This month marks the 20-year anniversary of the biggest art heist in history.  In March 1990, burglars breached the security alarms at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, handcuffed and bound two security guards, and got away with $300-million in rare paintings. In the two decades since, there have been occasional leads. However, the crime remains unsolved. Nor have any of the paintings been found.

In the aftermath of the theft, the name of one suspect immediately emerged—Myles J. Connor. The burglary had all the earmarks of a Connor break-in. There was a slight problem, though. He was safely tucked away in a federal penitentiary serving the final years of sentence for drug dealing. Still, he could have planned the crime from inside. That was his modus operandi. So investigators paid him a visit. And sure enough, Connor hinted that he knew the art thieves. He promised to cooperate. But for a price. He wanted his freedom. It was a scam he used several times before.

Myles J. Connor is one of the most fascinating characters I encountered in my thirty years as an investigative reporter. We first met in a cell at Boston’s Charles Street Jail. He was the inmate. I was a journalist investigating a story of misconduct by state prosecutors. On a steaming hot day in July, I spent three hours listening to Connor’s recitation of crimes he committed, and crimes that he was charged with but proclaimed innocence. The most recent of the criminal charges he faced was the murder of two young women, whose bodies he helped authorities recover. Despite knowing the location of the bodies, he said he was innocent of the murders. I believed him—as did many other people, including the District Attorney of the jurisdiction in which he was charged.

This was not the first time that I took up the cause of a notorious criminal, nor would it be the last. Four years before, I provided key testimony that led to the acquittal of Anthony Accetturro—the soon-to-be boss of a New Jersey crime family. I had no choice. I was an eyewitness and possessed video of an incident that disputed a cops account that he was assaulted by the mobster. He was being framed. Four years later, my reporting defended international drug smuggler/turned informant Barry Seal, then the target of overzealous Louisiana lawmen. Their abuses eventually led to Seal’s assassination by a Colombian hit team. Described by DEA agents as ”the most important informant” in the agencies history, Seal’s death was devastating to an investigation that would have crippled the world’s biggest cocaine cartel.

My contrarian stories dealing with Myles Connor, Anthony Accetturro and Barry Seal are an example of a dilemma that sometimes confronts investigative reporters. Do we defend the worst kind of characters to ensure the integrity of the nation’s justice system? Connor, Accetturro and Seal were, or would be, government snitches. In Connor’s case, he had a history of bargaining for his freedom.

The son of a cop and a well-known New England performer billed as the President of Rock and Roll, Connor first beat the system trading a stolen Rembrandt for a reduced prison sentence that was imposed in another art theft case. He engineered a heist at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in which three confederates walked into the gallery, fired a shot into the ceiling and when everybody dived to the floor, the 1632 Portrait of Elizabeth Van Rijn was grabbed from the wall.

Prior to Connor’s scheduled trial in the Wyeth case, there was a series of mysterious telephone calls and a movie-like rendezvous in a dark corner of a restaurant parking lot where the Rembrandt was placed in the trunk of a car driven by a state cop. The following day, the U.S. Attorney in Boston, the State Police Commissioner, and the acting director of the Museum of Fine Arts jointly announced that a “public-spirited citizen” returned the painting.

The “public-spirited citizen” was hustled into a federal courtroom two days later to received a four year sentence in the Wyeth case—a slap on the wrist for Connor, who was a convicted felon. In reality, he outsmarted himself.  FBI agents, who made case, had long memories. And when Connor pulled off  another scheme that resulted in his release from prison, it backfired.

Tommy Sperrazza was a vicious killer suspected of numerous homicides, including the murders of two teen-aged girls. They disappeared after witnessing him kill a man outside a Boston bar. The girls’ bodies had not been found. Connor, looking again for keys to the prison gates, approached Sperrazza with an absurd proposal. If he would tell him the location of the bodies, Myles promised to hijack a helicopter following his release and fly into the prison to facilitate the killer’s escape. Nobody in their right mind would believe such a proposition. But according to prison psychiatrists, Sperrazza was legally nuts. He drew a map for Myles.

The victims were buried in western Massachusetts, more than a hundred miles from the murder scene. Norfolk County District Attorney, William Delahunt―a U.S. Congressman as this is written―made a deal with Connor. In September, 1977, he led investigators to the girls’ remains and was paroled after serving only one year of his sentence.

Other lawmen decided it was time for payback. They linked Connor to the murders. Their chief witness was none other than Sperrazza. He said Connor showed him how to kill the victims―a remarkable claim for a guy believed to have murdered a dozen people or more. Myles had barely known Tommy outside of prison. Nor did he have a motive to commit the murders.

Enter on the scene John Connolly, a rogue FBI agent convicted two decades later for his dealings with informants. It is one of the Bureau’s worst ever scandals. Connolly promised Sperrazza all sorts of rewards if he linked Connor to the murders.  Tommy’s decision didn’t require much thought. Hence, he was the chief witness in a case that ultimately resulted in Connor’s acquittal. Connor was later convicted of drug charges in Illinois.

 As much as he enjoyed top billing, Myles was less important to my reporting than the characters recruited to testify against him. I produced a series of stories for Boston’s ABC afilliate titled, Witness for Hire.  My series also ran on CNN long before I was recruited to the network. The reports dealt with the excessive rewards and inducements given to jailed criminals in return for testimony in high-profile trials―a tactic I described as a “bounty hunter system of justice.” In short, witnesses like Sperrazza  had more reasons to lie than tell the truth. 

A few months after the Boston series, I worked as a freelance investigative reporter in New York on the ABC Close Up documentary, When Crime Pays, which featured the Connor case. Therefore, when his name surfaced in the Gardner museum theft, I didn’t have to think twice about the deal he was trying to make. But this time, Connor was apparently using bullshit as  leverage. Investigators received no useful information from him amd he served his full sentence. Although I talked to Connor a few times while he was in federal prison, we haven’t been in contact in years. I last heard that was living in Boston. But there is no sign of the $300-million in art around his house, or anyplace else that lawmen know about.

Maybe Myles is saving the paintings as a bargaining tool if he is ever charged with another crime. Though farfetched, it’s an intriguing thought.

My memoir, Odyssey of a Derelict Gunslinger, is available at amazon.com and independent bookstores. It offers much more than $19.99 worth of laughs. It is an account of my illustrious (I choose the adjectives) career.