“So, this has created a problem because of the Boston case,” Pierre said. “Your friends Fred and the others at FBI, they ask us to wait. To not take the paintings right now. You understand why?”
“Yeah, I do.” The moment Andre and his fellow officers completed their sting in the Picasso case, making arrests, the thieves would know that someone involved was actually an informant or an undercover cop. Suspicion would likely turn to Andre and perhaps to his American partner, Bob, the man whose bona fides Sunny and Laurenz had used to convince the thieves to work with Andre in the first place. If that happened, it might ruin any chance of using Laurenz and Sunny to recover the Gardner paintings.
I also understood Pierre’s dilemma. He couldn’t let $66 million worth of Picassos slip away. If word got out that he had failed to recover the artwork as a favor to the FBI, it would create a scandal and probably scuttle his career.
So I offered Pierre a suggestion: When you make the bust, pretend to arrest your undercover police officer. That way the thieves won’t know who betrayed them. At a minimum, it will buy us time.
Pierre liked the idea. “You are a good chess player,” he said, and promised to make it happen.
Incredibly, Pierre’s orders were not carried out during the Paris sting—the French SWAT team failed to arrest their undercover officer with the thieves. Worse, during an interrogation, another French policeman confirmed to one of the thieves that the buyer was in fact an undercover agent. It didn’t take long for the thieves in Paris to make the link from Andre to Laurenz and to me.
Pierre called and apologized profusely for the screwup. It wasn’t intentional, he said, and I believed him.
Unfortunately, the consequences were immediate and severe.
LAURENZ CALLED IN a panic a few days after the Picasso sting.
“They want to kill me! They want you! You and me! They want to assassinate us both!”
I told him to calm down and start from the beginning. Associates of the Picasso thieves were in Miami with Sunny, he said, demanding answers from Laurenz and money for the thieves’ legal bills.
“I was at the Blockbuster,” Laurenz sputtered. “You know I go every Tuesday for the new releases? They follow me there and they want to put me in the car and take me away. I told you these guys don’t fuck around.”
“How’d you get away?”
“I saw them from inside the Blockbuster and have my wife call 911 and when the police come I go out to talk to them.”
“Smart. Where are you now?”
“A hotel. The Loews. They take my dogs here.” Laurenz loved his two mutts, took them everywhere. He began bragging about the size and cost of his suite, and I let him prattle on. I needed time to think.
I wanted to know more about the goons threatening Laurenz. For one thing, they might lead me to the missing Gardner paintings. For another, they were threatening my life. But I had to find a way of stepping in that would be plausible to Laurenz and remain in character for Bob Clay. Here I held an advantage: Laurenz didn’t know that I knew he had floated my name as Andre’s partner to the Picasso thieves. As far as I ought to know, the French thieves had never heard of me.
So I said, “Laurenz, back up a second—you said they want to kill me, too. Why would they want to kill me? All I did was look at e-mails you sent me. I was never in this deal.”
Laurenz fell into the trap, and blamed Sunny. “Sunny said to them that you are a partner with Andre, and that we can trust Andre because we trust you. So now they want to know where you live. They want assassinate you because you are responsible for their friend being in jail.”
I exploded. “What the—? Why would Sunny say that? Never mind! Who do these guys think they are? I want to meet them! You set it up!”
Laurenz called back the next day. We’d meet the two Frenchmen at the bar at a luxury hotel in Hollywood, Florida. In three days.
THE OP PLAN for the hotel meet was a compromise, hashed out by committee. As one FBI employee later handwrote across the coversheet of his after-action report, it looked like “a total clusterfuck.”
Given the circumstances, I was officially brought back on to the case, but Fred made it clear the move was only temporary. He insisted that I use the meeting to introduce his undercover agent from Boston into the mix. The agent who would replace me was named Sean, and he often played a Boston mobster. I was instructed to vouch for Sean, to explain that he was taking over for me on the Gardner deal. I doubted it would work. Sean was a nice guy, but he didn’t know anything about international art deals. Besides, the Picasso case had already spooked the Frenchmen—this was the point of the meeting. It seemed like the worst possible time to get them to start dealing with a complete stranger.
“What if these guys refuse to deal with Sean?” I asked. “What if they insist on working with me? What do we say then?”
“We tell them to take their business elsewhere,” Sean replied.
I laughed. “Seriously? What about leaning on them? Take control of the situation? Maybe make a veiled threat?”
“No threats, not me,” Sean said. “This special agent is not going to be on tape threatening anybody.”
Sean was more worried about covering his ass than protecting mine. I didn’t waste effort arguing with him.
Before I left to meet Laurenz in the lobby, I stuffed a handgun in each pocket. It was the first time in my nineteen-year career I’d carried a weapon while working undercover. But this situation felt different, and I’d already been threatened. The people I planned to meet weren’t looking to sell me a priceless piece of art; they wanted to know why they shouldn’t kill me.
As I stashed the guns, Fred shot me a look. I said to Fred, “If these guys start to fuck with me, I’m going to kill them.”
“Please,” Fred said. “Don’t shoot anybody.”
“I don’t want to shoot anybody—never have—but these guys have already told Laurenz that they want to kill me.”
That got Sean’s attention. “Are these guys that dangerous?”
“Yeah, they’re that dangerous,” I said. “Listen, Laurenz told me a story about one of these guys. He has a thing for knives. The guy cut himself the first time he met Laurenz to show how tough he was. Sliced his arm and sat there, letting it bleed, real menacing-like, blood dripping down. And he says to Laurenz, ‘I don’t have any problem with pain. This is what real life is all about.’ So yeah, Sean. A guy like that? I take him seriously.”
SEAN AND I met Laurenz in the lobby.
Before we entered the bar, Laurenz described the two would-be assassins waiting with Sunny for us. He called them Vanilla and Chocolate. Vanilla was the white one—long, stringy dark hair and a crooked nose. Chocolate was black, bald, and wore silver braces across his teeth. He was the one with the knife fetish and was built like a linebacker.
We met them at the bar and the six of us took seats around a corner table—Laurenz, Sean, and me on one side, Sunny, Vanilla, and Chocolate on the other.
Vanilla and Chocolate were large, but they were not stupid. They treaded carefully, treating me with feigned respect. If I was who I claimed to be—a shady art broker with access to millionaire clients—the Frenchmen knew I could make them a great deal of money. It would be foolish to insult me before they got to know me. If, on the other hand, they concluded that I was a snitch or a cop, they could deal with me later.