“Look, I understand you want to do it up there, at the consulate,” I said. “But here’s the deaclass="underline" My authenticator, he’s an old guy. Not in such good heath. Doesn’t like to travel. So I think you’re going to have to bring the backflap down here.”
Garcia didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Then he said, “You have the money?”
Bingo. He was hooked. I said, “We’ve got the money, we got the money. One point six mil. What’s your fax number? I’ll send you a bank statement.”
Garcia gave me the number, and I asked him how he wanted the $1.6 million. I wanted him thinking about the money, not about where he could meet me or whether he could trust me. He asked for $665,000 cash and $935,000 in wire transfers to bank accounts in Miami, Peru, Panama, and Venezuela.
I jotted down names and numbers.
“Got it—see you tomorrow.” With the sale closed, I got off the line as quickly as possible, before he could think of anything else.
I called Goldman and filled him in: I would meet Garcia and Mendez at the same Turnpike rest stop at noon, then we’d drive to Philadelphia to meet the Gold Man.
THIS TIME, GARCIA and Mendez arrived even earlier—11:24 a.m., according to the surveillance team—and in style, inside a dark green Lincoln Continental with diplomatic tags, a third man behind the wheel. They backed into a spot, positioning the trunk only a few yards from the picnic tables. Mendez and the third man, a strapping, gray-haired gentleman in a dark suit, grabbed a table and scanned the crisp October sky. Garcia walked over to the Burger King and returned with two coffees.
At 11:54 a.m., I pulled into a nearby parking space with my undercover partner, Anibal Molina.
Garcia greeted me warmly. “Bob!”
“Hey Denis, how’re you doing, buddy?”
The third man stepped in front of Garcia and handed me his card. “Frank Iglesias, Consul General de Panama, New York.” He was a bear of a man—six-one and at least 230 pounds—but he used the buttery voice of a seasoned diplomat. “How nice to meet you,” he said.
We moved to the trunk and Mendez popped it. He opened a cheap black suitcase and pushed aside a pile of white T-shirts, revealing a large gold object ensconced in plastic bubble wrap—the backflap. Mendez reached into the suitcase, but I jumped in front of him. “Let me pull it out,” I said.
I lifted the backflap from the trunk and tried to contain my excitement as I considered its long journey—a Peruvian national treasure, buried for seventeen centuries, stolen by grave robbers and missing for a decade, now glistening in the New Jersey sun, rescued in part by a pair of unwitting Miami smugglers.
I beamed. “You really did it!” I said, my enthusiasm genuine. “Congratulations!” I laid the backflap back in the suitcase and bear-hugged Garcia. “I can’t believe it! You guys are pros.” I pumped Mendez’s hand. “This is fantastic. Fantastic!” I closed the trunk. “Let’s go see the Gold Man. I’ll drive slow so you can follow me.”
We piled into our cars and they followed us down the Turnpike, the start of an hour-long ride to western Philadelphia.
After we arrived in the parking lot of the Adam’s Mark Hotel, Iglesias popped the trunk and handed me the suitcase. “OK,” I said, walking toward the lobby, “let’s get this done.” As I crossed into the middle of the lot, reaching a spot where the bad guys had no place to hide, I gave the go-sign—I brushed my backside with my left hand. (The go-sign should always be something you rarely do, so you don’t give it by mistake.) Agents in raid jackets jumped out, guns drawn, shouting, “FBI! Let me see your hands! Down on your knees! FBI!” The agents pinned Mendez, Garcia, and Iglesias on the rough asphalt and cuffed their hands behind their backs. They led the Miamians away, but once they searched the diplomat, they un-cuffed him. Because of his diplomatic status, we had to let him go—for the time being. To prove Iglesias had been there, we shot a picture of him standing next to me. Ever the politician, the consul general managed an awkward smile.
At the FBI offices, we put Garcia and Mendez in separate interview rooms, each with one ankle shackled to a chain bolted to the floor. I brought in the prosecutor to see Garcia.
Goldman flashed his Justice Department ID, smiled, and said, “They call me the Gold Man.”
Garcia closed his eyes and shook his head.
THE AFTERMATH OF every art crime case has two parts: the routine judicial process in which the defendants hopefully go to prison—here Garcia and Mendez pleaded guilty and got nine months—and the public relations bonanza in which the press goes gaga over the rescue of the stolen art.
This always seemed to baffle supervisors who didn’t appreciate the public’s (and the media’s) love of art, history, and antiquities. To these supervisors, art crime seemed very distant from the FBI’s primary missions of catching bank robbers, kidnappers, and terrorists. Once, years earlier, after Bazin and I had recovered a painting stolen from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, we met with the brass to discuss our ideas for a big press conference. A supervisor laughed at our enthusiasm. “For this little painting?” he said. “You’ll never get anyone to come!” Oh, no, we explained, the painting is a replica of a five-dollar bill by the famous artist William Michael Harnett. It’s an important piece, we said; people will care. The supervisor just laughed louder. Thankfully, we had an ace in the room—Special Agent Linda Vizi, the spokeswoman for the Philadelphia division of the FBI and a friend who shared my interests in history and art. Vizi was tough and intellectual—she’d majored in classics in college, studying Latin, Greek, Russian, Spanish, Sanskrit, and hieroglyphics. She also understood the press in ways her supervisors did not. “I guarantee you,” Vizi told the supervisor, “the five-dollar-bill story will make the front page.” The next day, when journalists jammed the press conference, she ribbed the supervisor. An hour later, he stuck his head in Vizi’s office and announced with an odd sense of satisfaction, “Well, it looks like it won’t be on the front page after all. Waco is burning.” Indeed, the next day’s Inquirer front page was dominated by stories about arguably the worst moment in FBI history, the April 19, 1993, assault and subsequent inferno at the Branch Davidian compound that left eighty people dead. But at the bottom of page one, there also was a little story about a long-lost painting, rescued by the FBI.
From that day forward, Vizi and I worked together to make sure she had as much historical background as possible before we announced one of my cases. (As an undercover agent, I couldn’t appear in front of cameras. I always stood in the back of the room, well out of camera shot.) She kept the press conferences lively. Hardened journalists, weary of the FBI’s routine fare of violence, corruption, and bank robbery, seemed to perk up at the art crime press conferences. They were always on the prowl for something different, a legitimate good-news story, and art crime gave it to them.
The media reaction to the backflap case surpassed our expectations. Reporters fell in love with a story that offered easy comparison to Raiders of the Lost Ark—a case with an exotic location, grave robbers, a smuggled national treasure secreted into the United States in a diplomatic bag, the rescue of the seventeen-hundred-year-old relic at gunpoint. The story in the Inquirer was stripped across the front page. It began, “In a tale out of an Indiana Jones movie, the FBI has recovered an exquisite Peruvian antiquity.” The headline in the tabloid Philadelphia Daily News, stealing a line from the second Indy movie, blared, “That piece belongs in a museum!” The Associated Press version of the story was published in papers across North and South America. The president of Peru soon announced that Goldman and I would be awarded the Peruvian Order of Merit for Distinguished Service, a gold medallion with a blue ribbon, the country’s top honor for distinguished service to the arts. Goldman enjoyed the spotlight and I was glad to let him and others bask in it, deservedly so.