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
How the Gardner Museum’s security head befriended ‘the greatest art thief that ever lived’
Can Anthony Amore and Myles Connor’s unlikely bond help crack the greatest unsolved art heist in history?
By Kelly Horan Globe Correspondent,Updated March 14, 2020, 6:09 p.m.
The Gardner Museum's
head of security, Anthony Amore (left) and art thief Myles Connor
shared lunch recently at La Scala restaurant in Randolph.John Tlumacki/Globe Staff
Anthony Amore is not having it.
“Who in the world forgets they were involved in a Rembrandt theft?” he asks. “Who forgets that?”
This isn’t an interrogation, although Amore is directing his question to an art thief. This is lunch between good friends.
The
head of security at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and Myles
Connor, a man Amore calls “the greatest art thief that ever lived,” have
only just been seated, and already the conversation has turned to art
crime. How could it not? Connor, 77, began stealing from museums before
Amore was born.
By
1975, when Amore was an 8-year-old Yankees fan growing up in
Providence, Connor was already such an accomplished thief that he
committed one heist — the broad daylight theft of an oval Rembrandt oil
painting from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston — to use as a bargaining
chip for a reduced sentence in connection with another, earlier theft
from the Woolworth Estate in Monmouth, Maine (which included five Wyeth
paintings: two by N.C., three by Andrew).
Connor’s
rap sheet dates back to 1966. He had evaded capture for robbing the
Forbes House Museum, in his hometown of Milton, until a shootout with
police on a Marlborough Street rooftop left him nearly dead from four
gunshot wounds. Connor shot and almost killed a State Police officer in
the run-up to that melee, earning an attempted murder charge on top of
the one for art theft. He served six years — his first prison term — at
MCI-Walpole.
His
memory isn’t great these days, but Connor remembers that particular
episode with sparkling clarity: the news trucks broadcasting live from
the street below, the Boston Fire Department captain whose intervention
on the rooftop he says saved his life.
But
this Rembrandt business that Amore is talking about? Connor honestly
can’t recall. That’s because the Rembrandt in question is yet another,
this one taken from a private home in Cohasset during the summer of
1975. It so happens that Connor, following the MFA heist earlier that
spring, was living on the lam that summer. In Cohasset.
“You were involved in that,” Amore says.
“I
was?” Connor asks, letting loose a laugh so mighty it shakes his entire
body, as well as the table. Flatware jumps. Ice cubes clink in water
goblets.
Connor has no memory of it, but he is tickled to think so.
With friends like these
In
the annals of confounding bromances — think of the Old West lawman
Wyatt Earp’s deep friendship with the gun-slinging outlaw Doc Holliday —
the genuine affection between Anthony Amore and Myles Connor has to be
right up there.
The
men’s chosen vocations would seem to rule out an easy bonhomie. Amore
leads the investigation into the world’s greatest unsolved art heist, a
mystery entering its 30th year with the heist’s March 18 anniversary.
The
broad strokes of that dead-of-night crime are by now well known: Two
men wearing glue-on mustaches and police uniforms bluffed their way into
the old Palace Road entrance of the Gardner Museum, handcuffed the two
on-duty security guards to pipes in the basement, and vanished with 13
works of art into the predawn dark after St. Patrick’s Day.
Their
haul included three works by Rembrandt and Vermeer’s “The Concert.”
Today, the stolen works’ value is estimated to exceed, collectively, $1
billion. In the three decades since the heist, there has not been a
single arrest, not one piece of the lost art recovered.
If
the Gardner case is both a bane and what drives Amore, his friend
Connor says the whole thing was his idea. “I had intended to be involved
in the theft, but I got nailed by the feds.”
“I had intended to be involved in the theft," says art thief Myles Connor, "but I got nailed by the feds.”John Tlumacki/Globe Staff
When
the thieves hit the Gardner Museum, Connor was locked up in a federal
prison in Chicago. Some time later, he was transferred to a facility in
Lompoc, Calif. A visitor there told Connor that he and an accomplice had
robbed the Gardner to get him out of prison. That man was the late
David Houghton. He told Connor that his accomplice in the Gardner heist
was Bobby Donati (like Houghton, Donati died the year after the heist in
1991). It was Donati, Connor says, who helped him rob the Woolworth
Estate, in 1973.
Connor
also says that he and Donati cased the Gardner Museum together, in
1975. The pair pointed out would-be souvenirs. For Donati, the bronze
eagle finial perched atop a Napoleonic regimental banner. For Connor, a
Shang Dynasty ritual bronze vessel, or Gu, from the 12th century, B.C.
Both items were among the pieces stolen. Connor believes the Gu was
taken for him, and he’s pretty certain that Donati ended up with that
finial.
“The
only real reason that I know that they did it,” Connor says, “was
because David Houghton came all the way from Logan to Lompoc,
California, and told me.”
Amore
doesn’t confirm or deny that Donati and Houghton were involved in the
Gardner heist. But he does buy Connor’s account. “I believe Myles that
David Houghton visited him in Lompoc federal prison and told him that he
and Bobby Donati had committed the heist to get him out of jail. I 100
percent believe Myles that that happened.”
Amore adds, “I do believe that Myles is the inspiration for the Gardner theft.”
Knuckleheads
Amore,
53, is tall, soft-spoken, and dresses in tidy civilian camouflage: navy
blazer, pressed khakis, tie. His taciturn nature lends itself well to
the delicate balance he must strike between granting interviews to press
from all over the world and the imperative never to reveal more than he
can or wants to about the ongoing investigation. Amore can be
infuriatingly adept at scuttling a reporter’s efforts to probe.
Before
taking over the theft investigation, in 2005, Amore had been in only
one other art museum in his life. He says of his previous job, helping
rebuild security at Logan Airport after 9/11, “When your objective was
preventing terrorism, your goal was never to meet the people on the
other side. In this [work at the Gardner], you have to meet the people,
that is the only way to accomplish it.” And by people, Amore means, more
often than not, the so-called bad guys.
Growing
up in a modest Cape house sandwiched between two housing projects,
Amore says, he knew scofflaws to spare. Some were members of his own
family. “I grew up around those sorts of people. I’m comfortable
speaking to them.”
“My
inspiration for doing this work was talking to people who actually did
the crimes,” Amore continues. “The first most influential book I read
was ‘Mindhunter,’ by John Douglas. To stop serial killers, talk to
serial killers. That’s how I became friends with art thieves like Al
Monday and Myles Connor, and all these other knuckleheads.”
But
the knucklehead that Amore is genuinely fond of is Connor. “I liked him
from the minute I met him, in 2015,” Amore says. “When I sat down and
started asking him about the Gardner that first day, he told me
everything, and I told him some stuff he didn’t know that frankly
comported with some of his beliefs. And you could see his response to it
was visceral, that he wasn’t playing games with it. And I’ll go to my
grave believing that when he said, ‘I wish you’d get those paintings
back for [Gardner Museum director emeritus] Anne Hawley, she deserves to
have them back,’ he meant it.”
In
many ways, Connor could not be less like his law-abiding pal. He
unfurls his dress shirt to the third button and is wholly at ease
standing out in a crowd. The son of a Milton police sergeant and a
mother who was a Mayflower descendant, he remembers a rough-and-tumble
Irish paternal grandfather, and a more patrician maternal grandfather
who passed on to Connor a passion for Japanese weaponry and suits of
armor. Connor seems to have imbibed and combined both men’s influences.
An appreciation for art coursed through him from his earliest days.
Stealing it would come easy, especially when he felt that an institution
had been indifferent to him, to someone he loved, or to its collection.
Wound
tight as a toy snake in a can, Connor can be explosively uncontainable.
Over a meal with friends, when laughter overtakes him, it’s part of his
considerable charm. One can imagine that same unhinged energy producing
a more terrifying effect.
At
the old Al’s Spaghetti House in Nantasket Beach, where Connor’s band,
Myles Connor and the Wild Ones, drew sellout crowds in between his
prison stints in the 1960s, Connor was sometimes the target, and
sometimes the instigator, of some legendary dustups. His oldest and most
steadfast friend, Al Dotoli, towered over Connor then as now, and was
caught up in many of them.
Myles Connor's
oldest friend, concert producer Al Dotoli, smiled while reminiscing over
lunch. He regrets that he wasn’t able to keep his friend — who “could
play Chuck Berry like Chuck Berry” — on the stage. John Tlumacki/Globe Staff
“I
remember barroom brawls we used to get into,” Connor says. “All I used
to see was arms and legs. Al was like a big spider monkey nailing these
guys!” He’s hoarse with glee at the memory.
“As
opposed to him,” says Dotoli, who has joined Amore and Connor’s lunch,
“all I saw was a pile, and he was on the bottom of it!”
Dotoli
has spent a long career producing concerts for the likes of James
Cotton, the Rolling Stones, Grateful Dead, Dionne Warwick, and Frank
Sinatra. He regrets that he wasn’t able to keep his friend — who “could
play Chuck Berry like Chuck Berry” — on the stage. “I managed Myles
through his whole career. And it was always very difficult,” Dotoli
says, referring to Connor’s many arrests. “But the more he got in
trouble, the bigger he was a star. The fans loved it.”
The outlaw code
“The
things that matter to me,” Connor says, “are loyalty, ethics, believe
it or not, because it can be argued that I had none, but I do. It's like
the old outlaw code: You keep your word, don't backstab anyone, and try
not to hurt anybody that's innocent.”
But
not all of Connor’s exploits bore the cinematic shimmer of art theft.
“Myles and his coterie of friends do a lot to glamorize him,” says
Ulrich Boser, author of the book “The Gardner Heist.” “This is a
criminal.”
To
be fair, it’s not exactly hard to do. The once flame-haired rock star
is also a member of Mensa, the high IQ society. Upon his release — he
calls it “graduation” — from Walpole, in 1972, Connor says that his
near-perfect SAT scores had won him a spot in Harvard’s incoming class.
He chose opening for Roy Orbison and Sha Na Na over a more distant dream
of medical school.
But then, again and again, Connor chose crime.
“He
is unrepentant, in my opinion,” Boser says. “Look at what he has
actually done: shooting a police officer, knowing enough about a
gruesome [double] murder to lead police to [the women’s] grave. And
then, when I met him, he just told a number of stories that alone were
quite disturbing.”
What
of Connor’s friendship with Amore? “I do not believe that this
undermines Anthony’s work or his credibility,” Boser says. “Is Anthony
the best case, the best hope for bringing these paintings home? Yes. But
I would add an addendum. Someone somewhere knows where these are, and
that someone almost certainly has a connection to someone who has done
some unsavory things. It makes sense to me that Anthony is reaching out
and having conversations with people like that.”
No
one seems more aware of the optics of this friendship than Connor
himself. “Well, from my viewpoint, I’m very fortunate to have a friend
like Anthony, because of his position and situation, and my reputation,”
he says. “I’m aware that he must catch hell from people in his
profession that say, ‘What the hell are you hanging around with this guy
for?’ ”
Amore fields many
questions about his friendship with Connor. "You can't learn to be a
good art theft recovery person or a security person without speaking to
the experts in taking them," Amore says.John Tlumacki/Globe Staff
It’s
true. Amore does. And he’s considered this question, too. “Yeah, you
know, I do stop and say my whole life is about returning stolen art.
Much of Myles’s was taking it. But pragmatically, too, you can’t learn
to be a good art theft recovery person or a security person without
speaking to the experts in taking them.”
Outlaw
code or no, Amore and Connor share more than a fascination with stolen
art. They go to concerts together — Bruce Springsteen, Kevin Hart — and
they often share a meal. They speak by phone several times a week and
leave each other jokey voice mails. Just like friends do.
When
Connor underwent triple bypass surgery last November, Amore was a
frequent visitor at his bedside. He recalls that Connor had asked him to
bring two things: a book about samurai swords — Connor is an aficionado
and a collector — and soy sauce. Another visitor had brought Connor
sushi, his favorite. Owing to his open-heart surgery, however, she
skimped on the high-sodium condiment.
“He
said, ‘Yeah, can you bring me some Kikkoman soy sauce?’ ” Amore says.
“And I forget what holiday it was, but nothing was open. So I’m driving
around, and I see a 7-Eleven. Believe it or not, they had soy sauce, and
I bring it to him. I go, ‘Hey, look what I got. I brought you the soy
sauce!’ He goes, ‘This is La Choy. It’s not Kikkoman.’ He doesn’t want
it! And he’s like, ‘It doesn’t matter. I ate the sushi anyway.’ ”
When Amore tells this story, he has to raise his voice a little to be heard, because Connor has unleashed that laugh again.
Amore
pauses for a moment, and says, “God, I wish Myles was the thief. I
think to myself, I wish it had been him, because we’d have our stuff
back. You know, it’s just, the one place he didn’t rob is the one place
that hasn’t gotten its stuff back.”
But
surely Connor, who knew the men he says robbed the Gardner, must have
some insight into what they would have done with the art.
“I’m not sure,” Connor says. “I know Bobby had some connections in New York with organized crime.”
Connor
recalls a New York trip with Donati “to meet a guy.” The man in
question claimed to run a lucrative side hustle, Connor says, fencing
stolen art to wealthy buyers overseas.
“And
I said, ‘How do you get these paintings out of the country?’ And you
know, I’ve always known you can’t roll up an oil painting because you
damage it. But he claimed that he could, and he had a couple of big
empty cardboard rolls. And he said, ‘I’d just put them in these things,
and then send them to Europe.’
“You
have people with billions of dollars,” Connor continues. “They have 20
Rolls Royces, a couple lions, a couple hippos. It stands to reason that
they have their own art collections.”
Fanciful,
Amore says. But unlikely. Asked where he thinks the art is, Amore says,
“In typical art theft scenarios, we know that stolen art doesn’t travel
far. But then, nothing about the Gardner heist is typical, which is why
I will continue to investigate every single lead.”
Dotoli
adds a note of hope. “If the fat lady is going to sing at all on the
Gardner thing, these two will do it. There’s no other way it’s going to
happen. This will be the team.”
