This Is a Robbery: The World's Greatest Art Heist (2021) s01e03 Episode Script
We've Seen It
[intense, pulsing music plays]
[Ellis] In 1989,
I set up the Art and Antique Squad
at Scotland Yard.
I'd recovered a lot of stolen artwork.
I'd had a number
of international investigations.
After the robbery
from the Gardner Museum,
the FBI were in touch with us
as soon as they took over
the investigation.
We discussed the case in detail.
Who did the thieves hand them over to?
We don't know.
Where would they have gone?
We don't know.
But what we do know is
art travels around the world every day.
It's easy to smuggle
and use as an international currency.
In Boston in 1990,
the two front runners, shall we say,
is the Italian Mob or the Irish Mob.
[plucked bass line plays]
If it was the Irish Mob,
that was gonna be used as collateral
for buying arms for the IRA
by sympathizers in Boston.
Which, let's face it, there were a lot.
You begin with the premise
that there is a large presence
of Irish-American gangsters in Boston.
Whitey Bulger,
Pat Nee,
and Joe Murray,
who'd not only sympathize with the IRA,
but provided them weapons.
The most notorious case of that
is the Valhalla.
[reporter] Officials suspect
the Valhalla of Gloucester
was instrumental in delivering
almost ten tons of weapons and ammunition
to a smaller ship seized last month
in Irish waters.
At Scotland Yard,
I was involved in the recovery
of a painting by Yates,
which was commissioned by the IRA,
and the artwork was to be used
to raise money for arms.
So, you know, there it is, 100% proof
that stolen art is used to buy arms.
[bagpipes playing]
[Ellis] Paintings
wouldn't have had trouble
crossing the international borders
into Northern Ireland.
[lo-fi jazz music plays]
[man] I call it the north of Ireland.
To call it Northern Ireland
is to recognize
the state of Northern Ireland.
And Republicans don't do that.
My name is Richard O'Rawe.
I joined into the IRA in around 1971.
The atmosphere was very heady.
You went literally
from a very sort of happy youth to
It was as if you skipped
about ten years.
[loud explosion]
- [explosions boom]
- [man] Jesus!
Down! Get down!
Get down, everybody! Get down!
[woman on megaphone]
Good people, stay down and stay calm!
By 1990, the IRA had developed
a whole sort of empire.
They were raking in money hand over fist.
Thirteen paintings
would have been the last thing
that they would even bring up
at an Army council meeting.
[gunshots]
What are we talking about this shit for?
The IRA had nothing to do with this.
What's happened here is that someone
has introduced this IRA thing
to deflect attention away from
who really has these paintings.
[Ellis] On the other hand,
if it was the Italian Mob,
that was almost certainly
going to be used therefore
in some other area of criminality,
probably as a bargaining chip.
[Cullen] In that period I could see
a serious organized criminal saying,
"You know what?
This is a good time to do this."
Who would be in a position
to do something like that?
[Murphy] Bobby Donati.
[Connor] Donati.
- [Leppo] Bobby Donati.
- [Kurkjian] Bobby Donati.
[VCR clicking, whirring]
[Abath] They said "Boston Police,"
and I buzzed them in.
[intense string music plays]
Boston, a quiet museum, a daring robbery.
[man] It was an easy, easy score.
[man 2] The biggest art heist in history.
The thirteen art treasures stolen
are worth a half a billion dollars.
Take a look at these composite drawings.
[Murphy] These were
a get out of jail free card,
everybody knew it.
[Cullen] You had this coalescing force,
La Cosa Nostra.
- How you doing?
- I'm good.
[Cullen] The Mafia.
[man 2] Gardner Museum doubling its reward
up to $10 million.
[Murphy] The racketeering
and loan sharking and murders.
I stabbed him in the face and chest.
[Green] Why not kill these people?
[Hawley] I had no idea
what I was going into.
It was just horrifying.
[man 3] The empty frames
are all that remain on the museum walls.
There's no shortage of possible suspects.
That's part of the problem.
Back in the '80s, Boston was like
the bank robbery capital of the world.
It was the Wild West.
[sirens squawking]
[Murphy] There were so many
organized crime groups.
They would be doing their own thing.
It was huge.
[officer] Come out with your hands up!
[Brekke] In Boston, the complexity
of the cases was unbelievable.
[officer] Police. Open the door!
[Brekke] They would bring in
a close-knit group of people
that were career criminals.
Very planned out,
very well-done criminal activity.
Sometimes they would go for months
before they'd actually strike.
It was much more involved
and much more difficult
to break into those groups.
You're dealing with people
that had a loyalty to their neighborhoods
and to their friends.
[Murphy] There was this sort of,
like, code of silence.
You know, you could have 20 people
in a bar witness a fatal shooting
and nobody saw anything.
[reporter]
Think people were surprised today?
I don't know. I work in the back.
I don't know nothing.
[Murphy] That's the way it was.
It was this very sort of
distrust of outsiders.
Right, you ain't supposed to be down here.
You ask permission to take pictures.
You know better than asking questions.
I don't want to answer.
[Murphy] Very "us against them"
kind of mentality in some neighborhoods.
We have just as much rights
as anybody else.
[crowd clamoring]
Let us go to our neighborhoods,
where our kids are safe.
We want our kids safe!
We want our children safe.
[Cullen]
Boston is a city of neighborhoods.
It's important to understand
how organized crime works in Boston.
You had the Irish faction in Southie.
Another Irish faction in Charlestown
bleeding into Somerville.
In the north end you had this sort of
coalescing force called La Cosa Nostra.
"This thing of ours." The Mafia.
At the end of the '80s,
going into the '90s,
what we knew as organized crime
in the city of Boston had changed
because the FBI had a national policy
to take out the Italians.
Not only did they take out
the top tier of leadership,
but the second tier.
They weren't gonna stop
until there was nobody left.
The objective
of the organized crime program
of the Department of Justice with the FBI
is to essentially and ultimately
destroy the La Cosa Nostra
as a functioning criminal conspiracy
in the United States.
That's what I come to work
every day to do.
What is really squeezing organized crime
is not just the prosecutions,
but the change in culture.
The revenue streams that organized crime
had traditionally relied on had dried up.
So that's killing the wise guys.
There's a lot of dissension in the ranks,
and there's a lot of unhappiness.
For the years building up to March 1990,
there's already a family
in complete disarray.
There was this renegade faction that was
trying to wrest control of the family.
Vinnie Ferrara was a capo
in the New England Mob.
Allegedly behind an effort
to kill the family underboss.
There's murders on both sides.
It's violent.
[gunshots]
[flash bulb popping]
[indistinct radio chatter]
And they have
this Mafia induction ceremony in 1989.
[ominous music plays]
It's supposed to be
a peacekeeping ceremony.
Mobsters from around New England
gathered in this little house in Medford.
They pricked trigger fingers,
burned holy cards,
welcomed four new members
into the Mob.
[man] If we ever, on anybody,
any of us, any one of us here,
if we ever find out
that you've given the secret that we hold,
you can never get out alive.
[Murphy] The FBI had a bug in there.
They caught everything on tape.
And this was a huge coup for the FBI,
not just locally,
but nationally, internationally.
[suspenseful beat playing]
Vinnie Ferrara was arrested in late 1989.
[reporter]
Vincent "The Animal" Ferrara.
A man with a college background,
described by police as a sadistic killer.
- Don't put it too close to my eyes.
- [man] Okay.
There continued to be
successful prosecutions.
They know they're going away.
They know that they're in trouble.
Hey, how you doing?
- [man] Pretty good. How's it going?
- Good.
[Cullen] These are not guys who say,
"Maybe I should go back to school
and get my degree in something."
These guys are criminals,
always thinking,
"What's the next score?
How do I make money
so I don't become a civilian?"
In that disarray,
somebody would be more emboldened
to do something
as bold as the Gardner heist.
It had been sort of a way
of criminals locally
to barter for leniency, to steal art.
I mean, this was a plausible theory.
[Kurkjian] The reporting showed
that the Mafia in Boston
and the Ferrara gang
knew about the vulnerability
of the Gardner Museum.
A get out of jail free card.
One of the first people
to visit Vinnie Ferrara in jail
was his driver.
Bobby Donati.
Three visits: One before,
two after the theft.
They were very good friends.
Donati was a low-level,
more white collar criminal associate.
Had businesses in and around
East Boston and Revere.
An ice cream shop there.
I found that he was very good friends
with Myles Connor.
One of the major art thefts
Myles pulled off
they stole five or six Wyeth paintings.
Important paintings.
And he had a partner with him.
His great friend
Bobby Donati.
Bobby There's something
that I always liked about Italians.
They're outgoing.
They're boisterous.
Much more amicable.
Wyeth
that was the Woolworth estate.
That was actually Bobby Donati's deal.
And he had actually
put the whole thing together.
That's how I ended up
getting grabbed by the feds.
It was thanks to them
that I stole the Rembrandt.
[reporter] A year after the robbery,
Connor offered
to get the painting back for a price.
He wanted out of prison,
and a deal was made.
Donati would have known
through the Myles experience
that getting a piece of artwork
that's so important,
the feds will do business with you.
He would've had the idea in his mind.
And Bobby felt that their gang
would not be able to survive,
would not be able to win the gang war
that they had ongoing,
unless Vinnie was on the street
and out of jail.
So what Bobby Donati said to Vinnie
"We're going to pull off a theft
so shocking
that the feds will let you out of jail."
But it seems to me that after the theft,
Donati wanted to wait
for things to cool down,
and then would approach the FBI
to get this artwork back
and Vinnie Ferrara out of jail.
Bobby Donati was found decapitated
in the trunk of his car
shot to hell.
[Kurkjian] Donati's body was recovered
several days after his murder.
News crews did show up at his home
to get video of the house and of the car.
The police had already found remnants
of blood on the front porch.
The speculation was
he had been attacked there
and then put into the trunk of his car,
where his body was found
several days later.
His killing, as ghastly as it was,
was never solved.
It was investigated by the FBI,
and as I learned
when I sought his FBI file,
he had been under surveillance
by the FBI,
after the theft, but before his murder.
I decided to go deeper on Donati,
and made some friends
in the Revere, East Boston area,
people who knew Donati.
And one of them turned me onto a guy.
He told me of an event
involving Bobby Donati
that I was really intrigued by.
Bobby, very soon before the theft,
showed up at a place
they called the Shack,
in Revere.
He was there with a paper bag.
And in the paper bag
were two Boston Police uniforms.
Jesus. He's walking around
with police uniforms.
What's he doing with police uniforms?
Is Bobby Donati the key?
That's the best scenario
I can come up with.
That Donati had the paintings.
[intricate piano music playing]
Between 1990,
when the theft took place,
and around 1997
there was nothing.
[wind whistling]
[Hawley] I think many people
in the Boston community
did not realize the significance
of this place.
They just didn't.
To get the word out again
to a large audience is really important
for the continued search for the work.
I think that was one of the reasons
behind increasing the reward.
The Bureau felt we needed to get
a larger number out there.
I remember reading a clipping
in the newspaper that said,
"Gardner Museum raises reward
for recovery of paintings,"
and the first thought I had was,
"Wait, they're still missing?"
Very remarkable
that between 1990 and 1997,
there were very few stories
about the crime.
There was never, say, an arrest
or a suspect being questioned.
Bobby Donati, nobody ever had a chance
to ask him any questions, obviously.
With him dead,
whatever he might have done
to hide the art
so it could be used as leverage
I mean, that mystery
would have disappeared with him.
Right off the bat, to me,
the obvious angle
was to look into Myles Connor again.
He was in prison at the time,
which is a pretty solid alibi,
but this guy Donati
was a close friend of Myles
and had been involved
in helping him with a lot of cases.
So I just jumped to this conclusion.
The art had been stolen
and because he was in jail,
he needed a place to hide the art.
So I call Myles,
I get him on the phone,
'cause you can make calls.
And he said that he had this trailer.
Where better to hide it
than in Myles' trailer?
[man] Is this the infamous Myles stuff?
Nah, this is this is just storage.
I had a big trailer.
You know, 40-foot trailer.
Filled with stuff.
Japanese swords
were what I really specialized in.
I had a collection that rivaled
what they had at the MFA or at the Met.
Two hundred blades.
Most expensive ones
would be $500,000.
[Mashberg] Out of nowhere,
this petty criminal
named William Youngworth pops up.
This guy Youngworth is a caretaker
of Myles Connor's property,
which is essentially museum loot.
Youngworth was a guy
who had done me a favor
that I could not get anybody else to do.
So all my stuff went to Billy's place,
the trailer and everything else.
In talking to this guy,
I realized that he had at some point
opened up Myles' trailer,
and was basically selling off items
of Myles' without telling Myles.
There it went.
[Mashberg] He was facing prison time
for an unrelated crime.
He started trying
to negotiate his way out of that,
and he said that he had information
that could lead to the recovery
of the Gardner art.
It's plausible that Youngworth
stumbled across those items
while just sort of randomly
going through Myles' trailer.
[man] How do you know they're real?
I saw them in the Gardner Museum before.
- I believe they're real.
- [man] You've seen both?
[Mashberg]
I said to Youngworth,
"You're never gonna get around
this problem of not being believed,
unless you produce something
that's gonna give credibility
to your claim."
[indistinct speech]
[Mashberg] But I convinced him
to at least show me one of the items.
I wouldn't be in any position to take it.
I wouldn't even know where it was.
You could put it in a location,
then move it right away.
But you know, help me out here.
Uh, show me something,
and I can at least report that.
[tense music playing]
One night I was at work,
working late, and I got a call saying,
"Be at your office
a little before midnight
and we'll go from there."
I'm very skeptical, right?
I mean, to me,
this is sort of implausible.
But I thought, "What's to lose?"
We just took a long drive
to New York.
There was another car
that was along behind for a while.
Eventually, we pull up outside
this very kind of basic-looking
warehouse structure in Red Hook.
It was sort of a rough-looking building.
Youngworth had the key
to get into the facility.
He had a flashlight.
We went up two or three flights.
And he opens this storage locker,
has me stand just outside of it.
He gets a tube out.
And he pulls out the tube
and then he holds up
what looks to be
The Storm on the Sea of Galilee.
[inquisitive orchestral music plays]
And he's kind of running the light
over it a little bit.
Eventually,
the beam hits the Rembrandt signature.
And then he says, "Okay, that's all.
You've got to go. There's my proof."
Obviously, I have no idea
whether this is a forgery.
I'm no expert in art.
It just seemed to me
that it was very plausible
that the stolen art was stored here
at least temporarily.
[Mozart's "Piano Quartet No. 2" playing]
[man] If there is one master
who really interacts with the beholder,
then it's Rembrandt.
So you really need someone
in front of that painting to interact with
to finally get out of it what Rembrandt,
as the master, intended to be there.
Looking at
The Storm on the Sea of Galilee,
that's one of these examples
where we really see Rembrandt
as a storyteller.
The focus and framing
is fully on this ship.
Everyone seems to believe that they will
sink down in the next few seconds,
except Jesus
fully in control,
and then the contrast
with all of the other people around it
and storm in the background.
[storm rumbling]
[Hawley] Christ on this storm-tossed sea
is in motion,
and you can feel the movement.
That's why it's such a wonderful picture.
[Roelofs] This young guy did something
he'd never done before,
but also something that no one else
had ever done before.
[Hawley] If you stare at it long enough,
you realize something strange is going on
and you have Rembrandt
looking at you very wisely.
[Hawley chuckles]
Who's in charge here anyway?
Is it the painter or the subject?
The most interesting moments
in art history are the moments of change.
Standing in front of that painting,
for me,
would be an unbelievable experience.
Before we even went with the story,
we sat down for a long time with a curator
and the head of the Gardner Museum
so I could describe in detail
everything I'd seen.
[Hiatt] I think it was the FBI
that dismissed it.
Having a sense of urgency
in the absence of them,
I think we felt we had no choice.
I asked Tom if he'd be willing
to talk with some of our curators
so they could help him
identify the painting.
[Mashberg]
They were looking for clues,
like whether there was paint flaking off
in these little tiny, weird shape flakes.
They call them craquelure.
Then if you were to roll one up,
the painting would crack along the lines.
[Hawley] These objects are so old
rolling them would be devastating,
because it would crack.
It would put more cracks
into into the paint.
And they need to be stored flat.
And also not in acidic boxes.
You know,
they need to be in acid-free boxes.
Everything has to be treated so carefully.
Like a newborn baby, really.
Mashberg was asked some questions
by one of our curators.
Had he seen a tear
on the upper left hand corner,
or some marks
on the back of the painting?
And he seemed to give the right answers,
so that kind of added credibility.
And so we went with that.
[man] In early October last year,
the Boston Herald
was still the main player
- keeping the Gardner story alive.
- [bell ringing]
Reporter Tom Mashberg
asked Bill Youngworth
for more proof
he had access to the paintings.
[Mashberg] Youngworth kept calling,
saying, "What's going on?
What's the progress?
We aren't hearing anything."
I said, "They don't think
it's worth giving you
complete immunity deal
based on just that."
So I said,
"What else can you provide?"
[man] Days later, a plain manila envelope
arrived at the Herald.
Inside, a roll of photographs.
This is probably the best one
for page one.
It's gonna reproduce the best.
[man] Were these two missing Rembrandts?
[Mashberg]
The museum never issued a statement,
but what I was told was essentially
that it was just too inconclusive.
[suspenseful music playing]
[puffing] You know
long story short,
there was another possible
proof of life that collapsed.
But we sort of thought about paint chips.
And I said, "Would it be that hard
to scrape a little paint off?"
Walter McCrone out of Chicago had done
a lot of work debunking frauds,
using an electron microscope.
So, we flew out there, he looked at them.
Moment of truth here.
I'm literally expecting him to say,
"What, are you kidding?" [chuckles]
[man] I felt as though I was looking at
something that Rembrandt had produced,
and it looked exactly like
the paint layers
and the pigment that was produced
in Holland at that time.
Everything was just perfect
for a Rembrandt paint layer.
I've never experienced this before.
Youngworth seemed to be credible.
Somehow he always had just enough
information to keep us all interested.
[Mashberg] When we sent the chips
over to the museum,
they looked under their own microscopes
and they saw that the color
had not been used
in any of the Rembrandts that were stolen.
They may be chips
from the 17th century,
but, if the color doesn't match
the colors in the painting,
then they can't come from
those paintings.
'Cause it's very specific.
The color of these chips, I learned,
was something called Red Lake.
Red Lake is one of the materials
that an artist could use.
We could come up with a conclusion
that it is part of
a 17th-century Dutch painting.
But identifying the artist
is the next step,
and just on the basis
of one simple sample,
that would be highly tricky, I believe.
[Mashberg] At that time,
I think the museum people
really wanted Youngworth and Connor
to get a full immunity package
and a guarantee of reward money,
and then let's see the art returned.
It kind of became
a put up or shut-up moment.
But at the time, the FBI
and law enforcement rejected that idea.
They still felt that it was
caving in to extortion,
and there was no way they were going
to shorten Myles Connor's prison term
for the return of the art.
Could this be just an elaborate hoax?
Could it be?
Anything's possible.
Are you asking me if it is?
Let's get outta here, honey.
Youngworth had moved,
because he was afraid
that Myles was gonna wreak revenge on him
for basically ruining his collection
and selling it all off.
As a result of that,
the whole thing went south.
Nothing came of it.
Nothing came of that or the paint chips
or anything else.
I think Mashberg was truthful.
He was just
He was a victim of selective information.
You go through so many of these
that you just get exhausted
from the high that you think you're on it,
and then the terrible disappointment
when it's not real.
So it's very, very hard
to keep your spirits up about the process.
The enormity of it, you can imagine,
is just overwhelming.
Did you think you'd be talking
about this ten years later?
No, I really thought we would have
recovered these by now.
[Hawley] What I cannot understand
is why no one has come forward.
Because there have to be people
that know where it is.
[man] So when the robbery happened,
did you know or generally know
where the art went after the robbery?
No, I didn't.
Whatever he showed to Mashberg,
I'm not sure.
Mashberg swore up and down
it was the real thing.
But, like I said,
it was set up by Bobby Donati.
I sense the secret is the network of
where the paintings went
on March 18th, 1990
in the early morning hours,
where they were stashed,
was through these hands of Donati.
[man] Under the scenario that it's Donati,
do you think Donati went in himself,
- or do you think he hired people to go in?
- He had to. No.
Well
You don't just get somebody random.
You get somebody who's connected,
whom you know you can trust.
You find your nearest and dearest
to do it with you.
And the day after
Bobby Donati went missing,
his son picked up the phone.
Whom did he call looking for his father?
He called Bobby Guarente.
Donati
and Bobby Guarente were great friends.
These guys grew up together
in East Boston. They knew each other.
Bobby Guarente was somebody that
Very personable.
Was not ashamed
to have his name be mentioned
and associated with tough people.
[atmospheric music playing]
[Leppo] Bobby once robbed a bank.
Getting away, they kidnapped somebody.
They ran into a house and took a hostage.
Unfortunately, it was a judge's daughter
who they took hostage.
That's the story he tells me, Uncle Buck.
That was his code name, Uncle Buck.
Always carried a biscuit.
Guarente sort of is a big thinker.
I believe he was involved.
It makes sense because it may have been
known to Guarente and the Rossetti gang.
Guarente was a family relative
of the Rosetti's,
and it was the Rosetti gang
that had cased the museum
for a theft in the early '80s.
[Hierdorn] It was September 1981.
They were going to pull the Whistler,
the Matisse, and the Sargent.
[tense music plays]
[Kurkjian] There was a case
at the time of the theft
being built by the state police
involving TRC Auto Body Shop
on Dot Ave in Dorchester.
Guarente is several times showing up
during the state and federal
surveillance periods,
at the auto repair shop.
Bobby Guarente was in and out of TRC.
I'm sure he was
a lot more involved than that.
TRC was a place to go
if you needed a particular item.
We would park our surveillance van
at the closest spot we could get
across the street from TRC.
We'd just wait for them to open,
see who arrived.
No one was getting their car fixed.
[chuckles]
They were colorful.
A bunch of colorful characters,
as we came to know them.
Carmello Merlino
was kind of the godfather,
the one that people would bring
problems or ideas to,
who, everyone told me at the time,
was a legitimately made guy in the Mafia.
The other key people around him,
Charlie Pappas
David Turner,
George Reissfelder,
Leonard DiMuzio.
Our information was that Carmello Merlino
was supplying Robert Guarente
with drugs to sell.
And Mello was doing
a million-dollar cocaine operation.
There was a continual criminal enterprise.
I mean, it went on
As long as we were there,
it went on and on and on and on.
Armed robberies,
an armed home invasion,
robbery of Cheers, the bar
[Whelan] Turner and Pappas,
I was looking at for homicide in Plymouth.
It was clear very early, this group
needed to be taken off the streets.
They were dangerous.
We developed enough to charge them
with the conspiracy to traffic in cocaine.
[Sikellis] Merlino and Pappas
are the two main people to get indicted.
And they get five years.
As a result,
Charlie starts cooperating.
Carmello takes a different approach.
He starts talking about returning artwork
with the Gardner Art Museum.
Because we were
after the drugs and the murder,
we didn't get involved
in people shoplifting.
I believe it's very possible
they would send out their teams of people,
they'd find that item that you wanted,
steal it, and bring it back to TRC.
The feds in their account believe
that the idea for this theft was hatched
at Merlino's TRC Auto Body Shop
on Dot Ave in Dorchester.
They obviously have evidence
that leads them to this certain crew,
and they think that they had
their hands on it at one point.
You don't know who's sitting out there
that has a little piece of the puzzle.
So no one knows where they are.
And their criminal associates
don't know anything.
But their family know something.
You know, we all know
what our brothers are involved with,
what our brother-in-laws have done.
Know something.
[inquisitive orchestral music plays]
I hate water.
[man] George Reissfelder,
a garment worker in Boston's Chinatown,
was arrested following an anonymous tip.
Reissfelder had served time for murder.
The conviction was overturned
and he was released.
[woman]
The big breakthrough came
when the Deputy Superintendent
of the Boston Police Department
told me George was serving a bum rap,
that he was innocent,
that he was wrongfully convicted.
He wasn't a member of the Mafia.
He fraternized with these guys, knew them.
My ex brother-in-law,
he was very stern looking.
You'd look at him and you'd run.
He would look intimidating,
but he wasn't.
I loved George.
George was like my big brother.
He was best of friends
for a long, long time with Carmen Mello.
He was very, very slow moving.
He really was.
He wasn't a fast anything,
and he would drive like this.
Like, I said,
"Oh my God, the old lady."
[chuckles]
[Reissfelder] It was being in the city
every day. All the people.
I wanted to get away from all the people.
In prison, you're in a cellblock,
and day in and day out
you got no privacy.
You can't go to the bathroom
without people looking at your, uh
[Donna Reissfelder]
When you come out 16 years from prison
for something that they found out
that he wasn't involved in,
there's no way that you can
really change that quick.
Around eight o'clock,
we went out to George's apartment.
He said, "I have to hang a picture,
I need you to come up, help me do this."
Reissfelder was standing against the wall,
being his helpful self,
while I'm in the middle,
trying to get the picture
hanging straight on the wall.
The frame was gold
and it had, I would say,
fingertip marks all around it.
It was a foo-foo frame.
It was a woman's frame.
It didn't belong
in a bachelor's apartment.
I said, "Go get a different frame."
He said, "No."
I had to I had to make sure
I got the right measurements.
I mean, it's ugly enough,
never mind having a foo-foo frame on it.
I mean, it really is
It's an ugly picture,
or art, whatever you wanna call it.
And I asked George if he posed for it.
[chuckles]
Finally we got it right,
but it was a lot of fun hanging it.
[laughs]
I don't read the paper or the news on TV.
I didn't know there was
this big old robbery going on.
Many years after the robbery,
I got a phone call from Gardner Museum.
I'm looking at the paintings.
I'm saying, "I never seen any of these.
He's too skinny.
He wouldn't be able to lift that
Galilee thing if his life depended on it."
So I turn around
and I got down and I said, "Oh Jesus."
I got sick to my stomach.
Like someone punched me
right in the stomach.
All of a sudden,
everything comes crashing in.
It's like, "Well, well, well,
you know, you said you saw it."
Yeah, but I wasn't
anything involved in it.
I just was hanging it
on a freaking wall.
[electronic beat plays]
I liked calling him Tortellini.
[laughs]
I saw it hanging on a wall.
First and last time I ever seen it.
When I was talking to Gardner Museum,
I said, "My brother-in-law
couldn't do that."
I said, "He's too slow, he drives
25 miles an hour on the expressway."
"Donna, it took 'em 81 minutes."
I said, "Well that could be."
And then he said, "One of the thieves
kept going down to the basement
where they tied the guards up,
asking 'em, "Are you comfortable,
do you need water,
is the tape too tight?'"
And I said,
"Yeah, that's my brother-in-law.
Because he knows how it is
to be treated in a bad way."
[man] Suspect number one is described
as a white male in his early thirties.
[Reissfelder] George had a, like
Is that an egg shape?
If I remember, an egg shape.
His skin was olive.
He had black hair.
The first car that he had
was a red with a white top convertible.
One was a hatchback.
I think it was gray or blue or something.
[Stratman] For uniformed policemen to be
in what I recalled as a Dodge Daytona,
this little hatchback,
that seems odd.
[Leppo] He died of cocaine ingestion.
And two guys, including Merlino,
were on their way to his apartment
to see him,
and walked in and he was dead.
There was speculation.
Where did the painting go
that was over his bed?
Was it the Chez Tortoni?
Did Carmello Merlino take it?
[Donna Reissfelder]
I'm still trying to think what happened.
What snapped him off
to do something like that?
- [reporter] How do you feel?
- I feel great.
Happiest guy in the world.
- [reporter] Any bitterness?
- A little bit. A little bit.
- [reporter 2] What kind of bitterness?
- I think it could have been avoided.
You know, 16 years in prison,
you know, and he got nothing for it.
So I think that
with all that on top of it,
I would blame the state of Massachusetts.
I always remember,
my mother said to me,
just a couple of days before she died,
she said,
"Don't worry about it," she said,
"because as long as
you didn't do anything,
you got nothing to worry about."
She believed that if you were innocent,
you got nothing to worry about.
But she was wrong.
You know, she believed
that what's right is right,
but it doesn't always work that way.
In terms of the thieves, there've been
different names raised over the years.
Also David Turner's name came up.
[Sikellis] Around March 18th of 1990,
David Turner
he had gone dark on us
for a few days around that time.
We didn't know where he was.
I know a Weymouth detective
called his house, I believe,
and his girlfriend answered
and she said he took a trip to Florida.
There was no cell phones at that time,
so we couldn't call his cell,
so we dunno if he was beside her.
[Kurkjian] There is paperwork filed.
That paperwork shows
that he had rented a house in Florida.
February, March area.
I find credit card receipts.
Receipts that he's bought
hundreds of dollars' worth of equipment
from something called
the Spy Shop in Miami.
I also see a receipt
that's dated March 20th, 1990.
And it's at a auto rental place
in Fort Lauderdale,
and it looks to be he's returning the car
that he had rented for a month down there.
But on the receipt,
there is another license number.
So in my mind, there is a possibility
that David had given his credit card
to somebody else
to give him an alibi
that on March 20th,
two days after the theft,
he was down there in Florida.
The FBI didn't find anything
that looked like
association or involvement
with the Gardner Museum case,
except one surveillance report.
[tense music playing]
[Kurkjian]
One surveillance report of David Turner
David opens up the trunk of his car
and takes out what appears to be
a Ming vase.
["I Need Money" by Marky Mark
and The Funky Bunch playing]
[Sikellis]
Who are you gonna get to do this?
Someone you know you can trust.
Local made folks
who know their way around Boston
and are cocky enough
to pull something like this off.
Where the paintings go within minutes
of them walking out of there,
then it gets into
more sophisticated hands.
All this, you're trying to put together,
painting a picture,
and the key is usually informants
in these kinds of things.
Someone or some group of people
gotta start talking to you.
[man on tape] The date is 11/27/98.
This is Special Agent David T. Nadolski.
The time is 5:35 a.m.
The purpose of this tape
is a consensual voice recording
between Anthony Romano
and Carmello Merlino
to take place in Dorchester,
Massachusetts.
[intricate string music playing]
[Ellis] In 1989,
I set up the Art and Antique Squad
at Scotland Yard.
I'd recovered a lot of stolen artwork.
I'd had a number
of international investigations.
After the robbery
from the Gardner Museum,
the FBI were in touch with us
as soon as they took over
the investigation.
We discussed the case in detail.
Who did the thieves hand them over to?
We don't know.
Where would they have gone?
We don't know.
But what we do know is
art travels around the world every day.
It's easy to smuggle
and use as an international currency.
In Boston in 1990,
the two front runners, shall we say,
is the Italian Mob or the Irish Mob.
[plucked bass line plays]
If it was the Irish Mob,
that was gonna be used as collateral
for buying arms for the IRA
by sympathizers in Boston.
Which, let's face it, there were a lot.
You begin with the premise
that there is a large presence
of Irish-American gangsters in Boston.
Whitey Bulger,
Pat Nee,
and Joe Murray,
who'd not only sympathize with the IRA,
but provided them weapons.
The most notorious case of that
is the Valhalla.
[reporter] Officials suspect
the Valhalla of Gloucester
was instrumental in delivering
almost ten tons of weapons and ammunition
to a smaller ship seized last month
in Irish waters.
At Scotland Yard,
I was involved in the recovery
of a painting by Yates,
which was commissioned by the IRA,
and the artwork was to be used
to raise money for arms.
So, you know, there it is, 100% proof
that stolen art is used to buy arms.
[bagpipes playing]
[Ellis] Paintings
wouldn't have had trouble
crossing the international borders
into Northern Ireland.
[lo-fi jazz music plays]
[man] I call it the north of Ireland.
To call it Northern Ireland
is to recognize
the state of Northern Ireland.
And Republicans don't do that.
My name is Richard O'Rawe.
I joined into the IRA in around 1971.
The atmosphere was very heady.
You went literally
from a very sort of happy youth to
It was as if you skipped
about ten years.
[loud explosion]
- [explosions boom]
- [man] Jesus!
Down! Get down!
Get down, everybody! Get down!
[woman on megaphone]
Good people, stay down and stay calm!
By 1990, the IRA had developed
a whole sort of empire.
They were raking in money hand over fist.
Thirteen paintings
would have been the last thing
that they would even bring up
at an Army council meeting.
[gunshots]
What are we talking about this shit for?
The IRA had nothing to do with this.
What's happened here is that someone
has introduced this IRA thing
to deflect attention away from
who really has these paintings.
[Ellis] On the other hand,
if it was the Italian Mob,
that was almost certainly
going to be used therefore
in some other area of criminality,
probably as a bargaining chip.
[Cullen] In that period I could see
a serious organized criminal saying,
"You know what?
This is a good time to do this."
Who would be in a position
to do something like that?
[Murphy] Bobby Donati.
[Connor] Donati.
- [Leppo] Bobby Donati.
- [Kurkjian] Bobby Donati.
[VCR clicking, whirring]
[Abath] They said "Boston Police,"
and I buzzed them in.
[intense string music plays]
Boston, a quiet museum, a daring robbery.
[man] It was an easy, easy score.
[man 2] The biggest art heist in history.
The thirteen art treasures stolen
are worth a half a billion dollars.
Take a look at these composite drawings.
[Murphy] These were
a get out of jail free card,
everybody knew it.
[Cullen] You had this coalescing force,
La Cosa Nostra.
- How you doing?
- I'm good.
[Cullen] The Mafia.
[man 2] Gardner Museum doubling its reward
up to $10 million.
[Murphy] The racketeering
and loan sharking and murders.
I stabbed him in the face and chest.
[Green] Why not kill these people?
[Hawley] I had no idea
what I was going into.
It was just horrifying.
[man 3] The empty frames
are all that remain on the museum walls.
There's no shortage of possible suspects.
That's part of the problem.
Back in the '80s, Boston was like
the bank robbery capital of the world.
It was the Wild West.
[sirens squawking]
[Murphy] There were so many
organized crime groups.
They would be doing their own thing.
It was huge.
[officer] Come out with your hands up!
[Brekke] In Boston, the complexity
of the cases was unbelievable.
[officer] Police. Open the door!
[Brekke] They would bring in
a close-knit group of people
that were career criminals.
Very planned out,
very well-done criminal activity.
Sometimes they would go for months
before they'd actually strike.
It was much more involved
and much more difficult
to break into those groups.
You're dealing with people
that had a loyalty to their neighborhoods
and to their friends.
[Murphy] There was this sort of,
like, code of silence.
You know, you could have 20 people
in a bar witness a fatal shooting
and nobody saw anything.
[reporter]
Think people were surprised today?
I don't know. I work in the back.
I don't know nothing.
[Murphy] That's the way it was.
It was this very sort of
distrust of outsiders.
Right, you ain't supposed to be down here.
You ask permission to take pictures.
You know better than asking questions.
I don't want to answer.
[Murphy] Very "us against them"
kind of mentality in some neighborhoods.
We have just as much rights
as anybody else.
[crowd clamoring]
Let us go to our neighborhoods,
where our kids are safe.
We want our kids safe!
We want our children safe.
[Cullen]
Boston is a city of neighborhoods.
It's important to understand
how organized crime works in Boston.
You had the Irish faction in Southie.
Another Irish faction in Charlestown
bleeding into Somerville.
In the north end you had this sort of
coalescing force called La Cosa Nostra.
"This thing of ours." The Mafia.
At the end of the '80s,
going into the '90s,
what we knew as organized crime
in the city of Boston had changed
because the FBI had a national policy
to take out the Italians.
Not only did they take out
the top tier of leadership,
but the second tier.
They weren't gonna stop
until there was nobody left.
The objective
of the organized crime program
of the Department of Justice with the FBI
is to essentially and ultimately
destroy the La Cosa Nostra
as a functioning criminal conspiracy
in the United States.
That's what I come to work
every day to do.
What is really squeezing organized crime
is not just the prosecutions,
but the change in culture.
The revenue streams that organized crime
had traditionally relied on had dried up.
So that's killing the wise guys.
There's a lot of dissension in the ranks,
and there's a lot of unhappiness.
For the years building up to March 1990,
there's already a family
in complete disarray.
There was this renegade faction that was
trying to wrest control of the family.
Vinnie Ferrara was a capo
in the New England Mob.
Allegedly behind an effort
to kill the family underboss.
There's murders on both sides.
It's violent.
[gunshots]
[flash bulb popping]
[indistinct radio chatter]
And they have
this Mafia induction ceremony in 1989.
[ominous music plays]
It's supposed to be
a peacekeeping ceremony.
Mobsters from around New England
gathered in this little house in Medford.
They pricked trigger fingers,
burned holy cards,
welcomed four new members
into the Mob.
[man] If we ever, on anybody,
any of us, any one of us here,
if we ever find out
that you've given the secret that we hold,
you can never get out alive.
[Murphy] The FBI had a bug in there.
They caught everything on tape.
And this was a huge coup for the FBI,
not just locally,
but nationally, internationally.
[suspenseful beat playing]
Vinnie Ferrara was arrested in late 1989.
[reporter]
Vincent "The Animal" Ferrara.
A man with a college background,
described by police as a sadistic killer.
- Don't put it too close to my eyes.
- [man] Okay.
There continued to be
successful prosecutions.
They know they're going away.
They know that they're in trouble.
Hey, how you doing?
- [man] Pretty good. How's it going?
- Good.
[Cullen] These are not guys who say,
"Maybe I should go back to school
and get my degree in something."
These guys are criminals,
always thinking,
"What's the next score?
How do I make money
so I don't become a civilian?"
In that disarray,
somebody would be more emboldened
to do something
as bold as the Gardner heist.
It had been sort of a way
of criminals locally
to barter for leniency, to steal art.
I mean, this was a plausible theory.
[Kurkjian] The reporting showed
that the Mafia in Boston
and the Ferrara gang
knew about the vulnerability
of the Gardner Museum.
A get out of jail free card.
One of the first people
to visit Vinnie Ferrara in jail
was his driver.
Bobby Donati.
Three visits: One before,
two after the theft.
They were very good friends.
Donati was a low-level,
more white collar criminal associate.
Had businesses in and around
East Boston and Revere.
An ice cream shop there.
I found that he was very good friends
with Myles Connor.
One of the major art thefts
Myles pulled off
they stole five or six Wyeth paintings.
Important paintings.
And he had a partner with him.
His great friend
Bobby Donati.
Bobby There's something
that I always liked about Italians.
They're outgoing.
They're boisterous.
Much more amicable.
Wyeth
that was the Woolworth estate.
That was actually Bobby Donati's deal.
And he had actually
put the whole thing together.
That's how I ended up
getting grabbed by the feds.
It was thanks to them
that I stole the Rembrandt.
[reporter] A year after the robbery,
Connor offered
to get the painting back for a price.
He wanted out of prison,
and a deal was made.
Donati would have known
through the Myles experience
that getting a piece of artwork
that's so important,
the feds will do business with you.
He would've had the idea in his mind.
And Bobby felt that their gang
would not be able to survive,
would not be able to win the gang war
that they had ongoing,
unless Vinnie was on the street
and out of jail.
So what Bobby Donati said to Vinnie
"We're going to pull off a theft
so shocking
that the feds will let you out of jail."
But it seems to me that after the theft,
Donati wanted to wait
for things to cool down,
and then would approach the FBI
to get this artwork back
and Vinnie Ferrara out of jail.
Bobby Donati was found decapitated
in the trunk of his car
shot to hell.
[Kurkjian] Donati's body was recovered
several days after his murder.
News crews did show up at his home
to get video of the house and of the car.
The police had already found remnants
of blood on the front porch.
The speculation was
he had been attacked there
and then put into the trunk of his car,
where his body was found
several days later.
His killing, as ghastly as it was,
was never solved.
It was investigated by the FBI,
and as I learned
when I sought his FBI file,
he had been under surveillance
by the FBI,
after the theft, but before his murder.
I decided to go deeper on Donati,
and made some friends
in the Revere, East Boston area,
people who knew Donati.
And one of them turned me onto a guy.
He told me of an event
involving Bobby Donati
that I was really intrigued by.
Bobby, very soon before the theft,
showed up at a place
they called the Shack,
in Revere.
He was there with a paper bag.
And in the paper bag
were two Boston Police uniforms.
Jesus. He's walking around
with police uniforms.
What's he doing with police uniforms?
Is Bobby Donati the key?
That's the best scenario
I can come up with.
That Donati had the paintings.
[intricate piano music playing]
Between 1990,
when the theft took place,
and around 1997
there was nothing.
[wind whistling]
[Hawley] I think many people
in the Boston community
did not realize the significance
of this place.
They just didn't.
To get the word out again
to a large audience is really important
for the continued search for the work.
I think that was one of the reasons
behind increasing the reward.
The Bureau felt we needed to get
a larger number out there.
I remember reading a clipping
in the newspaper that said,
"Gardner Museum raises reward
for recovery of paintings,"
and the first thought I had was,
"Wait, they're still missing?"
Very remarkable
that between 1990 and 1997,
there were very few stories
about the crime.
There was never, say, an arrest
or a suspect being questioned.
Bobby Donati, nobody ever had a chance
to ask him any questions, obviously.
With him dead,
whatever he might have done
to hide the art
so it could be used as leverage
I mean, that mystery
would have disappeared with him.
Right off the bat, to me,
the obvious angle
was to look into Myles Connor again.
He was in prison at the time,
which is a pretty solid alibi,
but this guy Donati
was a close friend of Myles
and had been involved
in helping him with a lot of cases.
So I just jumped to this conclusion.
The art had been stolen
and because he was in jail,
he needed a place to hide the art.
So I call Myles,
I get him on the phone,
'cause you can make calls.
And he said that he had this trailer.
Where better to hide it
than in Myles' trailer?
[man] Is this the infamous Myles stuff?
Nah, this is this is just storage.
I had a big trailer.
You know, 40-foot trailer.
Filled with stuff.
Japanese swords
were what I really specialized in.
I had a collection that rivaled
what they had at the MFA or at the Met.
Two hundred blades.
Most expensive ones
would be $500,000.
[Mashberg] Out of nowhere,
this petty criminal
named William Youngworth pops up.
This guy Youngworth is a caretaker
of Myles Connor's property,
which is essentially museum loot.
Youngworth was a guy
who had done me a favor
that I could not get anybody else to do.
So all my stuff went to Billy's place,
the trailer and everything else.
In talking to this guy,
I realized that he had at some point
opened up Myles' trailer,
and was basically selling off items
of Myles' without telling Myles.
There it went.
[Mashberg] He was facing prison time
for an unrelated crime.
He started trying
to negotiate his way out of that,
and he said that he had information
that could lead to the recovery
of the Gardner art.
It's plausible that Youngworth
stumbled across those items
while just sort of randomly
going through Myles' trailer.
[man] How do you know they're real?
I saw them in the Gardner Museum before.
- I believe they're real.
- [man] You've seen both?
[Mashberg]
I said to Youngworth,
"You're never gonna get around
this problem of not being believed,
unless you produce something
that's gonna give credibility
to your claim."
[indistinct speech]
[Mashberg] But I convinced him
to at least show me one of the items.
I wouldn't be in any position to take it.
I wouldn't even know where it was.
You could put it in a location,
then move it right away.
But you know, help me out here.
Uh, show me something,
and I can at least report that.
[tense music playing]
One night I was at work,
working late, and I got a call saying,
"Be at your office
a little before midnight
and we'll go from there."
I'm very skeptical, right?
I mean, to me,
this is sort of implausible.
But I thought, "What's to lose?"
We just took a long drive
to New York.
There was another car
that was along behind for a while.
Eventually, we pull up outside
this very kind of basic-looking
warehouse structure in Red Hook.
It was sort of a rough-looking building.
Youngworth had the key
to get into the facility.
He had a flashlight.
We went up two or three flights.
And he opens this storage locker,
has me stand just outside of it.
He gets a tube out.
And he pulls out the tube
and then he holds up
what looks to be
The Storm on the Sea of Galilee.
[inquisitive orchestral music plays]
And he's kind of running the light
over it a little bit.
Eventually,
the beam hits the Rembrandt signature.
And then he says, "Okay, that's all.
You've got to go. There's my proof."
Obviously, I have no idea
whether this is a forgery.
I'm no expert in art.
It just seemed to me
that it was very plausible
that the stolen art was stored here
at least temporarily.
[Mozart's "Piano Quartet No. 2" playing]
[man] If there is one master
who really interacts with the beholder,
then it's Rembrandt.
So you really need someone
in front of that painting to interact with
to finally get out of it what Rembrandt,
as the master, intended to be there.
Looking at
The Storm on the Sea of Galilee,
that's one of these examples
where we really see Rembrandt
as a storyteller.
The focus and framing
is fully on this ship.
Everyone seems to believe that they will
sink down in the next few seconds,
except Jesus
fully in control,
and then the contrast
with all of the other people around it
and storm in the background.
[storm rumbling]
[Hawley] Christ on this storm-tossed sea
is in motion,
and you can feel the movement.
That's why it's such a wonderful picture.
[Roelofs] This young guy did something
he'd never done before,
but also something that no one else
had ever done before.
[Hawley] If you stare at it long enough,
you realize something strange is going on
and you have Rembrandt
looking at you very wisely.
[Hawley chuckles]
Who's in charge here anyway?
Is it the painter or the subject?
The most interesting moments
in art history are the moments of change.
Standing in front of that painting,
for me,
would be an unbelievable experience.
Before we even went with the story,
we sat down for a long time with a curator
and the head of the Gardner Museum
so I could describe in detail
everything I'd seen.
[Hiatt] I think it was the FBI
that dismissed it.
Having a sense of urgency
in the absence of them,
I think we felt we had no choice.
I asked Tom if he'd be willing
to talk with some of our curators
so they could help him
identify the painting.
[Mashberg]
They were looking for clues,
like whether there was paint flaking off
in these little tiny, weird shape flakes.
They call them craquelure.
Then if you were to roll one up,
the painting would crack along the lines.
[Hawley] These objects are so old
rolling them would be devastating,
because it would crack.
It would put more cracks
into into the paint.
And they need to be stored flat.
And also not in acidic boxes.
You know,
they need to be in acid-free boxes.
Everything has to be treated so carefully.
Like a newborn baby, really.
Mashberg was asked some questions
by one of our curators.
Had he seen a tear
on the upper left hand corner,
or some marks
on the back of the painting?
And he seemed to give the right answers,
so that kind of added credibility.
And so we went with that.
[man] In early October last year,
the Boston Herald
was still the main player
- keeping the Gardner story alive.
- [bell ringing]
Reporter Tom Mashberg
asked Bill Youngworth
for more proof
he had access to the paintings.
[Mashberg] Youngworth kept calling,
saying, "What's going on?
What's the progress?
We aren't hearing anything."
I said, "They don't think
it's worth giving you
complete immunity deal
based on just that."
So I said,
"What else can you provide?"
[man] Days later, a plain manila envelope
arrived at the Herald.
Inside, a roll of photographs.
This is probably the best one
for page one.
It's gonna reproduce the best.
[man] Were these two missing Rembrandts?
[Mashberg]
The museum never issued a statement,
but what I was told was essentially
that it was just too inconclusive.
[suspenseful music playing]
[puffing] You know
long story short,
there was another possible
proof of life that collapsed.
But we sort of thought about paint chips.
And I said, "Would it be that hard
to scrape a little paint off?"
Walter McCrone out of Chicago had done
a lot of work debunking frauds,
using an electron microscope.
So, we flew out there, he looked at them.
Moment of truth here.
I'm literally expecting him to say,
"What, are you kidding?" [chuckles]
[man] I felt as though I was looking at
something that Rembrandt had produced,
and it looked exactly like
the paint layers
and the pigment that was produced
in Holland at that time.
Everything was just perfect
for a Rembrandt paint layer.
I've never experienced this before.
Youngworth seemed to be credible.
Somehow he always had just enough
information to keep us all interested.
[Mashberg] When we sent the chips
over to the museum,
they looked under their own microscopes
and they saw that the color
had not been used
in any of the Rembrandts that were stolen.
They may be chips
from the 17th century,
but, if the color doesn't match
the colors in the painting,
then they can't come from
those paintings.
'Cause it's very specific.
The color of these chips, I learned,
was something called Red Lake.
Red Lake is one of the materials
that an artist could use.
We could come up with a conclusion
that it is part of
a 17th-century Dutch painting.
But identifying the artist
is the next step,
and just on the basis
of one simple sample,
that would be highly tricky, I believe.
[Mashberg] At that time,
I think the museum people
really wanted Youngworth and Connor
to get a full immunity package
and a guarantee of reward money,
and then let's see the art returned.
It kind of became
a put up or shut-up moment.
But at the time, the FBI
and law enforcement rejected that idea.
They still felt that it was
caving in to extortion,
and there was no way they were going
to shorten Myles Connor's prison term
for the return of the art.
Could this be just an elaborate hoax?
Could it be?
Anything's possible.
Are you asking me if it is?
Let's get outta here, honey.
Youngworth had moved,
because he was afraid
that Myles was gonna wreak revenge on him
for basically ruining his collection
and selling it all off.
As a result of that,
the whole thing went south.
Nothing came of it.
Nothing came of that or the paint chips
or anything else.
I think Mashberg was truthful.
He was just
He was a victim of selective information.
You go through so many of these
that you just get exhausted
from the high that you think you're on it,
and then the terrible disappointment
when it's not real.
So it's very, very hard
to keep your spirits up about the process.
The enormity of it, you can imagine,
is just overwhelming.
Did you think you'd be talking
about this ten years later?
No, I really thought we would have
recovered these by now.
[Hawley] What I cannot understand
is why no one has come forward.
Because there have to be people
that know where it is.
[man] So when the robbery happened,
did you know or generally know
where the art went after the robbery?
No, I didn't.
Whatever he showed to Mashberg,
I'm not sure.
Mashberg swore up and down
it was the real thing.
But, like I said,
it was set up by Bobby Donati.
I sense the secret is the network of
where the paintings went
on March 18th, 1990
in the early morning hours,
where they were stashed,
was through these hands of Donati.
[man] Under the scenario that it's Donati,
do you think Donati went in himself,
- or do you think he hired people to go in?
- He had to. No.
Well
You don't just get somebody random.
You get somebody who's connected,
whom you know you can trust.
You find your nearest and dearest
to do it with you.
And the day after
Bobby Donati went missing,
his son picked up the phone.
Whom did he call looking for his father?
He called Bobby Guarente.
Donati
and Bobby Guarente were great friends.
These guys grew up together
in East Boston. They knew each other.
Bobby Guarente was somebody that
Very personable.
Was not ashamed
to have his name be mentioned
and associated with tough people.
[atmospheric music playing]
[Leppo] Bobby once robbed a bank.
Getting away, they kidnapped somebody.
They ran into a house and took a hostage.
Unfortunately, it was a judge's daughter
who they took hostage.
That's the story he tells me, Uncle Buck.
That was his code name, Uncle Buck.
Always carried a biscuit.
Guarente sort of is a big thinker.
I believe he was involved.
It makes sense because it may have been
known to Guarente and the Rossetti gang.
Guarente was a family relative
of the Rosetti's,
and it was the Rosetti gang
that had cased the museum
for a theft in the early '80s.
[Hierdorn] It was September 1981.
They were going to pull the Whistler,
the Matisse, and the Sargent.
[tense music plays]
[Kurkjian] There was a case
at the time of the theft
being built by the state police
involving TRC Auto Body Shop
on Dot Ave in Dorchester.
Guarente is several times showing up
during the state and federal
surveillance periods,
at the auto repair shop.
Bobby Guarente was in and out of TRC.
I'm sure he was
a lot more involved than that.
TRC was a place to go
if you needed a particular item.
We would park our surveillance van
at the closest spot we could get
across the street from TRC.
We'd just wait for them to open,
see who arrived.
No one was getting their car fixed.
[chuckles]
They were colorful.
A bunch of colorful characters,
as we came to know them.
Carmello Merlino
was kind of the godfather,
the one that people would bring
problems or ideas to,
who, everyone told me at the time,
was a legitimately made guy in the Mafia.
The other key people around him,
Charlie Pappas
David Turner,
George Reissfelder,
Leonard DiMuzio.
Our information was that Carmello Merlino
was supplying Robert Guarente
with drugs to sell.
And Mello was doing
a million-dollar cocaine operation.
There was a continual criminal enterprise.
I mean, it went on
As long as we were there,
it went on and on and on and on.
Armed robberies,
an armed home invasion,
robbery of Cheers, the bar
[Whelan] Turner and Pappas,
I was looking at for homicide in Plymouth.
It was clear very early, this group
needed to be taken off the streets.
They were dangerous.
We developed enough to charge them
with the conspiracy to traffic in cocaine.
[Sikellis] Merlino and Pappas
are the two main people to get indicted.
And they get five years.
As a result,
Charlie starts cooperating.
Carmello takes a different approach.
He starts talking about returning artwork
with the Gardner Art Museum.
Because we were
after the drugs and the murder,
we didn't get involved
in people shoplifting.
I believe it's very possible
they would send out their teams of people,
they'd find that item that you wanted,
steal it, and bring it back to TRC.
The feds in their account believe
that the idea for this theft was hatched
at Merlino's TRC Auto Body Shop
on Dot Ave in Dorchester.
They obviously have evidence
that leads them to this certain crew,
and they think that they had
their hands on it at one point.
You don't know who's sitting out there
that has a little piece of the puzzle.
So no one knows where they are.
And their criminal associates
don't know anything.
But their family know something.
You know, we all know
what our brothers are involved with,
what our brother-in-laws have done.
Know something.
[inquisitive orchestral music plays]
I hate water.
[man] George Reissfelder,
a garment worker in Boston's Chinatown,
was arrested following an anonymous tip.
Reissfelder had served time for murder.
The conviction was overturned
and he was released.
[woman]
The big breakthrough came
when the Deputy Superintendent
of the Boston Police Department
told me George was serving a bum rap,
that he was innocent,
that he was wrongfully convicted.
He wasn't a member of the Mafia.
He fraternized with these guys, knew them.
My ex brother-in-law,
he was very stern looking.
You'd look at him and you'd run.
He would look intimidating,
but he wasn't.
I loved George.
George was like my big brother.
He was best of friends
for a long, long time with Carmen Mello.
He was very, very slow moving.
He really was.
He wasn't a fast anything,
and he would drive like this.
Like, I said,
"Oh my God, the old lady."
[chuckles]
[Reissfelder] It was being in the city
every day. All the people.
I wanted to get away from all the people.
In prison, you're in a cellblock,
and day in and day out
you got no privacy.
You can't go to the bathroom
without people looking at your, uh
[Donna Reissfelder]
When you come out 16 years from prison
for something that they found out
that he wasn't involved in,
there's no way that you can
really change that quick.
Around eight o'clock,
we went out to George's apartment.
He said, "I have to hang a picture,
I need you to come up, help me do this."
Reissfelder was standing against the wall,
being his helpful self,
while I'm in the middle,
trying to get the picture
hanging straight on the wall.
The frame was gold
and it had, I would say,
fingertip marks all around it.
It was a foo-foo frame.
It was a woman's frame.
It didn't belong
in a bachelor's apartment.
I said, "Go get a different frame."
He said, "No."
I had to I had to make sure
I got the right measurements.
I mean, it's ugly enough,
never mind having a foo-foo frame on it.
I mean, it really is
It's an ugly picture,
or art, whatever you wanna call it.
And I asked George if he posed for it.
[chuckles]
Finally we got it right,
but it was a lot of fun hanging it.
[laughs]
I don't read the paper or the news on TV.
I didn't know there was
this big old robbery going on.
Many years after the robbery,
I got a phone call from Gardner Museum.
I'm looking at the paintings.
I'm saying, "I never seen any of these.
He's too skinny.
He wouldn't be able to lift that
Galilee thing if his life depended on it."
So I turn around
and I got down and I said, "Oh Jesus."
I got sick to my stomach.
Like someone punched me
right in the stomach.
All of a sudden,
everything comes crashing in.
It's like, "Well, well, well,
you know, you said you saw it."
Yeah, but I wasn't
anything involved in it.
I just was hanging it
on a freaking wall.
[electronic beat plays]
I liked calling him Tortellini.
[laughs]
I saw it hanging on a wall.
First and last time I ever seen it.
When I was talking to Gardner Museum,
I said, "My brother-in-law
couldn't do that."
I said, "He's too slow, he drives
25 miles an hour on the expressway."
"Donna, it took 'em 81 minutes."
I said, "Well that could be."
And then he said, "One of the thieves
kept going down to the basement
where they tied the guards up,
asking 'em, "Are you comfortable,
do you need water,
is the tape too tight?'"
And I said,
"Yeah, that's my brother-in-law.
Because he knows how it is
to be treated in a bad way."
[man] Suspect number one is described
as a white male in his early thirties.
[Reissfelder] George had a, like
Is that an egg shape?
If I remember, an egg shape.
His skin was olive.
He had black hair.
The first car that he had
was a red with a white top convertible.
One was a hatchback.
I think it was gray or blue or something.
[Stratman] For uniformed policemen to be
in what I recalled as a Dodge Daytona,
this little hatchback,
that seems odd.
[Leppo] He died of cocaine ingestion.
And two guys, including Merlino,
were on their way to his apartment
to see him,
and walked in and he was dead.
There was speculation.
Where did the painting go
that was over his bed?
Was it the Chez Tortoni?
Did Carmello Merlino take it?
[Donna Reissfelder]
I'm still trying to think what happened.
What snapped him off
to do something like that?
- [reporter] How do you feel?
- I feel great.
Happiest guy in the world.
- [reporter] Any bitterness?
- A little bit. A little bit.
- [reporter 2] What kind of bitterness?
- I think it could have been avoided.
You know, 16 years in prison,
you know, and he got nothing for it.
So I think that
with all that on top of it,
I would blame the state of Massachusetts.
I always remember,
my mother said to me,
just a couple of days before she died,
she said,
"Don't worry about it," she said,
"because as long as
you didn't do anything,
you got nothing to worry about."
She believed that if you were innocent,
you got nothing to worry about.
But she was wrong.
You know, she believed
that what's right is right,
but it doesn't always work that way.
In terms of the thieves, there've been
different names raised over the years.
Also David Turner's name came up.
[Sikellis] Around March 18th of 1990,
David Turner
he had gone dark on us
for a few days around that time.
We didn't know where he was.
I know a Weymouth detective
called his house, I believe,
and his girlfriend answered
and she said he took a trip to Florida.
There was no cell phones at that time,
so we couldn't call his cell,
so we dunno if he was beside her.
[Kurkjian] There is paperwork filed.
That paperwork shows
that he had rented a house in Florida.
February, March area.
I find credit card receipts.
Receipts that he's bought
hundreds of dollars' worth of equipment
from something called
the Spy Shop in Miami.
I also see a receipt
that's dated March 20th, 1990.
And it's at a auto rental place
in Fort Lauderdale,
and it looks to be he's returning the car
that he had rented for a month down there.
But on the receipt,
there is another license number.
So in my mind, there is a possibility
that David had given his credit card
to somebody else
to give him an alibi
that on March 20th,
two days after the theft,
he was down there in Florida.
The FBI didn't find anything
that looked like
association or involvement
with the Gardner Museum case,
except one surveillance report.
[tense music playing]
[Kurkjian]
One surveillance report of David Turner
David opens up the trunk of his car
and takes out what appears to be
a Ming vase.
["I Need Money" by Marky Mark
and The Funky Bunch playing]
[Sikellis]
Who are you gonna get to do this?
Someone you know you can trust.
Local made folks
who know their way around Boston
and are cocky enough
to pull something like this off.
Where the paintings go within minutes
of them walking out of there,
then it gets into
more sophisticated hands.
All this, you're trying to put together,
painting a picture,
and the key is usually informants
in these kinds of things.
Someone or some group of people
gotta start talking to you.
[man on tape] The date is 11/27/98.
This is Special Agent David T. Nadolski.
The time is 5:35 a.m.
The purpose of this tape
is a consensual voice recording
between Anthony Romano
and Carmello Merlino
to take place in Dorchester,
Massachusetts.
[intricate string music playing]