Myles Connor

The cool cat leaning on the vintage pick-up on the cover of the 2003 CD Myles Connor & Friends is Connor himself, decked out in dungarees, a gunner belt and a black leather jacket over his wife-beater t-shirt with a motorcycle cap completing the look, as if he just stepped out of a Marlon Brando film. In the lower-left corner is the word “Rembrandt,” which is a hint about the rest of Connor’s story. Open the album jacket and there’s another picture, this one of him sitting on the roof of the truck, proudly extending his middle finger to the world.  Two of his “Wild Ones” band members lean against the fenders as the other two act as if they’re frisking.

Connor had a spotty musical career around greater Boston in the 1950s and into the late ‘70s, first with The Wild Ones and later as the so-called “President of Rock ‘n’ Roll.” But, as his producer Al Dotoli once said, “Every time we came close to major success, crime got in the way.” Connor spent more time behind bars in those days than he did on the stage. A lot more time.

His musical adventures began in 1958 in Braintree, Massachusetts, at a sock hop hosted by Arnie “Woo Woo” Ginsburg. For a while in the ‘60s, his band, The Wild Ones, were a fixture at halls like the Lewis Ballroom on Revere Beach and The Surf on Nantasket Beach in Hull and he could be heard on WMEX in commercials for Bay State Gas (imitating Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash and Roy Orbison singing “We love you, Bay State, ‘cause you’re a gas”). In the ‘70s, his made his home base at The Beachcomber in Quincy’s Wollaston neighborhood fronting The Myles Connor Rock ‘n’ Roll Review (sic).

For Connor, however, rock ‘n’ roll took a back seat to his life of crime. Over the decades, he was charged with everything from double homicide to stealing a bale of hay. Other arrests were for assault, drug trafficking, shooting a police officer, rape, counterfeiting and receiving stolen property, to name a few. He was shot four times in a gunfight with a Massachusetts State Police captain. Sometimes he truly was “the one,” who committed the crime, and sometimes he wasn’t. In 1975, he was convicted and sentenced to life for stabbing two teenage girls to death. Two years later, however, new evidence surfaced that proved his innocence. Similarly, his 1974 conviction in the murder of Boston police officer Donald Brown was overturned.

Connor served time in Walpole State Prison in Massachusetts for assault and attempted murder and was put away on drug charges in Illinois. While doing a bit at McKean Prison in Pennsylvania, he assembled the band Dream McKean and in 1975 and 1977, he played concerts at Walpole State Prison with Sha Na Na members Lennie Baker, Dan McBride and Dave Ryan and bluesman James Cotton. Among the tunes they covered were “Thunder Road,” “Jailhouse Rock,” “Folsom Prison Blues” and “Riot in Cell Block #9.” When he sang “let me take your books home, baby” in the song “Hey, Little School Girl,” listeners had no idea that Connor was probably planning to steal them and sell them for a profit.

Connor was eventually sentenced to 8-10 years for trying to sell an Andrew Wyeth painting to a government agent for $1 million. In fact, it was his love of art that got him into the most trouble and gained him the most notoriety. Connor claimed to have planned the 1990 robbery of $500 million worth of paintings including Rembrandt’s “Storm on the Sea of Galilee” from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Twenty-six years later, that crime remains the world’s largest unsolved art theft. He was named as a person of interest in the case but never charged because he was in prison at the time (for stealing works from the Mead Art Museum in Amherst, Massachusetts).

In his best-selling book, The Art of the Heist, Connor writes about his thefts from the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Smithsonian in Washington DC, among others. At age 18, he stole paintings from the Forbes House Museum in Milton, Massachusetts (where he was raised) and was arrested for robbing the Norfolk County Trust in Milton of $116,000. In 1965, he was convicted of stealing art from the home of a dead woman in Maine after having escaped from Hancock County Jail using a fake gun he’d fashioned from a bar of soap and shoe black. He was on the lam for five days before police found and arrested him.

More recently, Connor’s criminal activity has been less dramatic, limited to shoplifting sunglasses, using a pellet gun to steal a cell phone during a drug transaction and lifting bales of hay from a farm in Mendon, Massachusetts. Apparently, the hay was for some of his menagerie, which has been known over the years to include dogs, chickens, a cobra, various types of poisonous insects and an emu.

(by Richard Mattulina)