The tipster who had fingered an underworld figure for the Minneapolis police and the FBI three weeks following the theft practically made a pest of himself thereafter. He contacted the FBI many times six months later, named the perpetrators again, and said he didn’t know whether the paintings were still in Minneapolis or had been fenced elsewhere.
A memorandum dated October 24, 1980, says the tipster had “continually advised that [redacted] was responsible for captioned theft.” The most interesting thing about that particular memo is that it is included as part of the information the FBI developed after Elayne Lindberg told them of her conversation with the contractor. He appears to be the tipster who kept on tipping.
The files indicate that he merely confirmed what the FBI already knew about the theft, but his periodic reminders might have prodded them to make life uncomfortable for at least one of the perpetrators.
In 1983, the tipster contacted a retired FBI agent and claimed he could recover the paintings in return for a reward. Elayne told the former agent that there was a $5,000 reward being offered by Home Insurance. She said the company might even go as high as $10,000, if the paintings were in good condition. The former agent said the lower figure was probably plenty and he would stay in contact. Nothing came of it.
In June 1984, correspondence addressed to the Minneapolis office from an agent in the field suggests “reopening” the case because the tipster had new information. He claimed that one of the men he fingered was now in possession of the paintings. The note ends with a caution: “This case should not be discussed on Bureau radio frequencies because it is known that [redacted] has Bureau radio monitored.”
Nothing came of that either, but a year later, in the spring of 1985, the thief who allegedly possessed the paintings was under intense surveillance by the FBI. His phone was tapped, and he was being tailed. He was feeling the heat and making plans to relocate.
He phoned Elayne Lindberg and made a proposal. He would return all the stolen paintings if both the U.S. attorney and the Hennepin County attorney would agree not to prosecute. A preliminary meeting was scheduled between Elayne, the perpetrator, and his lawyer, but the perpetrator never showed up.
By August 1985, that same perpetrator was living in Detroit and negotiating through an attorney to set up a deal between himself, the FBI, and Home Insurance Company. By then he wanted immunity plus a cash reward. The FBI was eager to make the deal. They seem to have persuaded the prosecutors to go along, but there were still many stumbling blocks. Each party to the potential arrangement had a separate agenda, even the ones that appeared to be acting in concert.
All of the paintings, seven Rockwells and the fake Renoir, were subject to the negotiation, but Brown & Bigelow cared only about its four paintings (if those), and the insurer had a monetary interest only in those four plus the two that belonged to the gallery. Per the payout agreement, Brown & Bigelow and the insurer had to agree to any arrangement that was made and had to split the cost of a reward.
According to the file, the perpetrator’s attorney estimated the value of all the paintings at that point to be $1,115,000. “Similar paintings by Rockwell,” said the attorney, “have been sold in the open market for prices in excess of $100,000, a marked increase due to the death of Rockwell since the theft of these paintings.”
The value of Rockwell’s paintings had spiked after his death, but not as much as the attorney claimed. Even if it had, simple arithmetic indicates that for negotiation purposes the fake Renoir, in which neither the insurer nor Brown & Bigelow had any interest, was being valued as highly as the Rockwell paintings. Maybe higher.
Home Insurance was represented by Greg Smith, now an insurance attorney in New York. “I don’t recall being told that the Renoir was a fake,” he says. He can’t be sure whether his client was aware or not.
It seems likely that the FBI wanted a key piece of evidence and jumped at the chance to have Home Insurance and Brown & Bigelow retrieve it, even if it cost them a couple hundred thousand dollars.
The FBI, the perpetrator’s attorney, and Smith worked out a method of exchange in the event an agreement could be reached. The perpetrator, through his attorney, would make the paintings available “somewhere in the Eastern (judicial) District of Michigan.” The perpetrator would either tell the FBI exactly where they were or provide enough information for a search warrant that would result in their recovery. Simultaneously, a check would be made out to the perpetrator’s attorney and placed in escrow with the FBI. Home Insurance would have forty-eight hours to authenticate the paintings. Once the insurer accepted the paintings, the check would be cashed and the money turned over to the perpetrator.
Queried whether such an arrangement was normal in respect to stolen objects of value, Smith replied, “There is no normal deal.” Then he corrected himself. “You could say that they normally turn out to be disasters.”
The Detroit deal didn’t result in anyone getting ripped off or killed, but it didn’t work either.
“My client and the FBI discussed whether any reward should be offered for the return of the paintings, and ultimately my client decided against it,” says Smith. “A claim or maybe two claims had already been processed, and the insurer decided that would be the end of it as far as they were concerned.”
According to Bonnie Lindberg, the insurer was willing to go through with the deal, but Brown & Bigelow balked. As she recalls, the executive who made that decision said the company had already bought the paintings once, so why should they buy them again.
There was one more attempt at a deal after that one fell through. Early in 1986, a private investigator the Lindbergs had hired contacted Bonnie and told her that organized crime figures in Detroit had the paintings.
“I got on the phone with a lawyer who said he represented the mob,” says Bonnie. “The name ‘Rockwell’ was never spoken. He actually never uttered the word ‘paintings.’ It was ‘the property,’ or ‘the goods,’ all very pulp-novelish. I just said we’d have to think about it, and called the FBI. They told us not to do it, to leave it alone. I remember thinking that they might still be hoping to make a deal, and they didn’t want us involved. What they actually said was that if we succeeded we would be in possession of stolen property, because the insurer owned the paintings. I assumed he was talking about Brown & Bigelow’s paintings. I knew they’d been paid, but I didn’t know that we’d been paid as well. I suppose I would have found out pretty quickly if there’d been any serious conversation about getting them back, but that never happened.”
A letter addressed to the lawyer who represented the perpetrator (name redacted), dated April 9, 1986, concludes: “The Detroit office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation will make no further attempts to contact either Brown and Bigelow or Home Insurance regarding this matter.—Thank You for your assistance, Kenneth P. Walton, Special Agent in Charge, Michigan Division, Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
In January 1987, the Minneapolis office issued a memo suggesting that the case be closed because “the Statute of Limitations has run, the stolen paintings have not been recovered and efforts to assist in arrangements to recover the paintings have been unsuccessful.”
But if the investigators were unsuccessful, the thieves they were investigating hadn’t exactly succeeded. Their efforts to collect a reward had come to nothing. One of them had tried to trade the paintings for a plea bargain and been rebuffed.
The evidence indicates that in 1986, the man who relocated to Detroit turned the paintings over to representatives of the Miami mob in return for a relatively small fee, which he split with his cohorts. They’d had eight years to hit the jackpot, but they failed. That ended the Minneapolis gang’s involvement with the paintings.
The three who are still living are enjoying quiet retirements—one on the East Coast, two in the Twin Cities area.