Word: donati
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...Connor tells it, years after he and Donati sized up the Gardner, Donati teamed up with another old pal of Connor's, David Houghton, and the two of them arranged the heist. One of the questions that has baffled museum officials and investigators is, Why would anyone have bothered with the Napoleon eagle? A capture-the-flag statement? A political message of some type? No, not really. Bobby Donati just liked...
Connor devours art publications, even in jail--especially in jail--and has a scholarly manner that impresses crooks and confounds cops. And he doesn't mind saying that on his little tour of the Gardner, he didn't think much of Donati's taste. Among other things, the philistine had his eye on an eagle that topped a battle flag from Napoleon's Imperial Guard. In any event, Connor says he never acted on the urge to rob the Gardner. That's because he walked across the street in Boston's Fenway area and saw a score he liked better...
...would Connor, as wily as they come and a man with his own twisted set of ethics, give up his friends like this? Simple: they're dead. Houghton died in 1992 of natural causes, and Donati went out about a year earlier of multiple stab wounds, found hog-tied in the trunk of a car--which is relatively close to natural causes among the people he ran with. Connor says Donati would not have violated the gangster's vow of omerta. Bobby was a stand-up guy. If gangsters had been trying to find the stolen paintings, "they could have...
Connor says Donati, who, he assumes, hired two mugs to actually carry out the theft, initially intended to use the loot as a bargaining chip, though he won't say for what. "Then they got a tremendous offer for it," he says. Not from the Irish Republican Army, a name that has surfaced over the years, and not "from, per se, a political organization. But something a little more powerful than just a wealthy, eccentric collector." Whatever, it fell through, and the pieces were put into storage. Connor says Donati and Houghton later told him that if anything happened...
Connor says that while he served a prison term in the '60s, the Donati clan kept watch on his mother, and to return the favor, he tried to help them unload some Wyeth paintings stolen from the Woolworth estate in Monmouth, Me. With that, a career was born. Connor's father had been an antique-weapon collector; his mother painted and wrote poetry; and Connor, who already had a cherished collection of Japanese swords, had truly found his niche. But he kept slipping up. In July 1990 a federal judge who doubled the requested sentence called Connor "rotten...