Robert
Gentile's connections with Robert Guarante, a bank robber seen above
with a shirt over his head after an arrest in Natick, Mass., in 1968,
intrigued federal authorities investigating the theft of half a billion
dollars in art from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in March
1990.
It was a shore dinner in Maine a decade ago that transformed Robert
Gentile, an aging, unremarkable wise guy from Hartford, into the best
lead in years in one of the world's most baffling crime mysteries, the
unsolved robbery of half a billion dollars in art from Boston's Isabella
Stewart Gardner Museum.
Gentile disagrees with most of what the
government says about him. But he does not dispute that he and his wife
drove to Portland, Maine, from their home in Manchester. It was nothing
then for the couple to jump into a car and cross New England for a meal.
Gentile is said to be passionate about food. His nickname is "The
Cook."
Neither is there disagreement that Gentile was meeting
Robert Guarente and his wife. Guarente, a bank robber, moved from Boston
to Maine in 2002, after his last prison sentence. He was living in the
woods, two hours north of Portland. Guarente had been associated for
years with three Boston criminals who the FBI believed were involved in
or had information about the Gardner heist. One of the three was
Guarente's nephew; another was Guarente's driver.
Gentile and
Guarente had been friends and partners since the 1980s when they met at a
used car auction. Federal prosecutors have said in court: They were
inducted into the mafia together. They are believed to have "committed
robberies and possibly other violent crimes together." And they roomed
together for a while outside Boston while acting as "armed bodyguards"
for the mafia capo who was their boss.
No one disputes that
Gentile picked up the check in Portland. Or that he continues to
complain that Guarente's wife, Elene, ordered an expensive lobster
dinner.
What is disputed, hotly, is what happened outside in the
parking lot. Elene Guarente has told the Gardner investigators that she
believes her husband put one or more of the stolen paintings in their
car before they left their home in the woods and that the art was handed
off to Gentile in Portland.
Gentile claims that Elene Guarente's
account, which she first gave investigators in 2009 or '10, is, as he
once muttered in court, "lies, lies, all lies." Through his lawyers, he
denies receiving a painting or paintings, denies having knowledge about
the robbery and denies knowing what happened to the art afterward.
Gentile said he met with Guarente in Portland because his friend, who
died in January 2004, was sick, broke and in need of a loan.
Gentile's
most emphatic denial may have come earlier this month when a federal
judge sentenced him to 21/2 years in prison on what the government
called unrelated drug and gun charges. At age 76, overweight, crippled
by back injuries and suffering from a heart condition, Gentile pleaded
guilty to the charges — knowing that doing so meant a certain prison
sentence — in spite of an offer of leniency and a chance at the $5
million reward if he helped recover the art.
Gentile's lawyer, A.
Ryan McGuigan, accused the FBI of concocting the drug case to pressure
Gentile to cooperate in the Gardner investigation. The judge brushed
aside the argument, concluding that Gentile did not need to be persuaded
by an FBI informant to engage in the profitable sale of prescription
painkillers. In any event, McGuigan said Gentile had nothing to trade
the government for leniency or the reward, no matter how badly he wanted
both.
As he settles into prison, Gentile could become another
dead end in the succession of dead ends that have characterized the
Gardner investigation. But the account of how he became, at least
briefly, the best potential lead in the Gardner case offers a glimpse
inside a sensational robbery from which the art world may never recover.
Gentile And The GardnerThe
FBI will not discuss Gentile in the context of the Gardner robbery. But
its interest has become apparent in other ways, including filings in
court, a sensational press statement it issued in March, its pursuit of
Gentile's Boston associates and a curious price list found in Gentile's
home.
Buried among the guns and other odd items in Gentile's
basement was a list of the stolen Gardner paintings and accompanying
values. An infamous art thief from Massachusetts said recently that he
wrote the list and that Gentile probably acquired it, in a transaction
not directly related to the robbery that may have been nothing more than
an attempted swindle.
There are signs, too, that government
investigators are not persuaded by what one described as Gentile's
consistent denials. A federal prosecutor said in court that an FBI
polygraph examiner concluded there is a 99 percent probability that
Gentile was not telling the truth last year when he denied knowing
anything about the stolen art. Gentile's lawyer said the results are
false because the test was improperly administered.
A year ago,
dozens of FBI agents swarmed over Gentile's suburban yard. They found an
empty hole someone had dug and apparently tried to conceal beneath a
storage shed in his backyard.
Federal prosecutors said in court
that Gentile was such a fixture in organized crime in Boston by the
middle to late 1990s that he, with Guarente, was sworn in as a member of
the Boston faction of a Mafia family that is active in Philadelphia. In
a dramatic press statement in March 18, the FBI claimed the stolen
paintings were moved to Connecticut, at least for a time, and to
Pennsylvania. The bureau issued the statement on the 23rd anniversary of
the robbery:
"The FBI believes with a high degree of confidence
that in the years after the theft, the art was transported to
Connecticut and the Philadelphia region, and some of the art was taken
to Philadelphia, where it was offered for sale by those responsible for
the theft. With that same confidence, we have identified the thieves,
who are members of a criminal organization with a base in the
mid-Atlantic states and New England."
Characteristically, the bureau will not elaborate.
Not
only does Gentile deny being a member of the mafia, he denies knowingly
associating with gangsters. If he is being truthful, people who know
him say he is one of the world's most unlucky men because circumstance
in which he has become entangled.
Some of the most important art
ever created disappeared at about 1:30 a.m. on March 18, 1990, as St.
Patrick's Day celebrations wound down across Boston. Two thieves dressed
as police officers bluffed their way into the museum, a century-old,
Italianate mansion full of uninsured art and protected by an outdated
security system
They bound the museum security guards and
battered 13 masterworks from the museum walls before driving away in a
red car fewer than 90 minutes later.
Among the missing art: a
Vermeer, a Manet and five drawings by Degas. Two of the paintings —
"Storm on the Sea of Galilee," Rembrandt's only known seascape, and
Vermeer's "The Concert" — could be worth substantially more than $100
million, if anyone could find away to unload some of the world's hottest
art.
Cooking For The BoysIn
Hartford, Gentile seemed to inhabit a different world. He is short and
round, with a high forehead. His hair is white and he leans heavily on a
cane when he walks. He has penetrating eyes and is a pleasant
conversationalist when he chooses.
Over the last eight years, he
could be found most days at Clean Country Cars, a garage and used car
lot on Franklin Avenue in the Hartford's South End. He put a stove and a
refrigerator in a service bay and, as he wrote in a court filing,
"cooked lunch for the boys."
"I like to cook," Gentile once said. "Macaronis. Chicken."
The
list of attendees at his luncheons in bay No. 1, according to someone
familiar with the events, could read like a federal indictment. Among
others: Hartford tough guy and mob soldier Anthony Volpe and John "Fast
Jack" Farrell, the Patriarca family's card and dice man.
Gentile's
arrest record begins during the Eisenhower administration, although
most of his involvement with the police occurred in the 1960s.
Convictions include aggravated assault, receipt of stolen goods, illegal
gun possession, larceny and gambling. He beat a counterfeiting case.
During
three searches of his suburban ranch in Manchester last year, FBI
agents found explosives, a bullet-proof vest, Tasers, police scanners, a
police scanner code book, blackjacks, switch-blade knives, two dozen
blank social security cards, a South Carolina drivers license issued
under the alias Robert Gino, five silencers, hundreds of rounds of
ammunition, a California police badge, three sets of handcuffs with the
serial numbers ground off, police hats and what a federal magistrate
characterized as an "arsenal" of firearms.
There was a
surveillance camera trained on the approach to his home. Hanging from a
hook inside the front door was a loaded, 12-gauge Mossberg shotgun with a
pistol grip, a federal prosecutor said.
Gentile has giving
varying explanations for the presence in his home of the weaponry and
related paraphernalia. He said some of it had been there so long he
forgot about it. Other material probably was dropped off by a friend who
is a "dump picker." Gentile's lawyer said he is a hoarder.
He is
handicapped by back pain, probably the result, according to multiple
sources, of a blow his father delivered with a metal bar when he was 12
years old. He left school two years later to work for his father's
masonry business and became the youngest bricklayer and cement mason to
join the International Union of Brick Layers and Allied Craft Workers.
He took a stab at the restaurant business in the 1970s, but closed his place, the Italian Villa in Meriden, after two years.
Gentile
and his brothers had a reputation as top concrete finishers, according
to friends. When union construction slowed in the 1970s, he went to work
for a builder of swimming pools in greater Hartford.
Meeting GuarenteGentile
moved from swimming pools to used cars, according to friends and
material filed in court. He met Guarente at one of the automobile
auctions where dealers buy inventory, said associates of Gentile and a
person familiar with the investigation.
A source who claims to
have met repeatedly with Guarente beginning in the 1990s said that
Guarente was a bank robber whose last arrest and conviction, in the
1990s, was for cocaine trafficking.
"Guarente was Gentile's
connection with Boston," said the source. "Until then, Gentile was his
own man. He did his own thing, his own way. Guarente was a stone cold
criminal and robber. He told me he robbed 30 banks and, toward the end,
he was selling huge amounts of drugs."
Said a law enforcement
source: "Guarente was the hub of so many people. He is an interesting
guy because he is not well known. But he knows everybody."
One of
the places Guarente visited, according to a variety of sources,
including an FBI report, was TRC Auto Electric, a repair business in
Dorchester, Mass., a hangout of reputed Boston mob associate Carmello
Merlino.
Gentile met Merlino at least once: He was with Guarente
when he stopped by the garage to talk about having work done on his car,
according to a source who knows all three men.
Merlino and his
crew were on the FBI's list of Gardner suspects in the 1990s, according
to filings in federal court. The legal filings and FBI reports show
that, by 1997, the FBI had inserted two informants in Merlino's
operation. Over the next year, the informants reported that Merlino
treated Guarente like a partner. They also reported that Merlino talked
as if he might have access to the stolen art.
In one of the FBI
reports, an informant said it appeared to him that Merlino "was getting
the authorization to do something with the stolen paintings." A lawyer
with knowledge of a variety of Gardner cases said the informant reports,
collectively, suggest Merlino was trying to take possession of the
paintings.
Merlino also was meeting, according to FBI reports and
other legal documents, with two younger men: robbery suspect David
Turner, who was Guarente's driver; and, less frequently, with Stephen
Rossetti, Guarente's nephew. When he was questioned by the FBI, Gentile
was asked to identify Turner from photographs, said a source familiar
with the investigation.
While looking for the stolen paintings,
the FBI learned that Merlino and the two younger men were planning to
rob an armored car depot. Agents intercepted and arrested the men on
their way to the depot in early 1999. An FBI agent later testified in
court that, immediately after the depot arrests, he tried to question
the three about the Gardner heist. They refused to talk.
The
three robbers argued unsuccessfully that the FBI, through its
informants, created a conspiracy to rob the depot to leverage them to
talk about the stolen art. Gentile's lawyer failed when making the same
claim in court about his drug and gun indictments.
The Philadelphia ConnectionGuarente
also introduced Gentile to Robert Luisi, the Boston mobster who a
federal prosecutor said sponsored Gentile and Guarente for membership in
the Philadelphia mafia — a city where the FBI said some of the stolen
Gardner art was taken.
Luisi had tried to join, but was not
accepted by, the New England mafia, an associate said. Philadelphia
agreed to accept him when he reached out through a man he met in prison.
He agreed and, according to court filings, became the boss, or capo, of
the Philadelphia mob's Boston crew.
Guarente became Luisi's second in command and Gentile became a soldier in his crew, according to a prosecution court filing.
As
it turned out, Philadelphia's Boston crew collapsed within months of
being created. Within a year, Luisi had been indicted in a cocaine
conspiracy. Worse for Gentile, Luisi agreed to cooperate with the
government.
Gentile's lawyer said in court that Luisi lied to curry favor with the FBI.
During
his interviews with the FBI, Luisi said Gentile and Guarente committed
robberies together. He said they lived with him for a while in Waltham,
Mass., while acting as his armed bodyguards.
Luisi told the FBI
that Gentile always armed himself, usually with a snub nose .38-caliber
revolver and a .22-caliber derringer. He said Gentile gave him a
silencer for his own handgun.
The FBI found a half dozen
silencers in Gentile's cellar, as well as two snub nose, .38-caliber
revolvers and a .22-caliber derringer, according to a government legal
filing.
Luisi said that, in the late 1990s, Gentile was planning
the robbery of an armored car carrying cash from a casino in Ledyard and
that Luisi had introduced him to a crew of Charlestown robbers who
could help, a federal prosecutor said in court.
It was Luisi who told the FBI that said Gentile's nickname was "The Cook."
Gentile
acknowledges using the name "The Cook," according to a government court
filing. But his lawyer said he denies almost everything else.
He
acknowledges working for Luisi, but said he was paid what amounted to
small change for cooking and running card games, his lawyer said.
Another source who knew Luisi in the late 1990s said "Luisi had
apartment where they hung out and Gentile would cook. Gentile was the
cook and the bodyguard."
Within a year of Gentile's alleged induction in the mafia, his network in Boston was in disarray.
Guarente was indicted for selling cocaine on April 1998. He was released from prison in December 2000 and died in January 2004.
Merlino
and his crew were charged in the Loomis Fargo robbery on February 1999.
Merlino died in prison and the others have decades left to serve on
their sentences.
Luisi was charged in a cocaine conspiracy on July 1999.
When Guarente's wife told investigators in 2009 or '10 about the meal in Portland, only Gentile was a alive and out of jail.
A PostscriptOne
of New England's most colorful thieves, Florian "Al" Monday, believes
he knows the significance of the list of stolen Gardener paintings — and
their black market values — that the FBI found in Gentile's cellar.
He said it is his.
Monday
said, in a recent interview, that he has been engaged in the murky
business of stolen art at least since 1972, when he and a small group he
recruited stole Rembrandt's "St. Bartholomew" from the Worcester Art
Museum. In the process, one of them shot and wounded a security guard.
The painting was quickly recovered and the gang was arrested. Monday got
nine to 20 years in prison.
Because the Gardner thieves carried weapons, Monday said he was an early suspect in the theft of those Gardner paintings.
"Of
course, everyone thought that I had stolen them since I'm the guy that
invented that methodology, of robbing museums with a gun," Monday said
recently.
He got stung in 2002 when he and a partner, a Rhode
Island swindler who put up $250,000, tried to buy an etching they had
been persuaded was one of the Gardner's Rembrandt pieces. It was a
forgery.
Monday said he believes his list of the stolen Gardner art fell into Gentile's hands under similar circumstances.
Monday
said he drafted the list for a partner, who knew both Gentile and
Guarente. The partner wanted to buy Gardner art because he had lined up a
pair of prospective buyers. Gentile was the middleman through whom
Guarente and Monday's partner communicated, according to Monday and
another source.
Monday said he was putting up the money for the
deal, but would not say where he got it. He said he did not know and
never met either Gentile or Guarente.
"Guarente? I know nothing
about him," Monday said. "I never negotiated any prices for him. I
hadn't heard of Gentile until recently. The list ... was a list of the
paintings and the prices that I was willing to pay for them. That's what
those figures are. It is not their value. It is what I was willing to
pay for them."
The deal fell apart, Monday said, when the partner
suspected that he was being hustled, and that Guarente had no Gardner
art to sell.
Monday said his partner paid Guarente $10,000 when
Guarente said he needed the money to travel to Florida to obtain
whatever art was involved. Monday said he suspects Guarente never went
to Florida.
The partner was next told that he had to pay to see
proof that Guarente actually had the Gardner art. The proof was to be a
photograph, purportedly of the stolen art.
Guarente mailed the
photograph to Gentile. The partner, who carried a jeweler's loupe,
recognized it as a photograph of a page in an art book. He left with the
money but forgot the list.
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