How to track a dead violin thief
They found a priceless Stradivarius. I spent six months tracking the man who took it for my story in the Washington Post.
The tip came last summer. The FBI had recovered a 281-year-old Stradivarius violin stolen in 1980. Everybody knew who the instrument had belonged to. Roman Totenberg, the late father of NPR legal affairs guru Nina. But who stole it?
Investigators didn’t name the thief. He was dead, they said, so why bother. Nina Totenberg told me his name was Phil Johnson. He was an amateur violinist who had never made much of his life, she said. He had died of cancer and then his ex-wife found the Strad — one of roughly 500 still in existence.
That seemed good enough for everybody else. But for me, that left a hole in the story the size of a ’73 Gran Torino. Who steals a violin worth millions — that you can’t sell — and squirrels it away for 35 years?
We say there are no secrets in the digital age. Employers scour feeds to check on prospective workers and students. Electronic databases compile everything else, whether arrest records or cell phone numbers. Then I tried to find out about Phil Johnson. Trouble is, his years as a promising violinist were pre-1980. Pre-digital. I couldn’t even find his hometown.
Then I had a thought. What if we went analog? Magda Jean-Louis, one of our researchers, found a concert listing in a Boston Globe microfilm from 1980.
That led me to a couple of musicians who had played with Johnson back in the day. I called them to talk. Then I headed to the Boston Public Library and the films of old phone books. I found Johnson’s various apartments and other former classmates. Then I called Thanh Tran, Johnson’s ex-wife, who lives in Los Angeles.
Reporters had been hounding her and she was annoyed and hadn’t spoken to them. But before she could hang up on me, I offered this:
“I know Phil was more than a thief. I know he was once a promising musician. That’s what I’ve been told. You can give me no comment. I respect that. But what if we spent five minutes talking about why there is more to this story than a man stealing a violin.”
She talked to me.
Then Tran allowed me to visit her in California. Three times. Her generosity led to so much. She gave me photos of Johnson from throughout his life. She let me borrow his date book, full of penciled-in scribbles. She sent me a recording Johnson made narrating a story about his family to one of his teenage daughters. Hearing that voice unlocked something about this eccentric, creative, maddening, hilarious and ultimately failed man.
I did use Facebook to find some musicians who had known Johnson. But I found Johnson’s sister and brother through a 40-year-old sheet of paper in the files of the Boston Symphony Orchestra that listed his hometown after he scored a prestigious fellowship. Thanks to our amazing research editor, Alice Crites, I could now drive by Johnson’s childhood homes outside Philadelphia. I tracked down birth and marriage certificates of his parents’ at the county courthouse and visited his high school. A kind administrator let me look through old yearbooks.
So here we are, eight months and about 75 interviews later.
I keep a photograph next to my computer. I’ll probably remove it now that this story is done. Tran e-mailed it to me a few months ago. I printed it out and taped it to a wall. It shows Johnson from a recording session in 2011, just months before he died. Up until then, I believed what everyone — the FBI, violin experts, the Totenbergs — had told me. That there was no way Johnson had played the violin since at least 1985. Except there it was. The damaged man, barely-smiling, with a Stradivarius in his hand. A man who, only months earlier, had been all but anonymous. Until I went to the library.
So now… why don’t you read the story!
