By the late 1980s Elayne had begun turning gallery affairs over to her daughter, but it was a drawn-out process. She never informed Bonnie that Home Insurance had paid a $34,500 claim for the stolen Date Paintings in 1978.
“I wasn’t much involved when the payment came,” Bonnie explains, “and by the time I was, it probably slipped her mind. You know, the robbery was a big dramatic event, but it wasn’t front and center forever. We had a gallery to run, and frankly, we were doing quite well and it took most of our time and energy just to keep up. As I learned more about the business, I took on a greater role. My dad stepped in as well, so for a while there the three of us were equal partners.”
According to Gary Lindberg, his parents quickly came to terms with the fact that the paintings had been stolen from their gallery.
“Their attitude was, they’d done everything they could to make the place secure so they didn’t need to beat themselves up over it. But they didn’t exactly put it behind them either. They remained curious bordering on obsessed about what became of the paintings, where they were, who had them, and that never changed even though they were getting older.”
It was an attitude the whole family shared, and the irony of it isn’t lost on Bonnie. Frustration and a heartfelt wish for closure were part of it, but so was an unmistakable intoxication with the mystery and intrigue the situation generated. And kept on generating. After the initial rush of events, it took on a rhythm of its own.
“It would die out for a while, and all of a sudden something else would pop up, and it was like, ‘Okay, let’s see where this leads.’ And of course we’d call the FBI every time. I guess we became a thorn in their side.”
By 1990 Bonnie had major responsibility for the gallery’s public relations, marketing and planning shows, and the increasingly difficult task of getting the FBI interested in tips that continued coming in.
“We’d tell them about things we heard, but it got so I couldn’t even get an agent to return my phone call,” she says. “It seemed like they’d closed the case and didn’t want to reopen it. It was discouraging. I’d pretty much given up on it by 1991. Then we got a phone call from the Eleanor Ettinger Gallery in New York.”
The Ettinger Gallery was the premier East Coast dealer in Norman Rockwell’s work. According to the caller, Sotheby’s in New York had been contacted by a person representing a recently widowed Argentinean woman who wanted to auction three Rockwell paintings. They had been part of her late husband’s collection.
Sotheby’s determined that the paintings had been stolen. They were “The Spirit of 1976,” which had belonged to Brown & Bigelow, and the two Date Paintings that had belonged to the gallery.
“Barbara Ettinger told me that Sotheby’s had put her in touch with the man in Argentina, and he wanted to do the right thing, so we should contact him. I can’t remember the exact sequence of events, but at some point he called me. I believe Barbara Ettinger gave him my number.”
The caller introduced himself as Mario Ravanaugh (another Latino/Irishman), a private investigator and collector of classic automobiles. He said he had some familiarity with the market in collectibles due to his avocation, but he pleaded ignorance about the value of the paintings and art in general. He said the widow who possessed the stolen painting did indeed want to do the right thing, and so did he, but there would be a “finder’s fee” involved.
“The sum he mentioned was laughable, it was so exorbitant,” says Bonnie.
She called the insurance company, which by then had been bought and sold twice, and was told that she would have to pay the reward. In its written response, the insurer said if she were to do so, and as a result recovered the paintings, the paintings would belong to their owners only after the insurer had been reimbursed for the settlement it had paid. The sum indicated was the amount paid to Brown & Bigelow, with no reference to any payment to the gallery.
Bonnie contacted the FBI. The Minneapolis office made note of the call, but there is no indication that they followed up.
“That ended that, as far as I was concerned,” says Bonnie. “Whether there was actually a widow whose husband left her the paintings was never substantiated, but from then on we at least had an inkling that the paintings were in South America.”
But how had they gotten there? By way of Portugal, if a fax from someone associated with the Schreiner Gallery in Lisbon, addressed to “Mrs Elayne,” can be taken at face value. Dated April 16, 1993, it solicits Elayne Lindberg’s support in getting the paintings out of the hands of a “gang” in Brazil and bringing them “back to Portugal.” In other faxes, the writer explains that this would be step one in a plan to return the paintings to their rightful owners.
Bonnie and her husband, Kevin Callahan, a frame-maker she met when he did work for the gallery, had taken over most of Elayne Galleries’ affairs by the time the letter was received. Elayne died a year later.