night.

But despite this minor setback, the evening was a resounding success. Elated to have pulled off my plan so easily, I vowed to follow it up with another museum heist.

It didn’t take me long to make good on my promise. Soon after my success at the Forbes I set my sights on the Boston Children’s Museum. The director in those days was Michael Spock, son of the famous pediatrician, and his work at the Children’s Museum is credited with having revolutionized the museum experience. His hands-on philosophy, in which children were encouraged to touch priceless artifacts rather than simply view them from behind glass, seemed like a great idea to me. If they could get their hands on the stuff, surely I could too.

The first and most important lesson I learned from the Children’s Museum is that there is no end to the information people will give you if you only go and ask for it. Presenting myself as a legitimate collector of Asian art (which, technically speaking, I was), I visited the museum and inquired about their collection. Impressed by my knowledge and delighted by my interest, a staff member cheerfully showed me upstairs to the museum’s third-floor storage space, a treasure trove of artifacts that immediately set my heart racing.

Unlike the Forbes Museum, the Children’s Museum had a substantial security system. The first-and second-floor windows were wired to a sophisticated alarm system. The third-floor windows, however, appeared to have no such safeguards. Later, standing outside the museum, I could see the reason for this: the windows were situated in such a way that only Spider-Man could have reached them. Never one to be put off by such trivial details, I decided that this was where I would make my entrance.

At the time, the Children’s Museum was housed in an imposing mansion in an upscale neighborhood of equally imposing mansions in the Boston suburb of Jamaica Plain. It was a quiet part of town. On the night of the theft there wasn’t a soul out to recognize me as I parked my van and made my way down the tree-lined Jamaicaway toward the museum. I was dressed in dark clothes, a trick I’d learned from Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief. In a bag I carried two coils of rope and the same pry bar I’d used at the Forbes Museum.

Many people are under the mistaken impression that short men are at a disadvantage in life. If anything, my stature has been one of my most important assets. A small person who has learned to use his body, as I have, is able to do things larger men find impossible. The strength and agility I’ve developed through years of martial arts training, combined with my naturally compact frame, have always made me an excellent climber.

On one of my earlier visits to the museum I’d scouted what I hoped would be a fairly easy route up the back of the building. Now it was time to put my skills to the test. Slinging my bag over my shoulder, I shimmied two stories up a sturdy iron drainpipe and, with considerable effort, clambered over the rooftop overhang. Once on the roof I took one of the ropes from my bag and tied one end around one of the mansion’s several brick chimneys and the other end around my waist. Like a mountain climber working his way down the face of a cliff, I carefully lowered myself over the edge of the roof to the unalarmed attic window.

Spider-Man had arrived.

After snapping the latch with my pry bar and swinging my body inside, I untied myself and set to work. Unlike the Forbes Museum, where I had been able to literally drive my van right up to the front door, the Children’s Museum presented a special problem. I was going to have to carry anything I took back up to the roof and then down the drainpipe. Over the course of several visits to the museum I’d made a careful selection. Most of the items I planned to take were among those in storage in the attic, but several were on exhibit in the downstairs galleries.

After pausing in the attic to get my bearings, I headed down the narrow staircase to the second floor. Still cocky from my recent success at the Forbes House, I was fairly whistling as I took the last few steps. It wasn’t until I reached the downstairs hallway that I realized just how misguided my optimism was.

The scene before me was like something out of a Hollywood heist film: the dark galleries were crisscrossed with infrared beams. I stopped for a moment on the landing, trying to see a way through or around the web of red light, but there was none. I would have to satisfy myself with what I could find on the third floor.

Turning, I made my way back up to the attic to fulfill my wish list. With that accomplished, I slung my sack over my shoulder and, no doubt looking like a perverse Santa Claus, hauled myself to the rooftop. There, I tied my second rope around the bag and lowered it to the ground. Then, securing myself with the same rope I’d used to climb down to the dormer window, I clambered over the edge of the roof and shimmied down the drainpipe.