“Rockwell was one of the few creatures in American popular culture in the fifties who actually encouraged disobedience, willful disagreeableness and a tendency to break rules. I don’t know if we’d have had a lot of the sixties without the sort of benign permission of Rockwell’s images. There’s a wonderful painting of a girl with a black eye sitting outside the principal’s office, having gotten in a fight and obviously won. It’s not hard to imagine her a few years later burning her bra.”
After the September 11 attacks, as patriotism soared, so did Rockwell’s stock. He was one of America’s best-known artists, and a frightened nation found comfort in his well-known idealistic, nationalistic images. As part of a “United We Stand” campaign, advertisements of updated Rockwell images appeared in the
One of the three stolen Rockwell paintings became especially symbolic during that tumultuous post-terror time.
Painted for the Boy Scouts and Brown & Bigelow,
After the September 11 attacks, many good cases, complicated investigations with years of work invested, fell by the wayside. Understandably, the recovery of stolen property, let alone stolen art, became a very low priority for the FBI in the fall of 2001. Like almost every agent on my squad and others, I was assigned to check out the hundreds of dubious and frantic calls, reports of terrorists, anthrax, the Taliban, and Middle Eastern-looking men lurking and plotting in Philadelphia neighborhoods. I did the job quietly and diligently, waiting for the right time to raise the Rockwell case.
My prosecutor partner, Hall, faced different priorities and a looming deadline. He received orders to report to his Navy unit by mid-December and to expect a yearlong deployment. Hall told me that if we didn’t fly to Brazil by early December, he wouldn’t get to go at all. In late October, he approached his immediate supervisors carefully. Though they’d approved the trip before 9/11, they’d never liked it. They were control freaks who thought the best ideas came from management, from the top down, not from the people doing the actual work. His supervisors also didn’t see how Hall could justify a five-thousand-mile flight to solve a case that wouldn’t conclude with an arrest. In their view, a prosecutor put criminals in prison; he didn’t travel the globe, rescuing stolen cultural property. So when Hall broached the subject again in October, Hall’s supervisors, citing new priorities since 9/11, said no. A trip to Rio was out of the question.
Hall called me in a fury. He was thinking about going over his supervisors’ heads.
I was equally angry and told him to go for it. I added, “If you don’t go to Brazil, Dave, I don’t go.” He was my partner. I had his back. Hall, Goldman, and I believed we were working together to change the long-held law- enforcement mentality that art crime isn’t a priority. To accomplish this, we needed each other.
Hall set up a private meeting with the new U.S. attorney’s top deputy, the true brains of the office. Hall gave a five-minute pitch, then pulled out a color print of
HALL AND I arrived in Rio early on a Monday that first week in December, and rested up on Ipanema. We unpacked, uncoiled, and enjoyed feasting on two of the best steaks of our lives.
The next day, the FBI agent who worked at the U.S. embassy in Brasilia, Gary Zaugg, met us in Rio. He drove us to meet the local prosecutors. The Brazilians were pleasant but not optimistic that we would be able to charge Carneiro. We freely acknowledged that we had an ancient case, thin evidence, and that our best witness, Lindberg in Minneapolis, was uncooperative. The prosecutors made clear that extradition was next to impossible. In Brazil, they explained, flight is considered as natural a right as freedom of speech. There’s no crime in Brazil for resisting arrest or fleeing prosecution.
Worse, the prosecutors said, no one seemed to know if Carneiro still held the paintings. The local police had already searched his home and business, and come up empty. Our weak hand grew even weaker.
On Wednesday, we returned to the prosecutor’s office to meet the man we’d waited so long to question.
Jose Carneiro was a short, wide man of fifty, with a broad face and thinning black hair that clumped by his ears. He owned an art gallery, a private school, and was the author of books on art and poetry. He greeted us warmly in English and with a hearty baritone. He came alone, showing great confidence.
The Brazilian prosecutors went first. They reminded Carneiro he was under investigation for failure to pay the national property tax for the purchase of the Rockwells. This was a minor crime, a mere financial nuisance, and Carneiro knew it. He shrugged.
Hall tried next, opening with a prosecutor’s traditional tack, threatening prison to get what he wants. “You’re in a lot of trouble,” he told Carneiro. “The evidence is strong. You’ve admitted you have stolen American property. This is a serious crime in the United States. If we charge you, we’ll extradite you, fly you back in handcuffs, put you in an American prison. You’ll be there a long time.”
Carneiro responded with a throaty laugh. At worst, he knew, a U.S. extradition request would limit him to travel inside Brazil, a country nearly as large as the continental United States. Carneiro swept an open palm arm toward a window and its majestic vista of Rio. “I can’t leave Brazil? Welcome to my beautiful prison!”
Hall sat back, done. He had firm constraints. As an assistant U.S. attorney, he needed to tread carefully. Department of Justice guidelines limited what he could say, even in a foreign country. He represented the U.S. government, and any offers or promises he made could be binding—and he was under strict orders to offer no more than a promise not to prosecute.
On the other hand, as an FBI agent I could say anything, promise anything. My promises were worthless, but Carneiro didn’t know that. I could lie, twist facts, make threats—do almost anything except beat a suspect to get the job done. I put on my salesman’s hat.
I opened by trying to even the playing field, framing the issue as a geopolitical dilemma, not a potential crime. “Jose, let’s see if we can fix this, maybe make it all go away. Let’s try to find a way to do that. We get what we want, you don’t get in any trouble, and the prosecutors here get what they want. We all look good, everybody’s happy. What do you say?”
“I like it when everybody is happy,” he said.
It was a start. “Why make it worse, Jose?” I said. “Why pay more taxes? What are you going to do with these paintings? What good are they to you? Are you a Norman Rockwell lover to the point that you want to have these on your walls forever and leave a problem for your children and everybody else? Because you know you can’t move them outside of Brazil. And let’s be honest, these paintings are far more valuable in the United States than anywhere else. You’d get twice the price for them in the U.S. than here, but that’s the one place you can’t sell them. What good are they to you, Jose? Why are you holding these pieces hostage against America?”
Carneiro raised a finger. “Oh, Bob. I love America! We’re good friends. I love United States. I go to buy art all the time.”
“Great, wonderful,” I said, leaning forward but keeping my voice friendly. “But I’ll tell you what, Jose. If you don’t do this for us, maybe we can’t do anything to you here, but I guarantee you I’ll put you on a list where they’ll never let you inside the United States again.” It was a bluff. In December 2001, the terrorist watch lists didn’t yet exist. “You say you love the United States, but you’re holding our art hostage. Norman Rockwell is the quintessential American artist. In my country, everyone knows his work. You’re holding one of the patron saints of American art hostage. And you think you’re going to make friends doing that?”
Carneiro didn’t appear moved by my appeal, but he didn’t reject me either. “Let me think about it,” he said.
