Master Thieves by Kurkjian Stephen

Author:Kurkjian, Stephen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2015-01-11T16:00:00+00:00

Whereabouts in the shed, one agent asked him casually. And Robert Jr., who shared his father’s softer side, gave him a straight answer—his father had placed a false floor in the front of the shed, and beneath it, he had dug a deep pit, and inside the pit there would be a large plastic, Tupperware-type container.

Whatever’s important will be in a plastic container inside that pit, the younger Gentile told the agents.

His instructions set the agents off into a mad scramble, in which they tore up the false floor inside the shed, and found the deep pit under it and the big plastic container inside—a big empty plastic container.

Shown the container, young Gentile had one more piece of compelling information: A few years before, there had been a severe rainstorm in the area; water had flooded their backyard and gotten into the shed and even into the ditch beneath the shed’s false floor. Whatever had been in the ditch had been destroyed, Gentile’s son told the agents, adding that he had never seen his father as upset in his life as he was about the loss. When I asked Gentile about it, he said he didn’t recall the incident but thought it could have involved a couple of small motors getting wet.

A few days later, federal agents and Anthony Amore, the Gardner Museum’s security director, brought Gentile back to the Hartford federal building where he had taken the lie-detector test a month before.

One of the FBI agents got right up in Gentile’s face. “We know what happened,” he said. “Your son told us about the shed and how the pit got flooded.”

“Tell us where those canvases are,” Amore pleaded, assuming the role of “good cop” in the situation. “Even if the paintings are damaged or destroyed, I’ll see to it that you get a share of the reward money. Just show us the canvases.”

Gentile had been thrust into the middle of what federal investigators believed was their biggest break in their long, arduous pursuit of the masterpieces stolen in the early hours of March 18, 1990. Perhaps too ashamed to acknowledge that the paintings had been ruined while in his possession, or more likely worried about the consequences that might stem from such an admission, Gentile held firm.

“I don’t know anything,” he said.

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