The Great Bennington Museum Art Robbery

BY PAUL BUSH

David Farion, Joseph Reiss and Dennis Roberts were fond of foliage. Each weekend last September, they drove to Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire to look at the leaves and steal antiques.

Stopping in antique shops during the day, Roberts, the alarm specialist, figured out how to bypass the burglar alarms, while Reiss and Farion decided what to steal. At night, they broke in. Besides filling up Reiss’s red Maxi Van, what they liked to call their “fall foliage tour” helped introduce them to an area that was so easy to rob that they kept coming back long after the leaf season was over. It was in November that they discovered the Ben­nington Museum.

On New Year’s morning, custodian George Cushing entered the Bennington Museum. The Mu­seum, widely known for its collections of Grandma Moses paintings, pressed glass and regional art, had closed for the winter November 30. The staff had continued work, maintaining the collections and preparing for the coming season, but were now off for the holidays. Museum Director David Dangremond was in St. Louis visiting fam­ily. Cushing walked in the front door – the interior and exterior alarms had already been put out of commission behind him – turned towards the director’s office, and realized the Museum had been robbed. Cushing, the museum’s head of mainte­nance, was the first to see the handiwork of the High Tech Gang.

Farion, Roberts and Reiss, along with John Ozolins, were the gang’s four members. On New Year’s Eve, 1985, they committed the biggest crime to take place in southern Vermont when they hauled away more than $750,000 worth of art and antiques from the Ben­nington Museum. While it was the largest job they performed, the Bennington Mu­seum theft wasn’t particularly unusual for the High Tech Gang. Operating out of Buffalo, N.Y., the four men ran the gang like a cor­poration, executing more than 43 burglaries in eight states, stealing at least $5 million worth of goods in less than a year.

Without the Bennington Museum robbery, the High Tech Gang might not have been captured.

As one member of the gang who later turned state’s evidence told the FBI, they truly believed they had a license to steal.  In November, on their way to burglarize antique shops in Shaftsbury and Man­chester, Reiss, Roberts and Farion had stopped overnight at the Bennington Ramada Inn. Out for breakfast the next morning, Reiss and Roberts visited the museum and saw their “retirement score.” They returned with Farion later that day to join a public tour of the museum. Their visit resulted in the decision to steal the museum’s thirty-two Grandma Moses paintings and hold them for ransom.

Later that month a volunteer guide thought something was unusual when she noticed several men looking at the display cases instead of at the exhibits inside them. Farion, Roberts, Reiss and Ozolins had come to take another look at the Museum, espe­cially the alarm system protecting the Grand­ma Moses paintings. (The guide was unable to later identify any of the gang.) Rather than spend a trip simply planning a crime, the four went on to Lebanon, N.H. and burglarized an antique shop there. As Bennington Police Inspector Michael McColgan, who devoted more than a month to trying to solve the Museum theft, was to say, “They’re the type of guys that every time they went someplace, they made it a point to steal something before they went home.”

The High Tech Gang earned its name from the highly sophisticated techniques it used to beat even the best of alarm systems, but restaurants also figured prominently in its work. The Bennington Museum theft was planned at various restaurants in the Buf­falo area, and it was at a restaurant that the gang had formed in March, 1985.

Of the four members, John Ozolins, David Farion and Joseph Reiss were antique dealers, while Dennis Roberts was a self-employed alarm specialist. Ozolins, with an estimated one to two thousand burglaries behind him, had the distinction of being one of the most accomplished burglars in Buffalo. Reiss may have matched Ozolins in sheer audacity, for after his arrest by the FBI, Reiss went out and committed another ten burglaries. Of Farion, Inspector McColgan said, “He’s not your run of the mill thief. He has an excellent background in the art world. He knows his quality antiques, and he knows what to steal and not steal.”

The four considered the High Tech Gang a business. “They had it arranged just like a corporation in terms of who was an equal shareholder – even if one didn’t participate in a particular crime he’d get his fair share,” said FBI supervisor John Thurston. “They’d have board meetings: they’d sit down and discuss what crime they’d commit, how they would go about liquidating items, how much expense money would be provided. They handled it just as a board of directors handles any other corporation.”

The gang concentrated on antiques, but it also struck a drug store, taking food stamps, money orders and narcotics; a brand name outlet, taking such things as a telephone answering machine; and homes, stealing a television in one case. Near the end, to generate quick cash for their legal defense the gang robbed several jewelry stores.  Three months after Ozolins, Farion, Roberts and Reiss had decided to join forces, they had performed so many break-ins that the FBI and local police had begun to suspect separate cases they were working on were the work of the same men. At a meeting in the Buffalo office of the FBI in July, 1985, officers from three local police departments and from the New York State Police, representatives of the U.S. District Attorney’s and the state D.A.s office, and three FBI agents under supervisor John Thurston were assigned to what would be dubbed the High Tech Gang Task Force.

“They impacted pretty much the whole country,” commented Thurston. ”They com­mitted crimes in Buffalo and southern New York state, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Florida, Georgia – pretty much the whole East Coast, north to south. And we know they were distributing some of the proceeds on the West Coast.”

Ozolins, Farion, Roberts and Reiss had chosen their field well. Not only were an­tique shops and small museums easy to rob, but the items they stole were hard to trace and easy to sell. The art objects and antiques had a ready market among antique dealers and collectors and seldom carried serial numbers or other identifying marks. Even after the Task Force had begun executing search warrants, the difficulty in linking goods to specific burglaries proved one of the biggest obstacles in breaking the gang.

“They were an incredible group of people. Every time we executed a search warrant – I think in the course of the investigation we executed ten – every time we took property, they went out and got more,” said Thurston. “For example, we executed a search warrant at Reiss’s house and recovered two truckloads of stuff. We went back about three months later, and he had filled it up again.”

In Buffalo, the four members of the gang had become so convinced of their invulnerability that they had taken to calling the city police burglary division to report when they were home for the night. After identi­fying themselves by name they would ask that the officers on stake-out duty be told they could return to the station.

After their second visit to the Bennington Museum, the gang members went about see­ing how serious an obstacle the Bennington police would be. According to McColgan, “They tested our response to alarms by break­ing into an antique store on the west end of town. They actually did that a couple of different times during the night. They were sitting off in the background watching our response. They had it down pretty good.”

Satisfied with what they found, the gang members drove back to Buffalo, to return on December 30 to take care of last-minute details for the crime. They arrived in two rented cars and an eighteen-foot truck and checked into the Paradise Motel, not far from the museum, shortly before one that after­ noon. They made several shopping trips, go­ing first to K-Mart to pick up gloves to wear during the break-in, along with a set of crowbars, and then to a Dexter’s shoe store to buy identical pairs of boots, so that all the prints left in the December snow would be the same.

At 8:30 on New Year’s Eve, after eating din­ner at the Four Squires Restaurant, the four drove the rented Lincoln Continental and Ford Crown Victoria to the front parking lot of the Benningt on Museum. While Farion, Reiss and Ozolins pretended to clean the windshields, Roberts went over the fence separating the lot from the museum. Using a battery powered drill and a hole saw, he went to work on the burglar alarm. As Roberts drilled, the key switch slipped in­ side the alarm system lock box, and he had to go back to the cars to get a Swiss army knife from Reiss to fish it out. When he finished disarming the system, the four went back to the Paradise Motel to see what the police would do.

They monitored radio scanners for an hour. Satisfied nothing would happen, Ozolins dropped the other three off near the Museum’s north side. While Roberts stood watch, Reiss and Farion went down into an outside basement stairwell and broke through an iron gate, a storm door and a wooden door. Inside, they found themselves surrounded by an unexpected bounty.

They had emerged in the museum’s office area, which they had not previously seen. On the walls were eight important paintings, all of which they took, considerably enhancing their haul. They also took a cart from the office area to transport items within the museum. But first they discarded a videotape someone had left in the cart. It was entitled “Museum Security.”

Moving upstairs to the second floor, the y plucked a painting by Rembrandt Peale, the Museum’ s most valuable, from the wall. Then while Roberts kept watch from the center gallery windows, Farion and Reiss, with help from Ozolins when he arrived from parking the car back at the motel, began breaking into the glass display cases. With the professional care that was one of their trademarks, they pried the frames open rather than smash the glass. They gave up on one case that wouldn’t open, and when a shelf inside another gave way, destroying the contents, Reiss became upset.

Working by the light of exit signs, matches and penlights, they moved systematically from gallery to gallery. They had brought cardboard boxes with them, along with copies of the Bennington Banner they had previously stolen in Manchester, and they used the center gallery as a packing station. Besides taking silver, glass, pottery and paint­ings, they also took items that suited their personal taste. For example, Farion took a set of paperweights, along with various lamps and lighting devices. Through the night, Ozolins made four trips back to the motel, returning with the car to pick up boxes from the Museum’s north side each time five had been filled. At the Paradise Motel he moved the boxes into the moving truck.

New Year’s Eve worked in their favor. No one outside the group noticed any of this activity. Their biggest scare came when a police cruiser pulled into the Museum’s front lot. It parked there while an officer gave out two traffic tickets and then left.

The entire take amounted to only 300 items, but the task of breaking into the cases and then packing the items took until 4:00 in the morning. By then, Ozolins , Farion, Roberts and Reiss were exhausted. Farion convinced the others to leave the Grandma Moses paintings untouched. Their original plan was to hold them for an extended period and then ransom them to the Museum’s insurance company, but with only a few hours till daylight they decided against it.

Back at the Paradise Motel, they had a fifth person waiting for them. He was Louis Ruminski. He was one of two extra men they had wanted for the job. At the last minute the sixth man had been unable to come, while Ruminski was to prove himself nearly useless. “He had an IQ considerably lower than the rest of them,” explained McColgan. Ruminski had already used his own iden­tification to rent the two cars and the truck, which McColgan called “not the brightest move I’ve seen.” By the evening of the crime, the four main members of the gang had decided the best place for Ruminski was in the motel room, but even there he managed to screw things up. He was supposed to clean the rooms before leaving for Buffalo, but the crowbar that had been used to break through the outside doors got tangled up in the bed­ sheets and Ruminski couldn’t find it .

By the time George Cushing came in at 9:30 to check the heating system, the five were well on their way back to Buffalo. As soon as Cushing saw the open door to the office area, with the director’s ransacked desk visible inside, he knew what had happened. He called Jean Irons, the chairman of the Museum’s Board of Trustees, and suggested she come to the Museum right away, and then he called the police.

Irons described her reaction to what greeted her that morning saying, “It was a sickening sight to see it for the first time. It was a very wrenching experience.” However, she had little time to contemplate the apparent disaster that was spread throughout the museum. Her first task was to get in touch with Museum Director David Dangre­mond in St. Louis. Until he returned late the next day, she was in charge of assisting the police and organizing the work of deter­mining exactly what had been stolen. She also had to deal with the newspaper, radio and television reporters who poured in. January 1 was the first of many days she would spend in the Museum.

Dangremond kept in constant phone con­tact with Irons until he returned on the sec­ond. When he arrived, staff members were already putting in eighteen-hour days cat­aloguing the stolen items and coming up with reference information and photographs for the police. By the end of the day on the third, the basic inventory had been com­pleted, and the police and FBI, who had been called in because the stolen items were likely to have been taken out of state, had finished their on-site investigation.

Reiss’s knife had been found in the snow, where Roberts had inadvertently dropped it, and the night manager at the Paradise Motel had remembered a crowbar that had been turned into the lost and found by a maid. (A report of a suspicious pickup truck made by local citizen Crime Watch members coincidentally led to Buffalo, but the truck was not involved in the crime.) Mike McColgan of the Bennington Police had begun work in an effort that would see him in close cooperation with his counterpart from the Rutland FBI office, John Hersh. But evaluating the situation, Dangremond was not hopeful.

“Statistically, the chances of recovering anything are slim. It was very difficult to conjure up any false hopes of the possibility of recovering anything,” he said. His outlook was based on the knowledge that only eight to fifteen percent of all stolen art is ever recovered. Of 4,157 thefts in 1984, only 160 recoveries were made. In their choice of glass, silver and pottery, the High Tech Gang had stolen items that could not be readily traced . Unlike the paintings, most of the items had been produced in such quantities that they did not have individual identities. (Even large, distinctive items have proven embar­rassingly easy to dispose of. Sotheby’s, one of England’s most prestigious auction houses, once displayed a stolen $400,000 tapestry on the cover of its catalog.)

However, in what was to prove the most significant move of the entire case, by the third of the month, Dangremond and the Trustees had decided to broadcast news of the theft in art and antique journals. “We decided to publicize the theft as widely as possible. Many museums choose not to do that when they experience a theft,” said Dangremond. “There seem to be two reasons for that: one, that it will encourage copycat thefts, and two, the adverse public relations effect it might have.”

January 3 was also the day that Roberts, Reiss, Farion and Ozolins met to unload the moving truck, storing the twenty boxes in an apartment Reiss had rented for a girlfriend. By the next day, Ozolins was visiting antique dealers, offering the goods for sale. He took cash for a rose medallion bowl, which he handed over still wrapped in the Bennington Banner. On the eighth, he sold twenty-four pieces of Tiffany glassware worth $17,000 to a Buffalo antique dealer for $8700, also in cash.  When Reiss and Roberts originally described the Bennington Museum to Farion, they had called it their retirement score. No one had believed that it would turn out to be just that, but events were already begin­ning to catch up with the gang. This wasn’t the first time Ozolins had begun rapidly ped­dling the proceeds of the High Tech Gang’s crimes, nor was it the first time he had taken such cut rates. Unfortunately for him, the Tiffany glassware showed up in photographs accompanying an article on the theft in the January 17 issue of Antiques and the Arts Weekly, and on January 18 the antique dealer who had bought it contacted the FBI. As several people at the Museum and in various law enforcement agencies were to comment, if Ozolins had waited a little longer the Ben­nington Museum goods might never have been recovered.

The FBI-led Task Force taped several telephone conversations between the an­tique dealer and Ozolins. Ozolins denied the lamps were stolen and offered to buy them back, but he had already split the money with the others and he had a hard time get­ ting it back. On January 20, the Task Force arrested him on two counts of receiving and disposing of stolen goods. However, the Task Force still didn’t have enough evidence to tie the crime to the High Tech Gang.

Ozolins got out on $25,000 bail. The Task Force began questioning the members of the gang, and in the words of Mike McColgan, “The long and the short of it was that they were offered a trade-off for information.” One of the gang members decided the trade was worth it and began talking in return for im­munity. When the Task Force began ex­ecuting search warrants, the gang members began threatening to kill the person they thought had talked. But rather than Ozolins, it was Farion who had turned.

The Task Force waited another month before moving in . In the intervening period Reiss and Farion took some of the glass to an Orlando, Florida antique dealer, Joseph Rappa, who bought four Tiffany lamps for himself and agreed to take eighty pieces of Tiffany, peach blow and Steuben glassware on consignment, holding it long enough to make it hard to trace to Bennington. Reiss, joined by Roberts who flew down from Buf­falo, took the opportunity to burglarize a Florida antique shop.

Back in Buffalo, Farion met with Roberts at RC Anna’s restaurant to find out how they would dispose of the rest of the Bennington goods. Roberts responded that as soon as he and Reiss got back from a burglary in Dearborn, Michigan, they could begin moving it to California, where the y had a buyer in mind. Five days later, on February 21, the Task Force raided the homes of Reiss, Roberts and Reiss’s girlfriend, while the FBI and Orlando police simultaneously searched Joseph Rappa’s home in Florida. In one swoop, the Task Force seized most of the items that had been stolen from the Ben­nington Museum, along with antiques stolen in Manchester the day the gang had original1y discovered the Bennington Museum.

During the search, the Task Force found that the gang was preparing to mail the name plaque from Rembrandt Peale’s painting, “Susan Adella Wood,” to the Museum to prove they had possession of it. The move was apparently to have been the first step in ransoming the painting. Nonetheless, the Task Force waited until the next day to make any arrests. When it did, it caught Ozolins in front of his home and Reiss and Roberts near the Four Seasons Restaurant “with their bags packed en route to another burglary tour,” according to Thurston.

Seven more people have been arrested, in­cluding Rappa and Roberta Steinmetz, a former partner with Reiss in an antique shop. For the three principals, the charges include burglaries, transporting and disposing of stolen property, and racketeering, involving total sentences ranging up to several hun­dred years. Roberts and Ozolins have subse­quently entered into plea bargaining ar­rangements, while Reiss still awaits trial. If he is found guilty, under a new federal law he may be given a minimum of an additional two years for each of the ten burglaries he committed after his arrest, adding at least twenty years to his final sentence.

The victory has been a sweet one for the FBI, the Buffalo Task Force and the Ben­nington Police. Members of each group cite the important work done by the others in breaking the High Tech Gang. For David Dangremond and members of the Museum, the arrests brought an unexpected sense of elation. Dangremond finally allowed himself to believe the stolen items-might be returned. However, the Bennington Museum will have to wait until all the cases are resolved in court before it gets anything back.

The capture of the High Tech Gang is not the end of art and antique crime in Vermont. The gang merely took advantage of the easy targets it found in the area. As McColgan noted, “In my conversations with Farion, one . of the things that became clear was the availability of priceless items in New England. Many places had inadequate security systems and a lot don’t have any security systems at all:’ Until antique shops improve security, they will continue to at­ tract thieves, though none may ever match the High Tech Gang for sophistication, planning and audacity.

The Bennington Museum, meanwhile, has sponsored a symposium for the Vermont Museum Association in May on museum security. •