01x03 - We've Seen It

[bunniefuu]

[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 expl*si*n]

- [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.

[g*nshots]

What are we talking about this sh*t 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 k*ll 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 sh**ting

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 k*lling 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 k*ll the family underboss.

There's murders on both sides.

It's violent.

[g*nshots]

[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 k*ller.

- 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 g*ng

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 g*ng

would not be able to survive,

would not be able to win the g*ng w*r

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 m*rder.

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 k*lling, 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 m*rder.

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 g*ng.

Guarente was a family relative

of the Rosetti's,

and it was the Rosetti g*ng

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 m*rder,

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 m*rder.

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 c*ck 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]