Convicted spy Rod Ramsay as a potential Gardner heist suspect (Part One)
Convicted spy Rod Ramsay as a potential Gardner heist suspect (Part Two)
Clyde Lee Conrad on trial in a West German courtroom. Conrad was convicted on June 6, 1990
for his espionage activities while serving there on active duty in the U.S. Army,
and after he retired from the Army as a resident of West Germany
A Boston native, Roderick Ramsay was a member
of the Szabo-Conrad spy ring, for about two years, 1983 - 1985,
while stationed at the Army’s Eighth Infantry Division Headquarters in Bad Kreuznach, West Germany.
But Ramsay's criminal career did not begin with espionage. After his arrest, in June of 1990, the Washington Post reported
Ramsay admitted to invesitgators that he had robbed a bank in Vermont, and that
while working as a security guard in a hospital, he had attempted to break into a safe," FBI agent Joe Navarro testified at Ramsay's arraignment.
The Vermont bank robbery occured less than four months prior to Ramsay joining the Army,
and at a time when he was living just three miles from the Gardner Museum, in the Charles River Park apartment complex, overlooking Boston's Storrow Drive.
On August 28th of 1981, four men,
two armed with shotguns, and one in a getaway car keeping watch outside, robbed
the Howard Bank in Barton, Vermont of about $10,000.00.
Ramsay, who was only 19 years old at the time,
was said to be the mastermind
of the successful robbery. Ramsay's past run-ins with the law included charges for shoplifting and forgery.
The Szabo-Conrad spy ring was founded in 1967 by
Sergeant Zoltan Szabo, who recruited Sergeant Clyde Lee Conrad in 1974. Szabo lost his
top-secret security clearance in 1977 for selling government issue gasoline ration coupons on the black market. He retired from the Army two years later.
Conrad, whom Szabo had recruited in 1974, took over the espionage operation at that point.
Both Conrad and Ramsay worked as document custodians in the Division's G-3 [War] Plans section. Ramsay worked under Conrad both in his capacity as an Army Sergeant and
as a spy. Conrad "is believed to have managed at least a dozen people in the U.S. Army to supply classified information. It was one of the biggest spy rings since World War II,"
the U.S. Army Intelligence Command posted on Facebook in 2025.
The spy ring made millions of dollars, (nearly all of it going to Conrad) by stealing top-secret NATO and U.S. documents, and then selling them to Hungary and to a lesser extent, Czechoslovakia.
Conrad is believed to be one of only five American spies to have made more than a million dollars by way of espionage. What set both Conrad, and Ramsay, who was trained by Conrad,
apart from other spies, was their ability to recruit fellow soldiers to work with them in their espionage activities.
"Documents provided to Hungarian agents included NATO's plans for fighting a
war against the Warsaw Pact: detailed descriptions of nuclear weapons and plans for movement of troops,
tanks and aircraft."
"In addition to disclosing NATO wartime contingency plans," the New York Times reported, "the documents revealed key intelligence assets, including networks and safe houses in Germany used by American intelligence agents, according to officials. The Hungarians routinely share their information with the Soviet Union."
Ramsay had been perhaps its most prolific member, in terms of the sheer number of classified documents he managed to steal. Included in the "motherlode" of classified materials Ramsay
passed over to Conrad
were documents on the use of tactical nuclear weapons by US and NATO forces,
strategic plans for the defense of Europe in the event of an attack by Soviet and Warsaw Pact military forces, and manuals on military communications technology.
After ten plus years of the spy ring’s successful operation, however,
a senior member of the Hungarian Intelligence, Lt. Col. István Belovai, alerted NATO and the Americans
about a huge number of classified documents, being passed to Hungary, from somewhere in West Germany.
The classified documents included NATO battle plans, detailed descriptions of nuclear weapon locations and troop movements.
But before the investigation was complete, Belovai, who was under suspicion by Hungarian counterintelligence, was himself arrested in 1985, while making a pickup at a CIA drop in Hungary.
Before his arrest however, Belovai had provided a list of specific classified documents that had been shared with Hungarian intelligence, which allowed the Army to narrow
their focus on possible suspects to those who would have had access to them.
After a massive investigation, the Army was able to identify and prosecute most of the culprits. In the case of Clyde Lee Conrad however,
the U.S. Army had to work through West German authorities, where Conrad resided, since there was no extradition treaty between the two countries, for the crime of espionage.
The FBI first interviewed Ramsay about security breaches at Army Eighth Infantry Headquarters
on August 23, 1988, almost three years after he was honorably discharged from the Army. Only hours earlier that same day, German authorities had arrested
Conrad at gunpoint at home in bed with his wife.
"You vill take ze hands out of ze vife and place zem vere vee can
see zem," a German police investigator, Holger Klein, ordered.
The day of reckoning Conrad had feared for over two years had arrived, Stuart
Herrington, wrote in his book, Traitors Among Us : Inside the Spy Catcher's World.
Although this visit from the FBI was unexpected, Ramsay was not unprepared. When, at the end of the meeting, FBI agent Joe Navarro asked Ramsay if Conrad had ever given him
anything, Ramsay took from his wallet a mysterious slip of paper with a hand-written telephone number on it. Conrad had told him to use it in the future if he had to get hold of him, Ramsay
told Navarro.
Navarro carefully placed the slip of paper into an envelope, and brought it back to the FBI Tampa field office.
An FBI lab determined that the note given to Ramasay was written on a water soluble paper of a kind sold in novelty shops. It was known to be
favored by Eastern European intelligence services, as well. The paper
dissolved instantly, when exposed to any liquid, such as saliva, making it useful for rapid disposal and destruction of sensitive information in an emergency.
The telephone number was quickly identified as one belonging to the Hungarian Intelligence Service, by one of the other members of Conrad’s espionage gang,
Imre Kercsik, according to Navarro.
A Hungarian born physician, and Swedish national, Kercik served as a courier for the spy ring
and was arrested, along with his brother,also a medical doctor,
soon after Conrad.
But unlike Conrad, the two brothers cooperated with investigators.
The slip of paper given to Navarro by Ramsay represented hard evidence of Ramsay’s personal involvement in espionage. But while bringing Ramsay to justice was a priority, finding out
as much as possible about what Ramsay knew about the Szabo-Conrad spy ring was paramount; a matter of national security.
Understandably, the treatment Ramsay received by the FBI, compared with the handling
of an ordinary street-criminal might receive, for whom there was equally strong evidence of guilt, was
for that reason quite different.
But Ramsay was also treated differently from the other soldiers who were members of the Szabo-Conrad spy ring, perhaps owing to his level of involvement, his knowledge of the spy ring's operations,
as well as his willingness to cooperate, and his continued involvement in espionage and possibly other crimes, like perhaps the Gardner heist, when he returned to civilian life in the United States.
Perhaps Conrad was tipped off by his Hungarian contacts about Belovai’s arrest, or maybe it was a coincidence, but Conrad retired from the U.S. Army that same year.
Ramsay also left the Army that year, at the end of his enlistment in November, later claiming
he intentionally failed a urinalysis (drug test) and used that to get out of the Army without being pressured by Sergeant Conrad to reenlist.
In multiple interviews with Agent Navarro from 1988 to 1990, Ramsay claimed that his failing the drug test was not intentional.
“Conrad and I made so many plans. I was to be promoted and go to Heidelberg. I
was going to have greater access and responsibility—Heidelberg is HQ for all of
Central Europe—but I literally pissed it away,” Ramsay told Navarro.
For that first interview with Ramsay, the FBI's Navarro was accompanied by Al Eways of the U.S. Army Intelligence Security Command (INSCOM). It was Eways who had done much of the dogged investigative work, combing through Army personnel files and the backgrounds of individual soldiers, who fit the profile by virtue of having access to some of the classified documents known to be taken, in their search for whoever it was that had been leaking vast amounts of classified information to the Hungarians.
The effort led to the identification of Conrad as a suspect, and perhaps Ramsay as well. If it had not already been well established
that Ramsay was involved in espionage, it seems doubtful that Eways would have been riding along with Navarro in Tampa, Florida,
on the same day that the spy ringleader, Clyde Lee Conrad, the big fish, whom Eway's had personally helped bring down, was being placed in custody, in West Germany, thousands of miles away.
As a civilian, the Army had no jurisdiction over Ramsay.
It is quite possible that prior to this first meeting with Navarro, that Ramsay had already learned that his former Army supervisor, and fellow spy, Clyde Lee Conrad,
was under investigation for espionage.
As early as April 1987, Conrad was convinced, and with good reason, that he was under investigation. He said as much to an old Army buddy, Danny Williams, who
was actually working undercover in the investigation against him,
that he
believed he was being investigated at that time. This was 16 months before his arrest in August 1988, and the same amount of time before the initial interview of Ramsay by Eways and Navarro.
To address the danger, Conrad told Williams "I contacted everyone who has worked with me when I realized that I was under investigation." "I said 'after I'm gone do whatever you want.'
I closed my accounts, destroyed all the material, and wiped information from my computers." Ramsay had been Conrad's right hand man, if anyone was contacted with a warning from
Conrad, it would have been Ramsay.
In any case, Ramsay must have suspected, when two feds showed up on his doorstep unannounced, that he too was under suspicion,
although the agents he met with that day tried to downplay that possibility.
“You can relax, we’re not here to talk about you—we just need to pick your brain about the Eighth Infantry Division,” he told Ramsay standing outside his door, after asking him, “Would it be okay if we come inside to talk?” Ramsay agreed.
“Happily, Rod is buying what I have to sell.” Navarro concluded.
More likely, Ramsay, a smart and experienced spy and criminal, knew perfectly well what was going on, but played along knowing that perhaps the best way to buy himself some time,
and perhaps at least some of
his freedom, was to negotiate with that one thing he had of value, the information he possessed about operations within the Szabo-Conrad spy ring.
In addition to the book about Navrro's experience interviewing Ramsay, Three Minutes To Doomsday, written a quarter century later,
there is another less known book, called
Damian and the Mongoose, How a U.S. Army Counterespionage Agent Infiltrated an International Spy Ring,
like Navarro's a first-person account
written by former MSgt. Danny Williams, about his relationship with Conrad, while working undercover to investigate
him.
There are striking similarities in how MSgt. Williams and FBI agent Joe Navarro dealt with
the close up investigative process they were engaged in, that of conversing with suspected spies.
But what is even more striking is how similar Clyde Lee Conrad and his former espionage protege Rod Ramsay responded to the danger Navarro and Williams represented,
to them personally.
So call them, maybe
Just as Ramsay had given Navarro a piece of paper with the telephone number to Hungarian intelligence, Conrad had also given a number to Hungarian intelligence to Williams.
"I want you to have these. The first one is a number in Budapest for the Hungarian Intelligence Service, used by agents and couriers when they want to meet with someone. The second,
is the same type of number for the Czechs in Prague," Conrad told Williams.
Whether it was intentional or not, handing over the number was certainly a convenient way to put Williams and Navarro in touch with enemy intelligence services,
where they
could perhaps, if they were inclinded to betray their country, negotiate some kind of arrangement, which could include an exit ramp for Ramsay and Conrad as authorities closed in on them.
If there was a way out
for Conrad and Ramsay, it perhaps could lie with turning their inquisitors into allies.
The purpose of the Army sending MSgt. Williams undercover, to get reacquainted with Conrad
was so that they could catch Conrad in the act of recruiting him. And Conrad did try, despite his suspicions of Williams.
"Everything Clyde said, every story, every illustration was part of a determined effort to get me to volunteer
for espionage, which he hoped he could later claim was entrapment."
Ramsay, too, in one of his few meetings with Navarro without anyone else present, in the parking lot of the Orlando Sea World, seemed to be warming up to making Navarro a recruiting offer. “Joe, be honest with me. Now that the Wall is down, does all of this matter? My
helping you, my reports, do they even amount to a hill of shit?” But Navarro quickly shut it down.
Conrad
was likely convinced, or at least had to assume, that Williams was working undercover in the investigation against him from the outset.
Unlike MSgt. Williams, Navarro was not working undercover, but he was not being entirely forthright about
his purpose in interviewing Ramsay. He was questioning Ramsay, he told him, to find out everything he could about the Szabo-Conrad spy ring, but reall, what he most especially he wanted to find out
about was Ramsay himself, and his spying activities, and not just about Conrad and the Eighth Infantry Division, as he claimed to him initially.
Conrad made a concerted effort to keep things casual in his interviewings with Ramsay.
"Don’t wear anything that would make you look like an agent," Navarro advised his partner Terry Moody, when they were preparing to interiview Ramsay.
Jeans are fine,
but no skirt, no business suits, he told his partner Terry Moody. "On most occasions, I’ll be wearing a polo shirt with
khaki pants, and for the record, my weapon will be concealed, as will yours.”
“We’re not going after a confession,” he adeed.
“We have to focus on what is important: small admissions that add up
until they satisfy the espionage statute.”
"The worst thing you can do in interviewing is
set the bar at confession. What you want is what I was just talking about: facetime. Get
enough of it, and eventually you’ll learn everything you want to know."
Williams favored an approach similar to Navarro's, and with even more compelling reasons.
He was working undercover, and was pretending to be just a fellow career soldier, trying to renew a friendship with his old Army buddy, Clyde Lee Conrad.
If his
questions were too direct, Williams feared he would blow his cover, and if that happened, he also feared what Conrad might do.
"Conrad issued a threat to kill me if he decided I was part of the investigation [of him] he was sure he had discovered."
It was a difficult and dangerous assignment, and Williams's higher-ups were nonetheless putting pressure on him to be more direct in asking Conrad about his espionage activities.
Both Conrad and Ramsay admitted at that the start, to being involved in illegal activities, although nothing as serious as espionage, and both men implicated close military associates in espionage, Conrad
implicated Szabo, saying the retired Army soldier was now a Colonel in the Russian GRU, an exaggeration, but one that
did point to Szabo, an associate of Conrad's being involved in epsionage. Ramsay had implicated Conrad by sharing the phone number to Hungarian intelligence he had been given by him with the FBI.
Both Conrad and Ramsay seemed to understand that either a fight or a flight response would likely hasten their being both under investigation and under arrest, instead
of being merely under investigation. And both men strived to keep
their interactions amicable, in an effort to buy some time while they developed some kind of an escape plan, or at least delay their inevitable arrest.
Conrad did bare his teeth now and again.
"Danny, if I find you're a threat to my family, I'll put a bullet between your eyes. Family is everything," Conrad told Williams, on the first day Williams met with Conrad at his home,
after many years of not
seeing or being in contact with each other. It was a threat he repeated more than once.
Both Ramsay and Conrad were not without some bargaining power, however. As Ramsay explained to Navarro during one of their 40+ interviews spanning nearly two years,
Ramsay explained that Clyde Lee Conrad had told him that: “Information is the most valuable thing in the world.”
And only Ramsay knew how much information he had: Sources and methods, information about which classified documents had been copied and shared, and knowledge of the espionage operation,
which had operated for over ten years years within Eighth Infantry Headquarters. Ramsay's knowledge included key information, not even known to Conrad himself because
Ramsay had kept secret it from him, like the identities of two other soldiers, who had engaged in espionage, that were recruited by Ramsay to assist him, without Conrad’s permission or
knowledge.
Three decades later, in his book Three Minutes To Doomsday,
Navarro detailed his experience investigating and interviewing Ramsay. There would be another forty plus interviews of Ramsay by the FBI, nearly all led by Navarro,
after that first one in August of 1988, until his arrest on June 7, 1990.
But it would be nearly two years before Ramsay was arrested and jailed, (He was placed in solitary confinement.) three years before he was charged with anything,
and over four years before he was finally
convicted of espionage,
even though he had confessed and was pleading guilty.
The investigation, prosecution, and eventual conviction of Ramsay was peculiar, even in comparison with the other members of the same spy ring.
For twenty months, after having implicated himself in espionage, Ramsay had been free to come and go as he pleased.
There was not even any surveillance on him of any kind for over a year, or so Navarro suggested in his book:
"Nine days after our September 20 interview, the
Kercsik brothers [Conrad spy ring members] pick Rod Ramsay out of the photo lineup we sent and confirm he was
involved in the Conrad case. The next day, FBIHQ once again orders us to break off all
contact with Ramsay—an all-caps ORDER this time, the kind you can’t ignore. By the
time I’m again allowed to talk with Rod Ramsay, 357 days later, Lynn Tremaine [his partner on the Ramsay case] is
married and gone from the Tampa office, and the case against Ramsay has gone cold as
a Russian winter."
Ramsay was seemingly left to his own devices to try to develop a plan to extricate himself from this seemingly hopeless predicament.
Perhaps counter intelligence operatives were interested in what Ramsay would do in such a desperate situation, and sought to find out whom he would contact, by keeping him
under surveillance, but in secret, even from agent Navarro.
In a scene in the fictional TV series The Americans, a Russian spy character named Nina Krilova, remarked to one of the FBI's spy-catchers in an episode:
“What do you want with us? With Arkady and the others at the Rezidentura? Do you want to put them in jail? That's how policeman thinks, not how spies think.
We want everyone to stay right where they are, and bleed everything they know out of them forever.”
So it might well have been with Ramsay. The FBI’s desire to gather information from him, including information he would not readily
give up voluntarily was a higher priority than prosecuting him for espionage, especially at the beginning of their engagement with him.
Less than a week after Ramsay's first interview with the FBI, he told them that in January of 1986, a mere two months after he was discharged from the Army,
he had met with Conrad in Boston,
where Ramsay was then living with his mother.
Conrad was returning to his hometown, Sebring Ohio to visit family, but he stopped briefly in Boston, to meet with Ramsay.
Ramsay's espionage activities may have ended with the end of his enlistment and return to the United States,
but it would be the duty of federal investigators to ensure that was the case, and if not, then to find out what new projects he had taken on in the espionage realm, and with whom.
During the time of the FBI's first round of meetings with Ramsay, ABC News reported that Conrad’s recruits continued to work for Conrad back in the United States,
illegally exporting hundreds of thousands of
advanced computer chips to the Eastern Bloc, through a dummy company in Canada.
Ramsay admitted to the FBI that he was the source of that ABC News story, but said that he and Conrad had only discussed illegally exporting chips to the Eastern Bloc. The
project, Ramsay claimed, had never gotten off the ground.
The two spies
had never followed through on their plan to illegally export the computer chips, he insisted. “That [ABC] producer, Jim Bamford, he kept bothering my mother. She was getting very
upset. I thought if I just gave him this one little story, some bullshit, he would go away,” Ramsay told Navarro.
However, in doing so, he did acknowledge that he and Conrad had at least been in the planning stages of engaging in illegal acts inside the United States
that threatened national security.
Facing the possibility of decades in prison, or even life, Ramsay was an individual in desperate circumstances, but one with a sharp and experienced criminal mind
with which to come up with the means to possibly save himself.
The only alternative to abjectly submitting to his fate in the federal criminal justice system, with the crummy cards he was holding, would have been
to come up with a plan, something big, given the kind of manhunt that he, as one of the most prolific spies in American history would be up against, if he simply
successfully robbed a bank or something and fled.
Ramsay would need a caper big enough to make such a manhunt something that could be either overcome or unnecessary, something where he could strike some kind of a deal.
At the very least it would have to be able to help make his life more comfortable while he was inside prison, and perhaps after he got out, with a shorter sentence possibly, as well.
"Over 25 years, so many names have been thrown into this
[the Gardner heist case]," Kurkjian said in 2015, but none of those names had the kind of motivation, the desperation, or criminal background that Ramsay had for pulling off
the Gardner heist.
Unlike the other members of his gang, Clyde Lee Conrad was not cooperating with investigators in any way. He never did.
The master spy who recruited Ramsay and others, earning for himself millions of dollars from America’s enemies,
died in prison, less than ten years later, never having admitted to any wrongdoing.
Denying all of the charges against him, he did not implicate Ramsay or anyone else, in acts of espionage after his arrest, although he did implicate Zoltan Szabo, the decorated
soldier, who had started
the spy ring, in one of his initial conversations with MSgt. Williams.
In addition to his dire circumstances, Ramsay may have had buyer’s remorse, he might have been disappointed with the deal he was getting for all of his cooperation with investigators.
He might have felt bad that he had given up his friend Conrad,
who had steadfastly refused to tell investigators anything.
Using the stolen Gardner art to negotiate more lenient treatment for Conrad or himself, was a possible, partial remedy to this fix,
he and Conrad found themselves in.
There is indeed strong evidence, not shared directly with the public pointing to the art having been taken as a get-out-of-jail-free card. In 1976,
Myles Connor had famously arranged for the return of a Rembrandt stolen from the Museum of Fine Arts, in Ramsay's hometown of Boston, MA.
in exchange for a reduced sentence. In addition, a very close associate of
Ramsay's was from Connor's hometown of Milton, Massachusetts, although the friend, a former boarding room classmate, and college friend, was twenty years younger than Connor.
The association added to the possibility that Ramsay was familiar with the story of how Connor had made a
deal for a lighter sentence, by returning a Rembrandt painting, "Portrait of a Girl Wearing a Gold-Trimmed Cloak”
Connor would later claim starting over three decades later,
that he had himself stolen the work although
his various and wildly divergent accounts, to authors and journalists as cravenly hungry for attention and celebrity as Connor himself, as well as the fact that he did not fit the description
of the robber put out by the police, suggests otherwise. More likely Connor was "Myles away," at the time of the robbery
as his former friend William Youngworth put it. But Connor was nonetheless able to negotiate the return of the painting from the Charles Street jail.
Four years after the heist, the Gardner museum director Anne Hawley received a ransom note, and according to Stephen Kurkjian in his book Master Thieves,
"the letter writer stated that the paintings had been stolen to gain someone a reduction in a prison sentence, but as that opportunity had dwindled dramatically there was no longer
a primary motive for keeping the artwork." The most likely reason for putting this bit of backstory into the ransom note would have been to establish credibility,
since if no offer had ever been previously made to negotiate on these terms, for a reduction in prison sentence, then
that statement would call into into question the authenticity of the ransom note.
Fourteen years later, the FBI still had not ruled out the possibility that the ransom note was
indeed legitimate. "In 1994 we took it [the ransom notes] very seriously and we continue to take it very seriously," the FBI's Gardner heist lead investigator
Geoff Kelly said on a segment of American Greed in 2008, called Unsolved: $300 Million Art Heist.
Gardner Museum director Ann Hawley, also felt there was reason to believe the ransom note was real. In a CNN segment about the Gardner heist in 2005, there was
"an exclusive on camera appeal from the museum's director, an overture to an anonymous
letter writer eleven years ago who seemed legitimate."
Hawley: "I'm particularly interested in hearing from that person who had, I think, a real concern about our getting the work back."
Ten years later Hawley said on CBS Good Morning, "When people say, 'Well, why is it important?' I say, 'Imagine if you could never hear Beethoven's Seventh Symphony again, ever,'" Hawley said on CBS Good Morning in 2105, adding
"a Vermeer is certainly at that level of creation, and so is the 'Storm of the Sea of Galilee."
The Gardner heist, therefore, is a crime with a multitude of victims, millions of people have experienced a sense of loss from these missing works. But millions of people
were the victims of Ramsay's espionage as well. Ramsay was already living in a kind of exile on Main Street, dwelling in a state of anticipated estrangement from his fellow citizens, when
news of his spying was released to the public Tens of millions of art lovers was not going to change the state of his relationship to society at large, unlike that
of an ordinary street criminal, an outsider from society, but not an outsider to the same degree as a spy, who betrays his country.
Hawley has supplied other information that suggest the Gardner heist thieves were not ordinary street criminals. In 2013, twenty three years after the heist, and
ten weeks after I had first contacted the Gardner Museum
about my speculation that Rod Ramsay may have been one of the Gardner thieves, Anne Hawley told a WBUR reporter that
"The museum was experiencing these bomb threats coming from people in penitentiaries that were trying to negotiate with the FBI on information they said they had — and the FBI wasn’t
responding to them so they were hitting us. You can’t paint a more difficult time." If the Gardner heist were treating the case as a robbery investigation and not as a counter intelligence operation,
they would have spoken to this person who was so desperate to speak with them, they were committing additional crimes from behind bars.
Six weeks later, Hawley reiterated that claim in an interview she did on the WGBH news program Greater Boston. “We also are being threatened from the outside by criminals
who want attention from the FBI, and so they were threatening us, and threatening putting bombs in the museum,” Anne
Hawley said recently. “We were evacuating the museum, the
staff members were under threat, no one really knew what
kind of a cauldron we were in.” So criminals who want attention from the FBI, but this story and the ordeal the Museum underwent was not reported until 23 years later, and
no other media picked up on the story either time.
"When Hawley retired, the Boston Globe made passing reference to the dangers Hawley felt at that time. Hawley endured death threats in the months immediately following the robbery.
She twice evacuated the museum after bomb scares, and the FBI instructed her to take a different route home each night from work." Twic the Museum was evacuated because of bomb scares and
that never made its way into a news reports until twenty five years later.
“They scared me,” said Hawley. “I wouldn’t go out of my house alone at night.”
"The FBI has searched basements and attics, conducted elaborate sting operations from Miami to Marseilles, and tracked thousands of leads in the United States,
Japan, England, Ireland, Russia, Canada, and Spain."
“If these paintings do not get recovered — and I hope that’s not the case — it’s not going to be for lack of trying by the FBI, the museum, and the US attorney’s office," said FBI special agent Geoff Kelly, who has spearheaded the investigation for a dozen years.
Yet the history of the investigatin that can be documented and corroborated suggests otherwise," with people who claimed to have information including eyewitnesses, saying they were
met with indifference, rudeness, intimidation, or never follow up with at all.
The sting operations from Miami to Marseille, refers to any undercover operation conducted by Robert Wittman. The New York Times reported:
"Mr. Wittman wrote that his efforts in the investigation, called Operation Masterpiece, were sabotaged by an F.B.I. superior, called “Fred”
in the book, who micromanaged his work and tried to get him thrown off the case. 'We’d blown an opportunity to infiltrate a major art crime ring in France,
a loose network of mobsters holding as many as 70 stolen masterpieces,' Mr. Wittman wrote."
Compared with the local toughs,
whom the FBI have been hinting were responsible since 2013, Ramsay had far fewer disincentives to pull off such a monumental crime, and fewer reasons
to concern himself with the consequences of getting caught. His possession of the art, and knowledge of the crime, might well strengthen his negotiating position with federal authorities.
The Gardner heist took place at a time when Clyde Lee Conrad's lengthy trial in West Germany was still ongoing. There was no way Ramsay would be arrested during the trial at least.
As a soon-to-be key witness in an espionage trial of an American soldier in a foreign country, Ramsay had a distinct advantage, not enjoyed by other criminals.
An arrest of Ramsay for the Gardner heist, or any serious crime would have made international headlines and would have jeopardized the successful prosecution of Conrad and possibly others.
In a practice which is permitted under German law, Navarro testified under oath at Conrad’s trial, in a West German court, concerning
what Ramsay had told him about the espionage activity
of Conrad, and others as well as his own. No one was more familiar with the entirety of Conrad's espionage operation than Ramsay, except Ramsay himself.
Around that same time, other criminals, who like Ramsay, had entered into a cooperative relationship with the FBI, had exploited their status as witnesses and informants
to commit additional crimes with impunity.
In 1975, a career criminal named Robert “Deuce” Dussault, along with seven other armed men. pulled off Rhode Island’s Bonded Vault heist.
The Bonded Vault was a secret mob bank, inside an old fur storage building in Providence, RI.
One of the largest robberies in US history, the thieves stole an estimated $30 million in cash, gold, and jewelry from safety deposit boxes.
The heist is considered the biggest in the criminal history of the Northeast.
Well into the 1980's, Dussault, who had turned on his fellow gang members and became a star witness against them to save himself,
was being flown back to Providence, RI to testify at the trial of his fellow robbers, from Colorado, where he had been placed
in the federal witness protection program.
During that time, Dussault proceeded to engage in a crime spree in Colorado, that included
armed heists and shootouts, right when federal prosecutors were still depending on his testimony against the people involved in the Bonded Vault robbery.
In a book on the Bonded Vault case, called “The Last Good Heist,” the authors wrote that “even after all these years, it’s still unclear just how far federal investigators went
to protect Dussault [from arrest and prosecution].”
WPRI-TV investigative reporter Tim White one of the co-authors of the book, said in an interview on Rhode Island’s NPR affiliate, WNPN, that
Robert Dussault "robbed banks and businesses absolutely blind while under the thumb of the federal government."
“Deuce’s now unclassified FBI file shows him escaping from a state prison in Colorado on October 28, 1985; twenty one days later he was robbing a bank there.
How many other robberies he may have committed that year state and federal authorities are either unable or unwilling to say,” the book states.
Another famous example from that same era as the Gardner heist was James "Whitey" Bulger, who “rose to power
as a secret informant
to the FBI and relied on FBI agents to help him get away with murder and extortion.” At the same time “Bulger was credited inside the Justice Department with helping take out the top and middle tier of the local Mafia.”
As William Youngworth, who famously tried to negotiate the return of some of the Gardner art said in the 2005 Gardner heist documentary, Stolen:
"The FBI takes this public posture that 'listen we just want the stuff back and we don't really care how it comes back.' That's not true.
I mean I have sat there behind closed doors and they only have one agenda, the only thing they want is names," and "they want an informant,
more than they want the art back." adding, "They give people passes for 19 murders, you know, we're only talking about some pictures here."
In the same documentary, U.S. Attorney Michael Sullivan asks: "What's more important, the artwork or a criminal prosecution?” If there was any criminal prosecution
that was more important to the U.S. Government, at the time of the Gardner heist, than “some pictures here,”
it was that of the retired U.S. Army Sergeant Clyde Lee Conrad, on trial for espionage, which was taking place right then in a West German courtroom.
Even after providing in depth information about Conrad’s espionage, as well as his own and others, Ramsay was still a free man, although he was likely under surveillance,
one well aware of the rapidly approaching expiration date on his liberty.
The criminal profile of the typical spy is more that
of a white-collar criminal. And Ramsay, through his espionage, had certainly demonstrated he was capable of white-collar type criminal acts. But
he was also someone who as a teenager robbed a bank in Vermont, armed with a loaded shotgun. Ramsay was a multifaceted criminal threat, of a kind
that might have proven to be a challenge for those who sought to contain him, or perhaps it was believed the risks were worth it, and that it was more
important to watch Ramsay than to stop him.
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