In December 1998, a package wrapped in brown paper arrived at Elayne Galleries.
“I was so excited I didn’t take any notice of how it had been shipped,” says Bonnie. “I think it entered the United States via international mail, and was forwarded to us in the parcel post.”
Bonnie’s arrangement with the TV station allowed them to film her opening the package. She had a hard time holding up her end. “I told them they’d better hurry, because I was in such a state that I didn’t know if I could restrain myself.”
But she did, and as a result there is a video record of her carefully pulling off the wrapping, and her eyes tearing up as she examines the painting Carneiro has sent—“Before the Date/Cowgirl”—and pronounces it authentic.
“My God,” she says. “This is it!”
On December 24, 1998, $40,000 was wired to a bank account in Miami, per Carneiro’s instructions. Two weeks later Bonnie and Gary, Bonnie’s husband Kevin, and a three-person crew from KARE 11 flew to Rio de Janeiro. They spent the first night at a hotel. The next morning Carneiro picked them up in a Land Rover and they set out for Teresopolis.
Their destination was in the heavily forested mountains north of the city, three thousand feet above the beaches of Rio. The road initially led them through mile after mile of hillside slums. Then the city ended abruptly, and the wilderness began.
Teresopolis wasn’t far as the crow flies, but the highway wound circuitously, switchbacking up steep hills, then dropping into valleys thick with vine-covered trees. Flocks of brilliantly colored birds flashed across the road. In the distance they caught glimpses of two jagged and oddly shaped mountain peaks, Dedo de Deus (God’s Finger) and Nariz do Frade (the Monk’s Nose).
Remote as the area seemed, the road was well traveled. Summer was in full swing in the southern hemisphere, and Carneiro explained that Teresopolis was a favorite escape from the oppressive coastal heat, especially for the Carioca elite. It had been since Dom Pedro II, the last emperor of Brazil, made his summer residence there.
They stopped halfway, so Carneiro could buy everyone lunch. “It was this fabulous palace for carnivores,” says Gary. “Jose was quite the host. He made sure we all gorged ourselves until we were practically comatose.”
After lunch they continued to Teresopolis, a town of about 100,000 people. Their first stop was an office building in which Carneiro’s art gallery was located.
“This is my small gallery,” he announced. “I have a much larger one in Lisbon.” He asked the TV crew to refrain from filming while he showed them around.
“He had some interesting art,” says Gary, “but he didn’t say much about it. Instead he talked about his school, and how important it was to be educating the children of the community. It seemed to be his way of emphasizing what an upright citizen he was. We didn’t stay at the gallery very long. ‘Tonight I entertain you, tomorrow we’ll look at art,’ he said.”
Nevertheless, after they arrived at Carneiro’s Teresopolis residence, which took up the entire upper floor of an apartment building, they next spent more than an hour viewing all the paintings on display there. Carneiro’s wife was friendly, but she didn’t seem to know what all the hullabaloo was about and had no role in the entertainment. A chef had been hired to cook dinner—several courses, more meat.
“They eat an awful lot of meat down there,” says Gary.
It was late evening by the time the dishes were cleared. Carneiro proposed a toast, then another. “I don’t drink, so I had soda,” says Gary, “but he seemed to be fortifying himself.”
They discussed logistics for a while. Carneiro had made hotel arrangements for everyone. He said they would need an early start the next morning because they had a bit of a drive ahead of them. They would be heading to his villa, he explained. The television crew was welcome to come, but he had some second thoughts about filming.
“He’d gotten cold feet,” says Gary, “which is what I’d been worried about. They’d taken a few atmospheric shots at that point, but the paintings were what they came to see.”
Carneiro explained that he simply couldn’t allow photographs of the art he kept there, or even of the place itself. It was past midnight by then. The crew was disappointed, and Bonnie and Kevin were glum. Gary said that he would stick around awhile and reason with Jose. The others could retire for the night.
“We talked until 4:00 AM,” he says, “talked it all through. He kept drinking while I tried every argument I could. ‘I’ll tell you what I’m afraid of,’ he said. ‘I do business in the United States, and people there are going to see me, but they won’t hear my message. I’ll be the bad guy. I’ll be blamed. Then it will get back here, my reputation will suffer, children will be pulled from my school and everything will come crashing down.’ We went over every possible bad outcome, and I countered them with good ones. It took a long time, but eventually he agreed to go through with it.”
A few hours later, the two-car caravan took off. It was another sixty-mile drive into the mountains before they arrived at Carneiro’s gated villa.
Bonnie and Gary Lindberg with TV crew at Jose Carneiro’s villa in the Brazilian mountains
Workers were busy on the grounds. Peacocks were strutting among the statues. A groomed trail led up the mountainside, through the rain forest. “It was paradise, just gorgeous,” says Bonnie. “I wish I’d been in a better frame of mind to absorb it all, but I’d hardly slept and we were anxious to see the paintings.”
Carneiro was in no rush, though. He insisted that they tour the estate. The camera crew filmed background shots for the series, while Carneiro explained the provenance of the statuary and the history of the property. Finally, an hour and a half later, they entered the villa for the first time, passed through a foyer into a kind of living room, and there on the wall hung the missing Rockwells.
“We actually gasped,” says Bonnie. “It was kind of overwhelming. Twenty-one years we’d been wondering what had become of them, and suddenly there they were.”
The cameras whirred as the paintings were taken off the wall for authentication, which was quick and conclusive. Several paintings still had “Elayne Galleries” stamped on the back of the canvas. Then it was time for an interview with Carneiro. He explained that he purchased the paintings legally and in good faith, and, in essence, he had been duped.
The deal for the second Date Painting had already been struck. Carneiro promised he would send it as soon as the money arrived. That night the group was on a plane back to Minneapolis.
By the time the series aired on KARE 11, both Date Paintings were back in the hands of their rightful owner.