so tearful on camera, had already visited New York auction houses, where she’d been told the
The February 1999 news series concluded with a flourish—flashing images of
“So the question remains. What will it take to bring the Rockwells back to their rightful owners?… Carneiro knows that possession is nine-tenths of ownership, and he has that pretty much locked away in Brazil—Rockwell, our Boy Scouts and our flag.”
ON THE MORNING of September 11, 2001, I was at my desk by eight thirty, flipping through a file of Rockwell correspondence from the FBI agent at the U.S. embassy in Brazil.
It was eighteen months after the KARE 11 broadcast. By then, we had endured more than a year of the kind of diplomatic and bureaucratic delays that threaten every international case, and our Rockwell investigation was entering a new phase. With a new U.S.-Brazil mutual legal assistance treaty in place, the Brazilians had finally approved our request to question Carneiro. Hall and I were making last-minute preparations for a trip to Rio in late September or early October.
A few minutes before nine o’clock, a colleague hustled into the squad room, breathless. “Anyone got a television?”
I plugged in my four-inch black-and-white portable and aimed the antenna at a window. Crowded around the tiny screen, seven of us squinted at the burning World Trade Center, and saw the second plane hit the second tower. Within the hour, a supervisor was ordering us to go home, pack enough clothes to last three days, and stand by for orders.
Donna met me at the door. “How long will you be gone?”
“They say three days, but…”
By the next morning, I was on my way to Ground Zero.
I CALLED HALL as I sped up the New Jersey Turnpike, red lights flashing. We knew the Rockwell case would have to wait. Each of us expected to be busy for a while performing our secondary, or “collateral,” jobs. He was a commander in the Navy Reserves, assigned to an intelligence unit that specialized in terrorism, and he was guessing he’d be called up soon.
My collateral duty was working with FBI colleagues in times of the greatest mental stress. I was coordinator of the FBI Employee Assistance Program in the Philadelphia division, responsible for the psychological well-being of more than five hundred employees and their families.
It was solitary, sensitive, and confidential work, a job I had volunteered for following my acquittal at the Camden courthouse in the mid-1990s. I tried to help anyone struggling in our office—whether with drugs, alcohol, cheating spouses, difficult bosses, or serious medical problems. Colleagues came to me and unloaded horrific stories—about children or spouses killed, arrested, or dying of some dreadful disease. I did a lot of listening. I wasn’t a shrink and didn’t pretend to be. My primary credential was empathy. I knew what it was like to face trauma, the death of a good friend, and the stresses of a years-long fight to avoid prison. Hopefully, if nothing else, I stood as an example of perseverance. I could look a desperate person in the eye and honestly say, “Stay strong. The worst thing you can do when you go through a traumatic experience is to lose your faith that you will survive. Have no doubts: It’s painful, and that’s normal. You will get through this. Whatever you do, do not give up.”
I didn’t enjoy reliving my own trauma, and I never publicly discussed the accident. But I volunteered to become the bureau’s EAP counselor in Philadelphia because I thought it was the best way I could give back to an agency that had refused to give up on me.
Although the work was fulfilling, there was a dark side I hadn’t considered—experiencing firsthand the shock that victims’ families suffer. When an agent died, the FBI often sent me to notify the family. At funerals, I was tasked to discreetly escort elderly and young family members. When the Washington, D.C., sniper killed a Philadelphia man, I had to physically restrain a child who erupted in fury when I arrived at his doorstep to deliver the sad news. After jobs like those, I started to see in the victims’ families the specter of Donna and our kids.
Witnessing so much death and heartbreak posed psychological risks for an undercover agent. Working undercover is a mental game and you can’t let yourself become distracted by fear or emotion. For many years, I volunteered for a program called C.O.P.S. Kids, part of Concerns of Police Survivors, and its participation in National Police Week in Washington, which culminates with a wreath-laying ceremony for fallen officers. One year, as the ceremony wound down, I saw a nineteen-year-old son in a wheelchair and his mother struggling up a hill toward the Washington Monument. I strolled over to help and we began chatting. The young man was a paraplegic, an accident victim. His older brother and father, both police officers, had died in the line of duty in one year. As we moved up the hill, the son suddenly grabbed my arm and began screaming and crying. “Never get hurt! Promise me you’ll never get hurt.” I held it together until the drive home. By the time I crossed the Maryland-Delaware state line, I started shaking and crying. I never returned to National Police Week. I couldn’t take it anymore. When I worked undercover, I couldn’t afford to have scenes like that floating in my head.
I arrived at Ground Zero late on the afternoon of September 12.
The FBI had sent me to counsel firefighters, police officers, agents, paramedics, soldiers—anyone who needed it. But when I first arrived, everyone was still busy pulling at the rubble, digging for survivors. So I joined the rescue. I stood in a bucket line, one hundred people long, passing dirt and debris from corners of the World Trade Center foundation.
Eight days later, when the rescue mission officially became a recovery effort and the FBI sent me home, I returned to suburbia. Within hours, I found myself on the soccer field, coaching Kristin and her fourth-grade girls’ team, the Green Hornets. I was wearing a new set of clothes, but I could still smell Ground Zero.
I remained in Philadelphia but did not leave 9/11 behind. Every few days for the next year, my FBI colleagues in New York sent me the effects of local victims found at Ground Zero—credit cards, wallets, jewelry, cell phones, driver’s licenses, anything that could be identified. As EAP coordinator, it was my job to return them to the next of kin.
NORMAN ROCKWELL, DEAD for twenty-three years, already was making a comeback when the terrorists struck.
The long-held sentiment by “serious” critics—that Rockwell was a mere illustrator, who painted nostalgic caricatures of an innocent, largely bygone America—began shifting in the late 1990s. In 1999, a retrospective of his work, seventy paintings from 1916 to 1969, began a three-year tour to heavy crowds and uncharacteristically rave reviews.
“I think you can put it down to trendy revisionism and opportunism,”
That stereotype was based on Rockwell’s earlier work for
The revisionist view that culminated with the 1999 retrospective was that Rockwell was misunderstood, both by critics and fans who wrongly presumed he represented all values conservative. Looking deeper, it turned out that Rockwell was a sly progressive. In an essay that accompanied the 1999 national tour, art critic Dave Hickey argued that Rockwell’s art in the fifties helped inspire the social revolutions that followed. He invoked one of the stolen paintings,
