The leads that eventually proved more durable pointed toward a different network: the crew centered around a Dorchester auto repair shop with connections to the Patriarca crime family, the New England Mafia’s ruling organization.
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## The Dorchester Connection
The cluster of suspects that investigators came to focus on most intensively in the years after the theft centered on people connected to an auto repair shop in Dorchester, the Boston neighborhood where many of the city’s organized crime figures had their roots.
The most prominent name in this cluster, in early investigative theories, was Robert “Bobby” Donati. Donati was a Boston-area criminal with connections to the Patriarca organization. He was, according to Myles Connor—a well-known Boston-area art thief who claimed extensive knowledge of the Gardner theft—directly involved in planning or commissioning it.
Connor’s account of Donati’s role was that Donati had, years before the Gardner theft, “cased” the museum with Connor—the two men had visited together, looking at the collection, assessing what was there. Connor claimed that Donati later hired two men to carry out the actual theft. Connor himself was incarcerated on March 18, 1990, establishing that he did not participate directly, but he maintained that his knowledge of the planning was real.
The detail that gave investigators particular attention was a story about the Napoleonic eagle finial. Donati was said to have told associates that stealing the finial would be his “calling card”—a distinctive signature object that would announce, to anyone who knew him, who had done the job. A jeweler later told investigators that Donati had, at some point, approached him about selling a finial, but the jeweler had declined because the object was too recognizable, too specific, too obviously connected to a known theft.