Master Thieves by Stephen Kurkjian Read Free Book Online

officials by now on the edges of their seats. “They might dress up as police officers and demand late-night entry into the museum. Or disguise themselves as women who’ve run into some trouble outside of the museum and ask for help and to be let in.” And, perhaps most chilling of all, the pair may have a guard inside the museum who has provided them information—wittingly or unwittingly—about the security system.
    â€œWhat should we be doing?” Grindle asked the agents. He had just come onto the job as the Gardner’s security director and he knew, both in equipment and manpower, that the museum had a long way to go toward protecting its masterpieces.
    â€œWell, first off, you’d better be putting more people on during those concerts,” Clark snapped back. “If I know them, these guys already know the ins and outs of this place better than the mice do.”
    Grindle, Hadley, and Hewitt were shocked by what they’d heard. “Not sure whether it is a willing or unwitting (ac)complice,” read one of their notes from the meeting. Still, they had little understanding about how aggressive Royce and his pals in the Rossetti family could be in trying to pull off this score.
    Clark didn’t share with the Gardner team how the FBI had learned of Royce’s intention to break into the museum. But even if they’d been asked, it’s unlikely that Clark would have told them anything. Even though Clark had been associating with Royce and the notorious Ralph Rossetti for months, trying to buy valuable pieces of stolen art from them as the undercover FBI agent who eventually busted them that day outside the Italian restaurant in East Boston, it was FBI protocol to provide sufficient information only for potential victims to protect themselves. So Clark wasn’t authorized to share the true seriousness of the threat to the museum. Had Clark divulged what he knew, it would likely have only increased the museum’s concern about Royce’s ingenuity as a master thief, and his associations with the Rossettis.
    Maybe it was the wrong decision. Less than ten years later, the security staff at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum would come to wish they’d convinced museum trustees that radical changes were needed in the security system to protect the collection. The FBI had warned them, but the museum didn’t make its biggest changes until it was too late.
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    For seven years after being released from the state prison in 2007, Louis Royce stayed true to his pledge to the Massachusetts parole board to stay clear of involvement in any criminal conduct or consorting with his old pals in organized crime. But in June 2014 he was sent back to prison because of a parole violation—a teenager had complained to police that Royce had made unwanted verbal advances toward him at a Quincy playground. Although Royce disputed the youth’s account and was not arrested, the report was forwarded to his parole officer, who immediately ordered his return to jail pending a hearing.
    Royce rejected my urging that he contest the complaint before a parole board hearing. No, he said, and waived his right for a hearing and decided to stay in prison, believing that he had built up enough “good time”—the time that gets shaved off his original sentence for abiding by the terms of his parole while he was on the street—to be released without conditions in a month or two.
    â€œJust leave it alone,” he wrote to me. “You don’t know anything about prison rules.” Although I was convinced he was making the wrong decision, I had gotten to know Royce well enough over the years to know when he wasn’t going to budge.
    Royce had become more defensive in the wake of an attack he suffered about six months after he originally had been released on parole in 2007. He had been beaten up brutally inside a Quincy halfway house by another