Rockwell Heist: The extraordinary theft of seven Norman Rockwell paintings and a phony Renoir—and the 20-year chase for their recovery from the Midwest through Europe and South America

Chapter 7

48 7 That left one more insider, Robert “Buddy”Verson. After their initial investigations, the FBI assumed that he was the key. Their inquiry centered on whether he was a dupe, a perpetrator, or both. They couldn’t help noticing an eerie similarity between Verson’s experience with the fake Renoir and that of a New York–area resident who had been duped by a fake art scam. He had approached the FBI three years earlier, and some parts of the file on that matter are included in the Elayne Galleries file. A word about FBI files here, because they are crucial sources for the telling of this story. FBI files resemble good literature in two respects. Number one, what is left out is just as important as what is included. The reader has to fill in the blanks. This can be a powerful tool for a good writer of literature, but the FBI carries it to ludicrous extremes. An entire file page may contain only a few words. The rest consists of black stripes, 49 The Rockwell Heist indicating where lines, phrases, and complete paragraphs (you know when a paragraph is gone because the stripe at the bottom is shorter than the ones that precede it) have been “redacted.” That term—redacted—is the FBI’s, and it was apparently chosen over the more appropriate deleted for a reason. Redact is a verb meaning “to put into suitable literary form, to revise, to edit.” But police reports, court documents, and official records in general are not normally revised and edited. Stories are. In fact, when records and reports are revised and edited, they become stories, and therein lies another resemblance between FBI files and good literature: when the FBI responds to a Freedom of Information Act request, they have a story to tell, but it’s not necessarily the one you want to hear. The highly redacted documents concerning the dupe from New York City (name redacted, “A” for the purposes of this summary) reveal that in 1975, he and two partners, “D”and “E,”purchased a painting titled “St. Peter,” purportedly by the famed seventeenth-century Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn. A had been tipped about the availability of the painting by “B aka C,” who provided a written appraisal from Rikki’s Art Studios, Inc., Miami, valuing the painting at $375,000. After A and his partners purchased their Rem- 50 rubenstein brandt (price redacted), they stored it in a warehouse in New York City along with two other valuable paintings , one said to be by the Italian artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, the other by the Spaniard Diego Velazquez. Both paintings were said to date from the turn of the seventeenth century. According to the file, they had been acquired through someone identified as “B/C” as well. B/C told A that four paintings—the Velazquez, the Caravaggio, and two Rembrandts titled “St. Peter” and “St. Paul,” respectively—had been purchased in Havana in 1953 for $250,000 cash. Initially, he said, the plan had been to carry the paintings, plus $10.5 million in stolen bearer bonds, to Europe for subsequent sale. But that fell through. A went to the FBI in August 1975, when he became aware that one of his partners—further identified in the file as an officer of the Anthony Abraham Auto Agency in Miami—had removed the Rembrandt and one of the other paintings (it doesn’t say which) from the New York warehouse without A’s permission. A gave photos of the missing paintings to the FBI. They were shown to the curator of European art at the Metropolitan Museum, who said both were lowquality fakes. At that point the FBI decided not to open an investigation, but the file does indicate that B/C re- 51 The Rockwell Heist mained a person of interest. It contains an entry noting that in March 1976, B/C made an appointment with the Sotheby Parke-Bernet Gallery in New York, where he attempted to sell a painting he claimed was by the twentieth-century Austrian Expressionist Oskar Kokoschka . It was immediately spotted as a fake. The summary of the New York matter appears to be included in the Elayne Galleries file for three reasons: (1) B/C is identified elsewhere in the files as Rolando A, the Cuban who sold Verson the fake Renoir; (2) Rikki’s Art...