Soon I had the testament of the FBI’s leading undercover agent in New England during the 1970s and 1980s.
“He was the best thief I’d ever seen,” FBI special agent William Butchka told me, without hesitation. “He was clever, and he’d study a job for however long it took to figure out the best way of pulling it off successfully.”
As for the possibility that the plan to rob the Gardner Museum had originated with Royce, Butchka said, “I had never heard anyone talking about it before him. The next time I heard about the museum after that, it had just been robbed.”
I had been reporting on the Gardner theft for the Boston Globe since 1997, and getting Royce to talk seemed a tremendous advantage. Confidential files attested to his having cased the museum for a major robbery and, since this was the first time he had spoken about it, I felt confident he could provide the link that would lead to a breakthrough.
Unlike the FBI, whose strategy for finding the stolen artwork had evolved into a game of waiting for someone to call to make a deal or the Hail Mary of waiting for an anonymous tip, Royce offered a different path. The key to recovering the artwork lay with the crew who had stolen it, and Royce surely knew who they were.
Still, I wondered if it were possible that this eighth-grade dropout, who had spent most of his adult years behind bars, could hold the secret to this infamous case.
______________________
While with the Rossetti gang in the early 1980s, Royce says, he made several visits to the Gardner Museum. He had not been back to the museum since his boyhood, but now it was more than a warm place to spend the night. During his ensuing years as a criminal, Royce had hatched a plan to rob the Gardner of some of its most precious artifacts.
Royce told me about a fellow gangster who had taken part in the theft of a valuable Rembrandt from a Worcester museum in the 1970s. Royce had been impressed with the favorable buzz the heist had garnered in the criminal underworld.
Although a guard had been shot in the Worcester robbery, Royce was convinced that the security at the Gardner was so lax that he could pull in a huge score, and best of all, without any violence.
Royce wasn’t looking to hit the Gardner to secure the prison release of an associate or strike a plea bargain deal, as had become the custom in the gangland underworld. Instead, he had riches in mind. Royce and his fellow gangsters put the word out, seeking a commission from a wealthy art collector connected to the underworld. Then he made a detailed study of the museum’s security system and decided that, while a number of approaches for breaking into the building could be made, the easiest time to hit the museum was at night. The museum held chamber music concerts on Tuesday evenings that were lightly attended and overseen by only one or two guards. With Rossetti in tow, Royce planned to walk into the concerts and ignite several smoke bombs. In the ensuing chaos, they intended to rush to the galleries where the paintings they planned to steal were hanging and make as fast a getaway as they could manage.
Of course, once inside, Royce planned to find a way of getting his hands on the crucifix scene painted by Raphael in 1504, captured in a rich golden frame, Lamentation Over the Dead Christ, purchased by Mrs. Gardner in 1900 just as she was moving forward with constructing her museum in Boston’s Fens neighborhood.
Royce showed the score to Richard Devlin, who was immediately keen on the plan. Devlin knew from his brother and a former neighborhood accomplice, both of whom had been arrested for trying to fence stolen paintings in Florida in the late ’70s, the value of rare masterpieces. He was more than willing to accompany Royce when he scoped out the Gardner.
As fate would have it, one night while driving past a construction site near the museum, the pair noticed several pieces of heavy equipment apparently being used in a renovation job. Who needed police uniforms and smoke bombs when you had a cherry-picker truck left right there for the taking?
In an instant Royce decided this was the simplest way for him to grab the piece he had coveted for so long. He knew the Raphael crucifix scene was right there by the second-floor window, so the two men simply “borrowed” the man-lift.
“This is perfect,” Royce thought as he drove the piece of equipment the three miles to the museum. At the corner of the Fens and Palace Road, right in front of the Gardner, the pair made it seem that they were members of an emergency utility crew and set up orange cones around a nearby. . . . With Devlin providing lookout, Royce swung the bucket of the cherry-picker into place, close to the museum’s second-floor windows.
“I was within fifteen feet of it, but I could see the damned window was locked,” Royce remembers. “I considered breaking the glass, but I knew it would have set off an alarm. And there was no way we’d be able to get away in time with that piece of equipment. I waved off Richie [Devlin], and that was it.” Thankfully, keeping the windows locked was one security precaution the museum always maintained.
Although they may not have known about the incident with the cherry-picker, the FBI knew of Royce’s interest in robbing the Gardner from their undercover encounter with him and the Rossettis trying to sell the valuable prints they had stolen from the Newton home.
Notes taken by the Gardner Museum’s deputy director during a confidential meeting with FBI agents on September 23, 1981, held to inform the museum that it was in danger of being robbed by master thief Louis Royce and Ralph Rossetti, head of an East Boston gang.
Within days of recovering the artwork stolen from the Newton residence, the FBI had reached out to officials at the Gardner with a message.
“You’re going to be hit.”
“Lyle, we’ve been contacted by the FBI and two agents want to come in to see us,” said a 1981 note from Linda Hewitt, the Gardner Museum’s deputy director, to Lyle Grindle, its security director.
The next week, on September 23, 1981, FBI special agent Edward Clark and a second agent were ushered into the museum’s small first-floor library. Around a small wooden table, they shook hands with the three people who were most responsible for the museum’s safety: Grindle; Roland “Bump” Hadley, the museum’s director; and Hewitt.
Clark, a textbook example of an FBI agent, trim with sharp features, a crisp suit, and an almost military demeanor, didn’t waste any time with pleasantries. Instead he opened the meeting candidly.
“You’ve got a problem, my friends. Some people have found a hole in your security system.”
The Gardner staff, not used to such brusque talk, especially from law enforcement, bristled.
“The FBI’s Boston office has come in contact with men who have been working with a gang from East Boston,” Clark went on, in a formal, affected FBI manner the staff recognized from television and movies. “They’re intent on breaking in and robbing your museum.”
Clark let the words hang there for a moment to make sure they sank in. They did. The museum had never suffered a major theft as far as any of the three Gardner officials in the room knew. The only known loss had taken place more than a decade before when someone stole a miniature Rembrandt self-portrait sketch from its easel in the Dutch Room. The guard’s attention had been diverted when another person smashed a bag full of lightbulbs on the marbled floors. Who stole it or why was never determined, but the etching returned just as mysteriously a few months later when a New York gallery owner was approached by a third party to buy it and saw from printing on its back that it belonged to the Gardner Museum.
The thieves FBI agent Clark was talking about had a more ambitious robbery in mind. “These are serious people, and you’ve got to take them seriously,” he intoned ominously.
In speaking to the museum officials, he outlined several plans the FBI had vetted. The most credible, he said, involved targeting the museum during its Tuesday night concerts, held in the museum’s largest single space, the Tapestry Room, which filled nearly one side of the museum’s second floor.
“They’re planning to
set off a smoke bomb inside the Tapestry Room and, in the ensuing chaos, grab one or more of the paintings that hang on the walls of your Blue Room or Yellow Room on the first floor,” Clark said.
The Yellow and Blue Room galleries were the easiest rooms to steal a painting from, since they were so close to the museum’s main entrance, according to the handwritten notes of the Gardner officials during their meeting with the FBI. Raphael’s Lamentation Over the Dead Christ, Royce’s favorite painting on the desk on the second floor of the museum, was also in their sights.
“These are serious thieves,” Clark told Grindle, Hadley, and Hewitt. “They have the means and know-how to carry out their plan. You’ve got to take appropriate measures.”
“There’s more,” Clark said, the Gardner officials by now on the edges of their seats. “They might dress up as police officers and demand late-night entry into the museum. Or disguise themselves as women who’ve run into some trouble outside of the museum and ask for help and to be let in.” And, perhaps most chilling of all, the pair may have a guard inside the museum who has provided them information—wittingly or unwittingly—about the security system.
“What should we be doing?” Grindle asked the agents. He had just come onto the job as the Gardner’s security director and he knew, both in equipment and manpower, that the museum had a long way to go toward protecting its masterpieces.
“Well, first off, you’d better be putting more people on during those concerts,” Clark snapped back. “If I know them, these guys already know the ins and outs of this place better than the mice do.”
Grindle, Hadley, and Hewitt were shocked by what they’d heard. “Not sure whether it is a willing or unwitting (ac)complice,” read one of their notes from the meeting. Still, they had little understanding about how aggressive Royce and his pals in the Rossetti family could be in trying to pull off this score.
Clark didn’t share with the Gardner team how the FBI had learned of Royce’s intention to break into the museum. But even if they’d been asked, it’s unlikely that Clark would have told them anything. Even though Clark had been associating with Royce and the notorious Ralph Rossetti for months, trying to buy valuable pieces of stolen art from them as the undercover FBI agent who eventually busted them that day outside the Italian restaurant in East Boston, it was FBI protocol to provide sufficient information only for potential victims to protect themselves. So Clark wasn’t authorized to share the true seriousness of the threat to the museum. Had Clark divulged what he knew, it would likely have only increased the museum’s concern about Royce’s ingenuity as a master thief, and his associations with the Rossettis.
Maybe it was the wrong decision. Less than ten years later, the security staff at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum would come to wish they’d convinced museum trustees that radical changes were needed in the security system to protect the collection. The FBI had warned them, but the museum didn’t make its biggest changes until it was too late.
______________________
For seven years after being released from the state prison in 2007, Louis Royce stayed true to his pledge to the Massachusetts parole board to stay clear of involvement in any criminal conduct or consorting with his old pals in organized crime. But in June 2014 he was sent back to prison because of a parole violation—a teenager had complained to police that Royce had made unwanted verbal advances toward him at a Quincy playground. Although Royce disputed the youth’s account and was not arrested, the report was forwarded to his parole officer, who immediately ordered his return to jail pending a hearing.
Royce rejected my urging that he contest the complaint before a parole board hearing. No, he said, and waived his right for a hearing and decided to stay in prison, believing that he had built up enough “good time”—the time that gets shaved off his original sentence for abiding by the terms of his parole while he was on the street—to be released without conditions in a month or two.
“Just leave it alone,” he wrote to me. “You don’t know anything about prison rules.” Although I was convinced he was making the wrong decision, I had gotten to know Royce well enough over the years to know when he wasn’t going to budge.
Royce had become more defensive in the wake of an attack he suffered about six months after he originally had been released on parole in 2007. He had been beaten up brutally inside a Quincy halfway house by another recent parolee. Typically, he first refused to press charges against his assailant or the halfway house, saying that doing so would be against his code never to snitch on another. But he relented after doctors had to perform two surgeries on his brain, and gained an $11,000 settlement from the company that owned the halfway house.
As I got to know Royce and we continued to talk about his criminal past, I became convinced that regardless of who had actually pulled off the heist and who was involved in stashing the artwork, the idea had begun with him.
By allowing me to tell his story, Royce calculates that doing so may assist in a recovery of the paintings, and if that happens he deserves a cut of whatever multimillion-dollar reward is given in exchange for their return. He still talks with friends in law enforcement, who tell him the FBI is convinced that the heist grew from his plan and was carried out by individuals within Boston’s organized crime underworld. Most of all, Royce is convinced that among the few people who are still alive and know anything about who pulled off the robbery is Stevie Rossetti, his old cohort whom he had told in the early 1980s of the museum’s poor security.
“If it wasn’t Stevie who ordered it, he passed the score on to someone who did,” Royce tells me. “The only others who might have known anything are Stevie’s uncle Ralph, but he died in prison in 2008, and Richie Devlin. He was killed in a gangland shooting in 1994.”
Royce shrugs off the idea that the younger Rossetti, who is serving a forty-year prison sentence for participating in an armored car robbery, would give information to federal investigators to get a reduced sentence.
“Stevie’s no rat,” Royce almost spits at me when I ask. “He’s like me. He’s loyal and his word is his bond.”
Still, when I press the issue, Royce writes to Stephen Rossetti asking if they can talk, but Rossetti never responds. That Rossetti wouldn’t trust him upsets Royce but he receives even more disturbing news from another former member of the Rossetti gang. When Royce had been released from prison several months after the Gardner theft and returned to East Boston to try to find out who was responsible, Mark Rossetti, Stephen’s cousin, alerted the FBI that Royce was asking questions about the Gardner heist.
As had happened to him when he was barely a teenager, when he learned that John Royce was not really his father, the revelation that a member of the gang to which he had shown such allegiance and loyalty had informed on him was crushing to Royce.
Royce would get a call from his parole officer, warning him that unless he wanted to be hauled back to prison on a parole violation, he needed to stay out of East Boston and away from all his past criminal contacts, including those with whom he had first discussed robbing the Gardner Museum. By 2007, what had once been a twinkle in Royce’s eye had become the most notorious unsolved art theft in American history.
Chapter Two
They Knew Exactly What They Were Doing
In February 1989, thirteen months before two men dressed as police officers drove up to the Gardner Museum, a block away a single guard was struggling to control the throng of people who were visiting a new exhibit on the second floor of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. No one seemed to notice the two men with a baby stroller standing in front of the million-dollar Yuan vase enclosed in a glass case at the other end of the MFA gallery. And no one said anything as the men used a screwdriver to unhinge the top of the enclosure and remove the vase from its setting. Moving quickly, and without drawing attention, they then tucked the vase snugly into the stroller and walked out of the museum.
William P. McAul
iffe knows firsthand the nightmare of what a security breach at a museum can bring—he owed his job as director of security at the MFA to that one in 1989.
McAuliffe took over as the MFA’s security director soon after that daring heist, and right from the start he promised to get together with Lyle Grindle, the security chief of the Gardner Museum. Together they were charged with protecting some of Boston’s greatest and most irreplaceable riches, and McAuliffe knew he would benefit if they compared notes. And because of the Yuan vase caper, McAuliffe knew all too well the hazards of screwing up.
He had known nothing about museum security before he applied for the job; he had spent his career in the Massachusetts state police. But he was a quick learner, having risen to second in command of the force, and quickly immersed himself in the intricacies of guarding priceless treasures. In short order he came to learn two important lessons: that a museum was most vulnerable at night, and that guards and night watchmen should always secure a supervisor’s approval before making any decision.
Whether supervisor approval was required in the past is anyone’s guess, but McAuliffe underscored it to the several watchmen who worked the overnight shift at the MFA.
The importance of the lesson was driven home in the predawn hours of January 15, 1990. The winding streets around the Museum of Fine Arts were quiet, empty, and, with the Boston police force having just wrapped up its safety detail for the first official Martin Luther King Jr. holiday commemoration, lightly patrolled. Suddenly two men dressed in Boston police uniforms showed up at the rear entrance of the MFA and rang the buzzer.
“Boston police—open up. We’re looking for someone.”
A thirty-four-year-old who had been working the overnight watch shift for several years was alone manning the control room. Security at the MFA that night was heavier than usual since the museum was about to open a new exhibit of Claude Monet’s works, with dozens of his paintings on loan for the exhibit inside.
Master Thieves Page 4
