“I got a call about two years after the theft at Elayne Galleries,” says Minneapolis attorney Joe Friedberg. “The guy wouldn’t identify himself or say where he was calling from, but he asked if I was willing to negotiate with the insurers for the return of that art work. The conversation was such that if I didn’t do this, he was going to destroy it. I said, ‘I don’t know if I can. Call back.’”
Friedberg asked the State Professional Responsibility Board if it was ethical to do what the caller proposed. “I told them that the art might be destroyed if someone didn’t act,” he says.
The board had no position on whether negotiating for the art was ethical but told Friedberg that there had been a case in Ohio where a lawyer had done exactly what he was asked to do and was subsequently convicted of a felony.
“I passed,” says Friedberg.
A few weeks later he bumped into Dick Anderson, an FBI agent, at the Berman Buckskin store in Minneapolis. “I’d see him around quite a bit. He was the head of organized crime investigations here, so he had plenty of time on his hands. He asked me, ‘Joe, you know anything about the theft at Elayne’s?’ I told him about the call, but he’d already heard. He must’ve had a source over at the Board of Professional Responsibility.”
That chance encounter and the casual question it elicited were typical of the FBI’s efforts at that point. They had begun with several good suspects, but things hadn’t panned out, and two years after the paintings were stolen, the investigation was inactive.
Friedberg had another tangential connection to the theft. Minneapolis was home to several master thieves in the 1970s, among them the late Jerrold Conaway. “Jerry was a client of mine. I knew him well,” says Friedberg. “He was a very interesting guy, one of a kind.”
What made him unique, according to Friedberg, was that he was a sophisticated thief who also had a strong conventional work ethic. Conaway was employed as an asbestos worker on and off for most of his life, which was certainly prolonged by his avocation. He wasn’t inhaling asbestos fibers during the time it took to plan and pull off thefts—or while he did several stretches in prison. He died of mesothelioma in 1993, at the age of seventy-six.
“Jerry was also a very accomplished gambling cheat,” says Friedberg. “He once got into a crap game at a VFW in St. Paul, and he had what’s called an ‘arm’ on him, which is a die up the sleeve. So it was his turn, he throws, and oops—three dice come out on the table. He knew the jig was up, but before they grabbed him, he said, ‘Well then, I guess my point is 18.’ They didn’t think it was funny. They broke both his arms, and kicked him around some too, put him in the hospital for a while. He told me that in his opinion, he deserved it.”
Friedberg defended Conaway in the late 1970s, when Conaway was arrested due to a fluky set of circumstances that began when he took his car into a dealership for repairs. He was given the use of a loaner that had been stolen and recovered several weeks before, but the police had neglected to take it off their hot-car list. A cop spotted the car, pulled it over, and recognized Conaway. The officer ordered him to open the trunk and found it full of merchandise that still had price tags. On the strength of that, a search warrant was issued for Conaway’s home, where burglary tools were discovered.
“We tried to get the whole thing quashed because the car wasn’t stolen, but the judge ruled that it was an honest mistake on the part of the police,” says Friedberg, “so I represented him when he stood trial for possession of stolen merchandise and possession of burglary tools. It was kind of a treat having him for [a] client.”
One of the first items entered into evidence was an electrical device taken from Conaway’s home that could be magnetically attached to metal. The prosecutor called it a burglary tool.
“Jerry leaned over and said, ‘Bullshit, it’s a robbery tool, not a burglary tool, and I can show the jury how it’s used,’” says Friedberg. “He told me that you follow a jewelry salesman on his route, and when he’s inside a store you get under the hood of his car, and you put that thing on the distributor. There is another part to the device that you keep in your car, and you follow the salesman out in the country, push a button in your car, and it disconnects his distributor. Then his car stops and you rob him. So I asked him if he really wanted to testify to that, and he said, ‘Sure, I’m charged with possession of burglary tools. There is no such crime as possession of robbery tools.’ I told him to go ahead and testify. The jury loved him.”
According to Friedberg, Conaway had just returned from Las Vegas when he was arrested in the loaner car. He had been subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury that was investigating the activities of Tony “The Ant” Spillotro, a Chicago mobster who ruled the roost in Vegas from 1971 until he was murdered in 1986.
Spillotro reportedly reached out to the best thieves in the country for guidance in the process of putting together a rogue gang (“the Hole in the Wall Gang”) and planning a high-end burglary spree that earned him the wrath of more conservative mobsters, who wanted him to stick to skimming casino revenues. It was their displeasure that cost Spillotro his life.
“Jerry had been referred to me for advice on how to handle that grand jury appearance,” says Friedberg. “He told me, ‘I’m not answering any questions about Tony Spillotro, no way,’ so I advised him to take the fifth. I guess what happened is, they gave him immunity and he still wouldn’t answer, so he did a little jail time.”
According to the Minneapolis informant, Conaway had a role in planning the theft from Elayne Galleries but did not participate in the actual heist. “He was more like a—what would you call it—a consultant,” he says.
“To my knowledge, he wasn’t involved at all,” says Friedberg.