THE GREAT ART CAPER

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As 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 it.

Why 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 chopped his fingers off one at a time," and Donati wouldn't have given up the goods. Connor thinks it's more likely he was killed in a battle between Boston's warring mob factions than because some crime boss wanted a Rembrandt on his wall.

Sound a little too convenient to pin the Gardner heist on a couple of guys who've been planted? Sure it does, and the FBI understandably wonders if Connor is trying to take the heat off the real thieves or simply con his way to freedom. But Connor, who lives by a strict code of criminal conduct that is essentially honor among thieves, says you help comrades in distress. By telling what he knows, maybe he can help spring his buddy Billy Youngworth, the other con who says he can get his hands on the stolen paintings--if authorities will drop a stolen-vehicle rap that could keep Youngworth behind bars 15 more years. Federal agents have their ears wide open.

"It's still premature to discount anything along those lines," Dan Falzon, the only FBI agent who has been a part of the case from Day One, says of Connor's tale. But who pulled the job doesn't interest Falzon as much as where the stuff is now.

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 to them, they would leave him information about where the paintings are, but he needs to be out of jail to get that information. "And that's essentially the meat and potatoes of what I have access to."

Tom Mashberg of the Boston Herald didn't know what to make of the call on Aug. 18. Someone was asking him if he wanted to go for a ride, under cover of darkness, and see some of the stolen Gardner loot. He said yes, "but as far as I knew this was a hoax, and I expected to be shown a velvet Elvis." They met in a deserted place. There were two cars, Mashberg says, one man in each. And they took him to a warehouse.