Master Thieves by Stephen Kurkjian Read Free Book Online Page A

recent parolee. Typically, he first refused to press charges against his assailant or the halfway house, saying that doing so would be against his code never to snitch on another. But he relented after doctors had to perform two surgeries on his brain, and gained an $11,000 settlement from the company that owned the halfway house.
    As I got to know Royce and we continued to talk about his criminal past, I became convinced that regardless of who had actually pulled off the heist and who was involved in stashing the artwork, the idea had begun with him.
    By allowing me to tell his story, Royce calculates that doing so may assist in a recovery of the paintings, and if that happens he deserves a cut of whatever multimillion-dollar reward is given in exchange for their return. He still talks with friends in law enforcement, who tell him the FBI is convinced that the heist grew from his plan and was carried out by individuals within Boston’s organized crime underworld. Most of all, Royce is convinced that among the few people who are still alive and know anything about who pulled off the robbery isStevie Rossetti, his old cohort whom he had told in the early 1980s of the museum’s poor security.
    â€œIf it wasn’t Stevie who ordered it, he passed the score on to someone who did,” Royce tells me. “The only others who might have known anything are Stevie’s uncle Ralph, but he died in prison in 2008, and Richie Devlin. He was killed in a gangland shooting in 1994.”
    Royce shrugs off the idea that the younger Rossetti, who is serving a forty-year prison sentence for participating in an armored car robbery, would give information to federal investigators to get a reduced sentence.
    â€œStevie’s no rat,” Royce almost spits at me when I ask. “He’s like me. He’s loyal and his word is his bond.”
    Still, when I press the issue, Royce writes to Stephen Rossetti asking if they can talk, but Rossetti never responds. That Rossetti wouldn’t trust him upsets Royce but he receives even more disturbing news from another former member of the Rossetti gang. When Royce had been released from prison several months after the Gardner theft and returned to East Boston to try to find out who was responsible, Mark Rossetti, Stephen’s cousin, alerted the FBI that Royce was asking questions about the Gardner heist.
    As had happened to him when he was barely a teenager, when he learned that John Royce was not really his father, the revelation that a member of the gang to which he had shown such allegiance and loyalty had informed on him was crushing to Royce.
    Royce would get a call from his parole officer, warning him that unless he wanted to be hauled back to prison on a parole violation, he needed to stay out of East Boston and away from all his past criminal contacts, including those with whom he had first discussed robbing the Gardner Museum. By 2007, what had once been a twinkle in Royce’s eye had become the most notorious unsolved art theft in American history.

Chapter Two
    They Knew Exactly What They Were Doing
    I n February 1989, thirteen months before two men dressed as police officers drove up to the Gardner Museum, a block away a single guard was struggling to control the throng of people who were visiting a new exhibit on the second floor of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. No one seemed to notice the two men with a baby stroller standing in front of the million-dollar Yuan vase enclosed in a glass case at the other end of the MFA gallery. And no one said anything as the men used a screwdriver to unhinge the top of the enclosure and remove the vase from its setting. Moving quickly, and without drawing attention, they then tucked the vase snugly into the stroller and walked out of the museum.
    William P. McAuliffe knows firsthand the nightmare of what a security breach at a museum can bring—he owed his job as director of security at the MFA to that one in