Posted By: franklinmint
Mobster Suspected In Museum Heist To Be Sentenced - 05/09/13 01:38 PM
The Hartford Courant
8:23 a.m. EDT, May 9, 2013
Robert Gentile, the mobster locked in a standoff with federal authorities over hundreds of millions of dollars in artwork stolen from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, is scheduled to be sentenced Wednesday on drug and gun charges.
Federal investigators had been pressing the ailing, 76-year old gangster for at least two years in the belief that he has knowledge of what became of 13 priceless paintings stolen in 1990 in the most expensive, notorious -- and still unsolved -- stolen art case ever.
Gentile has repeatedly denied any knowledge of the art robbery or what happened afterward to as much as $500 million in art. If he had information, Gentile said he would immediately have provided it to federal investigators in exchange for leniency and the $5 million reward.
Federal investigators approached Gentile for information about the art robbery in 2010. A year later, they made him the target of an elaborate drug sting. During a search of his Manchester home following the drug arrest, investigators found what a federal magistrate called an "arsenal" of weapons in his cellar.
Gentile was first charged last year with conspiring with longtime associate Andrew Parente of Hartford to sell prescription painkillers. At the time, Gentile was a fixture at a used car lot and garage on Franklin Avenue, where he cooked lunch for the handful of senior citizen mobsters who still frequent the neighborhood.
He later was charged with being a convicted felon in possession of guns, ammunition and four silencers.
Gentile faces 46 to 57 months in prison under the terms of a plea-bargain agreement reached by his lawyer, A. Ryan McGuigan, and Assistant U.S. Attorney John Durham. The maximum sentence on each of the nine charges would have resulted in 150 years in prison.
McGuigan has suggested on prior occasions that the prosecution of his client is a bald attempt by the government to pressure "a sick old man" to produce information about an art theft that he knows nothing about.
"I'm sorry for costing the state a lot of time and money," Gentile repeatedly told U.S. District Chatigny when he pleaded guilty to the drug and gun charges in November. "I don't have many more years to fight this case, because I am a very sick man."
Asked by Chatigny whether he considered a guilty plea to be in his best interest, Gentile replied: "Yes, I do, for myself and the government, to save time. I don't have much time left."
Informed by the judge that he would have to forfeit the guns, Gentile said, "I don't want them."
As well as $22,000 in confiscated cash, the judge said.
"You can have that, too," Gentile said. "Thank you."
The Gardner robbery unfolded when two men disguised as police officers talked their way into the museum about 1:30 a.m. on March 18, 1990, and shocked the art world. They bound the museum's two security guards, battered priceless paintings from their wall mounts and frames, stuffed the canvases into a little red car and disappeared.
Among the estimated $500 million in stolen masterpieces are three Rembrandts -- including his only known seascape, "Storm on the Sea of Galilee" -- a Vermeer, a Manet and five drawings by Degas. One source close to the investigation said Gentile is the best lead that authorities have had in 22 years.
It's "all lies," Gentile said during an earlier appearance in court.
Over half a century, Gentile has had a reputation in Hartford mostly as a hustler and a thief, according to a variety of law enforcement and underworld sources. But in the past decade or so, federal authorities have developed information suggesting that his interests were wider than originally thought, the same sources said.
Associates of Gentile have said that, in the 1990s, he began traveling regularly to Boston. He became a made, or sworn, member of a crew of the Philadelphia crime family operating in Boston in 1998 at age 62, according to law enforcement and other sources. Gentile denies being a member of the mafia.
While in Boston, he also became associated with the crew of gangsters in Dorchester that included the FBI's best suspects in the Gardner job, according to the same sources.
Federal authorities won't discuss any specific allegation against Gentile.
"The government has reason to believe that Mr. Gentile had some involvement with stolen property out of the district of Massachusetts," Durham said during a hearing at federal court earlier this year.