[CPProt.net] Portrait of a thief (Myles Connor, linked to several museum thefts)

Mon May 23 06:16:32 CEST 2005

Portrait of a thief  
JOHN LARRABEE , Staff Writer  

May 23, 2005

NATICK, Mass. -- Even when he's sporting handcuffs and warming a seat in
district court, it's hard to see Myles Connor as the inspiration for
Hollywood's next museum-heist thriller. 
In the movies, after all, art thieves are played by Sean Connery or Cary
Grant. They wear hand-tailored suits and indulge champagne tastes. Home is a
villa on the coast of France or a stone tower rising above rolling moors.

But Connor's home is Blackstone, a beer-budget suburb where he shares a
ranch house with a longtime girlfriend, a few dogs, and several pet
reptiles. He'll talk a blue streak about Rembrandt during press interviews,
but his true art passion is Memphis rock-a-billy. Before age reduced his
reddish curls to wisps, he led a band that covered the '50s hits of Roy
Orbison and Elvis Presley.

Then there's his latest arrest six weeks ago. Connor parked outside a Natick
jewelry store while a passenger went inside. 

Moments later his companion dashed back out with a fistful of expensive
wristwatches. A rookie cop pulled over their car just blocks from the crime
scene.

For his alleged role in the amateurish caper, Connor faces charges of
larceny over $250, receiving stolen goods, and being an habitual offender.
He's being held on $20,000 bail.

Yet big-screen producers have taken notice of him all the same. According to
The Hollywood Reporter and other trade publications, Connor has sold rights
to his story to Mandalay Pictures, and casting negotiations are under way
with several top stars.

Before leaving the Natick courthouse after a recent pre-trial hearing, his
lawyer Marty Leppo pretended to dodge questions about the project, while
still doing his best to whet curiosity.

"I really can't discuss it," he told a reporter, "other than to say it has
become common knowledge that he's signed a book and movie deal."

Connor, now 62, first made headlines almost 40 years ago, when authorities
charged him with stealing art works from the Forbes Museum in Milton, Mass.,
his hometown. But his notoriety truly blossomed in the '90s, when his name
was linked to the robbery of Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, by
some accounts the biggest art heist in history.

On March 18, 1990, shortly after 1 a.m., two men dressed in police uniforms
knocked on a museum side door and convinced security guards to unlock it.
Once inside, they overpowered the guards and bound them with duct tape.

The bogus cops then wandered the galleries, taking what they liked. When
they left, 13 pieces were missing. The loot included three of the Gardner's
most valuable paintings: Vermeer's The Concert, and two Rembrandts, A Lady
and a Gentleman in Black and The Storm on the Sea of Galilee. The estimated
value of those works alone is $300 million.

More then 15 years later, the case remains a mystery. Despite a $5 million
reward and several announcements that the federal statute of limitations has
run out, authorities have yet to recover a single stolen item.

What is known is that Connor was nowhere near the Gardner on the night in
question. He was in a jail cell in Illinois, where he'd made the mistake of
selling two paintings long missing from an Amherst College library to an
undercover FBI man. He was paroled in 2000, after serving more than 10
years.

That doesn't rule him out as a suspect, however. News accounts suggest he
may have directed several other museum heists from behind bars.

In 1975, two armed men entered Boston's Museum of Fine Arts and lifted a
Rembrandt portrait from a gallery wall. Connor, then in jail on another art
theft charge, offered to assist prosecutors in the recovery.

Sometime later, an anonymous caller sent investigators to a Howard Johnson's
off an interstate. As directed, they left their keys in their parked car
while they went inside for coffee. When they returned to the vehicle, they
found the portrait in the trunk.

Connor pleaded guilty to the charge pending against him, but served no time.
Some skeptics in law enforcement suggested he'd engineered the theft to
obtain a get-out-of-jail card.

They said the same thing in 1984, after a visitor to the Massachusetts
Statehouse pried open a display case and walked away with the sheepskin
charter Boston's first settlers carried with them from England. At the time
Connor was serving a long prison sentence for accessory to murder.

Were it not for a strange twist in another case, the artifact might be
missing still. While tracking a serial stick-up man, police raided a Boston
home and discovered the charter in packing box. The same box contained
snapshots of Connor partying with blues legend James Cotton, a friend from
his rock and roll days. By then Connor's conviction had been reversed, and
he was a free man again.

Once again, no one was ever charged.

In August 1997, an ex-con named Billy Youngworth directed Boston Herald
reporter Tom Mashberg to a darkened warehouse, where a flashlight
illuminated what appeared to be one of the missing Gardner Rembrandts.

Youngworth claimed he could arrange return of all the missing art, on three
conditions: the $5 million reward would be his; prosecutors would drop a
stolen goods charge pending against him; and his pal Connor would leave
prison a free man. Without Connor's help, he said, the recovery effort would
be futile.

"WE'VE SEEN IT!" screamed The Herald's front-page headline. Investigators,
however, were unconvinced. They pointed out even a crude fake might look
like the real thing when examined in dim light from several feet away.

Youngworth never provided more concrete proof, and the FBI quickly dismissed
him as a hoaxster. "I think we're being conned," said Barry Mawn, then head
of the bureau's Boston office. "Nobody has been able to produce anything.
That tells me they're not in a position to do so."

Nonetheless, the story soon had journalists lining up for prison interviews
with an obliging Connor. He even found a way to take credit for the Gardner
caper without admitting guilt. Years before, he told reporters, he'd visited
the museum with a gangster pal, and during the tour he'd described in detail
his fantasy heist. Conveniently, the friend had turned up dead in 1991, the
apparent victim of a gangland execution.

Youngworth eventually landed behind prison walls, where he quickly faded
from view. Connor, on the other hand, found himself a celebrity.

Time Magazine pronounced him "a true professional . . . who could probably
run Christie's and Sotheby's from inside the can."

"A Mayflower-descended master criminal" roared Vanity Fair, swallowing whole
hog his claim of ancestral kinship to Pilgrim Myles Standish.

These days Connor does less talking. His only words at his last hearing were
"I love you," half-whispered to his girlfriend as an officer led him from
the courtroom.

She offered a reporter a few words in his defense, provided her name and
address not appear in print. Connor, she said, knew nothing of the robbery
at the Natick jewelry store. The passenger -- her own brother -- had told
Connor he was going in to pick up a package.

Up to that arrest, she pointed out, his record since his 2000 parole has
been squeaky clean. While living in Blackstone, he busies himself tending to
their many pets, and taking phone calls about the movie project. He expects
to be employed as a consultant when filming begins.

"Myles would have finished up his probation in just three months," she said.
"He's talking to producers. Why would he risk losing all that?"  

http://www.zwire.com/