Our target was a wealthy Brazilian art dealer who claimed that he’d purchased the paintings in Rio in the 1990s and therefore legally owned them under Brazilian law. The dealer was said to be politically connected and shrewd. Hall and I had spent two years working through diplomatic and legal channels to arrange a meeting with him, and that meeting was now set for Wednesday, in two days’ time.
We weren’t sure what to expect, largely because the United States and Brazil had recently ratified their first mutual legal-assistance treaty and our case would mark the inaugural joint criminal investigation between the two nations. There were a lot of uncertainties. We still didn’t know, for instance, if we would be allowed to directly question the Brazilian art dealer, and if so, whether he would be compelled to answer. In many countries, American prosecutors and FBI agents must put questions in writing or submit them to local magistrates for approval. I had also heard that it was not uncommon for witnesses in foreign countries to invoke the local equivalent of the Fifth Amendment and refuse to cooperate with American inquiries. If that happened here, we’d be screwed, and probably would be met with scorn by colleagues when we returned to Philadelphia tan but empty-handed.
I didn’t know how the week would play out, but I was quickly settling in for a good challenge, an away game with mysterious rules. I enjoyed the uncertainty of it all.
Hall was a seasoned advocate and a fun traveling companion, a friend. He and Goldman were the two prosecutors in Philadelphia who shared art crime cases—the three of us met at least once a week for lunch to strategize. Goldman had been busy with a drug trial and so Hall had drawn the Rockwell case. A bald, soft-spoken Yale grad of subtle intellect, Hall was also a commander in the Navy Reserves and held a black belt in karate. By nature and military and legal training, Hall needed rules of engagement and a clear strategy. He liked to enter a mission well armed, with a plan.
I turned to him as he fiddled with his coconut. “Stop worrying,” I said. “This is going to be fun.” I surveyed the beach scene again, my confidence building. “What we’ll have to do is treat this like a UC case, except we won’t be working undercover. We find out what the guy wants and see if we can give it to him. React to whatever he throws at us. Whatever we need to get it done, we’ll do. It’ll be great.”
THE ROCKWELL PAINTINGS were stolen on February 16, 1978, only hours after they were feted as the new star attractions at a Minneapolis gallery.
The party, at a gallery called Elayne’s in an affluent Twin Cities suburb, was well attended, despite the single-digit temperatures and a half foot of frozen snow on the ground. The owners, Elyane and Russell Lindberg and their daughter Bonnie, mingled with more than a hundred guests, sipping champagne and munching white sheet cake. Dozens of paintings for sale lined the walls, but the star attractions were a Renoir seascape and seven Norman Rockwell originals. The Lindbergs owned two of the Rockwells, a matching pair called Before the Date/Cowboy and Before the Date/Cowgirl. The two pieces were among the last of the artist’s works to grace the cover of the Saturday Evening Post. The five other Rockwell paintings were on loan, four of them from Brown & Bigelow, the Minnesota calendar company that had printed the Boy Scout calendars illustrated by the artist for more than a half a century.
The police report on the crime was sketchy: The party wound down around 10 p.m. The Lindbergs cleaned up, carefully activating the alarm and locking up. Then, at 12:50 a.m., a Pinkerton security guard making rounds discovered the back door to the gallery open, the deadbolt punched out, the phone and electrical lines severed. The distraught Lindbergs and police hustled to the crime scene to find the seven Rockwells and the Renoir gone. The invisible thieves left behind two clues: a pair of garbage bags and a size-ten footprint in the snow. Not much to go on.
The early days of the investigation were rich with mostly useless tips, with the public flooding Minneapolis police and FBI agents with leads. The primary focus fell on three unidentified white men said to have been acting oddly during a visit to the gallery on the day of the crime. The scruffy-looking trio hadn’t looked like art aficionados—at least, not your typical Norman Rockwell fans—and Russ Lindberg said he’d heard them argue in whispers over the value of the Renoir and Rockwell paintings. As the men left in a dirty white 1972 Chevy Impala hours before the reception, the suspicious gallery owner jotted down their license plate number. The FBI and police put out an all-points bulletin on the car. In a Teletype to headquarters a week later, an FBI agent reported little progress. “Whereabouts of current owner of vehicle negative to date, as it has been sold three times in the past month…. Investigation negative for any possible information.”
The FBI kept at it. Special agents from FBI divisions in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Chicago, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, and Detroit worked dozens of leads. They scoured prison phone records at Folsom State Prison in California, tracked a gang of burglars from New York City making their way west through northern states, and interrogated a Chicago-area burglar with a passion for stealing valuable postage stamps.
Over the next twenty years, the Rockwell heist drew intrigue, excitement, and dead ends. The Lindberg family fielded repeated calls from people who claimed to have the paintings. In the late 1970s, an undercover FBI agent and Elayne Lindberg flew to Miami to meet a Cuban art dealer who falsely claimed to know a Japanese diplomat willing to sell a few of the stolen paintings. In the 1980s, a Detroit man engaged in months of negotiations with prosecutors and FBI agents, then suddenly vanished. At one point, a Minneapolis man caused a few hours of hysteria and hope when he called Russell Lindberg, claiming he’d found one of the paintings. But when Lindberg showed up, he realized the man was a fool. What the man believed to be a Rockwell original was nothing more than a $10 canvas print.
By the late 1980s, agents in the FBI office in Minneapolis wanted to forget the case and move on. Insurance companies compensated the three owners for their losses—the Lindbergs, for Cowboy and Cowgirl, a Minneapolis family for Lickin’ Good Bath, and Brown & Bigelow for The Spirit of ’76, She’s My Baby, Hasty Retreat, and So Much Concern.
Although ownership of the stolen paintings officially passed to the insurance companies at settlement, Bonnie Lindberg continued to pursue all of the Rockwells, conducting her own investigation. She publicly criticized the FBI for dropping the case, and the bureau remained stoically silent. Lindberg spent a decade chasing leads that probably came from con men. Her efforts cost tens of thousands of dollars and earned her nothing but frustration.
But in late 1994, curators at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, received a curious letter from a man who identified himself as Jose Maria Carneiro, a Brazilian art dealer based in Rio. Carneiro offered to sell The Spirit of ’76 and So Much Concern, for “a fair price.” The curators declined, but they passed the letter to Lindberg.
The FBI in Minneapolis also received a copy of the letter, but the Rockwell case had long been closed.
THE CASE WAS so old that I didn’t even know it had existed when I got a call in January 1999 about suspicious Rockwells for sale in Philadelphia.
George Turak, an honest broker and a longtime source, told me that a Brazilian man had hired him to sell two Rockwell paintings on consignment, She’s My Baby and Lickin’ Good Bath. Turak said his research showed the paintings were stolen from Minneapolis in 1978. I confirmed this with a simple Internet search followed by a call to the Minneapolis FBI office, and an agent there briefed me on the heist. He also told me about the five remaining missing paintings. Intrigued, I went to Turak’s gallery and seized the two paintings.