Master Thieves

by Kurkjian, Stephen

  If he knew what happened to the paintings, this was the time to come clean. “This is more important than just paintings, Bob. This is about history. This is about humanity. There have been millions of Bobby Gentiles and Ryan McGuigans on this earth and there will be millions after us . . . but there’s only one Rembrandt.”

  Gentile, with his head down, responded: “I know, I know, I know, it’s important, I know.”

  Gentile then picked his head up and looked sadly over at his wife and grown children, and McGuigan picked up on it.

  “You’ll never get to hug your wife again, or your kids or grandkids,” he said. “Give these people what they want. Tell them what you know about the paintings.”

  Gentile put his head back down. Then put his hands, big and rough from a lifetime of working in the paving industry, over his face. The room fell silent for a few seconds as he sobbed.

  “In your right mind, do you think I would hold out if I knew something?” Gentile asked. “I know there’s a five million–dollar reward here. Do you think I would deny my family five million dollars and get these charges off my back if I could? I’ll tell you again, I don’t know anything, and whoever is telling you different is lying.”

  The meeting broke up soon after, but not before Lawton, who had begun the investigation, got in the final word:

  “What your lawyer told you is right: If you’re convicted of these charges, you’re going to die in prison.”

  Gentile went back to prison and waited to head back to court to face the drug charges.

  A few days later, just after the morning rush hour, a squad of FBI agents descended on his house in Manchester, a few miles east of downtown Hartford. More than two dozen agents surveyed his front and back yards, looking for signs of recently dug holes or anything else that might point to hidden treasures. They did likewise inside the house, going through every room, every drawer, and every nook and cranny—the basement included—looking for any clues that would prove Gentile had any association with the stolen paintings.

  The search gave the investigators proof that they were on the right track. Down in the cluttered basement, among a pile of old newspapers, the investigators found a Boston Herald newspaper that reported on the extraordinary theft. A sheet of typewriter paper was tucked into the newspaper. On the sheet was written the names of the thirteen pieces that had been stolen from the Gardner Museum. Alongside the names was scratched the amount that each might draw on the black market.

  The find surprised even McGuigan. Even though he was never convinced Gentile had anything to do with the stolen masterpieces, McGuigan thought to himself, maybe it had been a good idea that he had signed a separate contract with Gentile. It stated that he would represent Gentile as he cooperated with the authorities, and if it led to a recovery, McGuigan’s office would receive 40 percent of the $5 million reward offered by the Gardner.

  McGuigan was returning from court on another case when he got word about the FBI raid on Gentile’s house. He headed straight to his client’s house, slowing only to take a call from a newspaper reporter asking for comment on the search.

  “All I know right now is that they’ve got enough agents in my client’s backyard to fight a war,” McGuigan told the reporter. “They’ve got everything with them. Shovels, rakes, backhoes,” and then jokingly added: “Three dogs, two cats, and a ferret.”

  Such was the excitement surrounding the story that within seconds the newspaper had included in its online account of the raid that a ferret was being used in the search. For the first time in more than ten years a sense of anticipation built that the masterpieces would be recovered, in a Connecticut backyard less than one hundred yards from a busy highway, no less.

  When McGuigan arrived at the Gentile home he quickly sought out Brian Kelly, the assistant US attorney from Boston who was overseeing the Gardner investigation. Inside the house, McGuigan saw Gentile’s wife, sitting quietly on the living room sofa as agents walked briskly throughout the house.

  One agent handed McGuigan the warrant that had been signed that morning by a federal judicial officer to authorize the search of the house and backyard. Realizing that a backyard shed had not been included specifically in the search, the agents had gotten a second warrant that authorized that search.

  McGuigan, who had been a prosecutor before joining his father’s law firm in a high-rise in downtown Hartford, immediately made his way to a swarm of reporters and cameramen already huddled there on Frances Street, behind the yellow police tape, eager to report that a major break in the Gardner heist was imminent.

  Like any good lawyer with a high-profile client, McGuigan looked for the scrum of microphones to try to get his position stated. Appearing calm but stern, McGuigan spoke to the cameras: “This case comes down to the fact that this guy sold his own painkillers to some kid who was working for the FBI, so they could search his house,” he said. “My client knows nothing about the whereabouts of any paintings.”

  Gentile’s son shared McGuigan’s confidence that his father knew nothing about the paintings’ whereabouts. He assured the agents that while his father was a pack rat, he did not have the connections or the wherewithal to hide such priceless art. The only place he could imagine his father hiding anything valuable was in his shed in the backyard.

  The FBI was convinced that one or more masterpieces were hidden in a ditch dug under a false floor in this shed in scenic Manchester, Connecticut—in the backyard of Robert Gentile. But a thorough search in May 2012 turned up nothing.

  Whereabouts in the shed, one agent asked him casually. And Robert Jr., who shared his father’s softer side, gave him a straight answer—his father had placed a false floor in the front of the shed, and beneath it, he had dug a deep pit, and inside the pit there would be a large plastic, Tupperware-type container.

  Whatever’s important will be in a plastic container inside that pit, the younger Gentile told the agents.

  His instructions set the agents off into a mad scramble, in which they tore up the false floor inside the shed, and found the deep pit under it and the big plastic container inside—a big empty plastic container.

  Shown the container, young Gentile had one more piece of compelling information: A few years before, there had been a severe rainstorm in the area; water had flooded their backyard and gotten into the shed and even into the ditch beneath the shed’s false floor. Whatever had been in the ditch had been destroyed, Gentile’s son told the agents, adding that he had never seen his father as upset in his life as he was about the loss. When I asked Gentile about it, he said he didn’t recall the incident but thought it could have involved a couple of small motors getting wet.

  A few days later, federal agents and Anthony Amore, the Gardner Museum’s security director, brought Gentile back to the Hartford federal building where he had taken the lie-detector test a month before.

  One of the FBI agents got right up in Gentile’s face. “We know what happened,” he said. “Your son told us about the shed and how the pit got flooded.”

  “Tell us where those canvases are,” Amore pleaded, assuming the role of “good cop” in the situation. “Even if the paintings are damaged or destroyed, I’ll see to it that you get a share of the reward money. Just show us the canvases.”

  Gentile had been thrust into the middle of what federal investigators believed was their biggest break in their long, arduous pursuit of the masterpieces stolen in the early hours of March 18, 1990. Perhaps too ashamed to acknowledge that the paintings had been ruined while in his possession, or more likely worried about the consequences that might stem from such an admission, Gentile held firm.

  “I don’t know anything,” he said.

  _______________________

  “That day ruined my life forever,” Gentile tells me, sitting in the living room of the modest ranch-style home in suburban Hartford that he’s lived in for years with his
wife and two children. He has been home from federal prison for a week, and our conversation is the first time he has ever spoken publicly.

  I’d written to Gentile while he was serving a thirty-month sentence in federal prison in Otisville, New York, and had asked him if I could come visit him in prison to talk about his case and the authorities’ interest in his ties to the Gardner heist. I had caught his eye by giving him a thumbs-up during a break in one of his court hearings. “Who’s the older reporter, with the gray hair?” he asked McGuigan.

  He wrote back. “Wait until I get home in January, and call my house.”

  In fact it could have been a lot worse for Gentile. Assistant US attorney John Durham had asked that Gentile be sentenced to a total of forty-six to fifty-seven months in prison, a term recommended by the sentencing guidelines. But US district judge Robert N. Chatigny appeared to heed McGuigan’s insistence in court that investigators had focused on Gentile to squeeze him on the Gardner investigation. As a result Chatigny said that Gentile’s poor health and that of his wife deserved to be considered. He set Gentile’s prison term at a total of thirty months.

  Emerging from the courtroom, McGuigan said, ”Mr. Gentile is pleased with the sentence. He thinks it is fair.”

  Durham refused comment.

  In late January, I drove to Gentile’s Connecticut home and introduced myself. Although he still walked with the help of a cane, he looked more rested and clear-eyed than when I’d seen him in court. He said he needed the cane because he was still in pain from a long-ago back injury. He wore a bracelet on his ankle to ensure he complied with the terms of his probation, that he remain inside his house for three months after his release from prison.

  We talked for a long time. Gentile answered all of my questions, casting doubt on the FBI’s belief that he was the last person to know the whereabouts of the Gardner masterpieces. Then, near the end of the interview, Gentile told me to shut off my tape recorder.

  “Talk to me man-to-man.” I shut off the recorder.

  “I’m a man of my word,” he said, looking without expression at me. “If I tell you something, you can believe me.” He then proceeded to ask me what he might gain from the cooperation he was giving me.

  I told him that if he was looking for money, I didn’t have any to give. But if I wrote his account straight enough, and was able to corroborate that the feds had set him up in the drug case to get him to change his story about what he knew about the Gardner paintings, it might attract documentary filmmakers who would pay him to tell his story.

  I sensed that Gentile was trying to tell me something about himself and the paintings, perhaps even to withdraw his denial that he had nothing to do with them. “If you’ve got another story to tell, then I would be willing to ask my publisher to rewrite our contract so you would get a share of the proceeds,” I told him. “It would be an extraordinary story and I am sure it would be a best seller if it led to the recovery of any of the paintings, but you would have to acknowledge that all these denials have been lies, and what was behind them.”

  Gentile put his head down for thirty seconds. I might be on the verge of something historic here, I thought to myself. He waited and then looked at me with a gaze as strong and steel-eyed as I’d seen so far.

  “That’s just it,” Gentile said, motioning that I could turn my recorder back on. “They set me up, and they ruined my life. My daughter died while I was in jail. Prison officials wouldn’t even let me visit her before she died. And when I got out I found out the $950 a month I’d been receiving in Social Security benefits had been cut off because I’d been convicted of a federal crime.

  “What I told you stands. They set me up and ruined my life.” The moment had passed.

  As if to prove his point, Gentile gave me the key to his shed. Yes, he admitted, he kept valuables in containers in the ditch beneath the false floor. But only pieces of equipment or small motors that he had bought. Nothing illegal or stolen, and certainly not the Gardner paintings. I bundled up and crunched through the snow in his backyard and opened the shed’s doors. A new wooden floor had replaced the one the feds dug up, but the large plastic bins his son Bobby had described to the investigators were still inside. Some were filled with hoses, others with yard equipment. None seemed large enough to have held the tubes that could have contained large paintings.

  _______________________

  Although Robert Gentile was never identified by name, it was clear he was at the center of the bombshell announcement that Richard S. DesLauriers made in March 2013, on the twenty-third anniversary of the Gardner Museum theft.

  “With a high degree of confidence we believe those responsible for the theft were members of a criminal organization with a base in the mid-Atlantic states and New England,” he told the assembled press.

  DesLauriers stressed that while his agents had had no good leads about the artwork in more than a decade, their investigation had made them certain the works had been brought to Connecticut and then Philadelphia. DesLauriers’ remarks made front-page news around the world. For the first time since the 1990 theft the FBI had given details, scant though they were, about what their years of investigation had uncovered. After more than twenty years of chasing false leads, whether provided by outright liars or others chasing the reward of the century, the FBI finally had information they felt strong enough to announce to the world. That they had determined who the robbers were and had tracked the stolen artwork to Connecticut and Philadelphia was remarkable. That they weren’t releasing more details of the identities of those involved, they said firmly, had more to do with the sensitivity of the investigation than its certainty.

  While no one had been named as suspects at DesLauriers’ press conference, newspapers including the Boston Globe and Hartford Courant were soon quoting sources familiar with the investigation, putting names to those said to be involved: David A. Turner, orchestrating the theft; Robert A. Guarente, in charge of hiding the stolen masterpieces; and then Gentile as the fence.

  Ample information allowed enterprising reporters to connect the dots DesLauriers laid out. Turner, with his ties to the Rossetti gang and Louis Royce, knew of the museum’s vulnerability to theft. Having lost his father as a teenager, Turner had appreciated that Guarente had treated him like a son and had great respect for the aging mobster’s deep ties to organized crime. Guarente and Gentile were close, and Gentile readily acknowledged that he’d cooked for a weekend card game that Guarente organized at a house in suburban Boston and that Guarente had used the place as a base for his cocaine trafficking operation in the late 1990s.

  As for the FBI, DesLauriers hoped the announcement would have two immediate reactions that might lead to a breakthrough recovery. First, that the public would take his advice and look in their attics and garages to see if anything had been hidden there. And second, that someone in the underworld, who might have had secret information on the paintings, would make a call that would be picked up on one of the FBI’s many standing wiretaps.

  The announcement created tremendous media attention and brought numerous calls to Boston’s FBI office. But within a month all had been followed up to no avail, and the sense of an inevitable recovery soon faded. By that time the public’s attention, not to mention that of DesLauriers and every other FBI agent assigned to the Boston office, had rightfully shifted to another case: the Boston Marathon bombing. The FBI’s press person began referring to the Gardner announcement as a “publicity event,” and both DesLauriers and the head of the FBI’s criminal division declined to answer questions on how credible the information in their “significant investigative process” had actually been.

  In fact, the lines connecting the dots set out by DesLauriers were blurry and full of gaps. And the most important unexplained link was Philadelphia. Only a circumstantial case could be built that would tie Gentile to Philadelphia, though, I found, it did involve his ties to Guarente.

 
The cocaine that Guarente was indicted for trafficking in 1999 had allegedly come from the Merlino crime family in Philadelphia, and both Guarente and Robert Luisi Jr., his partner in the cocaine ring, were alleged to be made members of the Merlino crime family. Luisi himself was entrenched in Boston’s mob scene.

  In a grisly public scene that ranks among the nastiest in Boston’s history, Luisi’s father, half-brother, and cousin were gunned down by another reputed mob member in 1995 while having lunch at a popular Boston lunch spot. Several years later, Luisi and Guarente were indicted for being part of a twelve-member ring that was selling cocaine throughout Boston.

  “I drove Luisi to Philadelphia,” Gentile admitted to me that day at his house. But it had nothing to do with any cocaine dealings, he said. He said he was unaware that Guarente and Luisi were running a major cocaine operation out of a house in suburban Boston—he only visited them on weekends to cook for them and run a round-the-clock high-roller card game out of the house.

  Gentile said he had driven Luisi to Philadelphia on several occasions as Luisi was looking to expand his loan-sharking operations—but not cocaine—to Philadelphia and he needed permission of Merlino and his top guys. Could the topic of the Gardner paintings come up while in the car with Luisi or meeting with the Merlino gang in Philadelphia? I asked Gentile. “I didn’t speak to Luisi—or anyone else in Philadelphia—about the Gardner paintings during our drives,” Gentile said. “Why would I talk to them about that?”

  But there is little doubt that Luisi was talking to the federal authorities about his conversations with Gentile. When called before a federal grand jury, Luisi testified that Gentile had spoken to him about the possibility of putting a crew together to knock over armored car deliveries to and from the Foxwoods casino in Connecticut. Did he also talk about the Gardner case and Gentile? Luisi isn’t saying. After initially agreeing to continue to cooperate with federal investigators in their probe of the Boston underworld, Luisi pulled back, testifying that he had “found Jesus” and wanted to serve out his time in prison counseling others.