HEIST OF THE CENTURIES
How the Massachusetts State House’s cultural treasures have vanished, piece by piece
BY CHRIS FARAONE
This story originally appeared in the Boston Phoenix in August 2012. It is re-posted here as a reference to “L.A. or Bust: Investigators may never locate the Gardner paintings, but Governor Baker might be able to retrieve this missing sculpture for Mass with a phone call” (DigBoston, 2015).
There have been two legendary heists at the Massachusetts State House.
The first incident was a prank, most likely pulled by drunken undergrads in white saddlebuck shoes. It was 1933; legend has it that a small crew from the Harvard Lampoon snatched the solid pine Sacred Cod from the House of Representatives chamber, smuggling the mascot out in a box fixed to look like it was holding flowers. The Codnapping shook the commonwealth and beyond — a poem titled “The Pilfered Cod” even ran in the Los Angeles Times. State police were notified, and cries of blasphemy echoed for two days, after which Harvard College Police Chief Charley Apted, acting on a tip, drove to a remote section of West Roxbury, where a group of masked men returned the wooden fish.
The second famous theft was more pro league than Ivy League. No one was ever jailed for snatching page one of the 355-year-old Massachusetts Bay Company Charter. It’s said that in 1984, a man with a soft foreign accent and glasses cased the archives in the State House basement. According to investigators, another bespectacled man, about 10 years younger and mustachioed, followed up the next day by wrenching into the bronze vault holding the charter and walking out with the parchment tucked in a black leather portfolio. The burglar also swiped the wax seal that King Charles I himself had affixed to the document. The page was found six months later during an unrelated drug raid in Dorchester; the seal was recovered under similar circumstances 13 years later in Randolph. No one’s ever taken credit for the job.
As the central repository for historical art and artifacts in a region with profoundly deep roots, the State House — along with the Massachusetts Archives, which moved from the State House to Dorchester in 1985 — has served as a storehouse for one of the most prized public collections of paintings and ephemera in America. More than any other state, Massachusetts has a heritage that runs deep, from the Sons of Liberty to John Singleton Copley and a host of other American masters.
But this heritage has been slowly, quietly ransacked. Over the years, countless items have disappeared — and unlike the Cod and the Charter, most have never been seen again. That includes more than a dozen oil paintings of such notables as founding father John Adams and iconic State House architect Charles Bulfinch; documents including letters from George Washington to John Hancock; a box made from the original USS Constitution; Native American arrowheads; and the marble bust of education reformer Reverend Charles Brooks, sculpted by renowned artist Thomas Crawford in 1842, which was last seen by officials in the State Library 90 years ago. In 1970, a 35-by-54-foot stained-glass ceiling — once described by the Associated Press as “one of the largest single skylights in the country” — was removed from the House chamber. It would be 17 years before anyone realized that the oval-shaped wrought-iron masterpiece was gone for good, most likely divided into sections and sold off by Beacon Hill insiders.
Appraiser Chris Barber of the Boston-based Skinner Auctioneers says the value of the missing pieces “is inextricably tied to the State House.” That is to say, that without the story of where the goods came from — which could not be feasibly told, since they’re stolen — they’re worth no more or less than comparable works from their period. For example, few collectors would have interest in an anonymous 19th-century oil painting — unless they knew it was the missing portrait of Robert Rantoul Jr., who served in the US Senate and was a champion of religious tolerance and equal rights back in the 1830s.
The real mystery, though, is greater than each individual disappearance — it’s how the commonwealth was hijacked, over the course of centuries, and for the most part in plain sight.
PERSONAL HISTORY
As a reporter in Boston for the past eight years, I’ve spent entire weeks at the State House working stories. While a graduate student at Boston University, I toiled in a windowless room behind the women’s caucus on the fourth floor. Word was that years earlier, House Speaker Tip O’Neill sipped scotch and played cards in that room, and so I asked around to verify the rumor. In the process, I also began to dive into an ocean of much juicier secrets buried in the building’s past.
Many of the stories I heard pertained to artifacts that had vanished under strange circumstances — battle flags missing in action, a magnificent 15-foot mirror taken hostage by a local businessman in the 1960s (according to legend, he offered to return it in exchange for a tax credit). People told me these anecdotes to illustrate the larcenous culture running amok in a building where the last three Speakers of the House have been indicted and a former Senate president’s brother was one of America’s most wanted. But I began to see that these stories added up to more than a metaphor — they were a slow-building scandal of their own.
Budget-wise, neglect is partly to blame for the gradual pilfering. For example, the Bureau of State Office Buildings, which controls the art commission, has seen its funding slashed by about $1.8 million since 2009. These are not new problems. In the Boston art heist book Stealing Rembrandts, Anthony Amore and Tom Mashberg write, “The State House in Boston once freely displayed Revolutionary and Civil War weapons and coins, and signed documents from the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony along in its corridors.” In the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s, they wrote, “so many ancestral items were swiped behind the backs of unwary docents and security men” that part of the collection was removed to a secure location in Dorchester.
Cultural plunder isn’t rare around here. “To put the prevalence of art theft into perspective, in Massachusetts alone, nearly every major museum in the state has fallen victim to art theft,” wrote Amore, who is also the director of security at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. In some ways, the disappearance of artifacts from the State House approaches the scale of the infamous Gardner heist in 1990 — though unlike that crime, this hasn’t pierced the public consciousness. While some people die bitter, having chased Rembrandts to the grave, few have acknowledged the breadth of the commonwealth’s lost jewels, let alone lost sleep over a bygone canvas. And so I decided to go on a wild goose chase of my own.
TREASURE HUNT
After 18 years in the Old State House by the harbor, Governor Sam Adams and prominent patriot Paul Revere laid the cornerstone for the new Beacon Hill building on July 4, 1795. Nearly three years later, on a frigid January morning, legislators moved into their new home — a 172-foot-wide, 65-foot-deep, 155-foot-high brick monument. The total cost for the project was $133,333.33 — a tribute to the original 13 colonies — which did not include the copper roof that Revere would pound four years later.
I learned all of that and more at the scene of the crime, on one of the free hour-long tours offered by the Secretary of State’s office on weekdays. The tour is understandably limited to items that remain in the building. I was interested in things that aren’t there — goods that are either in a safe deposit box or a dark basement overseas, or decaying in a landfill somewhere.
To dig deeper, I started by consulting the State House Guide Book, which was printed nine times — by order of the General Court — between 1901 and 1933. As it turns out, in 1845 the commonwealth sent an envoy to France to collect early colonial records, all of which would be stored — along with the King Charles charter — in the Secretary of State’s office. Fifty years after that came the designation of Memorial Hall, which was initially filled with flags from the Civil and Spanish-American wars.
Around 1900, Governor John Brackett appointed someone to solicit contributions of portraits, with images of ex-governors as a priority. His successor, Governor Winthrop Murray Crane, went one step further, appropriating $12,000 for original paintings of all governors who had served since the adoption of the state constitution. It was also during Crane’s tenure that the commonwealth began commissioning murals — a medium that trended nationally soon after. In guide books and literature, the Massachusetts Historical Commission has described the first decade of the 20th century as when the State House became an official “repository for fine arts.” By 1910 there were more than 100 objects in the collection, spurring Governor Eben Draper to establish a state art commission of five qualified citizens.
Between the old guide books and my tour, my list of questions kept growing. If tradition strictly dictates who walks through the Bulfinch entrance in the front — US presidents, foreign heads of state, and governors on their first and last days — then why is the state so lax about thieves who sneak nostalgia out the back? I also wondered about the hundreds of flags that were once displayed in the Siena marble alcoves of Memorial Hall. I asked my guide why there were only one-dimensional facsimiles where so much pride used to hang, but she could only say that the flags were all removed in 1987, and are in safe keeping in the cellar. The only heists that came up, it seemed, were ones with happy endings.
‘DUST AND DEHYDRATION’
Considering the ease with which college punks swiped the Sacred Cod in 1933, it came as little surprise in the 1940s when the state archives department discovered that roughly 400 documents from the 17th and 18th centuries were missing — the letters from Washington to Hancock; notes written by the likes of Ben Franklin and John Jay. Conditions were so shoddy that in 1950 a guest speaker on “Student Government Day” addressed the House and Senate in a joint session, and used his platform to attack the state’s poor storage facilities. At the time, the archives were mostly contained in three offices on the fourth floor of the State House. The fourth stash was in the basement near the boiler room.
Back then, the state’s storage spaces were dank and without ventilation or air conditioning. Landmark Indian treaties were stuffed in drawers at random; on the fourth floor, plaster peeled from the walls while bins and buckets filled with water during rainstorms. The only items kept in relative safety were the Massachusetts constitution and the King Charles charter — both were behind locked doors in heavy metal cabinets. Otherwise, according to a 1956 Christian Science Monitor exposé, “Three hundred years of recorded American history are here given very little protection from the relentless encroachments of time, dust, and dehydration.”
Though already a public embarrassment, the decaying archives became humiliating front-page news in 1956, when two writers from the Boston Herald Traveler staged a heist to expose the state’s vulnerability. During work hours, reporters Jack O’Shea and Henry Bosworth pocketed 11 documents worth a total of $23,000. They didn’t wear masks or gloves, and they didn’t even have to use the bogus credentials that they brought in case somebody tried to stop them. They simply signed into the building under false names, reached into the open cases, and walked off with the booty. They wouldn’t be the last.
After years of historians campaigning for safer keeping, in 1960 the State House entered a major rehabilitation period, which included a somewhat secure new archive space in the basement. Though it would eventually prove to be inadequate, the bunker did mark an improvement from previous arrangements, especially for the cherished King Charles charter. Starting in 1961, that document was stored in a custom-built helium-filled bronze vault with a horizontal glass case; other heirlooms like the state constitution were given similar display treatments on the stone cellar walls.
Still, problems persisted, and in 1965 Joseph Coletti resigned as chairman of the Massachusetts Art Commission. An internationally renowned sculptor, Coletti publicly damned then-Governor John Volpe for curtailing the commission’s powers. “Numerous paintings at the State House are deteriorating and have been neglected by bureaucratic inaction,” Coletti told the Boston Globe. “The leaders of the commonwealth are unaware of the need for an art commission with expertise and integrity.”
Things soon worsened. In 1968, there was a second Codnapping — this time by UMass-Boston students, in protest of their school moving to remote Columbia Point. The fish was found tucked behind a door in the House chamber three days later, but the negative press left a sting. Still, despite the outrage over the Codnapping among members, no one sounded an alarm in 1970 when the massive stained-glass dome, then 75 years old, disappeared over a span of days. According to Representative David Bartley, who was Speaker of the House in 1970, “Somebody walked off with a couple of pieces of it.”
By the late 1970s, there was an obvious need for improvements in preservation. James Igoe, the deputy director of the Bureau of Public Records at the time, had taken to publicly exposing vulnerabilities in security, and even told reporters that the archives were less well guarded than facilities elsewhere. With a growing amount of low-level thuggery and organized crime hitting the region, in 1980 lawmakers finally approved a $19 million fortress in Dorchester for safekeeping. But the construction wouldn’t be completed soon enough.
THE SUSPECT
Whoever stole the first sheet of the King Charles charter and its wax seal acted on August 8, 1984, sometime around 10 or 11 am so as to strike between the shifts of museum workers making rounds. Either that or it was snuck out the previous evening — an alternative theory goes — past an alarm system and locked doors. Reacting to the heist, then-Secretary of State Michael Connolly wagged his finger at the now- defunct Capitol Police force, which patrolled the State House and six other buildings at the time. In his turn, however, Governor Michael Dukakis blamed Connolly for fumbling the sheepskin.
“The whole thing demonstrated how insecure our materials were,” says Albert Whitaker Jr., who was the state archivist when the charter went missing. “That case that [the charter] was in was an improvement over what they had before, but, as 1984 proved, that wasn’t entirely the answer. . . . Quite frankly, it was an embarrassment to all of us.”
Faced with that humiliation while running for a US Senate seat, Connolly also blamed reputed art thief Myles Connor. That despite the BPD and FBI turning up no corroborating evidence, and another popular hypothesis among Beacon Hill insiders that operatives working for John Kerry — or one of Connolly’s other opponents in the 1984 Democratic Senate primary — stole the charter to make the secretary look bad. Though he did get romped in the election, Connolly’s theory gained some traction six months later, when the charter was found rolled up in a box, haphazardly stashed in a dogshit-strewn Dorchester apartment linked to Connor.
A Mayflower descendent and son of a Milton police sergeant, Connor is the most prolific art thief in Boston history, and probably the most intriguing. A badass rock-and-roll frontman in the 1960s, his band, Myles and the Wild Ones, achieved local fame and even acclaim. But Connor sought more dangerous avenues to make bank, and by the early 1970s was amassing an arsenal of stolen pieces — everything from European paintings to swords and lethal weapons from the Far East. In 1974, he is said to have helped federal investigators recover Rembrandt’s Portrait of Elizabeth van Rijn, which had been stolen from the Museum of Fine Arts at gunpoint. So with the charter gone, Connor became the prime suspect — even though he’d been incarcerated during the robbery.
By the time authorities located the charter on Burt Street in Dorchester, it was 1985, and Connor was a free man. The apartment in question belonged to a Kathryn Perry, who was believed to have stolen drugs from pharmacies throughout New England. But in addition to cash and pharmaceuticals, authorities discovered the priceless document. Though not caught red-handed, Connor remained the obvious scapegoat — especially after a photo of him, posing with his blues-singer buddy James Cotton and Perry in the latter’s Burt Street pad, was found during a March 1985 raid on the Canton apartment of convicted art thief Kevin Gildea.
It seemed to make sense that Connor orchestrated the charter heist. Though he wound up getting acquitted, he was facing serious time for a double homicide when the page was stolen, and the theory was that he’d planned to use the parchment as a bargaining chip with prosecutors. But after all these years, Connor still hasn’t taken credit — not even in his embellished 2009 tell-all, The Art of the Heist. His longtime attorney Marty Leppo says that he is unaware of Connor ever stealing from the State House, but acknowledges that such poorly patrolled venues yield prime pickings for the criminally inclined. “They know that no one will even notice that anything is missing for five or 10 years,” he says.
According to Leppo, the Norfolk County District Attorney’s office has a storage room full of Connor’s spoils — including items from the Revolutionary War. He’s fighting to get them back, claiming that none of the confiscated goods appear on any stolen-art registries. If any of the loot was taken from the State House, though, Leppo wouldn’t find it listed in such databases, as the commonwealth has neither the time nor budget to report losses. With that said, even if Connor did make some grabs on Beacon Hill, the fruits were not likely around for long. Like he writes in his book: “In the underground world of organized crime, stolen art acts as a kind of universal monetary unit. . . . The majority of these pieces never even leave their shipping crates, but are shuffled from one storage facility to another, like so many sacks of pirates’ gold.”
FOUND OBJECT
Like a lot of Rembrandt chasers before me, I made a valiant attempt to locate the art in question. I spoke with crooks, attorneys, and the attorneys of crooks, and when that didn’t work, I tried players on the stiff side of the law. Early on, I called retired State House workers, as well as experts like Whitaker Jr. They all told me the same thing — that this type of cold case is nearly impossible to solve since the doers aren’t common thugs.
“Why do people take these things?” says Ulrich Boser, author of The Gardner Heist. “It’s a souvenir. You can buy a Bruins flag, or you could steal things out of the State House. . . . We don’t have enough details to know what was stolen or how, but whoever it was — they probably weren’t wearing black turtlenecks.”
Even after the super-secure archives opened in 1985 — and the state’s paper history was moved to Dorchester, along with some random objects including drums and muskets — there was still the question of how to best protect art that remained on Beacon Hill. Jack Patrick, who coordinated a State House restoration project that commenced in 1987, told the Associated Press that theft was still so common that he was hesitant to publicize an inventory out of fear “that items listed as valuable would disappear.” Nonetheless, that year, the Massachusetts Art Commission produced the first-ever official inventory of State House art. Their findings: at least 13 items had gone missing since the last rough manifest was taken in the 1950s.
“Public institutions like the State House always receive art, but they’re not always prepared to receive art,” says Sinclair Hitchings, who served as keeper of the prints at the Boston Public Library for 43 years starting in 1961. Along with his wife Catherine Farlow, Hitchings wrote the book A New Guide to the Massachusetts State House in 1964. “There’s some degree of safety if art is up on the walls since people would notice an empty spot. But sometimes things are displaced, and art goes into storage. That’s where the trouble happens, because if someone takes art from a closet in the State House, who’s going to notice?”
Some closets were likely emptied during the administration of Governor Bill Weld, who dealt some severe blows to the Art Commission’s funding — and the overall facade in general — in the 1990s. According to a 1991 Globe article, skylights were leaking aplenty, while there were nearly 50 holes in ceilings around the building. As for artifacts, a project by legislators and outside experts “to preserve some 500 military and other historic flags” was scrapped less than a year after it began in 1990. To make matters worse, in 1995, a 60-pound bronze bust of Senate President Henry Cabot Lodge was lifted from the second floor.
Nowadays, more than two dozen paintings and all of the state’s several hundred flags remain in storage. Most of those are in need of expensive healing; but overall, the collection is in its best condition ever. The building’s art collections management office maintains a detailed list of all works, as well as flags, and arranges restorers to revitalize damaged pieces. All things considered, though, their budget isn’t nearly enough. Asked if they have ample resources to hunt busts and canvases that vanished eons ago, one curator nearly laughs. “I wish,” she says, “but I’m just one person working part-time.”
As my research for this article wrapped up, I gave my list of forgotten items a last run through some search engines — and got some surprising results. Staring out from my computer screen was the familiar face of education reformer Rev. Charles Brooks, as sculpted by the American artist Thomas Crawford in Rome circa 1842. The state doesn’t know where it is. But the bust isn’t missing after all — it’s listed in an online database as being in storage at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). According to their catalog, the LACMA received the 25-inch marble from a benefactor couple, Mr. and Mrs. Herbert M. Gelfand, in 1993. Public auction records show that the piece was sold the year before by the Dedham-based Grogan & Company, for $6000. LACMA senior curator Ilene Fort told me that the museum will be looking into the artwork’s provenance.
Somewhere out there, there’s a person reading this who’s within arm’s length of another missing Massachusetts treasure — maybe a panel from the old stained-glass ceiling, perhaps the family coat-of-arms of colonial agent Dennys De Berdt that was last seen in the governor’s chamber around 1907. It’s unlikely that any relics of battle, or peace, or lawmaking will reappear as a result of this mention — none of it has been reported as stolen, so there’s little legal motivation for the perps to return anything, whether they’re in black turtlenecks or not. But no matter what, it’s still worth the search effort. Because whether they were lost, forgotten, trashed, or looted, every emblem is part of Massachusetts history.
And they’re all still missing.
Chris Faraone is the News+Features Editor of DigBoston and the author of four books including the Occupy travelogue 99 Nights with the 99 Percent. He is currently publishing installments on Medium of his latest project, Oregon Tale: A Series on Evictions and the New Rush for Resources Roiling the Wild West.
