Infamous America - BOSTON HEISTS Ep. 6 | Gardner Museum: “The Mafia Connection”

Episode Date: August 27, 2025

As the FBI’s investigation of local Boston art thieves fades, its investigation of crews linked to the Italian mob ramps up. Agents begin to focus on the men who are associated with Carmello Merlino’s gang. But the 1990s proves to be a deadly time to be involved with the Merlino crew, and suspects start dying. Eventually, the FBI declares partial victory and announces that it knows the identities of the thieves, but it does not know the location of the stolen items to this day. Join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join   Apple users join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes, bingeable seasons and bonus episodes. Click the Black Barrel+ banner on Apple to get started with a 3-day free trial.   On YouTube, subscribe to INFAMOUS+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: hit “Join” on the Legends YouTube homepage.   For more details, please visit www.blackbarrelmedia.com. Our social media pages are: @blackbarrelmedia on Facebook and Instagram, and @bbarrelmedia on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My relentless sleep problems have always come from an overactive mind. I lay in bed at night with my mind racing from one thing to another, and then, of course, I have a brainstorm about something new. That lights the fire, and then I'm in real trouble. To calm my mind, the only things that have ever worked with any consistency are sleep gummies. Sleepy Time Advanced Gummies from Mood.com come in various combinations of THC, CBD, and CBN, so you can get something that's very low in THC but higher in CBD, which helps turn off the stress, and CBN, which is the thing that makes you sleepy.

The brain shuts up, the racing thoughts stop, and it's off to sleep. Mood is federally compliant. The gummies are legal and delivered right to your door. At Mood.com, get 20% off your first order with our promo code, Infamous. Go to Mood.com and use the code infamous to get 20% off your first order with our promo code Infamous. to get 20% off your first order, and they have a 100-day satisfaction guarantee. Mood.com promo code infamous. Boston art thief Miles Connor said he and his friend Bobby Donati started studying the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1975 for a possible robbery.

According to Connor, the goal was simple and safe. Steal a bunch of valuable paintings, wait for the museum to offer a big reward, then return the paintings and collect the reward. By that time, Connor and several other thieves in New England knew from personal experience that it was risky to try to sell stolen artwork on the black market.

In 1975, Connor was in the middle of a legal saga because he had been caught selling stolen artwork to undercover FBI agents, artwork which he and Bobby had stolen a year earlier. Now, if Miles and Bobby were going to do the Gardner job together, they would have to wait. By the end of 1975, Conner was in jail, and he was facing a 13-year prison

sentence. But in January 1976, Connor struck a deal with the U.S. attorney who was prosecuting his case. Connor returned a Rembrandt painting, which he had recently stolen from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the U.S. attorney reduced his sentence from 13 years to two years and four months. That deal made Miles Conner a legend in the Boston underworld. Then, 10 years after Connor finished a prison sentence for selling stolen goods to undercover agents, he did it again. In 1989, Connor was arrested for selling cocaine and stolen goods to undercover FBI agents. That same year, a captain in the Boston Italian mafia named Vinnie Ferrarra was arrested for

murder, racketeering, and a slew of other things. Miles Connor and Vinnie Ferrar were close friends with him. Bobby Donati. By early 1990, Bobby had two friends who were facing long prison sentences. He knew the Gardner Museum was vulnerable, and he knew that artwork could be traded for a reduced prison sentence. Lo and behold, two thieves robbed the Gardner Museum on March 18, 1990. They spent 81 minutes in the museum from 124 a.m. to 24.m., and they walked out with 13 items, which were valued at $200 million at the time. According to Miles Conner, the thieves were his friends, Bobby Donati and David Houghton.

It's virtually certain that David Houghton was not one of the two thieves, but Bobby Donati was a definite possibility. While the FBI investigated Miles Conner and a local con man and thief named Brian McDevitt and notorious gangster Whitey Bulger, it also investigated Bobby Donati and a long list of guys who were connected to the Italian mafia in Boston. Over the next 25 years, the FBI would all but say that it was guys in the mob who committed the robbery, controlled the artwork afterward, and tried to sell it. But in a story filled with lies, mistakes, inconsistencies, unanswered questions, and unsolvable

mysteries, the most maddening aspects are the statements by FBI agents. They allowed the public to get tantalizingly close to the truth. but never close enough to feel satisfied. The FBI says it figured it out. It solved the mystery. It finished the puzzle. But it won't share the answers. Welcome back, my friends, to the crime that never ends.

From Black Barrel Media, this is Infamous America. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer. And this season we're telling the stories of two of the most infamous heists in American history, both of which happened in Boston, the Great Brinks robbery of 1950, and the historic art heist at the Isabella Stuart Gardner. Museum in 1990. This is episode six, the Gardner Heist Part 4, The Mafia Connection.

At the heart of the Mafia Connection were three crews who were separate but connected, the Ferrara gang, the Rossetti gang, and the Merlino gang. In the 1980s, all three were involved in typical rackets like drug dealing and robbery. For those who survived and stayed out of jail, the same illegal activities continued throughout the 1990s. But the number of guys who could make both claims dropped sharply over the course of the decade, until by the turn of the millennium, there were none left. Vinnie Ferrarra led the Ferrarian gang. Ralph Rossetti led the Rossetti gang, and Carmelo Merlino led the Merlino gang. In 1989, Vinnie Ferrar was arrested for murder, racketeering, and other crimes,

and he was facing a long prison sentence if convicted. His capture, may have prompted his close associate Bobby Donati to rob the Gardner Museum in order to use the artwork as leverage to help Ferraro reduce his possible prison sentence. Another of Bobby's friends, Miles Connor, was facing a long prison sentence at the same time, so Bobby may have had two direct motivations to rob the museum. Bobby Donati was friends with a mafia's social butterfly named Bobby Guarenti. Grenty was a popular guy, and he was close friends. with Carmelo Merlino and his crew.

The two Bobby's provided at least one connection between the Ferrara gang and the Merlino gang. With the Ferrara gang in disarray after Vinny's arrest, several scenarios for robbing the museum presented themselves. Bobby Donati and an accomplice could have robbed the museum in order to help Miles Conner. If so, they probably would have added the artwork to Connor's storage trailer full of stolen items

to keep it hidden until the time was right to make a deal. Conner's friend David Houghton was the caretaker of the storage trailer from 1989 until he died in 1992. At that time, control of the trailer passed to Conner's friend, Billy Youngworth. In 1997, Youngworth and Connor made a play to return most of the items, but they failed. At the end of 1997, Youngworth went to prison. In 1999, Miles Conner got out of prison and presumably took back his storage trailer. If the Gardner items were still in it, then it's possible that he has had them for more than 25 years

and has made no known attempt to return them to collect the reward money. But that scenario is very shaky, especially in light of future statements by the FBI. The next scenarios are that Bobby Donati and an accomplice robbed the museum, in an effort to help Vinnie Ferrarra, or simply to sell the artwork on the black market, or to follow through with Miles Conner's reported plan to steal the artwork for the express purpose of returning it to collect the reward. In those scenarios, it seems likely that Bobby Donati would have asked his friend Bobby Guarenti for help. Bobby Guarenti might have agreed to be one of the thieves, or he could have talked to

Carmelo Merlino. Merlino could have offered one of his crew to act as Donati's. partner. Or Merlino could have put forward two men from his crew, and then Bobby Denotti would not have participated in the robbery itself. He probably would have helped plan the robbery, but he would not have gone inside the museum. If any of those scenarios happen, some combination of four men were the most likely candidates to have participated in the heist, George Reisfelder, David Turner, Leonard de Musio, and Charlie Pappas. Unfortunately, the night of the night. 1990s were a very dangerous time to be connected to the Merlino crew.

Whether or not any of those four or Donati were involved in the heist in any way, they would all suffer soon after the robbery. Some worse than others. Of the five men who were the most likely candidates to have been the two thieves, George Reisfelder is at the top of the list. First, he closely resembles one of the two thieves, as described by Gardner security guards, Rick and Randy. They described one of the three.

the thieves as being about five feet ten inches tall in his late thirties, skinny, weighing about 160 pounds with a narrow face and dark hair. That certainly describes George Reisfelder, except for the age. Reisfelder was 50 years old at the time of the robbery, though the disguise could have masked his age fairly well. Second, more than 15 years after the heist, George's brother Richard contacted the museum in an effort to clear his brother's name. Sometime around 2009, Richard Reisfelder met with Gardner Security Director Anthony Amore and viewed pictures of the stolen items. The moment Richard saw the photo of Eduardo Manet's small painting, Che Tortoni,

Richard said he saw it hanging on the bedroom wall of his brother's apartment. In the 2021 Netflix docu-series, this is a robbery. The most entertaining interview by far came from Richard's ex-wife Donna. She said she also saw the painting in George's apartment in what she comically called a foo-foo frame. As a side note, whatever the frame was and wherever George got it, it was not the original Shetor Tony frame. The original frame was left at the museum sitting on a chair of the security director. The FBI was not able to interview George Reisfelder.

He died of an apparent drug overdose almost exactly one year after the heist. If Reisfelder had the Shea Tortoni, it vanished after his death. Leonard Demuzio was another popular candidate to be one of the thieves. Les has been written about Demuzio over the years, and somewhat sadly, the most noteworthy part was his death. Demusio was murdered exactly three months after George Reisfelder died, and an informant told the Massachusetts State Police that another member of the Merlino crew, David Turner, was the killer. Leonard Demuzio and George Reisfelder are often mentioned as a possible pair for the thieves,

and they were both dead within 15 months of the robbery. Next was Bobby Donati. Three months after Demuzio was murdered, Bobby Denotti was murdered. That made three men dead in the space of six months in 1991. In terms of the overall Gardner timeline, George Reisfelder died in March 1991. Leonard de Musio was killed in June 1991. Bobby Donati was killed in September 1991. Adding the other suspects, Miles Conner's friend David Houghton died of a heart attack in March 1992.

Con artist, thief, and early suspect Brian McDevitt fled to South America in or around June 1992. And between those last two, in April 1992, the FBI circulated an internal memo, which said the likely pair of robbers were the last two of the big five suspects, Charlie Pappas and David Turner. Pappas and Turner were good friends, but their friendship was tested after Charlie Pappas was arrested on drug charges in 1992. To stay out of jail, Pappas agreed to testify against Turner in the case of a home invasion from 1990.

The day before Thanksgiving, 1995, right before Turner was supposed to go to trial, someone shot and killed Charlie Pappas. The murder happened right outside Pappas' front door, and with his dying words, he swore David Turner killed him. But there was no proof, and so David Turner was the last man standing of the original five mafia-related suspects. At the same time, the Pappas-Turner-drunner-dard. drama was playing out, Miles Connor and his cellmate in California were trying to negotiate with

the FBI, and the Gardner Museum received a letter from an anonymous author who claimed to be able to return the artwork. Lots of things happened in the first five years after the heist, but none of them led to the artwork, and none of them yielded hard evidence about the identities of the thieves. In March 1997, a year and a half after Charlie Pappas was murdered, the Gardner Museum raised the reward for the return of the artwork from $1 million to $5 million. Starting in July and continuing for the rest of the year, the Billy Youngworth saga dominated the headlines. To the leaders of the museum, it seemed like there might be real progress toward recovering the stolen items. Maybe Miles Conner's friends really were responsible for the

heist, or they had somehow gained control of the items afterward. Maybe, but at the same time in 1997, on the mafia side of the investigation, a career criminal named Anthony Romano agreed to wear a wire and record conversations with Carmelo Merlino. Romano had a personal grudge against Merlino, and Romano's recordings produced some basic chatter about the Gardner heist, but nothing incriminating. By 1998, Billy Youngworth was in prison, and his possible lead had fizzled out like all the others. But, Anthony, Anthony Romano was recording discussions in the Merlino crew about an idea that could provide leverage to the FBI. Carmelo Merlino, his nephew William, David Turner, and Stephen Rossetti were talking about robbing the Loomis armored car facility in Easton, Massachusetts.

It was a crime reminiscent of the Great Brinks robbery of 1950. Ralph Rossetti, the leader and namesake of the Rossetti gang, died in 1998, and that year, his nephew, Steve, TV teamed up with the Merlino crew to plan the Loomis heist. But the robbery never happened. In the early morning hours of February 7, 1999, the day of the robbery, the FBI swooped in and arrested Carmelo Merlino, William Merlino, Stephen Rossetti, and David Turner. They were charged with conspiracy to commit robbery and a variety of weapons offenses for the small arsenal they were going to use during the heist.

During interrogation, the FBI repeatedly tried to get the men to talk about the Gardner heist, but the four men said they knew nothing. It took two years for their cases to go to trial. That was their window of time to use the Gardner artwork as leverage to get themselves out of trouble. The FBI practically begged them to do it, and they said nothing. In September and October of 2001, the four men were convicted at trial and sentenced. to prison. Carmelo Merlino was 67 years old, and he received a sentence of 47 years. He was guaranteed to die in prison. If he were involved in the Gardner Heist in any way, it was his last

chance to use it to his advantage. And he didn't. By that time in 2001, the FBI increasingly believed that Merlino's crew was responsible for the heist. If they were, did that mean Merlino no longer had the items in the late 1990s or early 2000s. He couldn't have used him even if he wanted to. Maybe? Did it mean he never had them, and the FBI was wrong, and the Merlino crew had nothing to do with the Gardner heist? Also, maybe.

William Merlino received a 13-year sentence. If he knew anything, he said nothing. Stevie Rossetti received a 51-year sentence. If he knew anything, he said nothing. and David Turner, who is still suspected by some of being one of the two thieves at the museum, received a 38-year sentence, and he said nothing, at least for the moment. A few years into his new life in prison, he may have changed his mind and started working with the FBI. That, like nearly everything in the Gardner story, is open for debate.

So, by 2002, there was only one person on the Italian mob side of the investigation, who was still alive and free, and that was Bobby Guarenti. By the early 2000s, the FBI believes Bobby Garrenti possessed at least two of the items from the Gardner heist. Guarante was close friends with David Turner and Carmelo Merlino, who had just started their long prison sentences. Yet it doesn't appear as though Guarantee made any real attempt to use the items to help his friends. By 2002 or no later than 2003, Guarantee was having health problems. and the FBI believes he reached out to the third Bobby in the Gardner story, Bobby Gentile, to discuss a plan to try to sell some of the stolen items.

The FBI believes Bobby Guarenti called his old friend Bobby Gentile and asked for a meeting. Those two bobbies were lifelong criminals, and they had been friends for 20 years. Bobby Guarantee was connected to the Italian mob in Boston, and Bobby Gentile was connected to the Italian mob in Philadelphia. Guarenti had a summer home in the small town of Madison, Maine, and Gentile lived in the small city of Manchester, Connecticut. Sometime in 2002 or 2003, Guarenti called Gentile and asked him to come to Portland, Maine. Bobby Gentile and his wife drove up to Portland, and Bobby Guarenti and his wife drove down to

Portland, and they all had lunch or dinner together. According to the FBI, during the meal, the two Bobby's excused them. themselves from the table and went out to the parking lot. Bobby Guarenti transferred at least two of the stolen Gardner items to the trunk of Bobby Gentile's car. According to Guarante's wife, Garante only had two paintings from the Gardner heist. Whatever Guarantee had, the FBI believes he passed him to Gentile. Then they went back into the restaurant, finished their meal, and went their separate ways. Bobby Gentile tried to sell the stolen items through his mob contacts in Philadelphia. Whether or not he succeeded is anyone's guess.

Bobby Garrenti died in 2004. Carmelo Merlino died in prison in 2005. Two more possible connections to the Gardner heist were gone, and it seems like the case grew colder for a couple of years. Then George Reisfelder's brother popped up and said he had seen the Shay Tortony in Georgia's apartment. Not long after George's brother met with Anthony Amore, the director of security at the Gardner Museum,

Amore received a new lead. Sometime around 2010, Amore and an FBI agent received separate calls from confidential sources. Both sources said the investigators should look for the Gardner items at Bobby Guarenti's summer house in Madison, Maine. Amore and the agent drove up to the house,

which had been vacant for years, and found nothing. On their way out of town, they visited Bobby Guernet, Guarante's wife to see if she would be willing to talk. She still lived in the area, and she was the one who told them about the meeting between Bobby Guarantee and Bobby Gentile in Portland, Maine. She told them about the transfer of at least two paintings from Guarantee to Gentile, and she provided a vague description of one of the paintings, which meant it could have been Rembrandt's, a lady and gentleman in black, or Vermeer's The Concert.

At the time, she didn't know, and therefore the investigators didn't know, that Bobby Gentile had tried to sell the paintings in Philadelphia shortly after the meeting in Portland. As far as the investigators knew in 2010, Gentiles still had the paintings. So, the FBI started investigating Bobby Gentile. In late 2011 or early 2012, the agency was able to arrest Gentile for selling a prescription drug to an undercover informant. and the arrest allowed agents to search Gentiles' house.

In February 2012, the FBI descended on Gentiles' modest home in Manchester, Connecticut, and spent eight hours looking for the gardener items. Agents didn't find any of the stolen items. The only suspicious things they found were an old newspaper from 1990, which featured a front-page article about the heist and a handwritten list of the stolen items with their possible values on the black market. The list looked bad, but it didn't prove Bobby Gentile knew anything about the stolen items or had ever touched them. It only suggested he read an article a long time ago and had guessed the prices of the items on the black market.

FBI agents and federal prosecutors spent hours interviewing Gentile, and Gentile consistently said he had no real information about the Gardner heist. Many other people have said Bobby Gentile was a consummate liar. For Gentile, lying was as automatic as breathing. But he was also 75 years old. He was overweight, in poor health, and facing a return to prison. He was in the same situation Carmelo Merlino was in 11 years earlier. If Gentile could help with the return of at least some of the stolen items,

he could get himself out of trouble. But he didn't. He went to prison. Later, after a serious health scare in prison, Gentile's lawyer said Gentile had a rare moment of possible honesty, in which Gentile admitted he did not have access to the Gardner items. That didn't mean he never possessed them or had access to them. It just meant he didn't have them at that time.

And so, the last real Gardner lead fizzled out like all the others. Bobby Gentile didn't have the goods. Maybe at one time he had some of them but not others. Maybe he never had any of them. By 2012, it was impossible to know. And then, one year after the raid on Bobby Gentile's house, the FBI held a press conference and said it did know. Agents essentially said they believed the story of the two Bobby's.

On March 18, 2013, the 23rd anniversary of the heist, FBI agents and a few other representatives held a press conference to reveal for the first time some of their results and theories. The key component of the event was this quote, which was printed in the written statement afterwards and read at the time. The FBI believes with a high degree of confidence that in the years after the theft, the art was transported to Connecticut and the Philadelphia region, and some of the art was taken to Philadelphia, where it was offered for sale by those responsible for the theft. With that same confidence, we have identified the thieves, who are members of a criminal organization, with a base in the Mid-Atlantic states and New England.

After the attempted sale, which took place approximately a decade ago, the FBI's knowledge of the arts whereabouts is limited. Translating the statement leaves you with this. The FBI said some of the art was offered for sale in Philadelphia around 2003, and before that, it moved from Boston to Connecticut to Philadelphia. Essentially, the FBI said it believes Bobby Guarantee took some of the stolen items from Boston and gave them to his friend Bobby Gentile, who lived in Connecticut. And then Bobby Gentile tried to sell them in Philadelphia.

And in the middle of the statement, of course, is the line about the identities of the thieves. The FBI believes it has identified the two thieves and they're members of an organized crime group in the northeastern United States. On the surface, that could mean the Irish or the Italian mob. But when the information about the identities is combined with the information about the travels of the artwork, it can only mean the thieves were associated with the Italian mob. By extension, it means the FBI believes Brian McDevitt was not one of the two robbers, nor was Miles Conner's friend David Houghton, though there was very little chance of that anyway.

And it leaves only a slim chance that Conner's former friend Billy Yudel. Youngworth had control of the stolen items in the late 1990s. If the FBI believes the Bobby Guarantee Bobby Gentile sequence of events, those events happened between 2002 and 2004. The FBI statement made no reference to the possible locations of the items or who might have controlled them from 1990 to 2002. That 12-year period remains open for speculation. Lastly, the statement narrows the list of possible thieves to the men who were connected to the Merlino crew.

Carmelo Merlino, his nephew William, Bobby Donati, Bobby Guarenti, George Reisfelder, David Turner, Stephen Rossetti, Leonard Demuzio, and Charlie Pappas. Of those names, William Merlino and Stevie Rossetti have never been real suspects. They're only connected through the attempted robbery of the Loomis Armored Car Depot in 1990. Carmelo Merlino was the boss, so he probably wouldn't have done the job himself. Then in 2015, the FBI seemed to eliminate a key suspect from the list of candidates. Two years after the big press conference, the U.S. Attorney's Office released security footage of the Gardner Museum from the night before the heist. The release ignited a new round of media attention, and in interviews, FBI agents revealed one new piece of information. They said the two thieves were dead by that time in 2015.

If that's accurate, then Stevie Rosetti, who was never a real suspect anyway, and David Turner have to be removed from the list. They could not have been the robbers. They were alive and in prison in 2015. They were both released in 2019, and both as far as it's possible to tell, are still alive today. And that revelation has always been the toughest for followers of the story because David Turner has always been one of the most popular candidates for one of the thieves. Museum Security Guard Rick Abbott said that of all the publicly discussed suspects, David Turner looked the most like one of the two robbers. So in the end, that means the FBI believes that these were probably two of these five,

Denotti, Guarenti, Reisfelder, Demuzio, and Pappas. In court documents, the FBI has focused on George Reisfelder and Leonard Demuzio. After all the possibilities and speculation, Ricefelder and DeMuseo seem to be the FBI's best guesses, but the agency still refuses to officially identify the two suspects. Even so, the FBI claims it has solved half the mystery of the Gardner heist. it knows the identities of the thieves. The other half remains wide open.

As of 2025, the FBI has no idea what happened to the stolen items after 2003 or where they are now. At the time of this recording, the total value of the stolen items stands at an estimated $500 million. The reward for information, which leads to the return of the items, is $10 million. Bobby Gentile, the last person who was suspected of having some of the stolen items, died in 2021. That leaves only David Turner, who could have been part of the story from the very beginning and who is still alive today. It's possible that he was one of the confidential sources in 2010, who provided the FBI with Bobby Guarante's address in Madison, Maine, as the location of the stolen items. But it's unlikely we'll ever know. As long as the items are missing, the FBI will never provide answers,

and the Gardner Heist will continue to be the crime that never ends. Next time on Infamous America, we start a series of stories about infamous kidnappings in American history. The most well-known, of course, is the story of the Lindberg baby. That's next time on Infamous America. Members of our Black Barrel Plus program don't have to wait week to week for new episodes. They receive the entire season to binge all at once with no commercials, and they also receive exclusive bonus episodes. Sign up now through the link in the show notes or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com.

This episode was researched and written by me, Chris Wimmer. It was produced by Joe Guerra, original music by Rob Valier. Thanks for listening.