22 Facts About Bobby Donati

Bobby Donati was reportedly a government informant, although federal prosecutors have denied it.

In recent years Bobby Donati has been identified as possibly being involved in the 1990 theft of art worth $500 million from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the largest art theft ever.

Bobby and Richard Donati were born on June 4,1940, in East Boston, to immigrants from Milan, Italy.

Bobby Donati, who had begun to search through local antique stores in search of quality furniture and decor for his house, began planning jobs with Connor.

Connor and Bobby Donati went as far as to climb nearby trees and time the guards' movements through the various galleries during the night hours when the museum was closed.

Bobby Donati still faced the challenge of Ferrara's crew and the other Argiulo loyalists in the North End.

Bobby Donati had been beaten over the head, stabbed over 20 times, and his throat had been cut.

Bobby Donati was the second of six mob figures killed during the early 1990s; many of the victims' bodies were found, as he was, in the trunks of their vehicles, a common Mafia practice to indicate the killing was related to the victim's criminal activities.

William Youngworth, an antiques dealer and mob associate who in 1997 led a reporter to what may have been one of the stolen Gardner paintings, hidden in a Brooklyn warehouse, claimed at that time that Bobby Donati was on the verge of being made when he was killed, and killing a made man requires his boss's approval.

Some reports suggest he was an occasional informant to authorities and thus was killed for that reason; In 1997, a federal prosecutor who had been threatened with contempt of court charges if he refused to say whether Bobby Donati was an informant told a judge that he had not been, at least not to any federal agencies.

Writer Ulrich Boser wrote in his 2009 book The Gardner Heist that it was "widely rumored" that at the time of his death Bobby Donati was preparing to tell police what he knew about it.

Bobby Donati had not, but recalled that he and Donati had long cased the museum and considered plans for a theft.

In 1997, Connor told Vanity Fair that he believed Bobby Donati had taken the gu, the oldest work in the museum's collection, to present to him as a gift later.

Bobby Donati told Kurkjian that shortly after the theft, he was visited at the Lompoc federal prison in California by David Houghton, another suspect in the case.

Houghton told him that he and Bobby Donati had stolen the art to bargain for his release, as Houghton believed Connor had been wrongly sentenced for his role in a drug deal.

The use of police uniforms as a ruse to gain entry was part of a plan he and Connor had come up with years earlier; shortly before the crime Bobby Donati was seen by an acquaintance at a Revere bar frequented by many mobsters holding a package which contained police uniforms.

Kurkjian offered another explanation for why Bobby Donati robbed the museum: he felt unsafe on the streets as long as Ferrara remained in custody, and hoped to use the art to bargain for his freedom, as Connor had done to reduce his sentence by arranging for the return of the BMFA's Rembrandt 15 years earlier.

Kurkjian's caller said Bobby Donati visited Ferrara at the federal lockup in Hartford, Connecticut, where he was being held, after his January 1990 arrest on racketeering charges.

Bobby Donati told Ferrara he would get him out; Ferrara pleaded with him not to try anything.

Three months later, according to the caller, Ferrara learned of the Gardner theft and immediately realized that was what Bobby Donati had been referring to.

Bobby Donati went to visit him again shortly afterwards at Plymouth state prison, where he had been moved as he was facing a state murder charge.

However, it apparently does not put much credence in the theory that Bobby Donati was behind the crime.