The Curious Case of the Stolen Art Treasure Ans

Priceless: How I Went Hush-hush to Rescue the World'due south Stolen Treasures
By Robert Wittman
Hardcover, 336 pages
Crown
List price: $25

South Embankment called himself Sunny, sabbatum stoically, an unlit Marlboro betwixt his lips. He, besides, searched for suspicious vehicles. In the backseat, I glanced at my borrowed Rolex and watched with amusement as Laurenz'south domed head bobbed and weaved with the traffic. At this rate, we were going to get in early, assuming Laurenz didn't attract a traffic cop or get united states of america killed first. He shifted lanes again, and I gripped the handle above the door. Laurenz was an apprentice.

A bored real-estate magnate in a V-neck T-shirt, faded blueish jeans, and sandals, he longed for adventure and assumed that this was how criminals ought to act on the way to a big deal -- drive erratically to make sure no 1 is tailing them. Just like in the movies.

Behind blackness- mirrored shades, I rolled my eyes. "Relax," I said.

"Irksome down."

Laurenz pursed his lips and pressed a sandal on the accelerator. I tried once again. "Um, information technology'due south kind of hard to exist inconspicuous to the law when you're driving ninety miles an 60 minutes downwards I-95 in a platinum Rolls-Royce Phantom."

Laurenz pushed on. A cocky-fabricated man, he didn't take orders from anyone. Sunny, still pouting considering I wouldn't let him carry a gun, ignored me besides. He ran a stubby hand through his thick mane and quietly stared out the window. I knew he was nervous. He fretted that Laurenz was likewise temperamental -- a whiner and ultimately a coward, a guy who might announced bold and buff, but couldn't be counted on if things turned violent. Sunny didn't speak much English and I didn't speak much French, but whenever we talked about Laurenz, nosotros agreed on i affair: We needed his connections. I tugged my seat chugalug tighter and kept my rima oris shut.

The two Frenchmen in the front seat knew me as Bob Clay. In using my true first proper noun, I was following a cardinal dominion of working undercover: Keep the lies to a minimum. The more than lies you tell, the more than you take to call up.

Sunny and Laurenz believed I was some sort of shady American art dealer, a guy who worked both sides of the legal and illicit art markets, an international broker comfy with multimillion-dollar deals. They didn't know my true identity: Special Agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and senior investigator of the FBI's Fine art Law-breaking Team. They didn't know that the European criminal who'd vouched for me in Paris was in fact a police informant. Most of import, Sunny and Laurenz viewed today's sale of half-dozen paintings as a mere prelude to the Big One.

Together, with their French underworld connections and my coin, we were negotiating to buy a long-lost Vermeer, a couple of Rembrandts, and five sketches past Degas. This collection of art was worth $500 million, and far more significant, it was infamous. These were the very masterpieces stolen seventeen years ago during the greatest unsolved fine art crime in history, the 1990 theft from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.

The Gardner heist had long haunted the art world and the many investigators who failed to run the thieves to footing and recover the stolen paintings. The Boston constabulary and local FBI function had chased hundreds of expressionless- end leads, checking every lousy tip, wild rumor, and spurious sighting. They'd debunked theories floated by con men and gadflies angling for the $5 million reward. Equally years passed, new suspects surfaced and old ones died, some nether mysterious circumstances. This spawned endless conspiracy theories:

Information technology was the mob; information technology was the IRA; it was a made- to- order heist past a strange tycoon. The thieves didn't know what they were doing; they knew exactly what they were doing. The burglars were long dead; they were alive, living in Polynesia. It was an inside chore; the police force were involved. The paintings were buried in Ireland; they were hidden in a Maine farm house; they hung on the walls of a Saudi prince's palace; they were burned shortly subsequently the crime. Journalists and authors investigated and wrote speculative and scandalous takeouts. Filmmakers produced documentaries. Each year, the fable of the Gardner heist grew. It became the holy grail of art crime.

Now I believed I was weeks abroad from solving it. I'd spent nine painstaking months hole-and-corner luring Sunny and Laurenz, ingratiating myself with them to win their trust, and today'southward entire ruse on a leased yacht was a almost-final step in that process, designed to prove to them beyond a doubt that I was a serious histrion. The six paintings in the trunk were rank forgeries, copies I'd picked out at a government ware house, yet good plenty to fool Laurenz and Sunny. The FBI script chosen for the three of us to get for a curt prowl aboard the rented boat, The Pelican. In that location, we would encounter a Colombian drug dealer and his entourage, and sell him the paintings for $i.2 million -- to exist paid with a mix of banking company wire transfers, gilded coins, and diamonds. Of course, the drug dealer and everyone else on the yacht -- his henchmen, the hot women, the captain and stewards -- were fellow FBI underground agents.

As we rolled toward our exit, the script reeled through my head and I visualized concluding- minute preparations aboard The Pelican: the Colombian dealer opening a shipboard safe, withdrawing a handful of Krugerrands and a sack of diamonds; the four brunette babes, hard bodies in their tardily twenties, stashing their Glocks and slipping into bikinis; the stewards in white linen uniforms laying out tortilla fries, salsa, rare roast beefiness, shoving two magnums of champagne into ice buckets; a sullen Irishman alone on a curved foam sofa, hunching over text letters on a silver BlackBerry; the captain flipping on hidden surveillance cameras and hitting "record."

The Rolls sped eastward onto the MacArthur Causeway, the royal link between downtown and Miami Beach. We were five minutes out. I thought about the phone phone call I'd made to my wife earlier that morning. I always called Donna in the last moments earlier an cloak-and-dagger deal. I'd say I love you lot, and she'd say the aforementioned. I'd ask well-nigh her solar day and she'd talk near the kids. We always kept information technology short, a minute or 2. I never said where I was or what I was about to exercise, and she knew ameliorate than to ask. The telephone call non but calmed me, it reminded me not to play hero.

We pulled off the causeway and Laurenz eased into the marina parking lot. He stopped the Rolls in front of the bluish-and-white canopied dock house. He pushed a five- dollar beak into the valet'southward hand, took the ticket, and turned toward the yacht. Of the 3 of us, Laurenz was the youngest and in the all-time shape, but he marched straight to the great white boat, leaving Sunny and me to unload the paintings. Sunny didn't care. He was a connected guy in French republic, close to 1 of 5 Marseilles mob families known equally La Brise de Mer, an organization whose signature hit is carried out by motorcycle assassins. But Sunny was no leader; he was a soldier, and one with mixed success. He didn't like to talk about his background, but I knew his history of theft and violence in southern France stretched back to the late 1960s. He'd spent the 1990s in harsh French prisons, then had been busted twice for aggravated attack before slipping off to Southward Florida.

Laurenz'south story was a quintessential Florida immigrant tale: A former accountant and money changer for wiseguys in Paris, he had fled France a wanted man. Laurenz arrived in Miami with $350,000 in the mid-1990s, at the dawn of the last existent manor blast. He smartly parlayed a combination of no-interest loans and a keen centre for distressed properties -- plus a few well- timed bribes to the right lenders -- into the American dream. Most of what Laurenz told me checked out, and on newspaper, he was probably worth $100 million.

He lived in a gated $two million house with a pool and Jet Skis docked on a private culvert that fed into Miami Bay. He wore monogrammed shirts and rarely went a week without a manicure. Laurenz drove the Rolls everywhere, unless he needed to ferry his dogs. For that, he used the Porsche.

Sunny and Laurenz had not known each other in France. They'd met in Miami. But they knew some of the aforementioned people dorsum dwelling house, wiseguys with admission to the people holding the stolen Vermeer and Rembrandts in Eu rope. The French police wiretaps confirmed that Sunny and Laurenz spoke regularly with known European art thieves, and on the calls, they talked about selling a Vermeer. There was only one missing Vermeer in the earth, the i from the Gardner.

Every bit I approached the yacht, I took in the scene -- the hearty welcome, the bikini babes, the thundering calypso music, and it struck me every bit slightly off primal. I wondered if nosotros weren't trying besides difficult. Sunny and Laurenz weren't stupid. They were good crooks.

Reprinted from Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World'south Stolen Treasures by Robert Yard. Wittman with John Shiffman. Copyright 2010 past Robert Chiliad. Wittman. Published by The Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House Inc.

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Source: https://www.npr.org/2011/06/24/137393980/robert-wittmans-priceless-pursuit-of-stolen-art

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