Five months later, the grand jury filed formal charges. While my FBI colleagues and supervisors appeared sympathetic, I figured my career was over. Worse, I agonized over Denis’s death. Why was I the one who survived? My driving error meant the death of my best friend. Now it threatened to tear away my job and my freedom. What would Donna and the kids do if I was sent to prison?
Facing a hard five-year sentence, I resolved to fight. I drew strength from the comforting familiar in my life—my family and my fledgling career, everything good I knew. Friends and colleagues were supportive, but a few urged me to consider a plea bargain. I couldn’t do it. As difficult as it was to accept that Denis died when my hands were on the wheel, my tortured heart told me he would want me to be forgiven—and his parents made it clear they didn’t hold me responsible, even urging authorities to drop the charges. But the prosecutor’s position was clear, so I hired a top-shelf criminal defense lawyer, Mike Pinsky, and he put his private investigators to work. Pinsky had a reputation for winning tough cases at trial. He was probably best known for winning not-guilty verdicts for a mobster accused of murder and a county clerk facing a bribery rap. Like me, Pinksy also had a reputation for being brutally frank. During our first meeting, we laid our cards on the table.
I asked him how he could represent mobsters, people he knew had done terrible things, including murder. How could he be so friendly with them?
Pinsky moved from behind his desk and took the chair beside me. He smiled.
“Bobby, let me tell you a little secret,” he said. “Appearances can be deceiving. It’s really all about perceptions, not friendships. These wiseguys call me all the time and say, ‘Mike, I got a parking ticket. Mike, I got a speeding ticket. Take care of it, will you?’ And I say, ‘Sure, no problem, I’ll take care of it.’ And you know what I do? I take the tickets and I pay them with my own money! Then later, much later, I bill them for it from some other case. They think I’ve got some sort of power and can fix their tickets. And I let them think that. It’s legal and it’s good for business.”
He leaned close.
“Bobby, I want to be clear about something in your case,” he said. “Before we proceed I want to make sure you understand exactly what’s at stake. If we go to trial, it may take years. It will certainly cost tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees and investigative expenses. There is no way to prepare for the strain this will put on your family, your marriage, and your job. And in the end, you could still lose and go to prison. You’re an FBI agent. You know that if you go to trial and are convicted, instead of pleading guilty at the beginning, the judge will give you a much longer sentence.”
I didn’t hesitate. “Mike, I’m innocent.”
Chapter 6
LEARNING TO SEE
Merion, Pennsylvania, 1991.
I PILOTED MY DINKY BUREAU PONTIAC SLOWLY DOWN North Latches Lane, a wide side street framed by graceful oak trees and gated stone mansions in the heart of Philadelphia’s upper-crust Main Line. I checked my hand-scrawled directions and followed North Latches until I arrived at a black wrought-iron gate with a discreet sign that said THE BARNES FOUNDATION. I pulled to the guardhouse and rolled down my passenger window.
The guard carried a clipboard. “Can I help you?”
“Hi. Bob Wittman. I’m here for the class.”
He checked his list and waved me in.
I was early and when I found a parking spot I sat in the car for a few moments. I gripped the steering wheel and exhaled. It was a crisp fall afternoon, almost two years after the accident, and I was still awaiting trial on the manslaughter charges. Pinsky wasn’t worried about delays, because it gave us time to get to the bottom of the screwy blood-alcohol test. Every few weeks, the lawyer would mail me a stack of documents related to the case—a pleading, a medical record, a private investigator’s witness interview. I’d quickly scan whatever Pinsky sent me, but I found it incredibly stressful to read investigative records about myself. It was even harder to read the cold, clinical medical assessments about Denis. Sometimes, I would open the long legal envelope from Pinsky, stack the papers on the kitchen table, and just stare at them.
Thank God I was working. The FBI, following an internal investigation, cleared me and put me back on the street. For a while, I worked with the drug squad. We seized cash, cocaine, and Corvettes, and locked up some pretty dangerous guys. I backed up undercover agents who risked their lives in hotel-room stings. I ducked gunfire from a couple of thugs during my first shoot-out. But drug cases weren’t for me. I doubted we were making a big difference. Most people I met on the streets sold drugs because they couldn’t make it any other way; they did it to survive. The way I saw it, drugs were a social problem, not a law-enforcement problem. I asked to return to the property theft squad, and soon I was working art crime again with Bazin. It was good to be back.
Within a few months, Bazin and I recovered a set of two-foot-high tomes by eighteenth-century British wildlife artist Mark Catesby, books of sketches worth $250,000 and as impressive as any by John James Audubon. Rescuing such beautiful books meant so much more to me than busting some sad sack in a crack house. Bazin told me that if I was serious about making art crime a career, I should consider taking a class at the Barnes, an appointment-only museum in the suburbs I knew only by its reputation as a treasure trove of Impressionist art. I said OK and Bazin set it up.
As I got out of my car and headed to my first class that afternoon, I didn’t know what to expect.
I made my way to the intimidating grand entrance—six marble steps, four Doric columns, and two large wooden doors framed by a remarkable wall of rust-colored Enfield ceramic tiles, each centered with a relief of a tribal mask and crocodile by the Akan peoples of the Ivory Coast and Ghana. As I would soon learn, every arrangement at the Barnes carried meaning. The entrance theme represented the debt modern Western art owes tribal Africa.
I stepped inside, signed in at the security desk, and stepped into the first gallery, an outrageous room jammed with a collection of masterpieces unrivaled by any one room in any gallery in Europe. On the wall in front of me, surrounding a thirty-foot window, hung three works with a combined worth of half a billion dollars. To the right was Picasso’s heroic Composition: The Peasants, a striking rendering of a man and a woman with flowers presented in deep hues of rust and persimmon, accented with a splash of carmine. To the left was Matisse’s Seated Riffian, a larger-than-life oil on canvas. It depicted a fierce-looking young man from the mountains of Morocco, his face rendered in bold Mediterranean hues. Rising above it all, reaching for the ceiling, was the Matisse masterpiece The Dance, a forty-six-foot-long mural with lithe figures in salmon, blue, and black, dancing joyously. I looked to my right and the room continued to overload my senses. The Card Players, a Cézanne in muted denim hues highlighted by the artist’s signature folds in the players’ overcoats, hung below Seurat’s much larger Models, which depicted demure nudes in a firework of color, the figures formed by millions of dots in the pointillist style.
A set of twelve folding chairs was arranged on a parquet floor in the center of the great room. Each student received writing paper, a pencil, and a copy of a thick book with a canary cover, The Art in Painting, by our benefactor, Dr. Albert C. Barnes. As we were warned in our letter of invitation, the museum doors were locked at precisely 2:25 p.m. The lecture began promptly at 2:30 p.m.