Master Thieves

by Kurkjian, Stephen

  For one, though the FBI focused on identifying who was responsible for the crime, to me, the secret to determining what had happened to the stolen masterpieces required figuring out not only who was responsible but also why they did it. Why would anyone seek to carry out a robbery on the scale of the Gardner heist, only to keep the paintings in secret for more than two decades? Why, after a young thief named Louis Royce realized in 1981 that the Gardner Museum was vulnerable to theft, did it take nine years for someone to actually rob it? After years of investigating this case, these questions continued to nag at me.

  To answer them, I have had to take a deep dive into the inner workings of Boston’s notorious underworld and gained the trust of some of its most flamboyant and pivotal figures. They ushered me into a world previously unknown to most people. In many ways, the trail I followed in the Gardner case was uniquely Boston, a historic but small city where bank robber and bank president can live side by side in the same neighborhood, or, as with the infamous Bulger family, where the notorious gang leader and State Senate president were brothers.

  So no one blinked when I passed on to the FBI the lead that a Massachusetts State Police captain had uncovered that a Gardner Museum gallery guard had cashed one of his monthly retirement checks at an after-hours club owned by another mobster and frequented by several whose names had been mentioned as possible suspects in the case. Whether it was followed up or not depended on the judgment of the sole agent on the case.

  This book also delves deep into the investigation of the Gardner case and how it was beset by carelessly blown leads and missed opportunities, raising the question of whether it was most effective for the FBI to be solely responsible for leading it.

  Although the individual agents assigned to the case have worked diligently to chase down even the most ridiculous lead, the organization has failed to penetrate the netherworld of Boston’s criminal gangs in pursuit of a recovery. And unlike investigations in similar cases in Europe, where teams of investigators work tirelessly and with the full backing of their governments and the art-loving citizens of their countries, the Gardner case has been relegated to as low a priority as the FBI can perhaps afford it.

  Anne Hawley, the director of the Gardner Museum since before the theft, is among the most frustrated by the investigation’s lack of success. In its aftermath, Hawley used every contact and resource available to her, from US senators to the Vatican, to prod the investigation and convince the public of the extent the loss of these masterpieces represented. That she has been virtually alone in these appeals marks the difference in how the Gardner theft has been viewed in America.

  The heist deserves to be treated like a national loss, drawing the same priority and availability of sophisticated resources that responded to the Boston Marathon bombing, and helped spur the city’s recovery from that tragedy.

  Until that happens, the continued absence of those masterpieces from the Gardner’s galleries will deny newcomers and devotees to the art world, whether world traveler or neighborhood resident, the beauty and sophistication that was such a major part of Boston’s contribution to the civilized world.

  Part I

  The Heist

  Chapter One

  Royce

  Just months after being paroled from Massachusetts state prison, where he had recently finished serving a seventeen-year sentence for kidnapping and attempted extortion, Louis Royce, now well into his seventies, walks easily through the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Measured by his rough appearance and rougher past, he seems an unlikely person to be strolling through the galleries of one of Boston’s most cultured sites. Considering Royce has spent most of his adult life in federal and state prisons, you’d think he’d be out of place standing alongside the refined blue bloods and moneyed tourists who customarily make their way through the Gardner. But, walking beside him, I sense a remarkable ease.

  It’s been nearly thirty years since Royce has been inside the museum, but he ambles through the rooms—albeit with a slight limp from that long-ago bullet wound—like someone who knows every inch of every gallery and staircase if not every painting on the Gardner’s walls. And he does.

  The Raphael Room, on the second floor of the four-story building, is ornate but tasteful.

  Its parquet floors, high ceiling, and deep red walls make it feel—like the rest of the museum—like a home rather than an art museum. As we stop at one of the floor-to-ceiling windows that overlook Boston’s Fens neighborhood, Royce brushes the top of an antique desk and a smile creases his well-worn face.

  “This is it,” he says, pointing to the painting encased in a gold frame that leans on the desk. “This is what I wanted to take.”

  The painting, Raphael’s Lamentation Over the Dead Christ, painted in 1504 and part of the Gardner collection since 1900, is a stunning piece. It isn’t large, but the details and the pathos it evokes are palpable. Just to hear Royce speak the thought of stealing such an exquisite piece in such an artistically sacred place is disturbing. But as I look into his eyes, I know he is dead serious.

  _______________________

  Louis F. Royce was only thirteen years old when he began visiting—and staying overnight, hidden away—at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Intended as a benevolent gift by a millionairess to the people of Boston in honor of her late industrialist husband, the museum has represented the best of what the city stands for since it opened its doors in 1903. And no one has taken advantage of that gift quite like Louis Royce.

  As a kid, Royce grew up hardscrabble in the tough, crime-ridden neighborhoods of South Boston. But something about the Gardner spoke to him and on his second visit, among some of the world’s most expensive paintings and antiques, Royce found a comfortable and well-hidden spot in a third-floor gallery and spent the night.

  His first visit had been a few months before, with his eighth-grade classmates from the Patrick Gavin Junior High School in South Boston. The field trip was intended to show the kids from one of Boston’s poorest neighborhoods some of the city’s finer things: beautiful paintings, antiques, and tapestries. But it wasn’t the artwork that Royce remembered most about the museum when he ran away from his South Boston home a short time later. His fond memories of the artwork would come decades later, after he had become one of Boston’s most successful thieves, and he saw the museum and its decrepit security system as the score of a lifetime. No, what the youthful Royce remembered most from that school field trip in 1950 was how warm the Gardner had been. So Royce sought the comfort of the museum after he ran away.

  After a day spent in petty crime, running numbers and bets for established bookies in downtown Boston, and shoplifting out of department and grocery stores, Royce made his way back to the Fenway neighborhood and walked into the museum before its late-afternoon closing. He made his way to the third floor, and the long narrow gallery that runs along the building’s eastern side. There he squeezed himself under the ornate antique table with a heavy crimson tapestry hanging over its edge, giving him the perfect hiding place. Under the table, below the painted terra-cotta of Matteo Civitali’s fifteenth-century Virgin Adoring the Child, Louis Royce found a new home and fell asleep.

  What had driven young Royce to run away, and ultimately into the life of crime that led to the plan to rob the Gardner Museum, was learning a family secret so devastating that he remembered it vividly when he recalled it for me sixty years later.

  “The man I thought was my father wasn’t,” he said.

  Although his parents were poor, with seven kids and two adults jammed into a three-bedroom, cold-water flat a block away from a busy subway station, a bond was shared among the family. The kids checked one another’s homework before going to bed at night, and any extra money that any one of them earned was always split with the others. Louis, being the oldest, followed that rule to the letter. Every week he turned over the few dollars he’d earned as a newspaper delivery boy to
his mother, who let him keep for himself the few tips that he made.

  It was a threadbare existence, but Royce remembers those early boyhood years with fondness. That is, until the day his mother sent him downtown to Boston’s City Hall to get a copy of his birth certificate so he could get his license to shine shoes. It was time he earned some real money after school, not just the pennies he made delivering the papers.

  “People like you, your teachers like you, the priests like you. You’d be good at shining shoes,” his mother, Lulu, told him.

  It was on that trip to City Hall that Louis Royce found out the secret his mother had been keeping from him his whole young life. John E. Royce, the man young Louis had known for as long as he could remember, who had tucked him in at night and even whipped him when he’d gotten caught in a lie or another transgression, was not in fact his father. Indeed, the space on the birth certificate Louis picked up at City Hall that day was blank where it listed “name of father.”

  When Louis returned home that afternoon, he confronted his mother: “Why isn’t Dad’s name on my birth certificate?” At the kitchen table, before the other kids got home from school, Lulu told her son the truth.

  He had been born Louis Morrill, having been given his mother’s maiden name as his last name. Before she married John Royce, Lulu told him, she had been involved with a married Gloucester fisherman and had two children with him: a daughter, who was born with Down syndrome and had lived her life in a state institution, and Louis.

  Although a year after Louis found the birth certificate John Royce would sign the papers to adopt him, it was too late.

  “I felt empty,” he recalled to me, sixty years later. “All of a sudden I was somehow different from the brothers and sisters I’d grown up with. I didn’t belong.”

  After his mother broke the news to him, Royce headed to his bedroom to stuff the few clothes he owned into a paper bag. Then his younger brother Billy walked in.

  “I heard,” Billy said, flopping onto the bottom tier of the two bunk beds squeezed into the bedroom. “Ma told me.”

  Louis said nothing and, not wanting to show he had been crying, didn’t even look at his younger brother.

  “Where are you going to go?” Billy asked. “You know, you don’t have to go nowhere. You can still live here with us like nothing happened. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “I know I didn’t do anything wrong,” Louis shot back, the rage boiling up inside him. “This isn’t my fault; it’s theirs,” he said, nodding to the kitchen, where his mother was getting dinner ready. “But it explains a lot.”

  Before Billy could say anything, Louis reminded him about his last birthday. There had been no cake, no celebration, as there had been for Billy’s as well as their sisters’. And instead of walking into the house with a gift, like a football or a baseball glove, their father had handed him an envelope when he got home that day, late and drunk as usual. Inside, without a card, there was a single dollar bill.

  “So what?” Billy shrugged. “You can take any of our stuff. You know that.”

  Louis clenched his hands into fists and walked over to Billy, fully intending to jump him and show him how furious he was. But Louis and Billy both knew that even if he landed a punch, that would be it. There would be no beating. Although Billy was several years younger than Louis, he was already catching up to him in height and size. The crazed toughness that would later manifest itself in his shooting two Massachusetts prison guards, whom Billy thought had frisked his mother too closely when she came to visit him in prison, was already beginning to show up. Though he wasn’t even a teenager yet, neighborhood kids knew not to mess with Billy Royce. He was stronger and tougher, and, as Louis had learned for sure earlier in the day, Billy had in him something Louis did not: their father’s DNA.

  When he left the Royce house that night, Louis became a “boy of the streets,” skipping school whenever he felt like it, hanging out in Scollay Square, Boston’s seediest area, a mecca of strip joints, all-night movie houses, bars, and diners.

  “The way I felt, that man wasn’t my father,” Royce told me, thinking back. “There was no reason for me to stay in that house.”

  When he recounted the story to me, all those years later, it was clear that just thinking about it again made Louis ashamed and embarrassed. Soon that sense of being an outsider, of never belonging, became a strong part of his psychology. He compensated by being loyal to the cohorts he spent his life in crime with, especially the members of the East Boston gang he joined in the mid-1970s after walking away from a minimum-security facility in Boston’s Mattapan neighborhood. He was always doing favors for them, it seemed: turning over the details of armored cars and banks he’d cased and figured were vulnerable to being robbed or accepting culpability for a crime so another gang member might evade prosecution. Or turning in stolen artwork so the gang leader might stay out of jail.

  The urge to be part of a group, no matter a criminal gang or a cell-block group of prisoners, defined Louis Royce, and regardless of whether the enterprise was legal, it meant that Royce never—absolutely never—informed on anyone.

  But first Louis had to learn the lesson of what loyalty could bring on the streets of Scollay Square. Right away, Royce loved the life he found there. He felt at home in the seedy Boston district populated by burlesque halls and rough bars, that attracted gamblers, thrill seekers, and down-and-outers. He quickly began running numbers for bookies like the infamous Ilario Zannino (aka Larry Baione), who rose to become one of Boston’s biggest organized crime figures.

  And Royce, and his inimitable abilities as a thief, were remembered by them. When Zannino was being prosecuted for bookmaking at a local district court, Royce and an associate broke into the courthouse during a weekend night in 1970, picked the lock on the evidence safe, and stole the cash and other incriminating records seized in Zannino’s arrest. Although Royce was prosecuted after police arrested him and found in his wallet some of the marked bills he had taken from the safe, he recalls with pride that Zannino paid him $10,000 for the job, which resulted in the charges against Zannino being dropped. More important, Royce earned trust and respect within Boston’s crime world by refusing to cooperate with the police who arrested him.

  “I figured this was the family that I had now, so no matter what scrapes we got in, I’d keep my mouth shut,” said Royce.

  His vulnerability, his need to make friends and gain respect, made Royce an oddity in the underworld. It also explained his loyalty to some gang members and not to others. In fact, except for being a master thief, Royce had few personal vices. He didn’t smoke, drink, or do drugs. And while it may have caused some smart-ass comments among his criminal associates, he made no secret of his being gay.

  No doubt, though, there was a threatening side to Royce. He was certainly willing to introduce violence to gain the upper hand. But even better, he liked people to know that his brother Billy was a criminal with a wild, violent streak. And while Louis Royce had committed dozens of robberies, two of his three longest sentences were for violent crimes. In fact, when he was planning the Gardner Museum heist, Royce was an escapee from federal detention for an elaborate kidnapping and extortion plan he’d been nabbed for ten years earlier.

  Louis F. Royce, circa 1981, considered by the FBI to be one of Boston’s most artful thieves, cased the museum for a heist, having known about its poor security since sleeping in its galleries as a runaway youth.

  In the early 1970s, Royce and several accomplices had forced their way into the home of a banker and his family in Lincoln, Rhode Island. While the family was held hostage, Royce drove the husband to his bank and, before it opened for business, stole more than $100,000 in cash from its safe. The crime came undone when Royce was arrested after he checked himself into a Boston hotel using his mother’s maiden name—Morrill—to sign the register. He was unaware that Boston police had just commenced on
e of their biggest manhunts ever in search of a criminal named William Morrill Gilday, who was on the run after killing a police officer during a local bank holdup.

  But easily his biggest heist, and a measure of how daring Royce could be, came in December 1981, when he arranged the robbery of a South Shore bank with a close friend, Richard Devlin, who had been released from prison on a furlough just an hour before the heist.

  Even though he was ten years older than Devlin, Royce was drawn to the younger man when they served time together in the 1960s at a Massachusetts state prison. The two shared an insatiable interest in criminal mayhem, and balanced each other well. Royce liked to plan his heists meticulously; Devlin delighted in carrying them out.

  “I liked him,” Royce told me, remembering those early days fondly. “He was a dynamic guy and if you stayed on his good side, which I made sure I did, he was always talking one score or another.”

  Although he would be released from prison the following month, Devlin went ahead and participated in the Rockland bank robbery while he was on a daylong furlough from a minimum-security facility in Plymouth, Massachusetts. During his first term as governor of Massachusetts, Michael S. Dukakis had broadened the state’s prison furlough program in an effort to ease the re-entry of prisoners into society.

  Despite the program’s good intentions, there was little oversight, which led to numerous examples of prisoners committing petty crimes while on work release. Most famously, Willie Horton, a convicted murderer, never returned from a weekend furlough and two years later was arrested for raping a woman and assaulting her fiancé in Maryland. The case came to light during Dukakis’s 1988 presidential campaign and proved his political undoing.