Robert Wittman - Priceless

By the late 1980s, agents in the FBI office in Minneapolis wanted to forget the case and move on. Insurance companies compensated the three owners for their losses—the Lindbergs, for Cowboy and Cowgirl , a Minneapolis family for Lickin’ Good Bath , and Brown & Bigelow for The Spirit of ’76, She’s My Baby, Hasty Retreat , and So Much Concern .

Although ownership of the stolen paintings officially passed to the insurance companies at settlement, Bonnie Lindberg continued to pursue all of the Rockwells, conducting her own investigation. She publicly criticized the FBI for dropping the case, and the bureau remained stoically silent. Lindberg spent a decade chasing leads that probably came from con men. Her efforts cost tens of thousands of dollars and earned her nothing but frustration.

But in late 1994, curators at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, received a curious letter from a man who identified himself as Jose Maria Carneiro, a Brazilian art dealer based in Rio. Carneiro offered to sell The Spirit of ’76 and So Much Concern , for “a fair price.” The curators declined, but they passed the letter to Lindberg.

The FBI in Minneapolis also received a copy of the letter, but the Rockwell case had long been closed.

THE CASE WAS so old that I didn’t even know it had existed when I got a call in January 1999 about suspicious Rockwells for sale in Philadelphia.

George Turak, an honest broker and a longtime source, told me that a Brazilian man had hired him to sell two Rockwell paintings on consignment, She’s My Baby and Lickin’ Good Bath . Turak said his research showed the paintings were stolen from Minneapolis in 1978. I confirmed this with a simple Internet search followed by a call to the Minneapolis FBI office, and an agent there briefed me on the heist. He also told me about the five remaining missing paintings. Intrigued, I went to Turak’s gallery and seized the two paintings.

Within days, the agent in Minneapolis called back with important news.

It turned out that Bonnie Lindberg had followed up on the 1994 letter from Brazil and that she’d partnered with a local television station, KARE 11, to document her dealings with Carneiro. The two-part exclusive would be running in a few weeks—the station was holding it to air during February sweeps. A few weeks later, after the series aired, I received a tape. For the FBI, it was a public relations disaster.

“Tonight,” the anchor intoned, introducing the story, “new information on a case long ago abandoned by the FBI. It’s a case where no arrests have been made and no paintings ever found—until now.”

Part One of the series recapped the 1978 theft and retraced the family’s detective work. “Bonnie Lindberg runs the gallery today,” the reporter said, “and she’s been the lead investigator in this case after the others walked away, after the FBI gave up, when literally no one seemed to care.” The reporter continued, “It’s amazing what Bonnie did on her own, following leads on four continents, crisscrossing the U.S. as well, a wild ride of faxes and phone calls…. In the last three years, all leads began to lead to Rio, leads the gallery says were rejected by the FBI.”

Part Two of the series began with Lindberg unwrapping a large package she’d just received in the mail from Brazil. Inside, she found Before the Date/Cowgirl , and she grew emotional as she held it. Next, the cameras followed Lindberg to Rio to negotiate the purchase of the companion painting, Before the Date/Cowboy , from Carneiro. During the visit, Carneiro also showed off The Spirit of ’76 , which hung prominently in his home, as well as So Much Concern and Hasty Retreat . The reporter said of Carneiro, “He says he’s done everything properly to purchase the paintings, and that appears to be true. There are certificates from the Art Loss Register in New York and London, verifying that the paintings are not stolen…. And while he’s willing to let the paintings go, he wants his money back first, three hundred thousand dollars.”

The TV report presented a somewhat misleading picture, omitting several relevant facts, including that Lindberg had agreed to pay Carneiro $80,000 for the Before the Date pair. Also, because my recovery of the two Rockwells in Philadelphia did not fit the reporter’s neat narrative, he mentioned the FBI’s role only as a brief afterthought, as if it were nothing. What’s more, KARE 11 failed to report that Bonnie Lindberg, so tearful on camera, had already visited New York auction houses, where she’d been told the Before the Date pair would fetch her $180,000. (Apparently, Lindberg was unaware that the Elayne Gallery had received an insurance settlement and therefore no longer owned the paintings; in purchasing the paintings from Carneiro, she believed that she was recovering what was rightfully her family’s property.)

The February 1999 news series concluded with a flourish—flashing images of The Spirit of ’76, So Much Concern , and Hasty Retreat , juxtaposed with a grinning Brazilian art dealer, the beach at Ipanema, and a reporter’s authoritative TV voice.

“So the question remains. What will it take to bring the Rockwells back to their rightful owners?… Carneiro knows that possession is nine-tenths of ownership, and he has that pretty much locked away in Brazil—Rockwell, our Boy Scouts and our flag.”

ON THE MORNING of September 11, 2001, I was at my desk by eight thirty, flipping through a file of Rockwell correspondence from the FBI agent at the U.S. embassy in Brazil.

It was eighteen months after the KARE 11 broadcast. By then, we had endured more than a year of the kind of diplomatic and bureaucratic delays that threaten every international case, and our Rockwell investigation was entering a new phase. With a new U.S.-Brazil mutual legal assistance treaty in place, the Brazilians had finally approved our request to question Carneiro. Hall and I were making last-minute preparations for a trip to Rio in late September or early October.

A few minutes before nine o’clock, a colleague hustled into the squad room, breathless. “Anyone got a television?”

I plugged in my four-inch black-and-white portable and aimed the antenna at a window. Crowded around the tiny screen, seven of us squinted at the burning World Trade Center, and saw the second plane hit the second tower. Within the hour, a supervisor was ordering us to go home, pack enough clothes to last three days, and stand by for orders.

Donna met me at the door. “How long will you be gone?”

“They say three days, but…”

By the next morning, I was on my way to Ground Zero.

I CALLED HALL as I sped up the New Jersey Turnpike, red lights flashing. We knew the Rockwell case would have to wait. Each of us expected to be busy for a while performing our secondary, or “collateral,” jobs. He was a commander in the Navy Reserves, assigned to an intelligence unit that specialized in terrorism, and he was guessing he’d be called up soon.

My collateral duty was working with FBI colleagues in times of the greatest mental stress. I was coordinator of the FBI Employee Assistance Program in the Philadelphia division, responsible for the psychological well-being of more than five hundred employees and their families.

It was solitary, sensitive, and confidential work, a job I had volunteered for following my acquittal at the Camden courthouse in the mid-1990s. I tried to help anyone struggling in our office—whether with drugs, alcohol, cheating spouses, difficult bosses, or serious medical problems. Colleagues came to me and unloaded horrific stories—about children or spouses killed, arrested, or dying of some dreadful disease. I did a lot of listening. I wasn’t a shrink and didn’t pretend to be. My primary credential was empathy. I knew what it was like to face trauma, the death of a good friend, and the stresses of a years-long fight to avoid prison. Hopefully, if nothing else, I stood as an example of perseverance. I could look a desperate person in the eye and honestly say, “Stay strong. The worst thing you can do when you go through a traumatic experience is to lose your faith that you will survive. Have no doubts: It’s painful, and that’s normal. You will get through this. Whatever you do, do not give up.”