So when Pappas, then 23, faced a minimum 15-year prison term in connection to a $1 million-a-year cocaine trafficking ring, he floated stolen artwork and information on the Isabella Stewart Gardner heist as bargaining chip.
The Herald - quoting sources - first reported in 1992 that Pappas and Dorchester drug lord Carmello Merlino offered to trade information on the 1990 Gardner theft in exchange for leniency on the drug charges. The offer also included promises about the whereabouts of $30,000 worth of stolen paintings from the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Museum in Cambridge in 1985.
Although sources told the Herald that negotiations between investigators and lawyers for Pappas and Merlino occurred, the $300 million art theft has not been solved and there is no hard evidence Pappas had access to the works.
Charlestown underworld leader Joseph P. Murray led a violent life that ended in a bloody death at the hands of his wife in 1994.
Somewhere along the line, his name arose as a possible conduit for the recovery of paintings stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
The story goes that Murray was eyeballed from time to time by Hub FBI agents trying to crack the case. One proponent of this tale was William P. Youngworth III, the shady Randolph antiques dealer and Gardner gadfly who popped up in the late 1990s claiming insight into the heist. “Joe Murray had the art hidden away in New York,” Youngworth told the Herald in 1997. “When he was killed that was the end of it.”
Murray was in fact shot dead by his wife, in Belgrade Lakes, Maine. But the rest of the speculation was not grounded in anything provable.
What is known is that Joseph P. Murray was a brutal criminal who tried to smuggle arms to the IRA aboard the Gloucester-based trawler Valhalla in 1984 - one of the more storied episodes in Boston IRA history. The Valhalla was seized, and several IRA figures were jailed as a result, Murray among them.
Somewhere along the line, his name arose as a possible conduit for the recovery of paintings stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
The story goes that Murray was eyeballed from time to time by Hub FBI agents trying to crack the case. One proponent of this tale was William P. Youngworth III, the shady Randolph antiques dealer and Gardner gadfly who popped up in the late 1990s claiming insight into the heist. “Joe Murray had the art hidden away in New York,” Youngworth told the Herald in 1997. “When he was killed that was the end of it.”
Murray was in fact shot dead by his wife, in Belgrade Lakes, Maine. But the rest of the speculation was not grounded in anything provable.
What is known is that Joseph P. Murray was a brutal criminal who tried to smuggle arms to the IRA aboard the Gloucester-based trawler Valhalla in 1984 - one of the more storied episodes in Boston IRA history. The Valhalla was seized, and several IRA figures were jailed as a result, Murray among them.
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