“Yes,” he said, and I realized he didn’t know there was a difference. In a way, his ignorance led credence to his offer. He was just passing on names he’d been given. If he’d been playing me, he would have done enough homework to know the difference.
“These paintings are good,” Sunny said. His English was poor, but I could understand most of what he said. It was certainly better than my French. “The paintings were stolen many years ago.”
“From where?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “A museum in the U.S., I think. We have them and so for ten million they are yours. You can do that? Ten million?”
“Yeah, of course—if your paintings are real, if you’ve got a Vermeer and a Rembrandt. Look, Sunny, my buyer’s gonna want proof. Do you have pictures you can send me? Proof of life?”
“I will see what I can do.”
THE CASE INCHED through the summer.
At FBI offices in Washington, Miami, Boston, Philadelphia, and Paris, agents and supervisors expressed cautious optimism, exchanging e-mails and hosting conference calls. The French police fed us more information on Sunny and Laurenz, confirming their links to underworld art brokers. Authorities on both sides of the Atlantic arranged for wiretaps. I kept in touch with Laurenz by phone. He said Sunny was moving forward on the deal, slowly. I urged Laurenz to push him.
By early fall, we were moving toward an undercover buy in France. Eric Ives, the Major Theft Unit chief at Headquarters, began to arrange for a group of FBI agents to travel to Paris in mid-October for our first formal meeting with the French.
One morning after Labor Day, Eric called to chat.
“What do you think?” he said.
“What do I think about what, Eric?”
“Sunny, Laurenz, Boston.”
“I think it’s on,” I said. “That’s what I think.”
IN THE FIRST week in October 2006, on the eve of our first big FBI-French police meeting in Paris, I flew down to Miami to see Laurenz and Sunny.
We met in the late afternoon at Laurenz’s favorite haunt, a Thai-Japanese joint just off the 79th Street Causeway. Laurenz and Sunny were already there, phones on the table, batteries out.
I sat down and removed my phone battery. “Ça va? Good to see you, Sunny.”
“Ça va, Bob.”
I slapped Laurenz on the back and gave him a big wink. “Nice work, buddy. We’re going to celebrate tonight, right?”
Laurenz beamed. “Absolutely. Already doing it.” He pointed to the bowl of green tea ice cream, topped with whipped cream, Laurenz’s idea of a celebration. He held up a glass of water in toast. “To the next deal!”
I said, “Amen, mon ami.”
Sunny cocked his head, confused—reacting just as we had hoped. The “deal” we were celebrating was a complete fabrication, one that Laurenz and I concocted the night before. It was part of our play, designed to impress Sunny.
Laurenz leaned close to Sunny and whispered rapidly in French. He explained that he and I had just completed an $8 million deal for a stolen Raphael. We’d each cleared $500,000, he said. Laurenz was a pretty good liar. Sunny nodded, duly impressed.
The fake deal was all part of an expanding wilderness of mirrors: I was playing Laurenz, and Laurenz thought that he and I were playing Sunny. I’m sure Laurenz had his own angles thought out. And Sunny? Who knew what really went through his mind?
Laurenz and I continued to banter about the fake Raphael deal until Sunny finally broke in, taking the bait. “All right,” Sunny said. “The paintings in Europe—we are ready. It can only be the three of us. We must work together to not get caught.”
“Of course,” I said.
“Yes, yes,” Laurenz said impatiently.
“Just the three of us,” Sunny repeated. “We’ll go to the south of France and…” He launched into a convoluted scenario for the exchange, one that included a series of rotating hotel rooms—the money in one room, the paintings in another, a human life as collateral in a third. With Sunny’s accent, I couldn’t understand every word, but it didn’t matter. We could clarify everything later. I just wanted to get things moving.
Sunny was quite clear on one point. “When you see the paintings, you will know that they are real. But once you see them, you must buy them. So let me say again that you must be serious about having the money. You see the paintings, you must buy them.”
“I want to buy them,” I said. “Vermeer and Rembrandt?”
“Yes, yes, we have,” Sunny said. “The important point is not the money or the painting, but that we are all happy, all safe. Nobody wants trouble. Very important, from here on out, nobody gets involved in this except us.”
Sunny grabbed a napkin and took out a pen.
“Now,” he said, and he drew a triangle and scribbled a letter in each corner—S, L, and B. “This is Sunny, this is Laurenz, this is Bob. We are in this together. We cannot let anyone else in the triangle. This is all it can be, ever. This way, if anything goes wrong, we’ll know it’s one of us who betrayed.”
Chapter 22
ALLIES AND ENEMIES
Paris. October 2006.
THE TROUBLE BEGAN A WEEK LATER, JUST MINUTES into our first formal Gardner case meeting with the French police.
An FBI supervisor from Boston—I will call him Fred—began with an impolitic demand. “Since we’ll be going along on the surveillances, we’re going to need to be armed.”
Fred spoke louder than necessary, clumsily enunciating every syllable. Just to be sure the French understood, he cocked his thumb and index finger in the shape of a gun. “So we need to take care of that, right off the bat.”
Fred liked to be in charge and because of the FBI’s sacrosanct protocols he was considered the lead supervisor on the Gardner case—back in 1990, the heist had been assigned to the Boston FBI’s bank robbery/violent crime squad, and Fred now led that unit. He’d been an FBI agent for seventeen years, but his expertise was SWAT and chasing bank robbers, not investigating art crime or running international undercover investigations. This was his first trip to a foreign country. It didn’t seem to occur to him that we were guests on someone else’s turf.
“We’re here to get our paintings back,” Fred said severely, as if puffing up his resolve would help get the job done. “The people who have our paintings will be armed. So will we.”
It was such an outrageous thing to say that everyone else in the room—the six French police officials, six other FBI agents, and an American prosecutor—simply ignored it. Fred had been watching too many movies. As I knew from my experiences in Brazil, Denmark, Spain, and other nations, most countries don’t allow foreign police officers to carry weapons.
One of the FBI agents stationed at the embassy politely cut Fred off, directing the conversation back to the matter at hand, our joint American-French sting operation.
This first major meeting raised the stakes on both sides. The French police had gotten into the spirit and hosted the meeting at the new Musée du Quai Branly, which showcased artifacts crafted by the indigenous peoples of Asia, Australia, the Americas, Africa, and the Polynesian region. It was one of the most interesting and confounding museums I’d ever visited—designed with a jungle theme, a thicket of trees and grass on the outside, dark passageways and dimly lit displays on the inside. It was easy to lose one’s bearings.
The Gendarmerie lieutenant colonel chairing the meeting was Pierre Tabel, the chief of the national art crime squad. Andre, the undercover French police officer who’d provided me the initial tip, had spoken highly of Pierre, describing him as a rising star in the Gendarmerie, savvy with keen political instincts, a future general. The art crime job Pierre held was a sensitive one because the unit often became involved in international cases and investigations in which the victim was a celebrity, wealthy, or politically connected. Pierre understood that these cases sometimes called for discretion, or off-the-book methods in which the supervising magistrates agreed to look the other way.