John Wilson knocks it out of the park, gets US Attorney Andrew Lelling to offer immunity for the Gardner Vermeer exclusively, the first definitive offer, Vermeer for Immunity. next stop immunity for any stolen Gardner artwork.
The taboo subject on the Gardner case is the reward, and also immunity, no one has dared to touch it, its the third rail, touch it and you loose all access to FBI Gardner Museum Amore etc, hence why mainstream media has complied thus far.
It leaves a gaping hole, open goal for a film maker who dares to cross the line
John Wilson is the first film maker to raise the issue of Immunity and extracted a firm deal offer from US Attorney Andrew lelling,"Gardner Museum Vermeer"4full immunity,
Control the "Gardner Museum Vermeer" & you run the table.
"Gardner Art Reward Price List" will unlock the lesser valued stolen Gardner artworks such as Degas drawings, Eagle finial, Bronze vase as test balloons for Rembrandts, Manet & Vermeer
US Attorney Andrew Lelling offered full immunity for the return of the Gardner Museum Vermeer. This is called Transactional Immunity with a provision that the witness not be required to testify against anyone involved in the Gardner case or subsequent handling of any Gardner art.
It’s now been thirty years since
two thieves dressed as police officers stole 13 artworks worth $500 million
from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on March 18, 1990 and we are still no
closer to solving this enduring mystery.
But there’s always a story within
the story and that is certainly the case with the Gardner heist which has more
layers than a Russian nesting doll.
The investigation gets curiouser
and curiouser with a cast of characters that appears to have jumped off the
screen from a Guy Ritchie film.
First, there's "Turbo"
Paul Hendry, a former art thief turned sleuth living in England who has been
following the case since it broke three decades ago when Vermeer’s “The
Concert” and Rembrandt’s “Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee” vanished
into thin air. Hendry is a popular voice in the Gardner Heist community, having
been featured in the 2005 documentary Stolen. He had a bone to pick with me when I gave celebrated Dutch art investigator
column. He's right... Turbo Paul came up with the original idea years ago. Nevertheless, he shared my article on social media He's been working this case like
a dog with a bone for years and has been a vocal critic of Anthony Amore, the
museum's longtime director of security.
This criticism reportedly prompted
an angry phone call from *******, . Hendry alleges that ******* threatened to “destroy” him if he
didn’t remove more than 30 tweets from his Twitter profile “Art Hostage”
criticizing Amore’s lack of results.
Is
the museum security director
using a proxy to crush any dissent of his investigation? I asked that
question to ****** himself by phone. He calls Hendry’s accusations
“ridiculous”. I also reached out to the museum for comment. “The
allegations
that the Gardner Museum or Mr. Amore are encouraging or condoning any
intimidation or pressure efforts by ***** toward the recipient are
categorically false," said Griff McNerney, Museum Communications
Manager.
The museum’s cocksure declaration was curious as no one at the institution ever
even asked to speak to the alleged victim in this case.
If this is the way the
investigation into the stolen artwork is being conducted also, it’s no wonder
they haven’t recovered anything in thirty years.
Is this the image the Gardner
Museum wishes to project to the world?
If thuggery and intimidation are
tactics being used to quash criticism of the Gardner investigation, museum
director Peggy Fogelman should step in and make changes immediately.
First, it’s time to fire security director
Anthony Amore who has been leading the museum’s investigation for the past 15
years. He’s never recovered a piece of stolen art in his life.
Imagine if Bill
Belichick had never won a playoff game in 15 years? He’d have been out of a job
a long time ago.
Instead of chasing leads, Amore
spends more time on social media on any given work day than Perez Hilton.
He’s also used his position to
launch a disastrous run for Massachusetts Secretary of State and has published
four books about stolen art including two coloring books. It seems that the
only person that has profited from the art heist, outside of the thieves, is
Anthony Amore.
Arthur Brand, dubbed “The Indiana
Jones of the Art World”, has taken to social media calling for Amore to “move
over” and let more seasoned investigators take the lead on recovering the
stolen art. Brand made headlines last year for finding and returning a $68
million Picasso that was stolen twenty years ago from a luxury yacht in the
French Riviera. Amore’s dismissed Brand, telling me during an online
conversation,
“We have no comment on some guy’s (bleeping) twitter.” This
institutional arrogance is one of the many reasons that not one stolen art work
has been recovered on Amore’s watch.
It’s like Inspector Clouseau thumbing
his nose at Hercule Poirot.
Is Anthony Amore the person we want
leading the charge to return 13 artworks to its rightful place here in Boston
as we mark the 30th anniversary of the notorious heist? I think not.
Casey Sherman is a New York Times
bestselling author of 11 books including the upcoming Hunting Whitey: The
Inside Story of the Capture and Killing of America's Most Wanted Mob Boss.
Follow him on Twitter @caseysherman123
The ‘Sociopath’ Scholar Who Made Films of His Crimes Tried to Confess to America’s Most Famous Art Heist
Out
of Rikers and facing a bank robbery charge in Providence, he’s trying
to complete his masterpiece of ‘autobiographical fiction’ that began
with buying a dime bag.
“Don’t spoil a good story by telling the truth.”—Isabella Gardner, founder of Boston’s Gardner Museum.
In February 2017, Joe Gibbons sat in a Greenwich Village restaurant and calmly confessed to a role in the largest art heist in American history.
Gibbons, a filmmaker and former MIT lecturer now in his mid-sixties—back in circulation after pleading guilty in 2014 to a Manhattan
bank robbery and spending a year in jail—had already confessed and
would soon be charged with another bank robbery, this one in Providence,
Rhode Island.
He
was sitting with a Pulitzer-winning journalist, Stephen Kurkjian, and a
novelist, Charles Pinning, both of whom had traveled from New England
and knocked on his door that afternoon. Their visit came weeks after an
assistant U.S. attorney in Massachusetts had called Gibbons’ lawyer to inquire about his possible involvement in the Isabella Gardner Museum heist.
In March of 1990, a security guard at the Boston museum let
in two thieves dressed as police officers who proceeded to steal $500
million worth of art, including works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Degas. The guard, who now lives in Vermont, was never charged and has long denied any involvement in the heist.
Twenty-seven
years later, Gibbons, chasing a morning’s worth of Jameson down with a
Kir Royal, was toasted—“well lubricated,” he calls it—and ready to
confess.
Soon
after midnight on the morning following St. Patrick’s Day, 1990,
Gibbons told his audience of two, he was at the Gardner Museum, to score
a dime-dag from a security guard there he’d bought from before.The
guard told him to walk with him into the closed museum’s
Blue Room with the promise of a dime bag, he said. There, several
masterpieces were spread across the floor. “I don’t know how to get them
out of the frames,” he says the security guard told him. He stomped on
Rembrandt’s Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee, the artist’s only known seascape.
“That’s not the way to do it!” Gibbons yelled.
The guard threw another piece of art on the floor, a Rembrandt sketch. “Do you want this one? Do you want this one?” he teased.
Gibbons
rejected the offer, he said, in part because he “wasn’t a big fan of
Rembrandt” but helped the guard pull off the caper. “I showed how you
could remove the backings of the paintings and take the canvases out.”
His
wife walked into the restaurant, and cut the interview short, not
wanting her husband’s name attached to still another crime even as he
faces possible jail time for the Providence robbery. So Gibbons wrapped
it up, saying that he’d run out of the museum with a dime bag and
without any of the paintings.
Still, he had confessed, before two writers to his role in the white whale of a crime that’s filled decades of newspaper columninches, TV-newsairtime and the pages of non-fictionbooks with speculation about who done it.
Asked
about his involvement with Gibbons, Kurkjian told me in July that “I’m
no longer working with him and have asked that he not associate me with
the reporting any longer.” Pinning refused comment. ***
But
what to make of the confession of a criminal and artist who’s dedicated
both careers to his “autobiographical fiction” propagating the myth of
Joe Gibbons, artist, filmmaker and self-alleged criminal mastermind?
Gibbons
began to cultivate that myth in Oakland, 1977. Then in his early
twenties, he moved to the Bay Area after attending Antioch College in
Ohio. He was welcomed into the art scene and began making films. He also
kickstarted his career as a petty criminal.
The
intersection of his two careers garnered press attention when
Gibbons—well-lubricated at the time—grabbed a painting off the wall of
the Oakland Museum during an opening party for artist Richard
Diebenkorn.
Gibbons shoved the painting beneath his
coat, and waltzed past hundreds of party guests and the museum’s
security. The police tracked him down, but rather than go quietly, he
seized the opportunity.
He was a member of a renegade
group of six artists called the “Art Liberation Front,” Gibbons claimed.
The Front had a manifesto, dreamt up by Gibbons: They were critical of
the arbitrary value placed on a piece of art—but they were also
publicity hungry.
“We’re inveterate opportunists,” Gibbons told the Berkeley Barb after the theft.
“Our philosophy is full of contradictions. It had nothing to do with
Diebenkorn—it was about museums in general. We saw the opportunity for
some publicity and we grabbed it.
“Basically we’re
creating meta-art, which is art about art,” he told the paper. “We are
whimsically critical of the art establishment as well as the art-critic
contingent, who view art solely in terms of its commodity function—its
exchange value versus its use value.”
By their logic,
the frame was the only piece of a painting that had any actual value.
Before the police caught up with him, The Front agreed they would return
the painting, but keep the frame hostage. One of their ransom demands,
the group told the Barb, was for the Oakland Museum to hold an exhibition with nothing but frames.
That
crime, which Gibbons unquestionably committed, might draw someone to
believe he could’ve somehow been involved in the famous Gardner Museum
heist. Beyond the obvious art-crime connection, there are the frames. On
that early March morning in 1990, the Gardner Museum thieves cut the
paintings out and left the frames—which still hang there, with nothing
in them.
Ben Feuerherd
I
first connected with Gibbons through a Facebook message this summer.
I’d seen a news alert about a bank robbery in downtown Manhattan, and
Gibbons, who I’d covered as a reporter, popped into my head. I messaged
him, hoping to find out how he’d adjusted after jail. When we met
Washington Square Park on a recent afternoon, he recounted the story of
the two writers who knocked on his door in February, and produced a
recording of his confession.
“It’s an old myth the
artist has to have experiences, which he can then use for his material,”
Gibbons told me between sips from a can of bubbly wine. His gray hair
was unkempt and long on the sides. He has few teeth left in his mouth.
“When
I was a teenager, I thought I was innocent and protected, my
upbringing,” he said. “I needed to really get dirty. Get my hands
dirty.”
In his films, Gibbons’ combined his dry wit and intellect with transgressive material.
“He
was always flirting with a certain amount of criminality. It was always
one of his subjects,” said noted film critic Jim Hoberman, who was one
of the first journalists to write about Gibbons’ work. “He was already
notorious for having stolen that painting” from the Oakland Museum.
Gibbons’
contemporaries in late 1970s and early 1980s in New York were creating
overtly sexual films in a trumped-up John Waters’ style, Hoberman said.
Gibbons,
on the other hand, was also exploring taboo subjects, but with wit and
nuance. “He was transgressive in a way that was much more interesting to
me,” Hoberman said. “His films were just much more interesting,
conceptually and visually. I was very supportive of them. I thought he
was doing something new.”
In his 1978 film, Spying,
for example, Gibbons secretly recorded his neighbors in San Francisco
as they sunbathed, gardened, kissed one another, and did other routine
tasks.
The film flirted with the taboo of voyeurism, but also commented on American daily life.
When
it was screened by the film society of Lincoln Center in 2012, they
published critiques of the film by Hoberman and filmmakers who knew
Gibbons’ work.
“It’s an aggressive film in its Rear
Window quality,” wrote artist Peggy Ahwesh, “but also a film that
exposes the pathos of a loner as he gazes on to the lives of others who
are active, have relationships, lovers, pets and manage to accomplish
the small tasks of daily life. Spying is the ultimate home movie.”
Away from the camera, Gibbons continued to find new material in his own criminality.
After
the Oakland Museum theft, Gibbons began stealing books at shops along
Telegraph Avenue near the University of Berkeley’s campus, in part to
pay for lawyer fees, he said. He would also steal champagne, his drink
of choice.
The book thefts were a clever scam, Gibbons
said. He would take an academic book from a shop and immediately flip it
at another store, sometimes for a several-hundred dollar payout.
He
went on to plead guilty in 1979 to a felony for stealing the Diebenkorn
painting, and was offered a deal to complete a drug-treatment program
in lieu of a prison sentence.
“The court gave me the opportunity of spending a year in a therapeutic community, or a year in Santa Rita jail,” he said.
Gibbons,
raised in Providence, moved back to the East Coast and entered the
McLean Psychiatric Hospital. When he completed the program in 1980, he
spent a short time in a New York City halfway house and reverted back to
his petty crimes, he said.
“The triggers were still
there. I immediately went back to stealing books,” he said. “I was, as I
say, conducting research, having experiences I could later distill into
art.”
After five months in New York, Gibbons moved to
Boston, where his avant-garde film career flourished as he made films
based on his actual experiences, conflated for effect. “I used the
circumstances that I found myself in as a base for fiction,” he said.
As he racked up parking tickets in Boston and in Rhode Island in the 1980s, his film A Fugitive in Paris opens with him jumping out of a window, running from the Boston Police after him because of them.
The film also goes on to explore another crime Gibbons had yet to commit at that point in his life: bank robbery.
His
work in this period would be shown in New York’s Museum of Modern Art
and the Whitney Biennial. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship and received a
range of praise and criticism from critics.
His most acclaimed work, Confessions of a Sociopath,
was released in 2001. It includes a number of old recordings, shot at
various points in Gibbons’ life, that show him appearing to break the
law in different ways. In one scene he shoots heroin; in another he
steals a book.
Gibbons earned the Guggenheim Fellowship
soon after the film was released and started the most stable job he ever
held: a lecturing position at MIT.
“I had ruled out teaching, but I’d gotten an MFA because the only way I could finish my film, The Genius was by getting a staffer’s loan,” he said.
He
would spend nearly a decade in the lecturing role in MIT’s Art,
Culture, and Technology program, but was forced to leave in 2010 because
he didn’t earn tenure.
“I would’ve liked to continue there,” he said. “Nine years is the limit for a not-tenured.”
Gibbons
returned to producing avant-garde films full time after he left MIT,
but struggled to achieve the same success he had earlier in his career.
In
November 2014, Gibbons walked into a Providence bank, stood in line,
passed the teller a robbery note and walked away with almost $3,000, he
said.
“I could just go in and stand in line. That’s what
allowed me to follow through with it,” he recounted. “So I went through
with it and it worked out as I imagined it.”
Gibbons’ fascination with crime was part of his motive, he said.
“Bank
robbery was something that always had a mystique that represented to me
the pinnacle of criminal achievement,” he said. “It sort’ve represented
an achievement because it’s sort of the opposite of the way I was
raised.”
After the Providence bank robbery, Gibbons
traveled to New York, where he says he stayed in budget hotels in
downtown Manhattan and drank heavily.
Weeks later, he was again out of money and options, he said.
“I
ran out of people I could ask for money. I had to leave the place I was
staying because either I couldn’t afford it or I wasn’t welcome there
anymore,” he said. “What would be more stressful? Going to the men’s
shelter at Bellevue or robbing a bank?”
He answered his
own question by walking into a bank in Manhattan’s Chinatown on the
afternoon of New Year’s Eve day 2014, standing in line before passing
the teller a note demanding cash. Another customer happened to walk up
to the counter at the same time and distracted the bank attendant. To
refocus the attendant’s attention, Gibbons lifted his hands onto the
counter and revealed a small video camera recording his heist, in which
he walked off with $1,002.
After he was arrested days
later, Gibbons told the NYPD he’d committed the Manhattan bank robbery,
and also the one he’s now charged with in Providence. He pleaded guilty
in the New York case in July 2015, and was sentenced to a year in jail
with credit for the six months he had already served.
When
Gibbons walked out of Rikers Island in September of 2015, he hoped he
was due for a big promotion in his entwined film and petty crime
careers.
His arrest had made a splash in the press after
the New York tabloids first reported the crime. The story would go on
to be covered in The New York Times, People magazine, and in an exhaustive Boston magazine profile. A documentary film crew even wanted to capture his post-incarceration life through their lens.
The myth of Joe Gibbons was growing again.
He
earned a new nickname in jail—Joey Banks—that’s now the greeting on his
cellphone voicemail. He’s identified himself as a “bank
robber/insurgent artist” on LinkedIn.
Maybe he could write a book. Or make a movie out of this.
But catch up with Gibbons today and he doesn’t seem like an artist poised to make a comeback.
Since
his release, he’s married Deb Meehan, also a filmmaker who currently
teaches at Pratt University and who he’s known for decades. There’s
visible friction between them, as she works to get him sober and keep
him out of jail, and he drinks, confesses to crimes, and recounts his
criminal past to reporters.
Gibbons was charged in the
Providence robbery in July, pleaded not guilty, and posted a $50,000
bond, a Rhode Island court spokesperson said.
He shares a
Greenwich Village apartment with Meehan, not far from a liquor depot
where he buys boxed and canned wine. He carried a tote bag to fill on a
recent afternoon trip to the store, and paid for the wine with what he
said was his wife’s credit card, instead of pocketing it like he
might’ve done years ago.
Even drunk and down on his
luck, he transitions seamlessly in conversation from tales of his bank
robberies to critiques of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.
And he still flirts with crime as material.
“I’m
just out and about, practicing my trade,” he said in a recent email,
attaching a photo of himself inside a Chase bank, holding up a deposit
slip. “Robbery—large bills only,” was scribbled on it.
He signed the email: “Joey Banks.”
But
drunk or sober, Gibbons’ eyes light up when he talks about the Gardner
Museum. Like the writers who sat with him in February, he saw
opportunity in his possible involvement in the famous heist. Not for
cutting a deal with the U.S. attorney for a reduced sentence in his
Providence bank-robbing case. Not for finally solving the decades-old
mystery. But for an autobiographical fiction film. For rekindling the
myth of Joe Gibbons.
“It was just better than gold,” he said, recounting his February confession.
Gibbons
took a trip to the Gardner Museum with his wife after the interview,
and playfully posed in front of the frame of the missing Rembrandt. His
lawyer later told him he has a “dangerous sense of play,” Gibbons said.
“I asked him if he knew someone looking for a Vermeer at cut-rate
prices.
“I would like to reconstruct it,” Gibbons said of
the heist. “I would re-enact it with the police uniforms. I don’t know
how far I could carry it.”
It wouldn’t be the first time Gibbons donned a police uniform for one of his films. In a scene from Confessions of a Sociopath, a camera pans up to reveal a mustachioed Gibbons in full police regalia.
In a sketch released by police after the Gardner heist, one of the suspects sports a similar mustache and look.
Think
about his criminal past, his films, his art theft, and an audience
might see Gibbons in that sketch. They might believe for a second he
could’ve been there, perhaps even with a video camera in hand, the night
$500 million of art vanished.
That’s exactly what he would want.
Netflix has a four-part series on the Gardner Art Heist slated for release later in 2020. Barnicle TV New York is the alleged TV Production company, now in post-production. The main story-line in the series reportedly follows an attempt in Ireland by Martin “The Viper” Foley, a former associate of gangster and notorious art thief Martin Cahill, to cut a deal with an Irish Republican named Tom “Slab” Murphy, said to have at one time been a Chief of Staff in the Provisional IRA.
Turbo Paul Hendry was working with Murphy on a similar deal decades ago, going so far as to meet with FBI special agent Mike Wilson at the American embassy in London, about getting the blessing of authorities in the U.S. to move forward on a recovery. But when FBI Agent Mike Wilson ran it up the flag pole with the FBI Boston field office, said to be responsible for the stolen Gardner art recovery effort, Hendry was told no deals. Two London based fixtures in the art recovery world, at least in the media, Charles Hill and Dick Ellis figure prominently in the Netflix series. Both were high ranking
detectives in Scotland Yard’s art squad who have worked in the world of stolen art recovery as private investigators for decades. The two are not partners, however, and have not always seen eye-to-eye on important matters related to a recovery. Hill, for instance has stated his belief that one person now controls the art and dismissed Ellis’ contention that control of the art was spread out among many parties as “speculation.” Some familiar faces to U.S. audiences in the world of art recovery in general and the Gardner Heist in particular are not slated to appear in the series.
Robert Wittman, the founder of the FBI’s art crime team, and author of Priceless about his work recovering stolen art working undercover is not interviewed for the series.
Neither is Arthur Brand, who has been involved with the recovery effort of Gardner art in Ireland, the past few years, and whose criticisms of the Gardner museum’s efforts made headlines in Boston last year. Reportedly Brand, as well as Turbo Paul Hendry, another critic of the Gardner heist investigation, were blackballed by Hill and Ellis along with the Gardner Museum security director Anthony Amore, all of whom refused to participate if Brand and Hendry were included in the Netflix four-part series. Amore, who has steadfastly insisted for over a decade that there is absolutely no evidence that the paintings are in Ireland, is under contract to write a book, which was due for release to coincide with the 30 yrs Gardner Heist anniversary, delayed now until the Fall, about Rose Dugdale, a volunteer member of the Provisional I.R.A. who stole nineteen old masterworks by Gainsborough, Rubens, Vermeer and Goya from Russborough House in County Wicklow Ireland in 1974. But aside from media spectacles like five hour lunches with a convicted(later got off on a tech) double Child Murderer, Myles Connor, who Amore insists is “the greatest art thief in history,” encourages Myles Connor, in his role as an actual participant in the art recovery effort and not just an unofficial surrogate for the FBI’s latest spin. We all think we know how this series ends, but we can all hope for a surprise and happy ending.
Spoiler Alert: Not a single stolen Gardner artwork has been recovered, not one, zero, zitch, so like many before them, the Netflix four-part series on the Gardner Art Heist is a story without an ending, without the vital "Pay-off" for the viewer.
It’s now been thirty years since
two thieves dressed as police officers stole 13 artworks worth $500 million
from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on March 18, 1990 and we are still no
closer to solving this enduring mystery.
But there’s always a story within
the story and that is certainly the case with the Gardner heist which has more
layers than a Russian nesting doll.
The investigation gets curiouser
and curiouser with a cast of characters that appears to have jumped off the
screen from a Guy Ritchie film.
First, there's "Turbo"
Paul Hendry, a former art thief turned sleuth living in England who has been
following the case since it broke three decades ago when Vermeer’s “The
Concert” and Rembrandt’s “Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee” vanished
into thin air. Hendry is a popular voice in the Gardner Heist community, having
been featured in the 2005 documentary Stolen. He had a bone to pick with me when I gave celebrated Dutch art investigator
column. He's right... Turbo Paul came up with the original idea years ago. Nevertheless, he shared my article on social media He's been working this case like
a dog with a bone for years and has been a vocal critic of Anthony Amore, the
museum's longtime director of security.
This criticism reportedly prompted
an angry phone call from *******, . Hendry alleges that ******* threatened to “destroy” him if he
didn’t remove more than 30 tweets from his Twitter profile “Art Hostage”
criticizing Amore’s lack of results.
Is the museum security director
using a proxy to crush any dissent of his investigation? I asked that question to ****** himself by phone. He calls Hendry’s accusations
“ridiculous”. I also reached out to the museum for comment. “The allegations
that the Gardner Museum or Mr. Amore are encouraging or condoning any
intimidation or pressure efforts by ***** toward the recipient are
categorically false," said Griff McNerney, Museum Communications Manager.
The museum’s cocksure declaration was curious as no one at the institution ever
even asked to speak to the alleged victim in this case.
If this is the way the
investigation into the stolen artwork is being conducted also, it’s no wonder
they haven’t recovered anything in thirty years.
Is this the image the Gardner
Museum wishes to project to the world?
If thuggery and intimidation are
tactics being used to quash criticism of the Gardner investigation, museum
director Peggy Fogelman should step in and make changes immediately.
First, it’s time to fire security director
Anthony Amore who has been leading the museum’s investigation for the past 15
years. He’s never recovered a piece of stolen art in his life.
Imagine if Bill
Belichick had never won a playoff game in 15 years? He’d have been out of a job
a long time ago.
Instead of chasing leads, Amore
spends more time on social media on any given work day than Perez Hilton.
He’s also used his position to
launch a disastrous run for Massachusetts Secretary of State and has published
four books about stolen art including two coloring books. It seems that the
only person that has profited from the art heist, outside of the thieves, is
Anthony Amore.
Arthur Brand, dubbed “The Indiana
Jones of the Art World”, has taken to social media calling for Amore to “move
over” and let more seasoned investigators take the lead on recovering the
stolen art. Brand made headlines last year for finding and returning a $68
million Picasso that was stolen twenty years ago from a luxury yacht in the
French Riviera. Amore’s dismissed Brand, telling me during an online
conversation,
“We have no comment on some guy’s (bleeping) twitter.” This
institutional arrogance is one of the many reasons that not one stolen art work
has been recovered on Amore’s watch.
It’s like Inspector Clouseau thumbing
his nose at Hercule Poirot.
Is Anthony Amore the person we want
leading the charge to return 13 artworks to its rightful place here in Boston
as we mark the 30th anniversary of the notorious heist? I think not.
Casey Sherman is a New York Times
bestselling author of 11 books including the upcoming Hunting Whitey: The
Inside Story of the Capture and Killing of America's Most Wanted Mob Boss.
Follow him on Twitter @caseysherman123
