Master Thieves

by Kurkjian, Stephen

  “What the hell, have you joined the other side?” Roquefort shouted at Donati playfully, and grabbed the taser stun gun he usually kept beneath The Shack’s front counter. He pressed the taser playfully into Donati’s side and pulled the trigger—it must have been the first time Roquefort had used the taser, as the blast of the gun did quite a number on Donati, burning right through his coat, shirt, and into his skin.

  Donati never explained what he was doing with the uniforms, but at least one person there that day remembered the odd encounter with the taser gun. And this source said there was one other person with Donati at the Shack that day: Bobby Guarente.

  Indeed, according to members of both men’s families, Guarente and Donati had long been close. Donati’s close relationship with Guarente provides the most tantalizing clue to his possible connection to the Gardner theft. In the FBI’s view, Guarente played a central role in the heist. He received the paintings, they believe, from small-time hoods such as Carmello Merlino and David Turner at Merlino’s Dorchester auto body shop. Then, they believe, Guarente held onto the paintings at his home in Maine until the early 2000s, when, after learning he had cancer, he turned the paintings over to Robert Gentile, the low-level hood based in Manchester, Connecticut. In the late 1990s, when Guarente ran a cocaine distribution ring out of a home in suburban Boston, Gentile worked for him as a cook, poker dealer, and part-time security man.

  Elene Guarente, Guarente’s widow, remembers Donati fondly. “My Bobby was close to Bobby Donati. They knew each other as teenagers. Bobby even brought his son on a fishing trip up to our place in Maine.”

  When Donati disappeared in September 1991, Guarente was one of the first individuals that members of Donati’s family called to see where he might be.

  According to sources who knew him, Donati wasn’t prepared for the level of police attention devoted to the Gardner theft. It’s easy to envision the scenario: afraid for his safety, he buries the paintings for a time, until the furor died down. Then, sometime in 1990 or 1991, he passes one or several of the works to someone he trusts: Bobby Guarente.

  Earle Berghman, the close friend of Guarente’s in Maine, is convinced the friendship between Guarente and Donati included dealings on the Gardner paintings. “Bobby Donati did that job,” he said of the Gardner theft. “Then he gave some of them [paintings] to Guarente when he became concerned about his own safety. Bobby Donati knew he was a marked man. Why else would he give over the thing he valued most—those paintings—to Bobby Guarente? Then, before Guarente died, he passed them on to Gentile in Connecticut.”

  The brutality of Donati’s death is particularly troubling for his family members, because he was under FBI surveillance in the weeks before it. He was attacked as he walked onto the front porch of his modest home on Mountain Avenue in Revere, a working-class Boston suburb. His body was found bludgeoned and stabbed twenty-one times, stuffed in the trunk of his white Cadillac, about a half mile from his home. Donati had become withdrawn and anxious and seldom ventured out of his house before his death. He’d told one associate about a month before he was killed that he’d noticed two suspicious men in black running suits hanging around his house and figured they were plotting to kill him.

  Why the FBI had Donati under surveillance at this time, or whether agents suspected he had been marked for assassination, is not stated in his FBI file. However, the files note that Donati owed a large amount of cash to local bookmakers. Others speculated that with Ferrara, his protector, locked up, Donati had been attacked by members of the rival gang headed by “Cadillac Frank” Salemme. No one has ever been charged in Donati’s murder.

  Lorraine Donati is haunted by her brother’s savage killing and has tried without luck to get answers from investigators about the circumstances of his death, and even whether he might have had anything to do with the Gardner case.

  “One bullet could have accomplished what they were looking to do,” Lorraine Donati says ruefully of her brother’s execution. “No one has to be stabbed and beaten like that unless there was some dark secret behind it. I go to bed every night angry or sad that I don’t know, and I seem to be the only one who feels that way.”

  As for Ferrara, the theft of the Gardner artwork made no difference in his years in prison. He bounced between federal prisons throughout the country during the next decade, but after learning that one of his closest associates had been a government informant against him, he decided to appeal his conviction. In going through the evidence against him, his lawyers learned that a key witness against Ferrara had recanted his testimony to the police, that Ferrara had not ordered the killing of his associate. However, that information had never been turned over to Ferrara’s lawyers.

  In 2005 a federal district court reopened Ferrara’s case after long-buried evidence surfaced showing Ferrara had no involvement in the killing of a young gang associate who had been dealing in drugs. US district judge Mark L. Wolf took two actions once he learned of the new evidence: He recommended that the Justice Department investigate the federal prosecutor who’d kept the information buried for sixteen years, and he found that Ferrara had served long enough on his racketeering charges and should be released immediately.

  After listening to five hours of recorded telephone conversations Ferrara had made while in prison during the previous year, Wolf was convinced that Ferrara was sincere in his promise to go straight. The phone calls “demonstrate that Ferrara remains deeply dedicated to his family, and is both able to obey rules and determined to do so in the future,” Wolf said.

  “Having had the opportunity to observe Ferrara closely over many years, this court finds Ferrara’s statement to be sincere and meaningful,” Wolf said of the former mob leader’s pledge to live a law-abiding and peaceful life if he was released from prison.

  For an ex-mobster to receive such a ringing personal endorsement from a federal judge appears remarkable in retrospect, but in the decade since his release, Ferrara has made good on his pledge to stay out of trouble and avoid association with any of his past criminal cohorts. He lives a quiet life, sharing a condominium with his son on the outskirts of the North End, keeping in close touch with his four daughters and six grandchildren.

  _______________________

  During the week after I got my surprise phone call, I had several conversations with the caller, who had personal knowledge of the talks between Donati and Ferrara. I also sought confirmation from Ferrara himself but, as he’d done to others who had approached him to talk since his release from federal prison in 2005, he declined to be interviewed.

  “Why are you telling me this now?” I asked the caller. It was nearly twenty-five years after the theft, and ten years after Ferrara’s release from prison, after all. There were several reasons, I was told, to come forward with the story. Not the least of these was the $5 million reward the museum was offering for the paintings’ safe return; like everyone else in Boston, Ferrara certainly had an interest in that. And, I was told, he’d pledged to share the reward with Donati’s son and other members of the Donati family. Ferrara would also lobby for the release—or at least a reduction in his long prison sentence—of David Turner, his old cohort in Boston’s underworld, whom he felt had been set up by the authorities to find out what Turner knew about the Gardner theft.

  Also, for someone who values greatly how he is viewed in the city of his upbringing, the caller said, Ferrara believed that facilitating the return of the artwork would go a long way toward improving his reputation.

  Having checked my caller’s information with several who know both men, including Elene Guarente and members of Bobby Donati’s family, I decided to relay what I’d learned to the FBI. Special agent Geoffrey Kelly, the FBI’s lead on the Gardner investigation for more than a decade, and Anthony Amore, still the head of security at the Gardner, agreed to see me. I had met both men numerous times in the past, but on each of those occasions it was me asking the questions and t
aking notes. This time it was different; I was doing the talking and Kelly and Amore took the notes.

  For nearly an hour, I told them about my conversations with the caller, and the detailed information he’d provided about conversations between Ferrara and Donati. Specifically, I told them about the places my caller suggested Donati might have buried any stolen artwork, including the house he’d rented on Mountain Avenue in Revere, his mother’s home in Everett, and the New Hampshire home his former wife was living in at the time of the theft. I also offered one further opportunity: If the pair had any doubt about what I was telling them, my caller was willing to meet with Amore—though not Kelly—to answer any further questions he might have.

  “Everyone knows I’ve never talked to the feds,” the caller had said, when I’d pressed him on why he would not meet with Kelly. “Besides, I don’t want people speculating that I’m in some kind of trouble, because I’m not.”

  I gave Amore the caller’s cell phone number, but he never called him. Nor did he—or Kelly—return my subsequent phone calls when I tried to determine what they’d thought of the information I had relayed to them, and what, if anything, they planned to do with it.

  Less than a month later, though, Kelly gave a clear indication of what he thought about the information I had passed on to him suggesting that Robert Donati had been instrumental in pulling off the theft from the Gardner Museum. In an exclusive interview with the Fox News local Boston outlet about the Gardner heist, Kelly made no mention of Donati as knowing anything about the Gardner heist. Instead, Kelly stressed that there had been “sightings” of the stolen artwork by individuals the FBI believed were worthwhile sources—clearly contradicting the story I’d told them. Kelly declined to identify the individuals in question, or say where the sightings had taken place.

  _______________________

  That the secret of the greatest art heist in world history might rest within the dynamics of the Boston gang war has not been lost on Anne Hawley. Although the war between the Salemme and Ferrara/Russo gangs was a tremendous concern for law enforcement for more than a decade between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s, leading to more than a dozen killings and several major trials, the Gardner theft was never raised seriously as a possible motive or even topic of inquiry in any of those cases.

  “I just can’t understand it,” Hawley thought as the years ticked by after the theft. “Here we have this gang war going on, with Whitey Bulger and all that making front-page news, yet no one ever gets questioned about the Gardner case.”

  Hawley made her own approaches. In the late 1990s, after a federal judge had held hearings into the FBI’s secret dealings with Whitey Bulger and other informants, she reached out to Boston Herald reporter Ralph Ranalli, who had covered them, and asked if any possible links to the Gardner case had surfaced. No, sorry, he said. When William Bulger, president of the Massachusetts Senate, made one of his frequent visits to the museum, she approached him. Would he be willing to ask his brother, Whitey, what he might know or be able to learn about the stolen artwork? Bulger never answered the question and changed the subject quickly.

  Investigators, however, have long been intrigued that Whitey Bulger might have had something to do with the Gardner robbery, or known who was responsible for it. US attorney Michael Sullivan went so far as to ask Stephen Flemmi, Bulger’s closest associate, who testified against him at his 2013 trial, if Bulger had any connection to the theft.

  Flemmi told him that following the theft, Bulger had directed him to find out who was responsible. In effect, Flemmi told Sullivan, Bulger had told him “no one pulls off a heist like that in my territory without paying me tribute.”

  Disgraced FBI agent John Connolly, who had handled Bulger as an informant, said that even though he was retired from the Bureau when the theft took place, he was asked by his old colleagues to see what he could find out from Bulger.

  “It was the same thing,” Connolly said. “He wanted to know so he could get his percentage, but he couldn’t find anything out.”

  The FBI has persistently shown little interest in pursuing Donati as a suspect. Despite Donati’s name being raised as being responsible, neither his sister nor his ex-wife had ever been questioned by authorities about his possible role. Nor did authorities ever search the Revere home Donati was renting at the time of his death for any signs of the paintings.

  Instead, Kelly insisted that the FBI remained focused on three men who were “persons of interest” at the center of their investigation: Carmello Merlino, owner of the Dorchester auto body repair shop who had died in federal prison in 1998 after being convicted of attempted robbery of an armored car headquarters; Robert Guarente, the gangster who died in 2004 soon after his release from federal prison after serving a six-year sentence for cocaine trafficking; and Robert Gentile, the low-level hood who for years was close to Guarente and who has consistently denied he had any role in the Gardner heist or in stashing the paintings.

  Regardless of their ties to the Gardner case, what does link Merlino, Guarente, and Gentile to the case is their affiliation to “Cadillac Frank” Salemme and his gang, who were not only fighting Vincent Ferrara for dominance of Boston’s mob underworld. Both gangs also knew how vulnerable the Gardner Museum was to being robbed.

  Bobby Donati was the guy in Vincent Ferrara’s crew who had always had his eyes on the Gardner, mostly because of his longstanding relationship with Myles Connor, Boston’s legendary art thief. Meanwhile, the Salemme gang knew about the woeful security guarding the Gardner’s riches from members of the Rossetti family, who had of course learned of it through master thief Louis Royce.

  Royce had told two people—Stephen Rossetti, the nephew of gang leader Ralph Rossetti, and Richard Devlin, an enforcer for underboss Salemme—about his days hiding out in the Gardner, of its poor security, and even how to rob the museum.

  But although Stevie Rossetti had helped pull off the art heist from the home in Newton with his uncle and Royce in 1981, he’d told another associate who reminded him of Royce’s tales of the Gardner’s vulnerability while driving by the museum one night, “I’m not interested in art. That’s Louis’ score.” Most tellingly, though, Rossetti continues to serve a forty-plus-year sentence for participation in the armored car heist in 1999, when offering the authorities information on the Gardner investigation would clearly prompt them to reduce his prison term.

  As for Richard Devlin, the second gang member Royce told about the museum’s vulnerability, he was a brutal enforcer. Devlin had gone to jail for dismembering a Dorchester tough in 1972 and, once released, specialized in robbing armored cars. He was so active that in the mid-1980s the authorities put together a joint federal-state task force to crack down on the surge of armored car robberies he had inspired in New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts.

  Devlin knew about the value of stolen artwork through his association with another gangster, Robert Wilson, who had at one point drafted Devlin’s brother, also named Robert, to help him fence a Van Dyck masterpiece and twelve lesser-known paintings stolen in Providence in 1976 to a buyer in Tampa, Florida.

  The buyer, however, turned out to be an undercover FBI agent, and Wilson, Robert Devlin, and a third associate were arrested, though ultimately only Wilson was convicted.

  (Interestingly, the Van Dyck, which was by far the most valuable of the stolen artwork, disappeared as mysteriously as it appeared. There had been no testimony during the trial that reported from whom it had been stolen or how it had come into Wilson’s possession. And four years after Wilson’s conviction, the federal judge who sent him to prison approved a motion to return the Van Dyck painting to Wilson because prosecutors had never established that the painting had been stolen. Daniel Grieco, Wilson’s lawyer, said he doesn’t recall having gotten the painting back from the FBI.)

  Devlin’s other brother, Frank, scoffed at the possibility that Richard Devlin might have been involved in the Gardn
er theft, though. “It seems a little above him after all the heinous stuff he was alleged to have done in his life,” he said. Frank Devlin was recently informed that his mobster brother had left what looked to be a diary in a bank’s safety deposit box before his death. It had taken a decade to be turned over to the state.

  “I might just have to open that diary up to see if there’s any secrets about the Gardner heist or anything else in it,” Frank said with a chuckle, still clearly not believing his brutal brother had any involvement.

  Devlin remained his dangerous self to the end. In fact, he was wearing a bulletproof vest when he sat in a car with Stevie Rossetti and Richard Gillis, another mob associate, watching a social club on Bennington Street in East Boston, one day in March 1994. The club was operated by forces that had once been loyal to Ferrara and Russo. At 9:30 p.m. gunfire erupted at the three Salemme associates. When police arrived, they found Richard Devlin slumped behind the wheel of his 1994 Buick Skylark. He’d been shot in the head and was in critical condition; he died a few days later. Gillis suffered a bullet wound to the face in the encounter, but Rossetti escaped uninjured.

  With Rossetti locked away and Devlin gone, Louis Royce’s original confidants now seem improbable sources of good information on the Gardner theft. At their 2013 press conference, they called to the public for more tips. If they have a reason for choosing not to investigate Bobby Donati’s old apartment for clues, they aren’t saying what it is.

  Afterword