Master Thieves

by Kurkjian, Stephen

  Merlino was trying another avenue to avoid going to jail on the 1992 cocaine trafficking charges. Through a lawyer, he reached out to Turner to try to recover the stolen Gardner paintings. The lawyer, who asked not to be identified, said he believed the authorities would be willing to drop the charges against Merlino if he could deliver the stolen artwork.

  Turner promised to try. But days later, he called the lawyer back. “I was close but someone got spooked,” Turner said. “The best I can tell you is that they were in the basement of a church in South Boston.”

  There were nearly a dozen churches within South Boston’s borders. Searches turned up nothing and Merlino was stuck, left to serve a short sentence in state prison on the cocaine trafficking charges.

  Pappas, whose father had been shot to death in a gangland shooting in 1981, suffered a far worse fate than Merlino. In November 1995, less than a month before he was to testify against his old buddy Turner on the home invasion, Pappas walked into the home of his girlfriend’s parents with his arms filled with grocery bags for Thanksgiving dinner.

  Two men burst into the breezeway of the house just as he got there. Their faces were covered with ski masks and they fired eight bullets into Pappas, including two into his mouth. Screaming, his girlfriend called Braintree police, who found Pappas still alive but with blood everywhere.

  “I didn’t see who did it,” Pappas told them, his speech garbled from the blood in his mouth. Gasping for air, he said, “There were two guys.”

  Pappas’s girlfriend was in hysterics, and she said to the cops, “He told me David Turner did this to him.”

  “How do you know it was Turner, Charlie?” Braintree police sergeant Karen MacAleese asked Pappas.

  “I know he did this because I’m testifying against him next week.”

  EMTs were swarming around, and they rushed Pappas into a waiting ambulance. Lieutenant Paul Frasier, who had known Pappas from his many prior scrapes with the law, jumped in.

  “Who did this to you, Charlie?” Frasier asked him.

  Pappas opened his eyes and recognized Frasier.

  “Go fuck yourself,” he hissed, and closed his eyes for the final time. He was dead before they reached the hospital.

  Just a few hours later, Turner, looking sharp in fresh clothes, was approached in front of his home by several Braintree police officers who told him they wanted to talk to him about Pappas’s killing.

  “If you’ve got any questions for me I’m willing to hear you out, but you’ve gotta call Martin Leppo first.” This was probably the first that the Braintree police knew that Leppo, a well-known criminal defense lawyer in the area, represented Turner. Turner could now be added to at least a half dozen individuals such as Robert Guarente, Stephen Rossetti, Myles Connor, Louis Royce, Dicky Joyce, and William Youngworth, whom Leppo represented who were considered suspects or at least having information on the Gardner theft at one time or another. “If we have any questions for you, we’ll find you on our own, don’t worry,” one of the officers responded.

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  The shooting of a prospective witness in a criminal trial sent shock waves through Massachusetts law enforcement. Massachusetts Governor William Weld, who had been a US attorney and head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, decried the lack of state resources to adequately protect such witnesses.

  With the principal witness dead, Martin Leppo pressed to have Turner’s trial go forward. But if Pappas’s death wasn’t enough, at the next court hearing state prosecutors revealed that another key witness, the woman who had been held captive at gunpoint while the Canton home was ransacked, was too afraid to testify. To top it off, a state police captain testified that Turner’s friends had approached her boyfriend at a nearby mall and threatened to kill him if she testified.

  “He was very scared,” she said. “He had no doubt if I testified he would be killed.”

  She never did, and the charges were soon dropped. Turner, who had denied the charges that he was responsible for the home invasion, had again beaten the rap and was set free. The furor soon died down and, as with his father before him, no one was ever prosecuted for Charles Pappas’s murder.

  But the heat brought down on Turner from these repeated close encounters with the law had an effect all the same. After the charges were dropped in 1995, Turner went straight.

  Besides, the mob had figured out that there was a new way in Boston to make huge amounts of money, quickly and legally: through contracts related to the Big Dig.

  Originally predicted to cost the federal government $2.8 billion, the Big Dig was a major construction project intended to place underground the major artery that cuts through the center of Boston, and build a new tunnel to Logan Airport beneath Boston Harbor. Due to unforeseen problems and delays, the project’s budget was ballooning to $14.6 billion. Turner and Stevie Rossetti, his mobster friend from East Boston who had served prison time for bank robbery and conspiracy, decided to get in on the bonanza. Both established trucking companies and during the mid-1990s landed more than $20 million in contracts from the state Department of Transportation.

  But even with all that money on the table, the chance of making millions through a quick and dirty score had too much appeal for both men.

  Carmello Merlino, having served his time for cocaine trafficking, was working on a new criminal opportunity out of his Dorchester radiator shop. A parolee named Anthony Romano Jr. who had come to work for his repair shop said an armored car headquarters in nearby Easton was ripe for hitting. Romano had a friend who was a guard on the inside and was in total control of the headquarters on Sunday mornings. There was as much as $50 million ready for the taking, he assured Merlino.

  But Anthony Romano Jr. didn’t happen to secure his job at Merlino’s shop by accident. He had been placed there by an FBI agent, David Nadolski, after he’d assisted Nadolski in recovering three priceless Bibles and a fourth book stolen from the Adams National Historic Site in Quincy. It wasn’t long before Romano reported back that Merlino was discussing the Gardner Museum paintings, and his interest in recovering them.

  Merlino wasn’t interested in their value; rather, he wanted to gain the release of someone out of jail this time. The $5 million reward that the Gardner was offering for information that led to the recovery of the artwork was just icing on the cake.

  The talk about the Gardner case became so frequent that Merlino didn’t blink when two FBI agents, including Neil Cronin, who was assigned to the Gardner recovery case, showed up repeatedly in 1998 to remind him of the agency’s interest in getting the stolen masterpieces back.

  After one of the meetings with the FBI agents, Merlino told Romano that if the deal went awry for any reason, the younger man would be suspected as the weak link and Merlino would make sure Turner killed Romano as well as his daughter.

  An air of inevitability hung over the garage that Merlino could facilitate the paintings’ return. So strong was this perceived probability that Cronin’s supervisor in the FBI’s Boston office visited Anne Hawley, still the Gardner’s director, in September 1998 with some good news: The FBI now knew who had stolen the paintings, FBI supervisor W. Thomas Cassano told Hawley. While he didn’t provide any names, her notes of their conversation quote Cassano as saying, “One is in jail, one is on the street, and one is dead.”

  Reports quickly spread among the trustees that the thief who had died had suffered a drug overdose soon after the theft. The one in jail was actually also thought to be dead, killed by members of the mid-Atlantic mob of which he was a low-level member. Little was known of the third individual, the one who was still on the streets, except that he had masterminded the theft.

  In the ensuing years, the thief who died of a drug overdose has been rumored to be George Reissfelder, a low-level hood who’d migrated into Merlino’s gang in the 1980s after being released from prison—with the help of legal r
epresentation by John F. Kerry, before he became US senator from Massachusetts and Democratic nominee for president—for a murder and robbery he was later absolved of.

  No clues to the Gardner robbery were found after a search of Reissfelder’s apartment, but his brother and sister later told investigators that they recalled seeing a painting that looked much like the Edouard Manet Chez Tortoni hanging in his bedroom. The painting had been banged out of its frame when stolen from the Gardner, and Reissfelder had hung the painting in his bedroom in a new frame.

  “I may not be able to tell you if a painting hung in a museum or was bought at Wal-Mart, but I could tell that one in George’s room was something beautiful,” says his sister, Donna Reissfelder Mauras, who now lives in Tucson, Arizona. “But I told George that the frame he had the painting in didn’t fit at all. It was a golden frame, too frou-frou, for a painting of a man like that one was.”

  There were several other clues that drew investigators to look at Reissfelder. Chief among them was his face: Long, narrow, and more youthful-looking than his age of forty, Reiss­felder looked like the older of the two thieves in the police sketches. Also, Reissfelder and Turner were friends, having hung out together at Merlino’s Dorchester auto-repair shop. Robert Beauchamp, who met Reissfelder while serving time in Massachusetts state prisons, said Reissfelder and Turner visited him several times in prison in the eighteen months after the Gardner robbery and before Reissfelder died in July 1991.

  “George wouldn’t tell me what it was, but when he came by himself, he did say he had done something with Turner,” Beauchamp said.

  Although the Massachusetts Department of Correction refuses to release records of the visits, investigators confirm Beauchamp’s account that Reissfelder and Turner visited him together.

  While the case implicating Reissfelder in the Gardner robbery is circumstantial at best, the information on him that Beauchamp and Reissfelder’s relatives gave investigators was sufficient to get a few warrants. On that basis they conducted complete searches of three of the houses he or his relatives lived in, but found nothing.

  There’s no doubt, though, that what Reissfelder had in his possession was important to Merlino, whose automotive repair shop Reissfelder visited often in the months before his death. The morning he was found dead in his apartment building, it was Merlino and an associate who summoned the Quincy Fire Department when they were unable to gain entry to the unit on their own. Maybe it was to buy cocaine to feed his growing addiction that drew Reissfelder to Merlino’s garage, or maybe it was to meet with other cronies including Turner, Pappas, and Guarente, whom law enforcement often found there and whose names have been associated with the Gardner theft, but many answers died with Reissfelder when he overdosed that summer day.

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  Merlino’s four-year sentence in state prison for cocaine trafficking out of his garage didn’t stop his strategizing on how to get his hands on the stolen masterpieces.

  An FBI investigative report written July 21, 1998, quoted Romano, its undercover informant, as telling the agents that Merlino had told him he had seven of the Gardner paintings and was working out a deal with criminal defense lawyer Martin Leppo to have them returned to the museum. Leppo was drawing up a plan, according to Merlino, that would ensure immunity from prosecution for possessing stolen property as well as an equitable plan to divide up the $5 million reward the museum was offering.

  At least $1 million would go to Youngworth, which was only fair considering he would have been instrumental in getting the artwork returned. According to Merlino, Youngworth had the paintings after Myles Connor, who was off to serve a ten-year sentence in federal prison, placed them in his safekeeping.

  Although Youngworth had backed out of a deal with the FBI to return the paintings himself, Merlino figured he had a way of convincing Youngworth to give up the artwork to him. He was going to kidnap Youngworth’s young son and hold him hostage until Youngworth, then in prison, decided to deal with him.

  As this plan suggests, Merlino was becoming more and more desperate in trying to find ways to recover the paintings, and at the same time becoming more and more suspicious of the FBI. He refused to have any conversations on the phone or inside the garage, fearing it was bugged, and believing the agents had hired lip readers to decipher his conversations when he was outside.

  The only person Merlino seemed to trust was Richard Chicofsky, a well-known FBI informant and local scam artist who prided himself on dealing with criminal associates and their lawyers, as well as federal investigators and prosecutors. In late 1997, over a two-day period, Romano watched as Merlino had conversations about the missing Gardner paintings with Chicofsky, Turner, Guarente, and Leppo.

  “Those Gardner paintings are coming up more and more,” Romano told David Nadolski, his FBI handler, on New Year’s Eve 1997. “I think this Chicofsky guy is the man in charge. He’s going to get them back for Merlino.”

  Since he was focused on Merlino’s interest in striking the armored car headquarters, Nadolski brought the information to Neil Cronin, the FBI’s lead agent on the Gardner theft at the time. Within days, Cronin and Nadolski arranged to meet privately with Chicofsky at the cafeteria of a Veterans Affairs clinic in Boston.

  Everyone knew Chicofsky as “Fat Richie.” He weighed close to three hundred pounds but, like TV star Jackie Gleason a generation before, he maintained an air of sophistication with a preference for silk suits and men’s cologne.

  “Richie, we hear you’re talking about the stolen Gardner paintings with Carmello Merlino,” Cronin said to him.

  “I might be able to do something for you there,” Chicofsky told the agents. “But I need to know if you’ll come through for me, if I do this for you.”

  He went on to explain that he had become friends with a Chinese woman who might be facing deportation over an expired visa.

  “You help me, and I might be able to help you with those paintings,” Chicofsky said.

  “You mean you might have access to the paintings?” Nadolski asked him directly.

  “Not me,” Chicofsky said. “Merlino is giving me hints that he’s able to get his hands on them.”

  Chicofsky asked the agents to go along with a scheme. He wanted to play along with Merlino and his plans for recovering the paintings but then trick him so that Chicofsky wound up with the paintings. That way he, and not Merlino, would get the $5 million reward.

  Confused, Nadolski went back to Romano and asked him, “Tell me again, what’s the relationship between these two guys? Who’s got the paintings, Merlino or Chicofsky?”

  Romano said it wasn’t clear to him but his gut told him that it was Merlino who held the upper hand and Chicofsky was trying to con his way into Merlino’s good graces. Cronin went back to Merlino and pressed him—did he have the paintings or not? Merlino said he didn’t have them within reach but was working to locate them.

  On being debriefed by Cronin, Nadolski shook his head in disbelief that the two aging con men were now trying to con each other over the missing Gardner paintings. He was glad he was not the case agent in the 1990 robbery, but instead was concentrating on the more straightforward matter of Merlino’s plans for hitting the armored car headquarters.

  But having Romano agree to assist him in doing whatever it took to infiltrate—and bring down—Merlino’s operation gave Nadolski an enviable weapon. If Romano, with his nervous manner and skinny arms marked with heroin tracks, was the picture of an ex-convict, then Nadolski, with a friendly demeanor and a no-nonsense professionalism, was the epitome of a federal agent. He had been in the FBI for more than ten years and was known for his ability to gain the confidence of informants.

  A bond of friendship and trust slowly grew between them and for much of 1998 Romano, playing the role of the loser kid inside the Dorchester auto body shop Merlino used as the center of his criminal operations, reported back to Nadolsk
i what he saw and heard going on there.

  Totally unaware that Romano was working as an informant for the FBI, Merlino trusted him more and more. He pressed him on whether he knew anyone without a criminal record who might be able to land a guard’s job at the Loomis-Fargo armored car headquarters in Easton. Once the friend had landed the job, Merlino said, he could put together a crew to rob the place of the $50 million he believed was held there during weekends.

  The friend Romano found for the job was in fact an undercover agent the FBI had made ready for the role. He was prepared to start working at Loomis-Fargo and then slowly earn Merlino’s trust. Nadolski told Romano that the only way they could go forward to target Merlino’s scheme was if Romano agreed to play a bigger role, and wear a wire to secretly record his conversations with Merlino. According to an unpublished memoir Romano later wrote, Nadolski had been able to win over his trust by being honest with him about the perils of what they were doing and how he would be protected. But the prospect of a new life in the federal witness protection program also appealed to him.

  “How many chances had I been given by my own father and messed up?” he wrote. “Dave thought a fresh start would appeal to me, and he was right. I loved the idea from the start.”

  Nadolski had his goal for the operation: If it worked, it would mean the two of them—the G-man and the ex-con who had been a lifelong heroin addict—would be responsible for the biggest undercover success in the history of the Boston FBI office.

  Merlino began talking about the armored car score almost from the time Romano went to work for his auto body shop in late 1997. He soon drafted his nephew Billy into the plan, but still several more were needed to carry out the score. For the next year, Romano, who never graduated from high school and battled drug addiction for his entire life, tried to keep the FBI informed of what was going at Merlino’s auto body shop, and the two biggest investigations being tracked inside it: the missing Gardner paintings and planning of a $50 million armored car heist.