I said, “I don’t want to go to jail either.”
“Yes, we know what is important.”
“So,” I said, hoping to get a confession on tape, “tell me about the robbery.”
Patrick was only happy to.
I ALWAYS TELL rookies that you’ve got to run down every lead. You never know which one will pan out.
Sometimes long shots pay off.
When Laurenz had dropped out of the deal, the agents at the Boston FBI office had thrown up their hands and closed the file. But the Miami division had not given up on Sunny; its agents opened a new investigation, Operation Masterpiece II, and lured Sunny back with the promise of a large cocaine deal. Soon, Sunny was calling me again to talk art.
At first, we spoke of the Vermeer and Rembrandt. But he also began to offer a second set of paintings—four works, including a Monet and a Sisley—stolen the previous summer from a museum in Nice. The two sets of paintings were held by different sets of gangsters, Sunny said.
I made it clear that I wanted the Boston paintings, not the Nice paintings. Sunny said I had to buy the Nice paintings first. It was a way to build trust, he said.
With the window to the Gardner paintings cracked open again, I had agreed and Sunny had set up the meeting in Barcelona to negotiate a price for the Nice paintings. I found it curious that Sunny chose Spain as a meeting spot—we knew from the wiretaps that the Vermeer was likely held in Spain.
I also figured we couldn’t lose. If Sunny was merely stringing me along about the Gardner paintings, we’d still recover the Nice paintings and help my friend Pierre solve a big art heist. On the other hand, if a deal for the Nice paintings led to a Gardner deal, we’d hit a grand slam.
Still, I approached the Spain meeting with extreme caution. I’d recently learned that a few weeks after our Florida hotel confrontation, Sunny had pulled an FBI informant aside and offered him $65,000 to have Laurenz killed.
IN THE BARCELONA hotel room, I let Patrick spool out the details of his big Nice museum heist. He was proud of his work.
Patrick explained that he had picked a Sunday in August, the slowest visitor day of the week during the slowest month of the year. He’d chosen the apricot-and-cream-colored Musée des Beaux-Arts because it is set off the beaten tourist track, perched on a hill in a residential neighborhood. I knew that the Musée des Beaux-Arts shared something in common with the Gardner and the Barnes—it was the inspiration and former residence of a single patron of the arts, a nineteenth-century Ukrainian princess. The museum still held important works, though its once grand vista of the city’s Bay of Angels was now obscured by a forest of bland apartment buildings.
Patrick described his four accomplices as two close friends and two nobodies, gypsies. The five of them dressed in blue city maintenance jumpsuits and shielded their faces with either bandanas or motorcycle helmets. Security was a joke. No surveillance cameras. No alarms. The half dozen guards on duty were unarmed, pimply-faced kids. Pushovers, Patrick recalled. With their ill-fitting blazers and drooping khakis, the guards were perhaps the worst-dressed males in France.
Patrick said his crew was in and out in four minutes.
Wielding handguns, the thieves pushed open the glass door at the entrance and ordered the guards and a handful of visitors to the floor. The gypsy henchmen held everyone at bay in the foyer as the others sprinted toward their targets. One thief ran through a sky-lit ground floor garden to a rear gallery, removing two paintings by the Flemish artist Jan Brueghel the Elder, Allegory of Water and Allegory of Earth. Patrick and an accomplice vaulted up sixty-six marble steps to the second floor, then scampered another thirty-four paces, past a Chéret mural and a Rodin rendering of The Kiss, to a room lined with Impressionist paintings, each hanging by a single hook. Patrick and his buddy lifted Monet’s Cliffs Near Dieppe and Sisley’s Lane of Poplars at Moret-sur-Loing and raced back downstairs. The thieves escaped by motorbike and blue Peugeot van.
I’d already read the French police file and knew the story well. But as Patrick related his tale, I reacted with awe at his cleverness and derring-do.
As a favor to Pierre, I began by pushing hard for the Sisley and Monet. Pierre sought these above the others because they were property of the French national government, on loan from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. The Brueghels were owned by the city of Nice and less valuable.
Patrick opened the negotiation by valuing the paintings at $40 million. I told him he was crazy, that the four paintings were worth no more than $5 million on the open market, which meant they were worth $500,000 tops on the black market. We negotiated for more than ninety minutes in the foul hotel room, with its dingy drapes and air stale with cigarette smoke. The air conditioner didn’t work and I didn’t dare flip on the ceiling fan because I worried it might gum up the hidden camera and microphone.
Patrick was a fierce negotiator and I found myself in an unusual position. In other cases—with the Rembrandt in Copenhagen, the Geronimo headdress in Philadelphia, the Koplowitz paintings in Madrid—I’d been able to offer any amount, knowing I’d never have to pay the money. But here, it was possible we might let the money for the Nice paintings walk—if we were near certain it would lead to the Gardner paintings.
As the afternoon waned, Patrick dropped his offer from $4 million to $3 million. Patrick was hungry to cash in. He’d planned this great heist, pulled it off, and all he had to show for it was four pretty pictures that could land him back in prison. He’d said he’d left the Nice paintings in France and had come only to talk. But what he if was lying? What if he had the paintings close by? Could he be tempted by a bag of cash? And what of the Gardner paintings?
I threw out a couple of options.
What if I gave Patrick $50,000 cash on the spot for the four Nice paintings with the balance due after I sold them? If I didn’t sell them, I told Patrick, I’d return the paintings and he could keep the $50,000. He said no.
OK, I said, what if I gave him the $50,000 for just the Monet and Sisley? He could keep the other two while I tried to sell them. Again, Patrick said no.
I gave it one last try and swung for the fences. On the chance that Sunny had lied, and that Patrick somehow had access to the Gardner paintings, I made a proposal. I pointed to my friends from Miami on the bed and told Patrick that they had a boat moored on the coast here, ready to smuggle the paintings back to Florida. Now, I said, Sunny knows I’ve got $30 million sitting in the bank, cash ready to be wired the moment I receive the Vermeer, the Rembrandt, and the other Boston paintings. So while I’m here, I said, why don’t we just do that deal too, and put all the paintings on the boat?
Sunny looked away from both of us, quiet. Patrick switched from French to English. He said, “You want Vermeer? I’ll get you Vermeer.”
“Can you get it?” I asked.
“No problem,” he said confidently. “I get anything you want. I find you one. There are many Vermeer.” He was offering to steal one for me.
“No, I don’t want a new one—they’re too hot,” I said. “I want an old one, missing for many years.”
Patrick nodded. “I sell you paintings from Nice. Then we talk more with Sunny.”
“Right,” I said. “OK.” So Patrick had no access to the Gardner paintings. But Sunny, I still believed, was using the Nice sale to test me. If I could win his trust with this buy, we still had a chance.