Patrick and I negotiated for another hour and finally settled on a tentative price for the Nice paintings, a little less than $3 million.
Patrick took a long drag on his cigarette. He blew smoke from the corner of his mouth, toward the translator. In English, he said, “Bob, very important, we would like business but very quiet business. You understand what I say?”
“I understand.”
“Very, very quiet.”
“Silencieux,” I said.
“Voilà,” Patrick said and stubbed out his cigarette.
AFTER BARCELONA, I never saw Sunny or Patrick again.
We spoke by phone in code but once we settled on the price I told them to work out the logistics with the undercover FBI agents in Miami. I was a financier, I explained, not a smuggler.
Four months later, when Patrick and a French friend visited Sunny in South Florida, I told them I was too busy to see them. My colleagues in Miami treated Sunny, Patrick, and their friends to one last party aboard The Pelican, and they set the final handover of the Nice paintings for June in Marseilles. The French were still refusing to allow me or any other FBI agents to go undercover in Marseilles, and Sunny knew better than to meet with anyone but me. Luckily, Patrick was calling the shots now, and he was dumb and desperate enough to agree to deal with my buyer in Marseilles—who was, of course, a SIAT agent, a member of the French undercover police.
The final takedown was imminent.
ON THE MORNING of June 4, 2008, a blue Peugeot van pulled out of a garage in Carry-le-Rouet, a tiny coastal Riviera town west of Marseilles. A compact beige jalopy followed close behind, Patrick at the wheel.
Undercover French officers watching nearby radioed ahead, noting that the van was heading southeast, as expected. The vehicles wove through downtown Marseilles on side streets, doubling back to avoid detection in Wednesday morning rush-hour traffic. But they did not shake Pierre’s surveillance men. How could they? The French police knew precisely where they were headed. The thieves were on their way to meet a SIAT agent, a man they believed to be working for me.
When the van and the jalopy reached the old harbor, they headed for the Corniche John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the picturesque road that hugs the rocky Riviera coast, rising fifty feet above the lapping waves of the glimmering Mediterranean Sea. The gangsters with the paintings came armed for battle. One of the men in the van brought an automatic weapon. In the small car that followed, Patrick carried a Colt .45 under his jacket. His passenger, a hulking man with shoulder-length blond hair, gripped a Czech-made hand grenade.
The vehicles snaked their way past the four-star Pullman Marseille Palm Beach, a mod-style hotel cut into the seaside beneath the roadway. Pierre and a small army of French police officers were coordinating the sting from the Pullman, two hundred meters from the takedown site, staffing a command center with a SWAT team and, in case it was necessary, a suitcase full of euros.
Beyond the Pullman, the thieves’ cars rolled into a valley flanked by curved public beaches and a dog track, and anchored by a series of boardwalk by-the-sea pubs and shops, a spot the police chose because it was easy to block all exits. It was still early—the morning sun still growing from the eastern hills, casting a warm orange glow across the wind-whipped beach—and so the thieves found plenty of free parking on the street.
Patrick and his friend with the grenade stepped out on the sidewalk and stretched, fifty meters from the sea. The guys in the van stayed put.
The French undercover officer waiting to authenticate the paintings began walking down the sidewalk, toward Patrick. The cop was alone, but plenty of colleagues wandered nearby in disguise—sweeping a storefront, walking a dog, sitting at a bus stop.
The thieves and the cop met by the beach.
Over the radio, someone gave the order.
A force of twenty policemen converged, weapons drawn and with overwhelming force, tackling Patrick, the friend with the grenade and—well done!—the undercover cop, too, preserving his identity and possibly mine.
IT WAS 2 A.M. in Philadelphia, but Pierre called anyway to fill me in. The French police found all four paintings in the blue van. They were in good condition.
He asked me about Sunny and Laurenz.
Laurenz wouldn’t be charged with a crime, I said, because he wasn’t involved in the Nice deal.
Sunny would be arrested at dawn at his home near Fort Lauderdale, I said. The press releases would start flowing in the afternoon.
AMERICAN GRAND JURY indictments can be written two ways.
There is a short form: A one- or two-page double-spaced vague statement of the law violated. The short form is preferred when the case is routine or when the government wants to deflect attention from an ongoing undercover aspect of the case.
Then there is the long-form indictment: A multipage, detailed document with a long narrative, a “speaking indictment” that summarizes the crime and every meeting between the accused and the undercover officers. Prosecutors almost always use the long-form indictment when they plan to convene a press conference. They do this because the rules require them to stick to the facts contained in the indictment. The more titillating facts they stuff into the indictment, the more they can repeat in front of the television cameras.
I didn’t see the American paperwork in the Nice case until after the indictment was unsealed and the press release went out.
I was disappointed but not surprised. Although Sunny was charged with just one felony count, prosecutors detailed the case in a long-form indictment that included my role as an undercover agent. The prosecutors didn’t mention the link to the Gardner investigation, or use my name, but the way they wrote it, they might as well have. If Sunny’s associates truly held the Gardner paintings in Europe, they now knew to never trust me, or anyone else connected to Sunny. The public indictment, posted on the Internet, left no doubt that I was an undercover FBI agent.
Angry, I called Pierre to let him know of the screwup.
Pierre said, “Like I say, everybody wants a piece of the cake and wants to have their face in the picture.” Everyone wanted credit.
We joked about supervisors for a few moments, and I reminded him that he was on his way to making general. We spoke about when we might see each other next, dancing around the big question.
Finally, I said, “Pierre, do you think we had a chance?”
“You mean for the Boston paintings?”
“Yeah.”
“Absolument,” he said. “We have a good idea who has them. We know to whom Sunny was speaking. But now that we arrest Sunny and say Bob is FBI, the case is gone. We will not have this chance again for many years. Perhaps you will get to try again?”
“No, I’m done,” I said. “I retire in three months.”
“Who will take your place?”
I hesitated because the query hit a raw nerve. I was eager to help train and brief my replacement, but the FBI didn’t seem to be grooming anyone.
I said, “I don’t know, Pierre. I don’t know. It’s a good question.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
UNDERCOVER WORK IS BY NATURE OFTEN SENSITIVE and dangerous. For me, the risks were part of the job, and the thieves I arrested now know my true identity. They do not, however, know everything, and I think it’s best left that way. Most of all, I don’t want to jeopardize the fellow law-enforcement officers and others who risked their lives to help me. Many of the criminals we caught are not gentlemen thieves; they are thugs who I fear would not hesitate to retaliate against my friends. To protect my colleagues’ identities and to protect certain FBI methods, I have omitted or slightly altered a handful of details. The essence of what happened remains unchanged.