On a Wednesday morning in October 2014, in a storage within the woods of Pennsylvania, Tommy Trotta tried on some new jewellery: a set of rings belonging to the baseball nice Yogi Berra. Every hunk of gold bore a half-carat diamond and the phrases NEW YORK YANKEES WORLD CHAMPIONS. The workforce had given them to Berra for every of his 10 World Collection victories—no participant had ever gained extra.
Trotta, a balding 39-year-old who lived together with his spouse and two youngsters in Scranton, had grown up a Yankees fan. He’d dreamed as a boy of at some point becoming a member of the workforce. Berra had been the favourite participant of his beloved godmother, who gave Trotta his first Yankees uniform when he was a toddler and took him to video games at Yankee Stadium.
Trotta by no means competed previous Little League. However there was multiple method right into a corridor of fame. In a methodically deliberate heist in the dead of night and rain of that October morning, he’d climbed onto a balcony on the Yogi Berra Museum & Studying Middle, in Little Falls, New Jersey, carrying a duffel bag of instruments and dressed completely in black. He’d minimize by a double-reinforced window constructed to resist foul balls from an adjoining stadium. Then he’d used a 20-volt DeWalt grinder, with a fire-rescue blade, to slice open a bulletproof show case labeled BASEBALL’S RING LEADER.
Berra’s rings now glinted on Trotta’s fingers. They evoked for him an impressive time earlier than his personal start: the mid-century years when Berra had gained World Collection after World Collection with teammates corresponding to Joe DiMaggio, Roger Maris, and Mickey Mantle. What number of males in addition to Berra—and now Trotta—would ever know the sensation of these rings on their fingers? What number of in addition to Trotta may sense the burden of all these victories, then destroy each final ounce of it for money?
Within the storage within the Pennsylvania woods, an electrical melting furnace was reaching a programmed temperature of greater than 1,900 levels Fahrenheit. Trotta handed Berra’s rings to a pal, who used jewelers’ instruments to pluck out the diamonds and minimize up the rings. The dismembered rings had been then dropped into the furnace, the place they liquefied right into a featureless mass of molten gold.
Mining has a proud historical past within the elements of northeastern Pennsylvania that Trotta and his crew referred to as residence. Scranton, the largest metropolis there, was named after a pair of brothers who exploited the area’s wealthy deposits of iron and coal. However the place earlier generations had descended into the bottom for uncooked minerals, Trotta broke by home windows. His mom lode was the championship rings, belts, and trophies—veined with treasured metals and gem stones—that sat, virtually for the taking, inside low-security sports activities museums throughout America.
Trotta so perfected this area of interest line of housebreaking that he evaded the FBI and greater than a dozen police businesses for twenty years. His longevity was all of the extra outstanding given the scale and make-up of his crew: three mates he’d recognized since grade faculty; his cousin’s fiancé; Trotta’s eldest sister, Daybreak; two of her ex-boyfriends; and a neighbor of one of many exes. By day, that they had regular jobs: plumber, carpenter, constructing contractor, bar proprietor, mechanic, Uber driver, real-estate closing agent. By night time, they allegedly served as Trotta’s getaway drivers, toolmakers, and assistants.
Trotta advised me his story final 12 months, whereas he was on pretrial launch, awaiting sentencing. He has pleaded responsible to a single depend of theft of main art work, as a part of a cooperation settlement with federal prosecutors who’ve indicted and are searching for to convict his complete crew. I interviewed Trotta in his lawyer’s workplace, on the condominium he shared with Daybreak, and over just a few meals and automotive rides. This text attracts on these conversations and on particulars within the federal indictments, police data, and different public paperwork.
Trotta stands at about 5 foot 8 and has a spherical, expressive face—cleft chin, slim eyes, jutting nostril and lips. He speaks like an earnest 10-year-old telling of adventures so grand, he can barely sit nonetheless. He turns 50 this 12 months. He hides his bald head beneath a newsboy cap; his as soon as lean, CrossFit-hardened physique has grown pear-shaped and wobbly. “Fats Elvis,” he advised me.
Trotta claims now to know what he by no means grasped throughout a lifetime of thieving: the ache he brought about individuals, significantly the households and followers of the sports activities heroes whose hard-won trophies he’d plundered. Yogi Berra was nearing his ninetieth birthday—his final—and grieving the latest dying of his spouse, Carmen, when Trotta broke into the museum that October, stealing 16 of Berra’s baseball rings and two of his MVP plaques.
“I’m hated within the sports activities world,” Trotta advised me. “I’m hated at a really deep degree.”
Trotta felt as if he was born to steal. “Within the blood” was how he put it, and it wasn’t only a metaphor. His father—Thomas Trotta Sr., often called “Large Tom” to Trotta’s “Little Tommy”—served as a police officer in Passaic, New Jersey, for seven years earlier than discovering that he appreciated the opposite aspect of the regulation higher. In March 1976, 9 months after Trotta was born, his father accepted $750 from an affiliate of the Genovese crime household to torch a Hackensack dance membership. A jury convicted him of arson and conspiracy, and a state choose sentenced him to 2 to a few years in jail, rejecting any “sentimental concern for the household of a crooked cop.”
Large Tom was a Vietnam Warfare veteran, keen on camouflage, jean shorts, and unique firearms. 4 months after leaving jail, he held up a Ceremony Assist pharmacy and was rapidly caught. Later he ran heroin and cocaine for a New Jersey drug ring. Little Tommy was 15 years previous—and watching from the again seat—when FBI brokers yanked his dad out of the driving force’s seat of the household automotive to arrest him. (Trotta Sr. agreed to testify towards his associates and was sentenced to 22 months in jail.)
Large Tom could not have been minimize out to be a profitable arsonist, stickup man, or drug trafficker, however he did higher as a thief, supporting his household with out as soon as getting caught. To steal with out violence was a sly artwork, and Little Tommy liked when his dad requested for assist. The place different fathers took their sons fishing, Trotta’s dad took his to steal salmon from a hatchery. The place different dads took their youngsters to see historic websites, Large Tom took his son to loot them: Little Tommy, at age 11, would look out for rangers on the Gettysburg battlefield at night time as his father dug up Civil Warfare artifacts with a metallic detector and spade.
They’d moved from northern New Jersey to rural Pennsylvania in 1986, supposedly to flee the corrupting influences of metropolis life. Nevertheless it was there, in tiny Madison Township—on a former hay farm, off a dust street, 15 miles east of Scranton—that Trotta’s prison training started in earnest. His sister Daybreak, who was 4 years older, had began relationship a boy named Nicholas Dombek, a floppy-haired blond who’d give up faculty, robbed a gasoline station, and moved in with the Trottas after having had sufficient of his personal dad and mom. Dombek grew to become a sort of older brother to Trotta, and a second son to Large Tom. (Dombek didn’t reply to requests for remark.)
Large Tom mentored Dombek in residence and industrial housebreaking; Dombek, in flip, mentored Trotta; and by highschool, Trotta had helped flip a bunch of boys he’d recognized since he was about 11 right into a surprisingly disciplined band of thieves.
The gang would hearken to idle speak amongst schoolmates and neighbors to determine when homes may be unoccupied or shops flush with money. Then they’d strike, syncing their actions over walkie-talkies and fleeing on ATVs and snowmobiles (additionally stolen) down wooded trails that police automobiles couldn’t attain. Trotta by no means used weapons: His code was at all times to run if noticed. However in different methods he might be ruthless. He stole $6,000 from the house of a schoolmate’s great-grandmother, he advised me, then gave the boy a minimize for his recommendation on find out how to do it. And he stole a protected from a clothes store managed by his personal girlfriend. Police interrogated the girlfriend, who had no concept he was accountable, however Trotta didn’t thoughts. The suspicion that fell on harmless workers after his burglaries, he stated, “was good for me.”
After graduating from North Pocono Excessive Faculty, in 1994, Trotta acquired a pupil mortgage and enrolled in a six-month vocational-training course in alarm-system know-how. He realized that you could possibly disable an alarm by ripping its management panel—or “mind”—off the wall. He came upon that many movement detectors had a “pet alley,” an unmanaged space close to the ground for small animals. And he found that the majority alarms had a built-in delay: 60 to 90 seconds between when a sensor was tripped and when safety was referred to as. The characteristic was designed to scale back false alarms by giving homeowners time to punch in a code in the event that they triggered the system unintentionally. Trotta took away a unique lesson: If a burglar acquired out and in in below 90 seconds, he may vanish into the night time earlier than anybody knew he’d been there. This perception, greater than every other, grew to become the idea for the following part of his profession.
In August 1999, Keystone Faculty, in La Plume, Pennsylvania, held a celebration for its most well-known alumnus: the Baseball Corridor of Famer Christy Mathewson, who pitched for the New York Giants from 1900 to 1916 and gained an astonishing 373 video games. Mathewson had helped invent the fadeaway pitch and was nicknamed the “Christian Gentleman” for his refusal to play on Sundays.
Trotta was invited to the festivities by a baseball-card seller he knew. They watched a one-man present about Mathewson’s life, then walked to the health club for an exhibit of memorabilia that Mathewson’s widow had given the varsity. Keystone’s athletic director was such an exuberant promoter of Mathewson’s legacy that she slid open a case to present guests close-ups of probably the most thrilling gadgets: Mathewson’s 1902 contract with the Giants; his 1916 contract with the Cincinnati Reds; and a World’s Champions jersey he wore after profitable the 1905 World Collection, its proper sleeve minimize off on the elbow for friction-free pitching.
Trotta didn’t suppose a lot of any of it till the automotive experience residence, when his pal casually stated that the Mathewson memorabilia in that one case may be value greater than half one million {dollars}. It was probably the most attention-grabbing factor Trotta had heard all night.
He referred to as Joe Atsus—a member of the thieving crew he’d recognized since center faculty—the second he acquired residence. As Atsus made his solution to the home, Trotta dug out a ski masks, a crowbar, and a pair of walkie-talkies. Once they acquired to the Keystone health club, after midnight, Trotta observed a parked automotive close to the glass aspect door he’d deliberate to interrupt by, and a plugged-in vacuum cleaner simply inside. If a janitor was there, they’d momentarily stepped away. Trotta was reaching for his crowbar to smash the door when it occurred to him to attempt the deal with. The door was unlocked. Trotta ran to the show, jimmied the sliding glass freed from its ratchet lock, and grabbed the jersey and contracts. He was out and in, he recalled, in about 25 seconds. “It was prefer it was meant to only be taken,” he advised me.
Trotta continued to burglarize properties to cowl his day-to-day residing bills; in contrast to his assistants, he had no different job. However properties had been haystacks: Someplace in all that litter, you’d perhaps discover an vintage, a gun, some jewellery, however nothing to make you really wealthy. Displays like Mathewson’s, Trotta realized, had been clutter-free—every little thing in them was treasured. Should you may snag half one million {dollars} in memorabilia in half a minute from a school health club, think about the takings in an precise museum.
Essentially the most prestigious museum in northeastern Pennsylvania was proper there in Scranton. Based by a neighborhood doctor in 1908, the Everhart Museum had a various assortment that ranged from a Tyrannosaurus rex cranium to work by necessary artists. In 2000, a 12 months after the Mathewson heist, the Everhart made headlines when it proposed strengthening its funds by promoting its one Matisse. The portray, a 1920 nonetheless life referred to as Pink Shrimp, had been appraised at greater than $4 million. Trotta and his crew set in movement a plan to steal it; they started by filming the museum’s structure with camcorders whereas pretending to be vacationers.
They misplaced their probability when the museum abruptly bought the Matisse. However Trotta was undeterred. On a return go to, he began speaking in regards to the portray with a guard, who talked about that one other art work was in all probability value extra: Springs Winter, a movie-poster-size drip portray attributed to Jackson Pollock.
Over the following 5 years, Trotta, Dombek, and different members of the crew took turns visiting—and at instances filming—the museum. They mapped the placement of every safety digicam and movement detector, every entry and egress. In mattress at night time, Trotta replayed the footage obsessively, till he felt he may stroll the museum blindfolded. The heist’s precise timing would rely, in a way, on the gods: The crew wanted a storm to hit Scranton between 2 a.m. and daybreak. From burglarizing homes as teenagers, they knew that unhealthy climate slowed the police and muffled the sound of breaking glass. Rain or snow was significantly efficient an hour or two after bars closed, when police—drained after the same old arrests—tended to lose steam and turn out to be, in Trotta’s phrase, much less “peppy.”
However all of these plans had been put aside one early morning in November 2005, when an enormous brawl erupted at a Scranton bar referred to as Whistles. Trotta, Joe Atsus, and one other schoolmate, Damien Boland—whose great-grandmother’s home Trotta had burglarized years earlier—had been having a drink when the melee (which they’d performed no half in) drew seemingly each final police cruiser to Whistles’ entrance door.
Let’s do it now, Trotta advised his mates. He had no ax, no crowbar, no ski masks. However an enormous bar combat close to closing time was a diversion as providential as a 3 a.m. downpour. He had extra luck nonetheless when his mates dropped him off behind the museum: A big tent—erected for the Everhart’s annual ball the following night time—blocked sight strains to the again door.
After failing to kick within the door, Trotta grabbed a ladder beside the tent and used it as a battering ram, bashing a gap within the glass and crawling by it. Within the pitch darkish, he bounded up the steps to the second-floor gallery. He eliminated the Pollock from the wall and, on the spur of the second, took an Andy Warhol silk display, La Grande Ardour, proper close to it. He was downstairs, out the opening, and in his pickup in lower than a minute. “We’re wealthy!” Atsus stated, in line with court docket paperwork.
However by sunup, Trotta was so satisfied of his imminent arrest that he pulled a garden chair into his driveway and simply sat there, ready for the police. Missing a masks, he’d improvised contained in the museum by lifting his sweater over his nostril, like some Looney Tunes bandit. Worse, it was a colourful sweater, which anybody on the bars he’d visited the earlier night would possibly acknowledge.
But by the top of the day, no police had confirmed. The Scranton Instances-Tribune quickly reported that the museum’s surveillance cameras had been below restore and never working that night time.
Trotta’s aid was changed by a brand new anxiousness, captured in a front-page Instances-Tribune headline the following day: “FBI: ‘No Marketplace for Stolen Artwork.’ ” “The true artwork in an artwork theft isn’t stealing the fabric,” Robert Wittman, then the FBI’s lead art-crime investigator, advised the newspaper. “It’s promoting it.”
Nobody had linked the Everhart and Mathewson heists, however phrase of each had unfold amongst museums, sellers, and collectors. Anybody who tried to promote the Pollock and the Warhol—collectively doubtlessly value tens of millions—or the Mathewson memorabilia would virtually definitely be found. Patrons, for his or her half, may face each civil and prison legal responsibility, having no credible excuse for ignorance.
At first Trotta thought he may promote the gadgets, no drawback, as soon as the five-year statute of limitations for theft expired. Later he realized his error: Underneath federal legal guidelines governing museum crime, prosecutors had as many as 20 years to convey expenses. In desperation, he despatched a videotape of the artwork and memorabilia to his father, to see if any of Large Tom’s underworld connections would possibly chew. “I can’t transfer this,” his dad finally reported again.
A couple of months after the Everhart job, one among Trotta’s crew noticed an article in Electrical Metropolis, another Scranton weekly. Arthur Byron Phillips, an eccentric artist who had loaned the Pollock to the museum, was providing a biblical-sounding reward. “Return the purported Pollock to him,” the paper stated, “and he’ll grace your palms with silver.” Phillips advised reward seekers to be ready to confirm their bona fides by naming the gallery on the portray’s reverse aspect: “Anybody arising with that identify will show that they’ve the precise image.”
Sizzling artwork won’t be sellable, Trotta realized, however apparently it might be ransomed. He discovered a gasoline station with a pay telephone, checked for safety cameras, and dialed.
“The Parsons Gallery,” Trotta stated.
Phillips replied after an extended silence. “You’ve gotten my consideration.”
“I need one million {dollars} in money. Don’t name the police.”
“I don’t have one million {dollars} in money.”
“You then’ll by no means see the portray once more,” Trotta stated, hanging up.
When Trotta handed the gasoline station the following day, the pay telephone was gone. He suspected that Phillips had referred to as the FBI. The telephone was probably on its solution to a criminal offense lab. Trotta was glad he’d wiped his fingerprints off his quarters. However he’d screwed up once more: He’d requested for an excessive amount of. “If we went, ‘$50,000,’ I let you know what—he pays, he will get his portray again, okay?”
Dombek finally determined that artwork was harmful. In keeping with prosecutors, he burned a portray by the Hudson River Faculty artist Jasper Cropsey—valued at $500,000 and stolen by Trotta from a New Jersey museum—fairly than threat getting caught with it. Dombek was like that. Whereas Trotta shone at getting loot, Dombek at all times had concepts about what to do with it.
The storage Nicholas Dombek had constructed, on the six acres he lived on in Thornhurst Township, was basically an improvised chemistry lab. Its lengthy cabinets had been lined with beakers, droppers, funnels, jugs, calipers, and cookers, alongside containers of assorted acids, powders, and options. Chemical formulation had been handwritten on the partitions beside what seemed to be private affirmations. DREAMS ARE EXTREMLY [sic] IMPORTANT YOU CAN’T DO IT UNLESS YOU IMAGINE IT, learn one. One other learn ALWAYS KEEP SECRETS. It wasn’t essentially the science that Dombek’s father and older brother taught within the public colleges (his dad had a grasp’s diploma in chemistry from Bucknell College), however it mirrored not less than a few of what he’d picked up earlier than quitting faculty after eighth grade and shifting in with the Trottas.
Although Dombek would later testify in court docket that he was attempting to alter the bond of water “to treatment most cancers,” his successes tended to the extra pedestrian: S-hooks for attaching stolen license plates to getaway automobiles; a spiked metallic ball for pulverizing bolstered glass; a series that vans may use to tear ATMs off their base. Daybreak Trotta, who dated Dombek as an adolescent and remained mates with him, recalled his specific facility for annihilating automobiles for her father, who helped individuals get rid of them for insurance coverage cash. “Nick may disappear a automobile in hours,” she advised me. Among the many literature Dombek stored useful had been The Anarchist Cookbook, A Area Information to Rocks and Minerals, and Restoration and Refining of Treasured Metals.
After the Mathewson and Everhart fiascoes, Trotta advised me, Dombek had one among his concepts. The factor that made most museum items invaluable—their standing as distinctive, immediately recognizable objects—was additionally the factor that made them unsellable. However what when you scrapped a museum piece, virtually such as you did a automotive? Might sure one-of-a-kind objects be remade, in a lab, into tradable commodities?
In March 2011, Trotta stole 13 silver golf trophies from the Nation Membership of Scranton throughout an in a single day storm, then delivered them to Dombek’s storage. 5 had been awarded to the membership’s most illustrious member: Artwork Wall Jr., who had gained the 1959 Masters at Augusta Nationwide, beating the defending champion, Arnold Palmer.
The trophies buckled below the warmth of Dombek’s torches and furnaces, then puddled and cooled into an untraceable blob of silver. (As Dombek refined his strategies, the blobs would come to look much less “prison”—as Trotta put it—and extra like professionally made ingots, within the form of bars or pucks.) Lumps of metallic would possibly promote for a tiny fraction of what the unique objects, with their feel-good historical past, would have fetched in a authorized market, however there was no authorized market. Trotta drove the silver blob to precious-metals sellers in Manhattan’s Diamond District, who purchased it for about $6,000, no questions requested.
A enterprise mannequin was born, and Trotta—newly married, with a spouse to help—devoted himself to its perfection. He started mornings now on his laptop computer on the native Starbucks or Dunkin’, Googling for web sites the place the phrases gold, silver, or diamonds confirmed up alongside phrases corresponding to museum and show. When a promising goal appeared within the search outcomes, he’d instantly drive, for hours typically, to see it; some had been mining museums, however much more had been halls of fame or sports activities museums, lots of them in small cities. (The crew cased the Nationwide Baseball Corridor of Fame, in Cooperstown, New York, for years, however gave up after discovering that the diamonds on the championship belt they had been after had been changed by cheap replicas.)
Trotta’s reconnaissance grew bolder. On return visits to a goal, he’d typically convey his sister Daybreak’s two preschool-age youngsters, which gave him cowl to movie its inside below the guise of recording his little family members. He’d ask his niece and nephew to stroll over to sure home windows, to see if their actions made lights blip on close by movement detectors. (Daybreak advised me she appreciated the kid care and was unaware of her brother’s ulterior motives.)
When it was Dombek’s flip to go to a goal, he’d discreetly faucet show instances with a penny, Trotta advised me, to glean from the sound whether or not the glass was simply breakable or bulletproof—data that helped Trotta resolve whether or not to convey his DeWalt grinder, Estwing camper’s ax, or heart punch on heist night time. With every profitable job, Trotta grew to become extra satisfied that his “dorky” face—along with the button-down shirts he wore on museum visits—made him appear to be probably the most generic of American vacationers.
When the climate app on their telephones confirmed storms nearing a goal, Dombek, like a soccer coach, would chalk arrows and X’s on his storage ground, diagramming Trotta’s path by a museum. Then, in Dombek’s yard, Trotta would rehearse the strikes at full velocity, monitoring his instances on a stopwatch.
Daybreak did her half by renting automobiles on the Scranton airport, then handing the keys to her brother. Not solely did leases hardly ever break down; they had been so new and clear that police tended to miss them, even within the rapid aftermath of a heist.
Trotta’s system left virtually no element unconsidered, from the way in which he activated burner telephones and bleached his housebreaking instruments to the music he psyched up with—AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” or Metallica’s “Enter Sandman”—earlier than crashing by a window. A trophy might be stolen from a museum at 3 a.m., melted in Dombek’s furnace by 8 a.m., and bought in Manhattan by 1 p.m.—sufficient time to take pleasure in a vodka with the Russian sellers they bought to and to choose up a brand new batch of ski masks on the Military-Navy retailer on their stroll again to the Port Authority storage, the place they’d parked.
From the summer time of 2011 by late 2013, as gold costs hit document highs, Trotta’s crew made practically $500,000, more money than they’d seen of their entire lives. Trotta had launched practically flawless heists on the Sterling Hill Mining Museum, in Ogdensburg, New Jersey; america Golf Affiliation museum, in Liberty Nook, New Jersey; the Harness Racing Museum and Corridor of Fame, in Goshen, New York; and the Nationwide Museum of Racing and Corridor of Fame, in Saratoga Springs, New York. Among the many objects melted into oblivion had been golf’s historic U.S. Beginner Trophy; a duplicate of the golfer Ben Hogan’s 1953 Hickok Belt, a diamond-studded gold strip given to the very best skilled athlete of the 12 months; an 18-karat Memphis Gold Problem Cup awarded in 1902 to the trotting horse Lou Dillon; a silver Fabergé tureen that Czar Nicholas II gave to Dillon’s American proprietor in 1912, to thank him for introducing harness racing to Russia; and two 1903 trophies designed by Tiffany, one for the Brighton Cup, the opposite for the Belmont Stakes.
By late 2013, the FBI and the sporting press began to suspect a connection among the many heists. Theories ranged “from the frequent avenue crime selection to advanced schemes worthy of ‘The Sopranos,’ ” The New York Instances reported that October. A 12 months later, Trotta was out and in of the Yogi Berra Museum so quick that nothing appeared amiss from the entrance doorways when the police acquired there, about 5 minutes after the alarm sounded. “Due to the rain and wind,” one officer wrote in a report, “our visibility was restricted.” Not till Berra’s son Dale arrived on the museum the following morning—he stored an workplace there—was the theft found.
When Trotta disappeared, typically for days, to case or burglarize a museum, he’d deceive his spouse. He’d say he was in New Jersey doing HVAC work with Joe Atsus and Joe’s brother, Al, who had a contracting enterprise. On their marriage certificates, in 2009, Trotta listed his occupation, falsely, as “plumber.” Trotta advised me that his spouse by no means requested questions, as long as cash got here in. Trotta’s dad and mom’ relationship had labored a lot the identical method.
The difficulty started after that they had youngsters. Trotta’s spouse began to resent his frequent absences, which left her with too little assist round the home. One night time, whereas Trotta was on his solution to a museum, she referred to as to demand that he instantly return with provides for his or her 1-year-old son. “She’s like, ‘Thomas wants diapers, you motherfucker,’ ” Trotta recalled. (His spouse, who filed for divorce in 2018, advised me that she most popular to not contain herself on this story, writing in an electronic mail, “I’m pleased with no matter Tommy acknowledged.”)
Cash was changing into tighter, too. Berra’s 16 rings and two MVP plaques—valued at $1.5 million intact—had grossed Trotta’s crew simply $10,300 after melting. The extra he and his spouse fought, the extra he questioned how lengthy he may stick with it: the burglaries, the lies, all of it. He thought of day-trading or opening a restaurant. If he may pull one final job—a extremely huge one—he’d have the capital to begin an trustworthy enterprise, draw a steadier revenue, do higher as a husband and pa. He was turning 40. It was time.
He discovered an exit the way in which he’d discovered every little thing else: on Google. In 1894, the Russian Empress Alexandra wore a spectacular crown at her wedding ceremony to Czar Nicholas II, the identical Nicholas, by the way, whose Fabergé tureen Trotta had stolen from the racing museum in Goshen. Some 1,535 diamonds coated six velvet-draped silver bands, which converged beneath a cross made from six bigger diamonds. Trotta believed he may get $5 million within the Diamond District by scrapping the crown’s stones.
The crown, he found, sat shockingly near a first-floor window in a Washington, D.C., mansion as soon as owned by one among America’s wealthiest girls. Marjorie Merriweather Publish—the cereal heiress, businesswoman, and philanthropist—had bought Hillwood, because the 25-acre property was referred to as, in 1955 and stuffed it with effective artwork and collectibles from 18th-century Russia and France. In 1977, 4 years after her dying, Hillwood opened to the general public as a museum and gardens.
Trotta had cased it greater than a dozen instances earlier than returning in the summertime of 2015 for a vital, remaining step. He referred to as it a “night time examine”: hours spent in a automotive or in bushes, looking out by binoculars for guards and different nocturnal exercise. Trotta was a couple of minutes from the night-check spot when he acquired right into a shouting match together with his spouse over the telephone. He was jolted out of it by a flash on the street: A velocity digicam had photographed his automobile, inserting it uncomfortably near Hillwood. He referred to as off the night time examine and drove the 4 hours residence, livid.
Again in Pennsylvania, he grew so impatient that he disbursed together with his traditional warning. Overlook the night time examine, he thought. He’d return to Washington with a single mission: to take the crown and retire. He may misdirect the police by setting hearth to—or, as he put it, “cooking”—a Hillwood outbuilding as a diversion. However Boland and Ralph Parry, one other pal who’d agreed to accompany him, talked him out of the hearth. “You need extra expenses?” Parry stated, in line with Trotta.
Within the darkness of an August morning in 2015, Trotta used fence cutters to enter Hillwood’s grounds and a grinder to chop a bulletproof window some eight toes from the empress’s crown. As Trotta reached for his ax to smash open the show case, he heard a voice shout “Halt!” Within the pink glow of his headlamp, he glimpsed a person in uniform down the corridor. The Hillwood, it turned out, employed night time guards. Trotta leaped out the window he’d entered, yelling, “Pop the smoke.” Boland yanked the pin from a smoke grenade and lobbed it behind them as they ran towards Rock Creek Park and forded the creek to Parry’s ready automotive. (In a press release issued by his lawyer, Boland referred to as Trotta an “inveterate liar” with “no credibility.” Parry’s lawyer didn’t remark.)
The failure drove Trotta right into a melancholy. Why hadn’t he returned for an evening examine? Why had he let his much less skilled mates speak him out of a diversion? What was unsuitable with him?
Since childhood, he’d tried to abide by the one scruple his father appeared to have: Don’t do medication. However after Hillwood, as his marriage crumbled, he wanted launch. He started taking Percocet, a narcotic painkiller, and have become hooked, paying as a lot as $50 on the road for every 30-milligram pill.
The cash he comprised of a 2016 heist of the Roger Maris Museum—all the way in which out in Fargo, North Dakota—hardly appeared well worth the hours of journey. And the medication had been making him sloppy. He minimize himself so badly breaking into the Worldwide Boxing Corridor of Fame, in Canastota, New York, and the Franklin Mineral Museum, in Franklin, New Jersey, that he trailed blood on the home windows and flooring. All for nothing; the boxing belts turned out to be made from an inexpensive alloy, and the mining stones—tourmaline, zircon, alexandrite—had been nugatory. Some malignant pressure gave the impression to be conspiring towards him. When he entered Harvard’s Mineralogical & Geological Museum, disguised as a Hasidic Jew and able to snatch a big diamond in the course of the day, the stone, which he’d seen each time he’d cased the museum, was now not on show.
His edge dulled by narcotics, he returned to the petty thievery of his youth: homes in his personal neighborhood, dinky vintage outlets, convenience-store ATMs—no matter, at any time when, for one more handful of capsules.
Trotta was driving to a pal’s condominium within the snowy early morning of March 4, 2019, when a Pennsylvania state-police cruiser got here up behind him. His Pontiac had been fishtailing on the slicked roads, however the troopers didn’t make a site visitors cease till he inexplicably pulled over. (Trotta advised me he’d wished to let the automotive move, not seeing its police markings till too late.)
Trotta failed a discipline sobriety check and was charged with a DUI, unlawful possession of managed substances, the unauthorized use of another person’s automotive (his cousin’s), using a unique automotive’s license plates (his sister’s), and different motor-vehicle violations. He stored it collectively sufficient to refuse a blood-alcohol check: The very last thing he wanted was anybody tying his DNA to the blood he’d shed at varied crime scenes. On the police barracks, nonetheless, he requested for water. A trooper fished his cup out of the trash and despatched it to a forensics lab.
When troopers opened the Pontiac’s trunk the following day, they realized that the driving force may be somebody aside from their traditional yahoo out previous his bedtime. Contained in the automobile had been bolt cutters, a sledgehammer, a headlamp, ski masks, walkie-talkies, burner telephones, bits of bijou, a checkered shirt that had been caught on safety cameras throughout a latest jewelry-store heist, and brochures for sports activities museums. When Trotta met his lawyer, he requested what the police had discovered within the automotive. The lawyer, a seasoned protection lawyer named Joe D’Andrea, replied, “Every little thing however Jimmy Hoffa.”
9 days after Trotta’s arrest, FBI brokers gathered at a state-police barracks with law-enforcement officers from New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. They’d come to assessment an extended listing of burglaries with comparable MOs and to determine whether or not Trotta was their lacking hyperlink. The DNA outcomes that got here in after the assembly erased all doubt.
Trotta was turning 44 that 12 months. He’d recognized the core members of his crew since Ronald Reagan was president. They’d seen each other by graduations, marriages, youngsters, joblessness, substance abuse, divorce. Joe and Al Atsus had been godparents to Trotta’s youngsters. “Should you’re robbing stuff at 11 or 12 with individuals, and at 40 you’re nonetheless robbing stuff with these individuals,” Trotta advised me, “you possibly can’t really get a more in-depth bond than that.” He estimated that over their lives collectively, they’d carried out greater than 1,500 burglaries.
However when he was arrested, he stated, not one among them got here to his support. No actual cash for attorneys or bail. No sympathy for the years of jail he would possibly face—for crimes that had enriched all of them. “He’s an enormous boy; he’ll eat it,” one among them advised his sister. Dombek, claiming to be broke, gave Trotta a handful of screws, suggesting that he scrap them for a bit of money, in line with Trotta. The police, in the meantime, began utilizing proof from the Pontiac, and interviews with not less than one affiliate, to cost Trotta with a sequence of native crimes: a 2016 ATM theft, a 2018 home housebreaking. “My mates,” Trotta concluded, “had been ready to bury me.”
In April 2019, together with his lawyer’s encouragement, he started cooperating with state police and prosecutors, and finally with the FBI. The police fitted him with a listening system, and he recorded damning conversations with Dombek, a person he liked like a brother. In a kind of conversations, Dombek stated that if anybody turned on him, he’d “sneak on their property, flip off the properly cap, and pour a gallon of some sort of substance down their properly and would kill that individual and their entire household,” in line with a police abstract of the recording. Dombek additionally talked about destroying proof of their crimes, and about plans to kill one witness by mixing fentanyl into his cocaine or by poisoning him with a poisonous plant referred to as false hellebore.
In August of that 12 months, the state police raided Dombek’s property, found the makeshift chemistry lab, and charged him with burglarizing a home with Trotta. Launched on bail, Dombek stormed over to the properties of Trotta’s mom and sister. He referred to as Trotta a “fucking rat,” in line with court docket data, and threatened violence if Trotta didn’t shut up or change his story. The police promptly charged Dombek with 5 counts of witness intimidation.
U.S. attorneys, in the meantime, persuaded their state counterparts to allow them to mount a single prosecution of practically all of the museum heists. As federal brokers gathered proof, Dombek and Trotta remained in a Pennsylvania jail on state expenses: the previous for 3 years, till he pleaded no contest to a single cost every of witness intimidation and residential housebreaking; the latter for nearly 4 years, till he pleaded responsible to the DUI, the ATM theft, and two residence burglaries.
Then, in June 2023, the U.S. lawyer for the Center District of Pennsylvania introduced federal expenses towards Trotta, Dombek, and 7 different alleged ring members, together with Joe and Al Atsus. (Al Atsus’s lawyer advised me that any prison allegations towards his shopper had been “completely ridiculous and patently absurd”; Joe Atsus’s lawyer declined to remark for this story.) Investigators had linked the ring to 21 burglaries throughout 5 states over greater than 20 years. A press launch credited 20 state and native police departments, in addition to the FBI, for serving to clear up the case.
Boland and the Atsus brothers have pleaded not responsible. Dombek vanished into the woods when he realized of his arrest warrant however reappeared after six months and pleaded not responsible. Tommy and Daybreak Trotta, Ralph Parry, and two others pleaded responsible as a part of cooperation offers. “Very responsible, Your Honor,” Trotta assured a federal choose.
“We ripped the heart out of individuals emotionally,” Trotta advised me. “I do know that now.” In Could 2019, whereas out on bail on the state expenses, Trotta broke right into a vacant home in New Jersey that the Atsus brothers owned. It was the final place he’d seen the Mathewson memorabilia, the Pollock, and the Warhol. He’d hoped to revive them to their homeowners, he stated. But when the gadgets had been there, he couldn’t discover them. Their whereabouts stay unknown.
Within the days after the 1999 Mathewson heist, two of the pitcher’s greatest followers had been among the many most closely interrogated. Eddie Frierson, an actor who’d written and carried out the one-man present about Mathewson that night time, endured searches by the state police and grillings by the FBI whereas nonetheless deep in grief himself over the loss to the school and to baseball historical past. “I used to be aching,” he advised me.
Terry Sensible was the Keystone Faculty official accountable for the Mathewson show that weekend. When she’d been employed as athletic director just a few years earlier, she’d inspired the school’s president to do extra with the memorabilia: What number of colleges may declare as an alumnus an inaugural inductee of the Baseball Corridor of Fame? It was Sensible who had opened the case that night time to present guests—together with Trotta, she now realizes—a greater take a look at Mathewson’s contracts and jersey. Worse than being questioned by six cops the following day are the sentiments of guilt and naivete she nonetheless lives with. “I can’t imagine it’s 25 years,” she stated as we spoke within the health club car parking zone, just a few steps from the door the place Trotta had let himself in.
Haley Zale launched a “Convey Again the Belts” marketing campaign on social media after her great-uncle’s championship belts had been stolen in 2015 from the Worldwide Boxing Corridor of Fame. Tony Zale had overwhelmed Rocky Graziano in 1948 to turn out to be the middleweight champion of the world. After Tony’s dying, in 1997, Haley visited the museum yearly to say her Hail Marys and Our Fathers, and to recollect the shy man who’d come up from nothing, overwhelmed Graziano, and been a grandfather determine to her—educating her boxing stances, applauding her childhood ballet routines, and calling her Miss America. “Visiting Uncle Tony’s belts,” she advised me, “was like visiting his grave.”
Lindsay Berra advised me that her grandfather Yogi reacted to the disappearance of his rings and plaques together with his acquainted good humor. “Effectively, I do know I gained them,” he stated. He anxious solely in regards to the schoolchildren who visited the museum: Might the damaged glass be cleaned up so the youngsters didn’t get minimize?
Berra’s relations took the theft more durable. “Each a kind of rings has a narrative behind it, and it’s about him and a workforce and the Yankees and a time in our nation,” Lindsay advised me. “You’re taking little items of American historical past while you take them. They belong to all Individuals, not simply the man who gained them.”
When the museum’s director referred to as in 2023 to inform her that the alleged culprits had melted the rings for the sake of some thousand bucks, Lindsay cried as a lot in sorrow as for the stupidity and waste. Wouldn’t it have been simpler and extra profitable to knock off a Kay Jewelers? she thought. She couldn’t perceive how Trotta may attempt on her grandfather’s rings—claiming to be a fan—solely to moments later destroy them.
I requested if she believed Trotta’s professions of regret. “No,” she stated. “I feel he’s sorry he acquired caught.”
Even after the police had discovered “every little thing however Jimmy Hoffa” within the Pontiac, even after he’d agreed to cooperate, Trotta burglarized a New York jewellery retailer and got here near ransacking the Saratoga Springs racing museum a second time. He aborted solely as a result of he’d noticed a guard throughout an evening examine. Then, in January 2024, as half his crew was headed for trial—with himself the star witness for the prosecution—Trotta allegedly stole present playing cards, money, and jewellery from the home of a girl he’d pushed residence from a bar. The police dropped the fees after Trotta’s lawyer gave the house’s proprietor a $7,500 examine for the lacking gadgets, the native police chief advised me. Trotta claims that it was a misunderstanding, however the federal choose overseeing the heist instances was displeased sufficient to revoke Trotta’s pretrial launch.
The intuition to steal stays so sturdy, Trotta advised me—so “within the blood”—that he feels as if his mind wants rebuilding. Like a recovering addict, he has to remain consistently on guard towards his personal impulses. He worries, too, about his son. At 11, he’s now the age Trotta was when Large Tom led him into a lifetime of crime. When Trotta calls from jail, he talks together with his son in regards to the distress of incarceration: the unhealthy meals, the piece of metallic with a half-inch mat that passes for a mattress.
For a few years within the early 2000s, to fulfill probation on a minor theft cost, Trotta held a part-time job loading Walmart vans. It was the one regular paycheck he’d earned in his grownup life; he was depressing. “It was just like the coal mines of previous,” he advised me. “It’s trustworthy and you could possibly get up and really feel proud, however, like, you’re in a class now of actual broke-ness.” Guys may dwell paycheck to paycheck there for 20 years and by no means save sufficient for even a bit self-indulgence.
Trotta had by no means grown wealthy as a thief. He’d taken some good holidays, eaten some costly steaks. However he drove junkers, dressed plainly, and had owned a home for simply a few years earlier than the funds grew to become an excessive amount of for him. His sister’s place, the place he’d lived in a basement bed room earlier than and after his marriage, was maybe the closest factor he’d needed to a steady residence. But a thief’s life—like a gambler’s—made wealth one thing aside from unattainable. Months would move by which Trotta would scrape by on penny-ante burglaries. “Then, abruptly, an enormous factor would hit: Increase, we’re good.” And for nonetheless many days the cash lasted, he felt free.
This text seems within the February 2025 print version with the headline “Trophy Hunters.”