“What do
“He is a joke,” Laurenz said. “And I think he might be a cop.”
“What do you mean?”
“He is no wiseguy. This I know.”
“Why do say that?”
“He is a pussycat. He say, ‘Oh, you don’t deal with me, I walk away.’ Oh, I am so scared. A real wiseguy, he look you in the eye and say very quietly, very calmly, ‘Fuck me? Fuck you. You tell me why I should not kill you today. Tell me now or you are dead before the day is over. Thank you. Good-bye.’ This is what the real wiseguy say.”
“Well—”
Laurenz floored the Rolls, rocketing away from the valet stand. “This guy Sean, he use green American Express card to pay the bill! A real wiseguy doesn’t use a credit card. He uses cash. Always, always! And he never takes a receipt! Never! Never!”
I didn’t know what to say. He was right.
Laurenz turned toward the causeway and downtown Miami.
After a few moments, he said, “I drop you at your hotel and then maybe I not see you again. Because if we had not done the deal on the boat, I would be thinking for sure you are a cop. But now”—Laurenz took his eyes off the road for a moment and squinted at me—“I don’t know if you are a cop and I don’t care. I am in fucking bad shape, OK? We are through.”
Laurenz stepped on the accelerator and cranked the radio.
He was out.
WITH LAURENZ GONE, the Boston FBI office shut down Operation Masterpiece.
Wonderful, I thought. Bureaucracies and turf fighting on both sides of the Atlantic had destroyed the best chance in a decade to rescue the Gardner paintings. We’d also blown an opportunity to infiltrate a major art crime ring in France, a loose network of mobsters holding as many as seventy stolen masterpieces.
Our failure convinced me that the FBI was no longer the can-do force it was when I’d joined in 1988. The bureau was becoming a risk-averse bureaucracy like any other government agency, filled with mediocrity and people more concerned about their career than the mission.
The Art Crime Team, launched with such promise, seemed headed for that fate too, roiled by constant turnover. We’d not only lost Eric Ives as unit chief, but our best prosecutor as well, Bob Goldman. Petty and insecure bosses in Philadelphia had given my best friend an ultimatum: Drop art crime and return to garden-variety drug and bank robbery cases or find another job. Goldman had called their bluff and quit, abruptly ending a twenty- four-year career in law enforcement. Perhaps worse, half of the original street agents assigned to the Art Crime Team had now moved on, looking to advance their careers. It was disheartening.
As I began my final twelve months as an FBI agent in the fall of 2007, I planned to finish up a few lingering cases, train an undercover replacement, and start thinking about my retirement party. I’d travel with Donna, visit my sons in college, attend my daughter’s high school recitals.
Then one afternoon that fall, my undercover cell phone buzzed.
It was Sunny.
Chapter 25
ENDGAME
FOUR MONTHS AFTER SUNNY’S PHONE CALL, I FOUND myself in a frayed Barcelona hotel room, negotiating with his boss, Patrick.
Six of us crammed around a flimsy table and two single beds. Patrick and I sat on opposite sides of the table by an open window. Sunny and an undercover Spanish police officer perched on the edge of one bed. My muscle, the two FBI agents from Miami, still posing as Colombian drug dealers, lounged on the other bed.
A hidden camera in the ceiling fan recorded everything. A Spanish SWAT team waited next door.
Patrick, a lithe and cocksure Frenchman of Armenian descent, perhaps six foot three, sat a foot from my face, chain-smoking Marlboro reds. He was sixty years old, with close-cropped gray hair and a day’s white stubble on his chin. He kept his brown eyes locked on mine, patient and as focused as a sniper. His words came deliberately and in short sentences.
“We are older men, you and I,” Patrick said in French. “Money is nice, but liberty is very important.”
I’d hoped to bring along a French-speaking undercover FBI agent to translate, but the bureau hadn’t been able to find anyone qualified. So the Spanish officer did the job. He moved from French to English and English to French with speed and gusto, but also with an unsettling lisp and effeminate voice that belied the tense negotiation. I could imagine the macho FBI agents watching on video in the next room, snickering at the incongruity.
I said, “I don’t want to go to jail either.”
“Yes, we know what is important.”
“So,” I said, hoping to get a confession on tape, “tell me about the robbery.”
Patrick was only happy to.
I ALWAYS TELL rookies that you’ve got to run down every lead. You never know which one will pan out.
Sometimes long shots pay off.
When Laurenz had dropped out of the deal, the agents at the Boston FBI office had thrown up their hands and closed the file. But the Miami division had not given up on Sunny; its agents opened a new investigation, Operation Masterpiece II, and lured Sunny back with the promise of a large cocaine deal. Soon, Sunny was calling me again to talk art.
At first, we spoke of the Vermeer and Rembrandt. But he also began to offer a second set of paintings—four works, including a Monet and a Sisley—stolen the previous summer from a museum in Nice. The two sets of paintings were held by different sets of gangsters, Sunny said.
I made it clear that I wanted the Boston paintings, not the Nice paintings. Sunny said I had to buy the Nice paintings first. It was a way to build trust, he said.
With the window to the Gardner paintings cracked open again, I had agreed and Sunny had set up the meeting in Barcelona to negotiate a price for the Nice paintings. I found it curious that Sunny chose Spain as a meeting spot—we knew from the wiretaps that the Vermeer was likely held in Spain.
I also figured we couldn’t lose. If Sunny was merely stringing me along about the Gardner paintings, we’d still recover the Nice paintings and help my friend Pierre solve a big art heist. On the other hand, if a deal for the Nice paintings led to a Gardner deal, we’d hit a grand slam.
Still, I approached the Spain meeting with extreme caution. I’d recently learned that a few weeks after our Florida hotel confrontation, Sunny had pulled an FBI informant aside and offered him $65,000 to have Laurenz killed.
IN THE BARCELONA hotel room, I let Patrick spool out the details of his big Nice museum heist. He was proud of his work.
Patrick explained that he had picked a Sunday in August, the slowest visitor day of the week during the slowest month of the year. He’d chosen the apricot-and-cream-colored Musee des Beaux-Arts because it is set off the beaten tourist track, perched on a hill in a residential neighborhood. I knew that the Musee des Beaux-Arts shared something in common with the Gardner and the Barnes—it was the inspiration and former residence of a single patron of the arts, a nineteenth-century Ukrainian princess. The museum still held important works, though its once grand vista of the city’s Bay of Angels was now obscured by a forest of bland apartment buildings.
Patrick described his four accomplices as two close friends and two nobodies, gypsies. The five of them dressed in blue city maintenance jumpsuits and shielded their faces with either bandanas or motorcycle helmets.
