Hey Dad, Can You Help Me Return the Picasso I Stole?

A painting went missing in 1969, then turned up at a museums doorstep. No one knew how or why—until now

- Dan Barry

The Picasso fell off the proverbial truck. It vanished from a loading dock at Logan International Airport in Boston and wound up where it didn’t belong, in the modest home of one Merrill Rummel, also known as Bill.

In fairness, this forklift operator had no idea that the crate he tossed into his car trunk contained a Picasso until he opened its casing. In fairness, he didn’t care much for it; he preferred realism.

But now things had turned all too real. FBI agents were hot on the trail of a hot Picasso unavailable for public viewing, as it was hidden in Rummel’s hallway closet. He and his fiancee, Sam, began to panic.

“How do we get rid of it?” she recalls thinking.

“We couldn’t just give it back. It was a pain in our butt.”

Fortunately, Rummel knew a guy. Someone particularly skilled at making problems melt away. A fixer. He dialed a number he knew by heart.

The Case of The Missing Picasso goes back. Back before the far more notorious theft of 13 works of art from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990. Back, in a sense, to a time before Picasso had even painted the piece.

Back to the 1950s of Waterville, Maine, where the Rummel boys—Bill and his younger brother, Whit—were testing their hometown’s Yankee forbearance. If one boy was looting parking meters for his coin collection, the other was pilfering pens from Woolworth’s. If one was stealing radios from junked cars, the other was racing his car so recklessly that it seemed destined for the junkyard.

But their father, Whitcomb Rummel Sr, always managed to calm the aggravated constabulary with assurances that he would handle it. And he did: When 12-year-old Whit—known in the family as Half-Whit—was caught stealing from Woolworth’s, his father forbade him from entering any shop for a year.