The F.B.I. was baffled by the costliest art theft in American history—more than $200 million in works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, and others taken from Boston’s stuffily exclusive Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990. Boston Herald reporter Tom Mashberg tells how, more than seven years later, he found himself at the center of attempts to recover the stolen treasures, dealing with a Mayflower-descended master criminal, Myles J. Connor Jr., and Connor’s former friend and nemesis, a petty crook named Billy Youngworth.

From the passenger seat of the blue-gray Crown Victoria, I could see a decrepit low-rise housing project. It was two A.M. on August 18 of last year, and my driver and I were about an hour outside Boston. He parked in front of an old warehouse across from the project, which was noisy even at that hour. A scrawny woman with braided hair ran over and peered in the car window. In that neighborhood we had to be either cops or customers looking for drugs, and we were obviously not cops.

“ Billy sent us,” the driver told her, and she nodded and hurried away.

“ Billy” was William P. Youngworth III, a petty criminal from the suburbs of Boston who said he could help recover 11 paintings stolen seven and a half years earlier from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. I was a reporter for the Boston Herald, and my driver had been chosen by Youngworth to show me some proof of his claim.

He put on rubber gloves and escorted me, by the glow of a flashlight, into the warehouse and up four flights of stairs. We turned down a dim corridor lined with padlocked metal doors. Stopping at one, he produced a set of keys and opened the lock. Inside, I saw plastic bins on wheels, with steamer trunks in some of them. My guide reached into one of the bins and pulled out an oversize black cardboard tube.

Gingerly he extracted a large, rolled-up canvas, which he unfurled before me. It was, I am certain, Rembrandt’s The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, arguably the most famous missing painting in the world. I saw frayed edges, where the painting had been cut from its frame on the night it was stolen, and I was shown, in the flashlight’s beam, Rembrandt’s signature.

Then I was sent away in a taxi, after being ordered not to write a word in the Herald for a week, by which time the cache would have been moved to another location. I suspected, but never knew for sure, that Youngworth had followed us. A haunted-looking man of 38, pale and beefy, with a thick Boston accent and a deep reservoir of paranoia, he would trust no one—not me or even the driver he had chosen—with the great score of his lifetime.

My trip to the warehouse had its genesis the week before, on August 13, when Youngworth held one of the most startling news conferences in Massachusetts history. Standing outside the courthouse in Dedham, a Boston suburb, where he was being arraigned for possession of firearms and a controlled substance, he declared that he could “ broker the return” of 11 of the 13 priceless items taken from the Gardner Museum in 1990.

Youngworth, known to the law mostly for passing bad checks and running a shabby antiques depot in nearby Randolph, said he would help get the art back in exchange for the $5 million reward posted by the museum and immunity from prosecution. Then he asked for one more thing—something that gave this former convict with a dozen aliases a much-needed aura of credibility. He asked for “ the release from prison of my friend Myles Connor.”

In law-enforcement and art-theft circles, the name Myles J. Connor Jr. carries weight. At 55, Connor, with a Mayflower pedigree and a fatal attraction to crime, has been a rock ’n’ roll guitarist, a karate expert, and a collector of precious samurai swords. If Youngworth had Connor’s go-ahead to make a public offer for the art’s return—and obviously he did—there had to be substance to his claim.

Although Connor and Youngworth were both behind bars on March 18, 1990, when the Gardner was robbed, people familiar with museum theft had long suspected that Connor must have known about the burglary. In the arena of art crime, his résumé has few equals. In 1974 this elfin, red-haired son of a police officer was arrested in Mashpee, on Cape Cod, for trying to fence three works by N. C. Wyeth and one by Andrew Wyeth. Valued at $165,000, they had all been stolen earlier that year from the Woolworth estate in Monmouth, Maine.

That was not Connor’s first “ art caper,” as he likes to say, but it was a felony—a “ jackpot with the Feds.” Seeking to barter his way out of a likely 10-year sentence, he masterminded, nine months later, the daylight abduction of a Rembrandt, Portrait of Elsbeth van Rijn, from Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, known as the M.F.A. The Rembrandt was soon recovered, with no charges filed, and Connor was given generous consideration at his parole hearing for his aid in brokering the return of the stolen painting.

Connor thereby achieved a most unusual trade-off—fine art for freedom—which became his criminal signature. Last August, it seemed, he was looking to reprise his Rembrandt gambit, but from prison this time, with Youngworth as his errand boy.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is a fourstory Venetian-style palazzo built in Boston’s Fenway district at the turn of the century by the flamboyant socialite wife of Jack Gardner with some help from her friend Bernard Berenson, the art expert. It sits a short distance from the M.F.A.

Though small and certifiably stuffy, the Gardner holds one of the country’s major private art collections, including Titian’s Europa, which Rubens called “ the greatest painting in the world.” Up until March 18, 1990, the Brahmin bastion extolled the fact that none of its roughly 2,500 works had ever been replaced, or removed, or even moved (nor had any acquisition been permitted) since the death of Isabella Stewart Gardner in 1924.

Things changed drastically, however, shortly after one A.M. that March night. Two white men dressed as Boston police officers knocked on a wooden side door of the museum, which had a peephole behind ornate iron bars, and talked their way past the two security guards. Once inside the vestibule, the cops became robbers, forcing the guards into the basement and handcuffing them to pipes. Done up in false mustaches to avoid later identification, the thieves soon disabled the alarm system, removed the security videos, and got down to business.

Bypassing the Titian and other Renaissance masterpieces, the men headed for the Gardner’s vaulted Dutch Room. They smashed the glass front over Vermeer’s The Concert and removed the oil painting—one of about 35 surviving works by the Dutch master—in its frame. From the other side of the panel displaying the Vermeer, they plucked Landscape with an Obelisk (an oil on oak attributed to Rembrandt but recently determined to have been painted by one of his acolytes, Govaert Flinck). From the wall opposite the Vermeer, they took a postage-stamp-size Rembrandt self-portrait, an etching.

From the back wall, they removed two frames suspended by long wires. One held Rembrandt’s only seascape, The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, the other a disputed Rembrandt, A Lady and Gentleman in Black. For reasons unknown, but probably having to do with how the canvases were fastened to their mounts, the thieves sliced these works from their frames. Stiffened by age and varnish, the paintings left behind a cascade of 360-year-old paint chips.

From the Blue Room, featuring Impressionists, the thieves took a Manet oil, Chez Tortoni, and from the Short Gallery, five works by Degas: La Sortie du Pelage, a pencil and watercolor on paper; Cortège aux Environs de Florence, a pencil sketch with a rose wash on paper; Three Mounted Jockeys, an ink sketch with rose, flesh, and white washes on paper; and two versions of a charcoal on paper entitled Program for an Artistic Soirée. Two other items were taken: a 2.7-pound Chinese bronze beaker, or ku, from the Shang dynasty (circa 1200 B.C.), and the bronze finial from a Napoleonic flagstaff.

Well before dawn, the thieves were gone. Although they had been sloppy with the Rembrandts, they left behind not a single clue to their identities or their motive. The F.B.I. soon took charge of the case, acknowledged to be the costliest art heist in U.S. history. Its value has been put at $200 million, but, given the rarity of the Vermeer and the Rembrandt seascape, no real estimate is possible.

The Gardner theft was a baffling baptism in crime for the museum’s trustees. Carrying a meager $40 million endowment, the Gardner had not only lax security but also minimal insurance. Its first reward offer, $1 million, stood for seven years without prompting a single worthwhile lead. In 1997, at the urging of the F.B.I., the museum upped the reward to $5 million, but there was still no useful progress.

Now, after more than seven barren years, Youngworth surfaced, dropping Connor’s notorious name and imperiously issuing demands. It was a strange moment for a museum that had investigated, by its own count, hundreds of leads and tips that had not panned out. One lead, which sent F.B.I. agent Daniel Falzon to Japan in 1992, had ended dismally. The “ Rembrandt” Falzon went to view was a fake so feeble that even the artistically challenged detective quickly spied its flaws.

But as odd as Youngworth must have seemed to Gardner and law-enforcement officials that day in Dedham, he made sense to me. By then I had spent three months probing both Myles Connor and the Gardner case log, and I’d stumbled across Youngworth’s secret role as a caretaker for Connor’s goods. Connor was known to hoard artworks, both legally obtained and otherwise, and I had bluffed Youngworth into believing that I knew he and Connor were sitting on the Gardner haul. I threatened to dog him in print unless he came clean. He offered me something even better: an exclusive on the Gardner heist.

Since then I have been both a reporter and a participant in the negotiations surrounding the return of the paintings. I am confident that the artworks will be returned, even if the whole truth never comes out.

The Gardner case first drew my attention three months before Youngworth’s press conference, as I sat in a small Rhode Island prison interviewing a forlorn inmate named Edward B. “ Rocco” Ellis.

Ellis, a bullish man of 48 with a record of extortion and cocaine trafficking, was once a professional chef and married to the Boston aesthetician Elizabeth Grady. He is serving 25 years in federal prison for violating the Mann Act—transporting a minor across state lines with the intent of performing a sexual act. Ellis insists that he was framed by a former girlfriend. His lone ally on the outside, Diana Sandgren, a private citizen who devotes herself to aiding prisoners, had approached the Herald to look into his case.

I was willing to listen, having written often about overzealous sex-abuse prosecutions that were in fact bum raps. Ellis in no way fit the profile of the sex offender, and he was suffering a brutal time in the penal system because his conviction made him a “ skinner”—lower even than a stool pigeon in the felons’ food chain. He showed me a two-inch knife wound on his abdomen which, he said, had been stitched by a fellow inmate using a sharpened paper clip as a needle and dental floss for sutures. “ I don’t think I’ll live beyond Christmas,” he said.

Ellis then said that he had shared a prison cell in the early 90s with Myles Connor, and that Connor knew the names of two men, since deceased, who had been in on the Gardner heist.

In March 1990, even though Connor was in jail, he was a natural suspect for the robbery, but he has maintained consistently that he was not involved. His longtime lawyer, Martin K. Leppo, said then, and repeats now, “ Myles would never tolerate butchering art.”

Still, starting in 1992, with Connor’s approval and support, Ellis had sought to use the two names he’d been given by Connor—Robert A. “ Bobby” Donati and David A. Houghton—as leverage with federal officials in Boston. It is common for inmates to trade information for judicial favors. Ellis hoped his fresh leads in a stale case might be parlayed into a transfer to a medium-security prison near his home in western Massachusetts.

For nearly five years Ellis had had no luck with his bartering, and by the time I met him he was frantic. Determined to be taken seriously, he blurted out that Connor had access to a valuable stolen artifact that would be used to bargain for Ellis’s release once Connor left prison in 1999. The item was the royal beeswax seal that had been affixed to the Massachusetts Bay Colony charter by King Charles I of England upon the founding of the colony in 1629.

In 1984 the first page of the handwritten charter, as well as the seal, had been stolen from a display case in the basement of the Massachusetts State House, on Beacon Street. Police recovered the charter page by coincidence seven months later, during a raid on a Boston apartment which Connor and some of his associates used for a safe house. Connor was never charged in the charter caper, but there was little doubt among police or the underworld that it had been his score. The day police found the charter page, they missed the seal, which resembles a chunk of hardened cow dung. Referred to as “ the hockey puck” and “ my fuzzy friend” by Ellis, the seal was apparently, 13 years later, still under Connor’s firm control.

Later, Connor himself would tell me that the seal was far too insignificant to swap for his own release, but he confirmed that it might have been used to help Ellis. At the time I met with Ellis, however, Connor and I had no relationship. He was wary of my motives—for all he knew I was part of an F.B.I. sting—and he would say only, in the vaguest terms, that he “ possibly” had access to the seal. He did so as a favor to Ellis, who needed to prove that Connor was truly his ally. In the end, it was a very telling remark, because just weeks later the seal reappeared, in the custody of William Youngworth.

Ellis had told me enough to get me curious. He had indeed shared a cell with Connor, and the seal, in fact, was then still missing. So on and off for two months, with my Herald colleague Laura Brown, I followed up Ellis’s tales. First I checked out his sex abuse prosecution, which to my mind had clear flaws, particularly regarding the way his alleged victim had been questioned by inexperienced social workers. Later I looked into the mystery of the seal and other New England art crimes. By early July I had grown obsessed with Myles Connor and the two reputed Gardner thieves.

Bobby Donati turned out to be a mobster with a reputation as a hit man and armored-car robber. He and his brother, Dicky, also now dead, had been involved in numerous robberies with Connor, dating back to the Wyeth case in 1974 and including, Connor later told me, the M.F.A. heist in April 1975.

Connor also acknowledged casing the Gardner many times, with both Donatis, beginning in the early 1970s. The veteran burglars “ couldn’t help but notice” the museum’s minimal security, he said. Once, he told me, the Donatis unlatched the simple lock on an unalarmed window on the museum’s first floor. They returned often to find that the lock remained unsecured and apparently unnoticed.

Connor also told me that Bobby Donati coveted a certain shiny Napoleonic flagstaff tip on display in the museum. Connor says he tried to steer his friend’s interest toward a bronze Shang-dynasty beaker. (Neither of these stolen items is among the 11 offered up for ransom by Youngworth.)

In September 1991, at age 50, Bobby Donati was found hog-tied and stabbed to death in the trunk of an abandoned Cadillac in Revere, Massachusetts, a few miles from Boston. Whether his murder was Gardner-related has not been determined; Connor will say only that he believes the Shang beaker stolen from the Gardner was intended as a gift to him from his lifelong friend.

David Houghton turned out to be an even better lead. In the late 1950s, in the Boston suburbs of Malden and Melrose, he was one of the “ Elvis Bandits,” a gang of cat burglars with DA haircuts who were arrested in connection with a hundred or so break-ins. By the mid-60s, Houghton was a loyal Connor follower, working as an antiques dealer, mechanic, occasional fence, and roadie for Connor’s rock band, Myles and the Wild Ones.

When Connor was last jailed, in 1989, for transporting stolen property across state lines, Houghton took custody of many of his friend’s belongings. These effects, scattered across Massachusetts, included many steamer trunks filled with valuable antiques and artifacts, in particular Oriental swords and sheaths collected by Connor over 30 years.

“ Myles’s stuff,” as the eclectic hodgepodge became known, filled a 40-foot-long box trailer, and was a chore to manage. In March 1992, Houghton, who at 52 was planning to marry and had moved to rural Auburn, Massachusetts, arranged to have Myles’s stuff transferred to a new custodian, approved by Connor. Not long after that, Houghton, who weighed 350 pounds, died from coronary-artery disease.

Houghton, Connor would later say, was the man who organized the Gardner break-in and hid the loot, with Bobby Donati as his inside man. The new custodian he entrusted with Myles’s stuff was William Youngworth.

Billy Youngworth claims that he met Myles Connor 23 years ago, while studying karate in the suburbs south of Boston. Connor says they met in Walpole state prison (now known as M.C.I.—Cedar Junction) in 1978. By then, Connor was 2 years into the 4-year sentence he’d received for his involvement in the Wyeth case and other crimes—shortened from a likely 10 years, thanks to his role in brokering the return of the M.F.A.’s Rembrandt stolen in 1975.

Youngworth was doing time for armed robbery. In 1977 his Chrysler New Yorker had been traced to a Watertown, Massachusetts, bank job, and two witnesses testified that he was the getaway driver. He received 13 years, serving 8 of them in Walpole.

Youngworth says that in Walpole’s 10-block he gravitated toward Connor as a father figure. His own father, William junior, had been seriously ill with a vascular disorder through most of the 1960s, and was often unable to find steady work in the sheet-metal trade. His mother, née Audrey Sullivan, had died on Christmas Eve 1967 after bingeing on Seconal and sherry. She was 31, and her son was barely 8. Youngworth says he and his sister, Mary, became “ two angry little kids, impossible to deal with as we grew into teenagers.” Even now, he says, he remains estranged from his sister, who is in jail in Florida, and his ailing father.

Paroled in 1986, Youngworth embarked on a life of small-time theft and con artistry. He was especially adept, he says, at fobbing off cheap Oriental rugs and suspect Shaker furniture as high-quality items. Whenever possible, he hooked up with Connor and the Donatis.

That was a heady time for Connor. From 1986 until his arrest in 1989, he was in his criminal prime, often enjoying huge cash scores by robbing drug dealers, then using the money to purchase samurai swords, as well as jade and ivory, at highbrow auctions. Connor says that his personal art collection is worth $5 million.

Youngworth claims he worked with Connor and the others in countless robberies. Many of the crimes, he says, benefited the Irish Republican Army by guaranteeing cash and weapons for “ the cause,” which is never far from the hearts of Boston’s Irish-American underworld. He says he specialized in providing Connor’s colleagues with false driver’s licenses and passports.

Some associates say Youngworth indeed had a knack for fabricating IDs and a discerning eye for Oriental rugs. But others, Connor among them, say he was at best a secondary figure who tended to insert himself into criminal exploits he had heard about from others.

My sense is that Youngworth did consort for many years with felons. According to two credible sources, one of them a lawyer, he was present at a brutal Mob hit inside a van, but the Mafia killers allowed him to live. Driven by braggadocio, however, Youngworth also invents stories. He has even said he was with Connor at the M.F.A. heist—“ a sad lie,” according to Connor.

Youngworth was re-arrested in 1986, in a drug-conspiracy case, and again in 1988, for illegally carrying a firearm and violating parole. The second arrest cost him two years in a federal prison.

Freed on August 10, 1990—nearly five months after the Gardner robbery—Youngworth says he was determined to go straight. He looked up an old girlfriend in the antiques trade, Judith Sacarob Cohen. She was 38, he was 31. The daughter of Florence Sacarob, a real-estate agent in Boston’s tony western suburbs, Judith was married to Louis Cohen and ran an antiques store in Allston, a neighborhood in west Boston. Louis Cohen was behind bars at the time, and Judy, smitten anew by Youngworth, asked him to help with the store.

By July 1991 the pair had a son, William IV, and were running a shop called Almost Antiques, which specialized in Victorian furniture. “ For a while it was a really beautiful place,” says a former employee. “ Judy was a tough businesswoman, and Billy was really hustling to bid on estate sales.” The couple married in 1994.

Connor, meanwhile, was back in jail, having fallen prey to an F.B.I. setup in Bloomington, Illinois. A special agent named Tom Daly had spent three months courting him, using the undercover identity of “ Joe,” a New York-born fence with contacts in the Far East. In March 1989, Connor finally tried to move some hot items through Joe, among them a Simon Willard clock missing from the Woolworth estate in Maine and two fine Dutch works stolen in 1975 from the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, The Interior of the New Church, Delft, by H. C. Van Vliet, and St. John the Baptist, by Pieter Lastman.

Connor was busted, and by early 1990 he was in a cell with Rocco Ellis at the federal prison in Lompoc, California. There he began reaching out to former associates to find a reputable caretaker for his treasured collection of swords and other goods. First it was Houghton. By mid-1992, at Connor’s request, the big box trailer crammed with steamer trunks had been secured by Youngworth in a private lot behind Almost Antiques.

Connor, who once saw Youngworth as a “ trustworthy friend in a time of need,” now believes that Youngworth sold many of his objets d’art for pennies on the dollar whenever he was strapped for cash. “ He has proven to be a degenerate thief, but I don’t believe for a minute that your readers will shed a tear to hear that Myles Connor was robbed.” (Youngworth denies robbing his friend. “ Myles is mistaken. Most of his property is safe.”)

Later, speaking of Youngworth’s treachery, Connor told me, “ He has stolen 99.9 percent of my belongings. At one point I wanted to live in a baronial Tudor mansion with all my things around me.” He paused. “ Perhaps it’s a blessing. All I need now is a Japanese teahouse.”

From 1993 to 1997, according to Judith Youngworth, she and Billy were in a narcotics tailspin. Desperate for money and ill-equipped to keep their business running, she said, the couple started selling off bits and pieces of Connor’s property, in the end displaying many of his items as antiques for sale in their store.

Soon they started missing rental payments on Almost Antiques. By 1995 they had sold their $413,000 Newton home at a loss, acquiring in its stead the Barn, a ramshackle building that was part used-furniture store, part residence, on a two-acre site in nearby Randolph. Young-worth’s behavior “ was very erratic,” said Robert Webber, their landlord in Allston, who evicted the couple in 1994.

At one point that year, Youngworth lodged a $100,000 claim with his insurer, Fitchburg Mutual Insurance Co., asserting that he had been robbed of Oriental rugs at gunpoint in the basement of Almost Antiques. The insurers refused to pay, citing “ compelling evidence” that no crime ever occurred.

One former employee at the Barn says Billy and Judy probably spent $500,000 on drugs in two years, 1995 and 1996, mean-while ignoring piles of bills. Under aliases and in his own name, Youngworth now owes thousands of dollars to utility companies. The I.R.S. has a $19,535 tax lien on the Barn. In November 1997, from jail, he declared bankruptcy.

Debts and civil suits weren’t Youngworth’s only problems. In February 1996, acting on a tip from a jailed informant, police had found a stolen white Aerostar van in one of three garage bays at the Barn. Youngworth said he was set up, but the case was scheduled for a September trial. If convicted, Youngworth would be liable to prosecution as a “ habitual offender,” which could get him 15 years.

On July 9 the Barn was raided again. After 10 hours of searching, the police and the F.B.I. confiscated only three 100-year-old firearms and a marijuana roach. Still, Youngworth was tossed in jail, to be indicted on ominous-sounding “ weapons and drug” charges.

With his wife and son in a panic, Youngworth needed a “ get out of jail quick” card. And he had one: the seal from the Massachusetts Bay Colony charter.

Youngworth insists that his name was never supposed to surface in connection with the return of the seal. He says that he offered it to a Randolph detective named William Pace in exchange for his release from the police lockup, and that Pace agreed. But within 24 hours Massachusetts secretary of state William Galvin was holding a press conference about the recovery of the prized artifact, and word leaked out that it had been in the hands of a petty criminal named Youngworth.

Given Rocco Ellis’s avowals about the seal, it was apparent to me that Youngworth must be connected to Connor. I went to see Ellis in prison, and he was despondent. He said that Houghton had entrusted Youngworth with Connor’s property, and that the seal had likely been hidden in the false bottom of a trunk or a storage case. Somehow, Youngworth must have stumbled upon it. Worse, though, he had used up a great bargaining chip to beat a minor bail problem.

What about the Gardner art? I asked. Ellis seemed to brighten slightly. “ If it turns up, I guess I’m entitled to some reward,” he said.

Almost immediately I began to try to flush Youngworth out, reporting repeatedly that he was now the focal point of the Gardner investigation. At first Youngworth ignored my articles, but eventually I got a call at the Herald. The city-desk clerk said, “ It’s a guy who says you’ve been writing about him.”

Youngworth was livid, charging that I had been maligning him. I offered to buy him lunch and discuss the matter, and we met an hour later. He seemed paranoid and strung out. Over coffee, he petulantly accused me of being “ the F.B.I.’s mole” at the Herald. “ They’ve got one at every newspaper!” he railed.

After a while, he began to open up. It appeared that the raid on his house had been staged to get at Connor’s property, some of which Youngworth then took to a warehouse for safekeeping. He obviously didn’t know about Houghton’s role in the Gardner robbery; in fact, he kept insisting that the theft had been commissioned by the yakuza, Japan’s Mafia.

Later he gave me a tour of the Barn, and I saw that dozens of Connor’s trunks lay about on the floor, open and empty, while others were still piled up neatly, strapped shut. The thought briefly entered my mind that the Gardner paintings might be in one of those musty containers.

Within days I’d cut a deal with Youngworth: if he got me an interview with Myles Connor, I’d turn the heat down in the paper. Better still, if Youngworth could persuade Connor to broker the art’s return, the Herald and I would try to convince the Gardner and the F.B.I. that they should treat the deal seriously.

On August 8, at Youngworth’s request, Connor agreed to see me at the McKean Federal Prison in Lewis Run, Pennsylvania, where he was finishing up the final 2 years of his 10-year sentence.

If Youngworth emanates despair, his great hero, Myles Connor, projects the comforting air of a gray-bearded professor. One of the most colorful and fascinating of modern criminals, he is considered by many of his peers to be a sort of Robin Hood. A vegetarian, he is feared in prison as a convict who can overpower much larger men. When he is moved through the penal system, he is coded as a “ high flight risk.” Since we met, he has bent my ear for hours on art, the law, samurai-sword-making, Hummel figurines, and the best ways to hijack armored cars (he favors brandishing a rocket-propelled-grenade launcher from the back of a flatbed; it rarely fails, he says, to persuade poorly paid drivers to turn over their keys). As America’s preeminent art thief, he also has many opinions on the subject of stealing artworks.

“ Art collectors—and that includes museums—are at best temporary custodians of the items they acquire,” Connor told me. “ More than three-quarters of what you see in museums today was looted or stolen.”

To Connor, crime is a cross between chess and guerrilla war. His first run-in with police came in 1965, when he was caught stealing Tiffany lamps from a property on the Maine coast near where his family vacationed. Henry “ Hank” Hosking, the then 60-year-old local sheriff’s deputy who moved in to arrest him, knew Myles by name and tried to talk him into giving himself up quietly.

Instead, the 22-year-old pitched the lawman down a hillside, fired a bullet over his head, and drove off. Arrested a few hours later, he soon bullied his way out of the lockup in Sullivan, Maine, by waving around a tiny revolver he had carved from a bar of soap.

“ I had more pressing business,” Connor once explained. “ They were in my way and laid hands on me. I’m not professing to be a nice guy, but usually I am. Besides, it is well within the convict’s code to deal with an unruly deputy in a firm, nonlethal fashion.”

From that moment on, Connor was essentially on a lifelong lam. He was recaptured but released by Maine authorities in early 1966. Soon the Massachusetts State Police were hunting him in connection with a plot to snatch a Rembrandt from the Fogg Museum at Harvard. A search of his apartment in Revere turned up seven antique swords stolen from the Peabody Museum in Salem, as well as Chinese art objects taken from the Forbes Museum in Milton. (The police also came upon Connor’s pets, a large cobra and an alligator.)

On April 27, 1966, Connor was apprehended by a Boston police corporal, whom he shot in the testicles. Connor himself was shot four times, and after a gun battle in the Back Bay he was trailed by his blood drops to a Marlborough Street rooftop.

“ I was captured, shot to hell,” he explained, “ handcuffed and leg-cuffed, so near death I had no discernible pulse. I had a shattered spleen, a transected kidney, some perforated intestines . . . I later lost several feet [of intestines] in surgery . . . and hits to the spine, elbow, leg, hand, liver, and stomach. Still, I was subjected to a line of interrogation that included being hoisted by my private parts, then having said parts pummeled to the hue of eggplant-purple-black, and then being worked over by a gang of cowardly goons until they mistakenly pronounced me dead. These were cops. I held my breath, stopped moving, concealed from them my contemptuous glare by shutting my eyes, and essentially tricked them thus—and beyond a doubt saved my life . . . for they were also scheming to throw me off the rooftop, and would have done so had I not screamed at the top of my lungs, for all of the Back Bay to hear, that ‘these motherfuckers are trying to kill me!’ ”

It took Connor a year and a half and two operations to recover, but he seemingly has no ill effects from his old wounds. He runs 50 miles a week, he says, and does 100 push-ups every day. He dreams of hiking in the Himalayas once his sentence is served.

Connor speaks proudly about having become a member of Mensa in 1996, about almost getting admitted to the Harvard School of Medicine in 1972, and about jamming in his youth as a rock ’n’ roll guitarist with Sha Na Na and his own band, Myles and the Wild Ones. He is more reluctant to talk about his 32-year-old son from a brief, youthful marriage, Myles junior, who has spent time living on the street. Another subject he confided for the first time to me was his six-year charade, in the 1970s, as a salaried curator at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

During that time, wearing a fake beard and mustache and employing a Teutonic accent and a false identity (“ Dr. Hoover,” in honor of the F.B.I.), he roved the catacombs of the museum, finding among its hidden treasures the early makings of his own art collection.

By the time of my second visit to Connor, he had been moved to the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Center in Central Falls, Rhode Island, by federal officials hoping to learn more about the Gardner offer made by Youngworth. I asked him flat out if he had ordered Houghton and Donati to knock over the museum. He glowered, and I witnessed the frightening, feral side of him I had heard described. But then his face relaxed, and the malevolence turned to mischief:

“ To most museums, I guess, my name is like Darth Vader. I’m quite capable of breaking into any museum, including the Gardner, and I’ve been in places—like the Smithsonian storage houses—where they would not be happy to know I’ve been. But I did not plan, nor did I consign, the Gardner break-in.”

He does not deny, though, that he orchestrated the 1975 heist at the nearby Museum of Fine Arts. He even jotted down some of the details:

The surveillance into [the museum’s] operation and all aspects of M.F.A. security was intense, including fly-overs and around-the-clock observation. A burglary via underground passageways was not ruled out. (By the way, the Gardner Museum absolutely could have been successfully burgled underground at this point.)

But as the time closed in, the most direct method of a lightning-strike sortie utilizing disguises that were impenetrable was finally decided on. . . . There were two back-up plans and fail-safe contingencies. . . . It was done with extreme precision.

That precision included laying down machine-gun fire at the feet of the dozen museum guards who ran after the retreating thieves. The Rembrandt portrait was smallish, in an oval frame, and easy enough to hoist from its simple peg. Connor seems to have overseen the delicate task himself. One M.F.A. guard, a retired Boston cop, attempted to wrestle the prize from its robbers, but he was smacked across the head with the muzzle of a pistol. “ I respected him—a typical Polish cop,” Connor said. “ But our goal was no injuries, especially to civilians. We met the goal.”

Connor secreted the painting under a friend’s bed. (“ Everyone loves the thought of owning a Rembrandt, if only for a little while. My friend was thrilled at the concept, and there it remained.”) After three months, police investigators still had no clues. Then Connor sought out a contact in the Massachusetts State Police, Major John Regan, to help broker the work’s return. A short time later, on a dark street, a man in a ski mask—not Connor, but one of his most loyal intimates—passed the painting to Regan. Connor notes with pleasure that all 17 people involved in the M.F.A. heist remain unknown to this day.

Isabella Stewart Gardner, who was given to staging boxing matches and befriending bohemians and rogues when she wasn’t scouring Europe for art, might have liked Myles Connor.

His father, Myles senior, was a straight-arrow Milton policeman, whom Connor describes as “ perhaps the only truly honorable person that I have ever known in law enforcement.” His uncle was “ Wild Bill” Connor, a John F. Kennedy confidant and the legendary operative of the Office of Strategic Services—precursor of the C.I.A.—who ran the New England office of the Veterans Administration in the 1960s.

Connor’s mother, née Lucy Conant Johnson, had the Yankee pedigree. Her great-great-grandfather was William Gregory Cole, a Civil War clipper-ship owner and New England arts patron whose cousin Thomas Cole founded the Hudson River school of painting. Further back still were William “ the Elder” Brewster, a spiritual leader of the Mayflower Pilgrims, and Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense. (“ He’s probably the source of my rebellious and anarchistic streak,” Connor says.) More recently, Lucy Connor can be linked to the suffragist Julia Ward Howe, a cousin of her grandmother’s, and Charles Johnson, a collector friendly with the historian William Sturgis Bigelow. Bigelow and Howe, it turns out, were friends with Isabella Stewart Gardner.

“ I’m sure some of my ancestors knew Mrs. Gardner very well, and visited her home,” Connor told me.

Lucy Connor was horrified to see her son turn into a criminal. After one of his escapades in Maine in 1965, she rode around in a police cruiser pleading with him over a bullhorn to give himself up. “ He needs psychiatric help,” she said.

“ That was damn embarrassing, God rest her soul,” Connor says. “ I make no bones about it: I’m an outlaw, and I’ll always be an outlaw. . . . Not for a moment do I intend on painting myself as some misunderstood soul undeserving of condemnation and disapproval for my various criminal exploits. However, neither am I the unflattering character so deftly portrayed by some.”

Speaking about the Gardner theft, Connor finds it “ inexcusably sloppy” that the crew that hit the museum sliced two Rembrandts from their frames and smashed the glass in front of the Vermeer, which, he says, could easily have been unbolted, sparing The Concert a shower of potentially ruinous glass shrapnel. “ Thank God they didn’t try for the Titian,” he says of the museum’s most prized work, which is wall-size. “ The poor thing would have been cracked in half.”

A week after my early-morning trip to see the Rembrandt in August, my account appeared in the Herald, and soon the Youngworth-Connor offer became an international sensation. I was asked to meet with the Gardner’s chief conservator, Barbara Mangum, and describe to her in detail the painting I’d been shown.

Soon the Gardner issued a press release stating that the canvas was “ a good copy or perhaps the original.” It also hired a lawyer, Rudolph F. Pierce, to begin negotiating with three parties which had divergent interests: the museum, which wanted its art back but did not want to be seen as kowtowing to criminals; Youngworth, who had hired Connor’s lawyer, Martin Leppo, to work out an immunity deal; and federal officials in Boston, who were demanding concrete proof—such as a lesser item from the theft—before going forward.

As the reporter who had seen the Rembrandt, I had access to all sides, and it soon became evident that they would not be able to make a deal. On the Gardner’s board of trustees were two opposing camps, one that wanted to get to the bottom of Youngworth’s offer, and another that put its faith in law enforcement’s ability to crack the case. Meanwhile, the U.S. attorney for Boston, Donald K. Stem, refused Youngworth immunity without proof that he could deliver the art, and Leppo counseled his client to do nothing that might lead to an arrest.

Wondering whether paint chips or photos of the works might be proof enough, I asked Youngworth if he could provide them. In mid-October, just before he was convicted and jailed in the stolen-van case, a manila envelope containing a roll of 25 negatives and a small vial of paint chips came into the *Herald’*s possession, and we set about checking them out.

Because of the poor quality of the resultant photographs, the negatives were inconclusive. The chips were examined by Walter C. McCrone, a Chicago scientist often called on by the F.B.I. to test evidence under electron and polarized-light microscopes. McCrone had debunked the famous Shroud of Turin by testing fibers and determining that they were spotted with 14th-century paint, not with Christ’s blood. He had also exposed fake Rembrandts by demonstrating that microscopic bits of chalk in the canvas primer were produced much later than the 17th century.

McCrone declared the chips we gave him to be 350 years old, and to have originated in the region where Rembrandt and Vermeer painted. His findings produced headlines everywhere, and the chips were handed over to the F.B.I. and the Gardner. Six weeks later, news releases announced that the chips were “ not what they purport to be.” I soon learned that the Gardner had compared the chips with those left behind from the sliced Rembrandts, but not with anything by Vermeer. When I urged them to do so, it appeared that the chips were quite consistent with The Concert.

But by then the press had declared Youngworth a hoaxer and the Herald and me dupes. Once again the Gardner story faded from the news.

After Youngworth was jailed in the van case, I grew closer to his wife, Judy. From her I learned the depth of the couple’s drug dependency and its effect on their lives. I also learned that they had methodically sifted through Connor’s trunks. By late November, Billy had been able to dry out in prison, but Judy was still addicted to prescription drugs.

On November 23, I drove her and little Billy to the state prison in Concord for their first contact visit in six weeks. She spoke with hope about their future, whispering that they might migrate to Israel once the Gardner matter was resolved.

The next morning she was found dead, apparently from an overdose of prescription drugs. Her son tried to revive her with cold compresses before finally running for help. Judith Youngworth was 45.

By early January of this year, only three people were still willing to give Youngworth a chance to produce the stolen art: a Gardner trustee and philanthropist, who has asked to remain anonymous; Harvey Silverglate, the Boston lawyer famed for defending Louise Woodward in the nanny murder case, whom I had called to represent me in the event of a subpoena’s arising over my trip to the warehouse; and myself.

The trustee had grown intensely frustrated with the attitude of law enforcement toward Youngworth. The Feds, he said, were afraid of being seen as weak if they granted immunity for the art’s return. “ They do not respect the importance of these paintings,” he said. “ And they’re far too risk-averse. They’d never make it in the private sector.”

In December, at my urging, Silverglate and the trustee went to speak with Youngworth in prison. Both came away convinced that he was not perpetrating a hoax, and soon the two men were proposing a contract that would turn the Youngworth offer into a legitimate business deal.

Youngworth would “ provide information” leading to the return of the stolen art. Doing so was in no way illegal, Silverglate reasoned, since the terms of the Gardner’s $5 million reward were predicated on that very concept: information for money. In exchange, the wealthy trustee would agree to pay Youngworth $1.5 million tax-free, half of it in a 20-year trust for Youngworth’s small son, who had become a ward of the state.

My role was to help keep the parties in contact, and to assure Youngworth that there was no setup. In the end, I might even be the person told the whereabouts of the art. Since I am a reporter, my source of information would be subject to certain privileges under the First Amendment.

As of mid-January, a deal seemed close to being consummated.

Throughout the long negotiations, my editors and I debated the propriety of a reporter’s becoming a player in what is essentially a crime story. We told the Gardner and federal officials that we had no interest in the reward money. We agreed, in the end, that the importance of the art made our actions appropriate. Newspapers, after all, are recycled every day, and reporters come and go. But there are only some 35 Vermeers in existence, and only one Rembrandt seascape.

Curiously, as the months passed, Young-worth more and more avoided mention of the one man he had originally singled out: Myles Connor. Meanwhile, Connor, in jail in Rhode Island, was learning in greater and greater detail how the custodian of his possessions had allegedly robbed him blind.

Neither Youngworth nor Connor has ever fully explained how the Gardner art came under Youngworth’s control. And Connor now seems far more interested in getting back his missing swords than in benefiting from the return of the Gardner art. He is furious with Youngworth and has begun proceedings to sue him. “ I’ll do my time,” he told me, “ and when I get out I’ll look up Bill and make arrangements for him to repay me for what he owes me.”

Youngworth has told me many uncorroborated versions of the Gardner crime. At one point he said he had planned it from prison; another time he laid it all to a crew of armored-car robbers. The version he has not told is the one I suspect is true: that he came across the loot by accident, in one of the trunks or storage cases belonging to Myles Connor which had been entrusted to him by David Houghton. And that he did so in the course of methodically embezzling Connor’s collection of samurai swords and other precious objets. The novice, in other words, accidentally outwitted the master.

Or did he? When I spoke to Connor in early January, he told me he was working diligently to recapture a controlling interest in the stolen paintings. “ One way or the other, that art will be returned,” Connor said. “ And you can bet that Myles Connor will have a hand in it.”

I mentioned my theory about Youngworth to Connor, and he just shrugged. “ Do you believe in Karma?” he asked. “ I do. I believe that what goes around in one’s lifetime probably comes around. The way I see it, getting hooked up with Billy Youngworth was probably a great big Karmatic kick in the ass to Myles Connor.”