Anthony Amore
One of a number of famous stolen
Rembrandts
A year or so ago, I received an
uncharacteristically quick response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
request I had filed with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It seemed that my application for all FBI
records pertaining to Raymond L.S. Patriarca would be granted, and rather soon,
because another organization had filed the same request and the information was
readily available. Since I was happy to
receive the files in the form of a compact disk, I would have my information
within weeks.
When the disk came, I could
hardly wait to read its contents. The size of the data was huge, consisting of
thousand of pages of scanned FBI documents about the man who ran organized
crime in New England from a small, understated business office on Federal Hill,
just a block away from the corner of Federal and Albro Streets where my father
grew up and where I once played with my brother on my grandmother’s front
stoop.
As I started to read the
documents, I was taken aback by how much was redacted. The Bureau is careful not to release the
names of people who are still alive or to divulge information that remains
pertinent to criminal investigations. It
seemed like every other sentence contained a blocked-out name. How could this
many people from the 1950s and ‘60s still be within this mortal coil? Could the
water in Providence be that good?
I wasn’t quite sure what I hoped
to find in the files. I certainly wanted to learn more about organized crime,
and Patriarca’s reign was so long and so impressive that anyone interested in
true crime, as am I, would undoubtedly be mesmerized by the Bureau’s
files. As an investigator and writer,
the Patriarca FOIA files represent a veritable anthology of mafia activity in
New England from the 1950s through the early 1980s. But when I started to dig in, I became
disheartened by the volume and put off a comprehensive review.
The Patriarca Papers feature has
been a godsend, doing the heavy lifting for me by culling out the important
topics by heading and thereby creating a helpful index. I found myself on this
site more often than my own FBI-produced CD.
And one day, a particular heading jumped out at me: PAGE 49: Looking for
a half a million Rembrandt.
I’ve been looking for a
Rembrandt--actually, three stolen Rembrandts taken from the Isabella Stewart
Gardner Museum in Boston--for more than a decade. I also wrote a book about
Rembrandt thefts and had never heard of a Raymond Patriarca nexus. I read the
FBI document and found that an unidentified individual had asked him if he knew
“the thief from Boston who has the Rembrandt worth a half a million dollars. He
stated that he has a guy who is willing to pay fifty to seventy-five thousand
dollars for it. Raymond told him no, but he will try to find out who he is.”
The conversation took place in
July of 1962, so it had nothing to do with the three I seek--those were taken
in 1990. Still, I was curious: what Rembrandt was it, and where is it now?
My first step was obvious. Myles
Connor is the world’s greatest art thief and a notorious criminal in the Boston
area during the relevant period (and for many years thereafter). He certainly
sounded like the perfect suspect. So I
checked his autobiography, The Art of the Heist. Within, he tells of all of his criminal
exploits. But there’s not a whiff of a 1962 Rembrandt to be found. In fact, he
doesn’t mention a Rembrandt heist until he swiped a magnificent work from the
Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1975. I don’t believe he’d have left out a
theft from more than fifty years ago.
My next suspect was Florian “Al”
Monday. Al was the mastermind of a Rembrandt theft in Worcester in 1972. Though
he wasn’t thought of as a Boston thief, he was from Rhode Island and had ties
to the Patriarca organization at the relevant time. I went over the voluminous notes I had kept
from my interviews of Monday over the years and, again, there’s no mention of a
stolen Rembrandt ten years prior to his biggest crime.
Still curious, I pored over old
newspapers and found some Rembrandt heists from the period. There were
masterpieces taken in Berlin and Holland, among others. But not only were they
not in the half-million dollar range, they had all been recovered. In the
United States, a painting believed to be a Rembrandt titled Tobias and His Wife
was stolen in San Francisco, but that was only worth about $9,000.
So, I’m left perplexed. It’s one
thing to know a painting is stolen. It’s an entirely other thing to know an
unknown painting is stolen.
I began to wonder if maybe the
mysterious man who approached Patriarca knew only one great artist’s name and
referred to a stolen painting as a “Rembrandt” because he had never heard of,
say, Frans Hals or Gerard Dou. In other words, a valuable painting equals
“Rembrandt.” Or, as a colleague posited, perhaps there wasn’t really a painting
available. Maybe it was just the criminal echo-chamber at work.
I should probably just
dismiss it as meaningless chatter. As
far as I can see, it didn’t come up again. But I’m not the sort who can just
forget about a stolen masterpiece. So, as is the case with so many missing
paintings, the search continues