THE GREAT ART CAPER

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Connor, whose life story beggars fiction, opened in the '60s for Sha Na Na, played guitar with Roy Orbison on several occasions and led a band called Myles and the Wild Ones. He had a pet alligator named Albert and "cried like a kid who'd lost his cocker spaniel" when Albert went off to the big swamp in the sky. He has one brother who is a cop and another who is a priest. ("I don't know where they went wrong," he says.) A self-professed martial-arts expert (who pronounces karate kah-dah-tay), he once escaped from prison by carving a bar of soap into "the most perfect-looking pistol you've ever seen," and he is described by the FBI as a master of disguises. He once proclaimed, in his faintly Continental intonation, "The thing about art theft is the Robin Hood element in it." Not your common thug.

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. At the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

"There's no comparison relative to one place having half a dozen of what could be called real masterpieces and the other one maybe 50 to as many as 100," Connor says. He also knew that the Gardner had no theft insurance--the last thing a thief needs; no insurance company to sell a stolen painting back to. And he "had inside information" about an insured Rembrandt hanging on loan in the Museum of Fine Arts, an institution with serious "political clout" that would send up "a huge hue and cry" and therefore was "the much, much more desirable place" to send into hysterics.

Besides, Connor loved the piece--a splendid portrait of a woman often mistaken for Rembrandt's sister. "There are Rembrandts," says Connor, who could probably run Christie's and Sotheby's from inside the can, "and there are Rembrandts." Though it was valued at $1 million at the time, "it was actually worth" much more, he says, given the inflated art market.

Sure enough, the Rembrandt he lusted after was stolen. Connor, who once took several slugs in a blazing gun battle with a Boston police officer, says, "There isn't a museum in the world that's invulnerable" to a true professional. He won't say exactly how the Fine Arts caper came off, or even admit to the theft. But he arranged the return of the Rembrandt later that year--in exchange for avoiding prison after pleading guilty to the theft of Andrew Wyeth paintings from an estate in Maine.

So we're not talking hobby here. We're talking a love of art, a contempt for law enforcement and the thrill of the score. As for the Gardner heist: "You can believe I didn't plan the thing, or The Rape of Europa would have been the first to go." The Titian work was the most valuable piece in the museum but was passed over for lesser goods, Connor says with disgust.