Master Thieves

by Kurkjian, Stephen

  Devlin, too, exploited the furlough program to continue his life in crime. On Saturday, December 19, 1981, Devlin signed himself out of his minimum-security facility at 6:45 a.m., ostensibly to drive to his job nearby. But instead Devlin drove north to a rest area off Route 3 in Marshfield, half an hour away, where Royce was waiting for him along with another member of the Rossetti gang in a van the two had stolen earlier that morning.

  With Royce driving Devlin’s car and Devlin in the stolen van, the trio drove north another fifteen miles to the South Shore Mall in Hanover, and the Rockland Trust Company.

  “I’d scoped out the bank weeks in advance,” Royce says now with the pride only a master thief could muster. “I knew every in and out of the place. When we got there we could see the folks inside counting out the cash. They were preparing for the arrival of the armored car, which always came right when the bank opened, at 9 a.m.”

  So a half hour before the truck’s arrival, the thieves parked their stolen van in the lot of a nearby school and Royce dropped off Devlin and the third man just outside the bank. The men lugged the steel frame of a truck tire out of Royce’s trunk and hurled it through the bank’s window. Then, brandishing rifles, they jumped through the shattered window and ordered the three petrified tellers to hand over the bags of cash they had been filling.

  While the pair were inside the bank, Royce drove back out to nearby Route 3 and parked beneath an overpass. He opened the hood of his car as if it had broken down. There was nothing wrong with the engine, but it allowed Royce to stay put in an accessible place without attracting suspicion. In fact, Royce had outfitted the car with storage areas to stash the rifles that were being used in the robbery along with the money bags from the heist.

  Within minutes, before police could respond to the bank’s alarms, Devlin and his partner were out of the bank and driving to the top of the overpass, where Devlin jumped out of the stolen van and scampered down with the money and rifles to Royce’s waiting car. While Royce and Devlin got away clean, their associate drove the stolen van to the parking lot of the nearby Norwell High School and abandoned it. Police located it a short time later.

  No one was ever arrested in the Rockland Trust theft, but Hanover police who investigated the case told me that Royce’s story checked out, down to the very last detail. In the ensuing months in Boston, Royce said, he and Devlin settled into the Rossetti gang and cased several major scores, including breaking into the Gardner Museum.

  _______________________

  Nearly a year before, on a January night in 1981, Royce walked into Jacques, a typical gay bar in Boston’s Bay Village. It was wild and a little bit seedy, with lots of mirrors and glitter and red-cushioned, stationary stools set around a horseshoe-shaped bar. Royce supposed it was meant to be swanky, but the redbrick industrial-style floor was the real giveaway. It was a dump.

  In this dive, the seeds of the infamous Gardner Museum heist were sown.

  “I know this girl. She’s my girlfriend. She says her father is one of the richest men in Boston,” a young man at the bar told Royce matter-of-factly.

  “Girlfriend?” What the hell? Royce thought. He’d been at the bar looking for a little company.

  “Bisexual,” the kid said flatly. Royce shrugged. A career gangster then in his forties, Royce couldn’t be picky. The younger men who typically frequented Jacques accepted him, and maybe even found him attractive. With his thick afro and love of hard rock music, he did what he could to fit in and more often than not he was able to find a desirable twenty-something for a quick encounter or even to take home. What he didn’t usually do was mix business with pleasure.

  “He’s got one of the best houses in Newton,” the kid went on.

  Royce was getting more interested, and not just in the young man. Rich? Newton? That’s one of the most desirable suburbs outside of Boston, he thought.

  Royce never checked out what the kid was telling him about how he had gotten access to the house and the family, but he was convincing—the house contained expensive jewelry and “an amazing collection of art.” After a little more small talk, the kid told Royce that if he was looking for an easy score and was willing to share the proceeds of what was stolen, he might be able to gain him access to the house.

  “Tell me about the art,” Royce said.

  “Mostly it’s numbered prints. Chagall. Dalí.”

  “Wait a minute,” Royce interrupted. “Dalí? He’s my favorite.”

  Although he had been breaking into well-to-do homes and condos in Newton and neighboring Brookline for several years, this would be the first time Royce would be stealing art. But he’d always loved art.

  Over the next several weeks, the pair concocted a plan. Royce gave his new boyfriend a pad that allowed him to copy the keys to the front door of the Newton home, as well as to the alarm system. The boyfriend had told Royce the family visited Florida every winter, so all they had to do was be patient.

  In mid-February Royce met the boy again at Jacques and learned the Newton couple had planned their Florida vacation for the last two weeks of February. Now Royce had to put the final pieces of the puzzle in place.

  Days before the theft was to take place, Royce approached Ralph Rossetti and his nephew, Stephen. Hardened criminals, the Rossettis had become like family to Royce. Well, at least Ralph was. Stevie was too much of a hothead, and too young for Royce’s liking.

  About a year earlier, a botched robbery attempt had left Royce recuperating from a gunshot wound for over a month, during which time he reached out to Ralph Rossetti for a place in his gang. Royce had always relied on a loose network of friends in crime, but after being shot during one aborted robbery and turned on by a couple of accomplices with whom he had robbed a bank in Dorchester, he decided that the cover provided by being part of a proper crime family would help protect him. The elder Rossetti, having served time in prison with Royce in the 1960s and knowing of his career as an active and aggressive B&E—breaking and entering—artist, welcomed him.

  On the night of February 21, 1981, Royce and the Rossettis were ready for the Newton heist and drove together in Royce’s late-model Cadillac from East Boston to Newton. As the boyfriend had told him, there was one light on in the living room as if to warn potential robbers that the house was occupied. It was not, and Royce, with his headlights off, pulled into the long driveway and parked.

  Royce used the copied keys to disarm the alarm system and to get in through the front door. Once inside, also by design, he broke a downstairs window so it would look like the thieves had gained entrance that way, and that it was not the inside job it really was. The crew took more than $50,000 in jewelry that night, as well as eleven paintings and prints. Based on Mike’s information, Royce and the Rossettis knew exactly where everything was, so getting the jewelry was easy. The art took more time.

  Once all the artwork had been taken from its wall placements, each piece was placed in a separate bag and brought out and stacked in the trunk of Royce’s car.

  Now the question was simply where to stash their booty.

  “Let’s drive this haul over to A-Z, like we agreed,” Royce told the Rossettis before they left the Newton house. Royce had bought from a friend a rundown antiques shop, A-Z Trading, in Hyde Park, a blue-collar neighborhood of Boston, and the place had served him well. It was filled floor to ceiling with cheap pieces of furniture, mirrors, and secondhand items, but it also allowed him to hide valuables from other break-ins.

  “No way,” Stevie Rossetti said. “This is too much stuff for your penny-ante store. Let’s get it over to Eastie, then we can figure out what we’ve got.” Rossetti was referring to East Boston, the neighborhood that was home to the Rossetti gang, and a hotbed of mob activity in the early 1980s.

  Immediately, Royce knew it had been a mistake for Ralph to bring along his nephew. Royce and the younger Rossetti had been clashing for months, ever since R
oyce had told Ralph of his plan for robbing an armored car. Stevie had loved the plan when Royce explained it to him and Ralph. But the younger Rossetti balked at the gang Royce had pulled together to handle the robbery. “They’re like you, too old,” he’d said bluntly, ending the debate over whose people they were going to use. Royce had looked at Ralph, and knew he could never overrule Stevie.

  The senior Rossetti, hunched and contemplative, never looked up. “We can always use younger men.”

  “Never try to overrule my nephew,” Rossetti later told Royce ominously. “That’s not how we do it here.”

  The Rossetti gang was growing in reputation on Boston’s crime scene. They added members of motorcycle gangs to their numbers and extended their criminal activity beyond armored car and bank robberies to ripping off drug dealers and big-time card games and even hijacking trucks loaded with oriental rugs. When a gang war loomed in Boston in the mid-1980s, the Rossettis quickly threw their support behind “Cadillac Frank” Salemme and battled against a rival gang that was fighting for control of the Boston underworld.

  Royce knew he would never overtake Stevie Rossetti in stature in the gang, so he kept his mouth shut. He drove back to East Boston, wanting to banter about the score they had just pulled off without a hitch. But seeing Stevie was his sullen self, Royce kept quiet as the elder Rossetti gave him directions back to East Boston. There, atop a hill overlooking Suffolk Downs, Boston’s only racetrack, they carried the stolen artwork into the basement of Ralph Rossetti’s house.

  Soon the local press was sniffing around, trumpeting that the theft was one of the largest home break-ins in Newton history and that the thieves appeared to have gained entry to the house by breaking a downstairs window. Two Newton police detectives had been assigned to the case. Royce and the Rossettis laid low, waiting for the news of the theft to disappear from the pages of the Boston newspapers so Royce could see what some of his best black-market fences, whom he’d used in the past to move some of the finer items that passed through the A-Z, might be willing to offer for the artwork.

  That was the plan, at least. Unbeknownst to Royce, Stevie Rossetti had decided to do a little freelancing.

  On his own, less than three weeks after the theft, Stevie Rossetti visited his uncle’s basement and took one of the prints and photographs of several of the other stolen paintings to a connection who had expressed interest in purchasing some of the artwork. Stevie reported back to Ralph Rossetti the next day. “I’ve got a guy who’s interested in buying everything,” he told his uncle excitedly.

  The first Royce heard about it was when Ralph Rossetti called him. “Stevie’s found someone who is interested in doing business,” Ralph said.

  Although he was upset that the younger Rossetti had reached out to a stranger on his own, Royce agreed to a meeting outside an Italian restaurant near busy Maverick Square in East Boston. He knew he didn’t have a choice.

  Royce easily warmed to the stranger as they sat in his Cadillac. He talked knowledgeably about Dalí’s work, and the value of what had been stolen. But what really won Royce over was when the stranger said he’d heard of Royce’s proficiency as a thief from another fence with whom Royce had worked in Providence. The Rossettis, who sat in the backseat, seemed as impressed with the stranger as they were with Royce’s growing reputation.

  “I’ll give you $50,000 for the whole score,” he told Royce. “But I need more than these photos. Before I deliver you any money I need proof of what you’ve got. All of it. Everything.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” Royce countered. “I don’t know you. You say we have friends? You seem to know what we’ve got. How do I know you’re not FBI?”

  Royce paused and threw a handkerchief on the stranger’s lap. “Put this around your eyes and I’ll take you to the stuff.”

  Although they were less than five minutes from Rossetti’s house, where the artwork was still stashed, Royce went from one side street to another, weaving through East Boston, making sure they weren’t being followed. Royce knew the FBI wouldn’t let one of their own out of sight with three known mobsters, so, not seeing any tail or obvious surveillance, he soon relaxed and started talking.

  When they got to Rossetti’s house Royce instructed his passenger to remove his blindfold. By this time he was getting comfortable, and knew that after the blindfolded drive he had the stranger’s full attention. “You know, I’m planning another score that might interest you,” Royce said. “The artwork there makes this look like small potatoes.” Royce handed over a guidebook to the Gardner Museum.

  “Me and the old man have a plan,” Royce boasted, nodding toward the book. “Anything catch your eye?”

  “Are you kidding?” the stranger said with a laugh, flipping through the guidebook. “Let’s see what you’ve got first. Let’s see how this goes.”

  Royce led the group to the backyard, to a door not easily seen from the street. That’s when he noticed the stranger’s shoes.

  ”Did you see those shoes? Look at that shine,” Royce whispered to the elder Rossetti, who blew off Royce’s concerns.

  “Let’s do this,” Ralph said, and the meeting went forward.

  They showed the stranger all eleven pieces from the score at the Newton home.

  “This is nice, quality stuff,” the stranger said. “$50,000 for everything, right? I don’t have time to raise that kind of cash. How about $10,000 for the Dalís?”

  Three prints for $10k? Royce nodded approvingly to the Rossettis.

  A meeting was scheduled, but the stranger kept putting Royce off. Before long Royce gave up on him. “He doesn’t have the dough,” Royce told Ralph Rossetti.

  Then, in late August, six months after their initial meeting, the stranger called Royce.

  “Let’s make a deal,” he said.

  As he continued to wait for an opportunity to cash in his big score, Royce finally heard the magic words from his fence.

  “Where can we meet?” the stranger asked. “I’ve got a buyer for the stuff myself, and I want to do this deal as quickly as possible.”

  “Stevie will meet you late tomorrow afternoon,” Royce said. “East Boston. Outside the entrance to the Sumner Tunnel.”

  The next day, Royce and Ralph Rossetti sat in Royce’s car about a block away from the arranged site for the meeting, a tunnel that carries cars to and from downtown Boston and Logan Airport. But before the younger Rossetti even arrived on the scene with three of the Dalí prints, a swarm of FBI agents descended on Royce’s car and arrested him and the elder Rossetti. They also seized three of the paintings stolen from the Newton home: one lithograph signed by Chagall and two signed by Dalí.

  While Stevie Rossetti was able to elude capture, Royce and Ralph Rossetti were arrested and arraigned on multiple theft charges in Middlesex County Superior Court. They made bail, but Royce returned to court less than a year later to face the charges. He knew he had little recourse but to plead to the break-in at the Newton house. But he had an offer to make to the prosecutors.

  “If you drop the charges against Ralph, I’ll tell you where you can find the rest of the score,” he told prosecutors.

  The deal was struck, though nothing was said about it when Royce appeared in court. Less than a month later police announced a raid of a North Shore motel during which they’d recovered the valuable paintings and prints that had been stolen from the Newton home. Neither Royce’s nor Rossetti’s names were made public as being involved in the paintings’ recovery.

  ______________________

  I first met Louis Royce in a private room at a Massachusetts state prison, in a section where inmates could meet with their friends or lawyers. He was in the final months of the seventeen-year sentence for pleading guilty to masterminding a scheme to kidnap and hold for ransom a well-to-do Boston restaurant owner.

  “This is the third long bid I’ve done since the early ’70s,” he tol
d me, estimating that he had spent about five years during the past four decades on the street, with two of those years as an escapee from federal custody.

  In fact, Royce’s criminal record shows that even as a twelve-year-old he was being arrested by Boston police. But those early run-ins with the law, according to his record for being a “stubborn child,” soon turned more serious as he became adept at larceny and breaking and entering.

  Despite the grimness of his past, Royce was upbeat when we met and I told him that I wanted his help in figuring out the Gardner case. Over the next several months we met more than a dozen times and I came to appreciate how important Royce’s experiences were to solving the case. Royce swore he did not know who was responsible for the theft; he had been in prison when it had taken place. But I knew that if I could get him talking, all these years later, he would surely tell me whom he’d told about how vulnerable the museum was to a major theft, not to mention the details of his elaborate plan, and that in turn might help me to determine who pulled it off.

  Royce was blunt about his motive. He had two reasons for wanting to see the case solved.

  “I figure they still owe me my 15 percent,” he said. Under the norms of the criminal life, the person who learns of a potential score, or hatches the plan for it, and passes it on to others, is due 15 percent of the profits of the theft, depending on the tipster’s clout with the actual thieves. “As I see it, with the way it works in my world, someone owes me a lot of money.”

  “You find out who did it,” Royce said. “I’ll make my case with them.”

  Also, Royce said, regardless of who had ordered it and why, the specific purpose of the theft way back in 1990 had long since passed. “Maybe they [the paintings] were taken to get someone out of jail, but that obviously hasn’t happened. So they’re just laying somewhere now, unseen and unappreciated. They should be back with the museum now.”

  Before I spoke to Royce I knew I had to check to make certain of his bona fides. I needed to be sure he had indeed been a master thief who had studied how to rob the Gardner Museum and that he was a trusted member of one of Boston’s most aggressive underworld gangs and had brought the secret of how to rob the museum into that mob.