On a Wednesday morning in October 2014, in a garage in the woods of Pennsylvania, Tommy Trotta tried on some new jewelry: a set of rings belonging to the baseball great Yogi Berra. Each hunk of gold bore a half-carat diamond and the words NEW YORK YANKEES WORLD CHAMPIONS. The team had given them to Berra for each of his 10 World Series victories—no player had ever won more.
Trotta, a balding 39-year-old who lived with his wife and two kids in Scranton, had grown up a Yankees fan. He’d dreamed as a boy of one day joining the team. Berra had been the favorite player of his beloved godmother, who gave Trotta his first Yankees uniform when he was a toddler and took him to games at Yankee Stadium.
Trotta never competed past Little League. But there was more than one way into a hall of fame. In a methodically planned heist in the dark and rain of that October morning, he’d climbed onto a balcony at the Yogi Berra Museum & Learning Center, in Little Falls, New Jersey, carrying a duffel bag of tools and dressed entirely in black. He’d cut through a double-reinforced window built to withstand 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 display case labeled BASEBALL’S RING LEADER.
Berra’s rings now glinted on Trotta’s hands. They evoked for him a magnificent time before his own birth: the mid-century years when Berra had won World Series after World Series with teammates such as Joe DiMaggio, Roger Maris, and Mickey Mantle. How many men besides Berra—and now Trotta—would ever know the feeling of those rings on their fingers? How many besides Trotta could sense the weight of all those victories, then destroy every last ounce of it for cash?
In the garage in the Pennsylvania woods, an electric melting furnace was reaching a programmed temperature of more than 1,900 degrees Fahrenheit. Trotta handed Berra’s rings to a friend, who used jewelers’ tools to pluck out the diamonds and cut up the rings. The dismembered rings were then dropped into the furnace, where they liquefied into a featureless mass of molten gold.
Mining has a proud history in the parts of northeastern Pennsylvania that Trotta and his crew called home. Scranton, the biggest city there, was named after a pair of brothers who exploited the region’s rich deposits of iron and coal. But where earlier generations had descended into the ground for raw minerals, Trotta broke through windows. His mother lode was the championship rings, belts, and trophies—veined with precious metals and gemstones—that sat, almost for the taking, inside low-security sports museums across America.
Trotta so perfected this niche line of burglary that he evaded the FBI and more than a dozen police agencies for two decades. His longevity was all the more remarkable given the size and makeup of his crew: three friends he’d known since grade school; his cousin’s fiancé; Trotta’s eldest sister, Dawn; two of her ex-boyfriends; and a neighbor of one of the exes. By day, they had normal jobs: plumber, carpenter, building contractor, bar owner, mechanic, Uber driver, real-estate closing agent. By night, they allegedly served as Trotta’s getaway drivers, toolmakers, and assistants.
Trotta told me his story last year, while he was on pretrial release, awaiting sentencing. He has pleaded guilty to a single count of theft of major artwork, as part of a cooperation agreement with federal prosecutors who have indicted and are seeking to convict his entire crew. I interviewed Trotta in his lawyer’s office, at the apartment he shared with Dawn, and over a few meals and car rides. This article draws on those conversations and on details in the federal indictments, police records, and other public documents.
Trotta stands at about 5 foot 8 and has a round, expressive face—cleft chin, narrow eyes, jutting nose and lips. He speaks like an earnest 10-year-old telling of adventures so grand, he can barely sit still. He turns 50 this year. He hides his bald head beneath a newsboy cap; his once lean, CrossFit-hardened body has grown pear-shaped and wobbly. “Fat Elvis,” he told me.
Trotta claims now to know what he never grasped during a lifetime of thieving: the pain he caused people, particularly the families and fans of the sports heroes whose hard-won trophies he’d plundered. Yogi Berra was nearing his 90th birthday—his last—and grieving the recent death of his wife, 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 in the sports world,” Trotta told me. “I’m hated at a very deep level.”
Trotta felt as though he was born to steal. “In the blood” was how he put it, and it wasn’t just a metaphor. His father—Thomas Trotta Sr., known as “Big Tom” to Trotta’s “Little Tommy”—served as a police officer in Passaic, New Jersey, for seven years before discovering that he liked the other side of the law better. In March 1976, nine months after Trotta was born, his father accepted $750 from an associate of the Genovese crime family to torch a Hackensack dance club. A jury convicted him of arson and conspiracy, and a state judge sentenced him to two to three years in prison, rejecting any “sentimental concern for the family of a crooked cop.”
Big Tom was a Vietnam War veteran, fond of camouflage, jean shorts, and exotic firearms. Four months after leaving prison, he held up a Rite Aid pharmacy and was quickly caught. Later he ran heroin and cocaine for a New Jersey drug ring. Little Tommy was 15 years old—and watching from the back seat—when FBI agents yanked his dad out of the driver’s seat of the family car to arrest him. (Trotta Sr. agreed to testify against his associates and was sentenced to 22 months in prison.)
Big Tom may not have been cut out to be a successful arsonist, stickup man, or drug trafficker, but he did better as a thief, supporting his family without once getting caught. To steal without violence was a sly art, and Little Tommy loved when his dad asked for help. Where other fathers took their sons fishing, Trotta’s dad took his to steal salmon from a hatchery. Where other dads took their kids to see historical sites, Big Tom took his son to loot them: Little Tommy, at age 11, would look out for rangers at the Gettysburg battlefield at night as his father dug up Civil War artifacts with a metal detector and spade.
They’d moved from northern New Jersey to rural Pennsylvania in 1986, supposedly to escape the corrupting influences of city life. But it was there, in tiny Madison Township—on a former hay farm, off a dirt road, 15 miles east of Scranton—that Trotta’s criminal education began in earnest. His sister Dawn, who was four years older, had started dating a boy named Nicholas Dombek, a floppy-haired blond who’d quit school, robbed a gas station, and moved in with the Trottas after having had enough of his own parents. Dombek became a kind of older brother to Trotta, and a second son to Big Tom. (Dombek did not respond to requests for comment.)
Big Tom mentored Dombek in home and commercial burglary; Dombek, in turn, mentored Trotta; and by high school, Trotta had helped turn a group of boys he’d known since he was about 11 into a surprisingly disciplined band of thieves.
The gang would listen to idle talk among schoolmates and neighbors to figure out when houses might be unoccupied or stores flush with cash. Then they’d strike, syncing their movements over walkie-talkies and fleeing on ATVs and snowmobiles (also stolen) down wooded trails that police cars couldn’t reach. Trotta never used weapons: His code was always to run if spotted. But in other ways he could be ruthless. He stole $6,000 from the home of a schoolmate’s great-grandmother, he told me, then gave the boy a cut for his advice on how to do it. And he stole a safe from a clothing shop managed by his own girlfriend. Police interrogated the girlfriend, who had no idea he was responsible, but Trotta didn’t mind. The suspicion that fell on innocent employees after his burglaries, he said, “was good for me.”
After graduating from North Pocono High School, in 1994, Trotta got a student loan and enrolled in a six-month vocational-training course in alarm-system technology. He learned that you could disable an alarm by ripping its control panel—or “brain”—off the wall. He found out that many motion detectors had a “pet alley,” an unmonitored area near the floor for small animals. And he discovered that most alarms had a built-in delay: 60 to 90 seconds between when a sensor was tripped and when security was called. The feature was designed to reduce false alarms by giving owners time to punch in a code if they triggered the system accidentally. Trotta took away a different lesson: If a burglar got in and out in under 90 seconds, he could vanish into the night before anyone knew he’d been there. This insight, more than any other, became the basis for the next phase of his career.
In August 1999, Keystone College, in La Plume, Pennsylvania, held a celebration for its most famous alumnus: the Baseball Hall of Famer Christy Mathewson, who pitched for the New York Giants from 1900 to 1916 and won an astonishing 373 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 dealer he knew. They watched a one-man show about Mathewson’s life, then walked to the gym for an exhibit of memorabilia that Mathewson’s widow had given the school. Keystone’s athletic director was such an exuberant promoter of Mathewson’s legacy that she slid open a case to give visitors close-ups of the most thrilling items: Mathewson’s 1902 contract with the Giants; his 1916 contract with the Cincinnati Reds; and a World’s Champions jersey he wore after winning the 1905 World Series, its right sleeve cut off at the elbow for friction-free pitching.
Trotta didn’t think much of any of it until the car ride home, when his friend casually said that the Mathewson memorabilia in that one case might be worth more than half a million dollars. It was the most interesting thing Trotta had heard all evening.
He called Joe Atsus—a member of the thieving crew he’d known since middle school—the moment he got home. As Atsus made his way to the house, Trotta dug out a ski mask, a crowbar, and a pair of walkie-talkies. When they got to the Keystone gym, after midnight, Trotta noticed a parked car near the glass side door he’d planned to break through, and a plugged-in vacuum cleaner just 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 try the handle. The door was unlocked. Trotta ran to the display, jimmied the sliding glass free of its ratchet lock, and grabbed the jersey and contracts. He was in and out, he recalled, in about 25 seconds. “It was like it was meant to just be taken,” he told me.
Trotta continued to burglarize homes to cover his day-to-day living expenses; unlike his assistants, he had no other job. But homes were haystacks: Somewhere in all that clutter, you’d maybe find an antique, a gun, some jewelry, but nothing to make you truly rich. Exhibits like Mathewson’s, Trotta realized, were clutter-free—everything in them was precious. If you could snag half a million dollars in memorabilia in half a minute from a college gym, imagine the takings in an actual museum.
The most prestigious museum in northeastern Pennsylvania was right there in Scranton. Founded by a local physician in 1908, the Everhart Museum had a diverse collection that ranged from a Tyrannosaurus rex skull to paintings by important artists. In 2000, a year after the Mathewson heist, the Everhart made headlines when it proposed strengthening its finances by selling its one Matisse. The painting, a 1920 still life called Pink Shrimp, had been appraised at more than $4 million. Trotta and his crew set in motion a plan to steal it; they began by filming the museum’s layout with camcorders while pretending to be tourists.
They lost their chance when the museum abruptly sold the Matisse. But Trotta was undeterred. On a return visit, he started talking about the painting with a guard, who mentioned that another artwork was probably worth more: Springs Winter, a movie-poster-size drip painting attributed to Jackson Pollock.
Over the next five years, Trotta, Dombek, and other members of the crew took turns visiting—and at times filming—the museum. They mapped the location of each security camera and motion detector, each entry and egress. In bed at night, Trotta replayed the footage obsessively, until he felt he could walk the museum blindfolded. The heist’s exact timing would depend, in a sense, on the gods: The crew needed a storm to hit Scranton between 2 a.m. and dawn. From burglarizing houses as teens, they knew that bad weather slowed the police and muffled the sound of breaking glass. Rain or snow was particularly effective an hour or two after bars closed, when police—tired after the usual arrests—tended to lose steam and become, in Trotta’s phrase, less “peppy.”
But all of those plans were set aside one early morning in November 2005, when a giant brawl erupted at a Scranton bar called Whistles. Trotta, Joe Atsus, and another schoolmate, Damien Boland—whose great-grandmother’s house Trotta had burglarized years earlier—were having a drink when the melee (which they’d played no part in) drew seemingly every last police cruiser to Whistles’ front door.
Let’s do it now, Trotta told his friends. He had no ax, no crowbar, no ski mask. But a huge bar fight near closing time was a diversion as providential as a 3 a.m. downpour. He had more luck still when his friends dropped him off behind the museum: A large tent—erected for the Everhart’s annual ball the next night—blocked sight lines to the back door.
After failing to kick in the door, Trotta grabbed a ladder beside the tent and used it as a battering ram, bashing a hole in the glass and crawling through it. In the pitch dark, he bounded up the stairs to the second-floor gallery. He removed the Pollock from the wall and, on the spur of the moment, took an Andy Warhol silk screen, La Grande Passion, right near it. He was downstairs, out the hole, and in his pickup in less than a minute. “We’re rich!” Atsus said, according to court documents.
But by sunup, Trotta was so convinced of his imminent arrest that he pulled a lawn chair into his driveway and just sat there, waiting for the police. Lacking a mask, he’d improvised inside the museum by lifting his sweater over his nose, like some Looney Tunes bandit. Worse, it was a colorful sweater, which anyone at the bars he’d visited the previous evening might recognize.
Yet by the end of the day, no police had showed. The Scranton Times-Tribune soon reported that the museum’s surveillance cameras were under repair and not working that night.
Trotta’s relief was replaced by a new anxiety, captured in a front-page Times-Tribune headline the next day: “FBI: ‘No Market for Stolen Art.’ ” “The true art in an art theft is not stealing the material,” Robert Wittman, then the FBI’s lead art-crime investigator, told the newspaper. “It’s selling it.”
No one had linked the Everhart and Mathewson heists, but word of both had spread among museums, dealers, and collectors. Anyone who tried to sell the Pollock and the Warhol—together potentially worth millions—or the Mathewson memorabilia would almost certainly be discovered. Buyers, for their part, could face both civil and criminal liability, having no credible excuse for ignorance.
At first Trotta thought he could sell the items, no problem, once the five-year statute of limitations for theft expired. Later he realized his error: Under federal laws governing museum crime, prosecutors had as many as 20 years to bring charges. In desperation, he sent a videotape of the art and memorabilia to his father, to see if any of Big Tom’s underworld connections might bite. “I can’t move this,” his dad eventually reported back.
A few months after the Everhart job, one of Trotta’s crew saw an article in Electric City, an alternative Scranton weekly. Arthur Byron Phillips, an eccentric artist who had loaned the Pollock to the museum, was offering a biblical-sounding reward. “Return the purported Pollock to him,” the paper said, “and he’ll grace your palms with silver.” Phillips told reward seekers to be prepared to verify their bona fides by naming the gallery on the painting’s reverse side: “Anyone coming up with that name will prove that they have the actual picture.”
Hot art might not be sellable, Trotta realized, but apparently it could be ransomed. He found a gas station with a pay phone, checked for security cameras, and dialed.
“The Parsons Gallery,” Trotta said.
Phillips replied after a long silence. “You have my attention.”
“I want a million dollars in cash. Don’t call the police.”
“I don’t have a million dollars in cash.”
“Then you’ll never see the painting again,” Trotta said, hanging up.
When Trotta passed the gas station the next day, the pay phone was gone. He suspected that Phillips had called the FBI. The phone was likely on its way to a crime lab. Trotta was glad he’d wiped his fingerprints off his quarters. But he’d screwed up again: He’d asked for too much. “If we went, ‘$50,000,’ I tell you what—he pays, he gets his painting back, okay?”
Dombek eventually decided that art was dangerous. According to prosecutors, he burned a painting by the Hudson River School artist Jasper Cropsey—valued at $500,000 and stolen by Trotta from a New Jersey museum—rather than risk getting caught with it. Dombek was like that. Whereas Trotta shone at getting loot, Dombek always had ideas about what to do with it.
The garage Nicholas Dombek had built, on the six acres he lived on in Thornhurst Township, was essentially an improvised chemistry lab. Its long shelves were lined with beakers, droppers, funnels, jugs, calipers, and cookers, alongside containers of various acids, powders, and solutions. Chemical formulas were handwritten on the walls beside what appeared to be personal affirmations. DREAMS ARE EXTREMLY [sic] IMPORTANT YOU CAN’T DO IT UNLESS YOU IMAGINE IT, read one. Another read ALWAYS KEEP SECRETS. It wasn’t necessarily the science that Dombek’s father and older brother taught in the public schools (his dad had a master’s degree in chemistry from Bucknell University), but it reflected at least some of what he’d picked up before quitting school after eighth grade and moving in with the Trottas.
Though Dombek would later testify in court that he was trying to change the bond of water “to cure cancer,” his successes tended to the more pedestrian: S-hooks for attaching stolen license plates to getaway cars; a spiked metal ball for pulverizing reinforced glass; a chain that trucks could use to rip ATMs off their base. Dawn Trotta, who dated Dombek as a teenager and remained friends with him, recalled his particular facility for annihilating cars for her father, who helped people dispose of them for insurance money. “Nick could disappear a vehicle in hours,” she told me. Among the literature Dombek kept handy were The Anarchist Cookbook, A Field Guide to Rocks and Minerals, and Recovery and Refining of Precious Metals.
After the Mathewson and Everhart fiascoes, Trotta told me, Dombek had one of his ideas. The thing that made most museum pieces valuable—their status as unique, instantly recognizable objects—was also the thing that made them unsellable. But what if you scrapped a museum piece, almost like you did a car? Could certain one-of-a-kind objects be remade, in a lab, into tradable commodities?
In March 2011, Trotta stole 13 silver golf trophies from the Country Club of Scranton during an overnight storm, then delivered them to Dombek’s garage. Five had been awarded to the club’s most illustrious member: Art Wall Jr., who had won the 1959 Masters at Augusta National, beating the defending champion, Arnold Palmer.
The trophies buckled under the heat of Dombek’s torches and furnaces, then puddled and cooled into an untraceable blob of silver. (As Dombek refined his methods, the blobs would come to look less “criminal”—as Trotta put it—and more like professionally made ingots, in the shape of bars or pucks.) Lumps of metal might sell for a tiny fraction of what the original objects, with their feel-good history, would have fetched in a legal market, but there was no legal market. Trotta drove the silver blob to precious-metals dealers in Manhattan’s Diamond District, who bought it for about $6,000, no questions asked.
A business model was born, and Trotta—newly married, with a wife to support—dedicated himself to its perfection. He began mornings now on his laptop at the local Starbucks or Dunkin’, Googling for websites where the words gold, silver, or diamonds showed up alongside terms such as museum and display. When a promising target appeared in the search results, he’d immediately drive, for hours sometimes, to see it; some were mining museums, but far more were halls of fame or sports museums, many of them in small towns. (The crew cased the National Baseball Hall of Fame, in Cooperstown, New York, for years, but gave up after discovering that the diamonds on the championship belt they were after had been replaced by inexpensive replicas.)
Trotta’s reconnaissance grew bolder. On return visits to a target, he’d often bring his sister Dawn’s two preschool-age kids, which gave him cover to film its interior under the guise of recording his little loved ones. He’d ask his niece and nephew to walk over to certain windows, to see if their movements made lights blip on nearby motion detectors. (Dawn told me she appreciated the child care and was unaware of her brother’s ulterior motives.)
When it was Dombek’s turn to visit a target, he’d discreetly tap display cases with a penny, Trotta told me, to glean from the sound whether the glass was easily breakable or bulletproof—information that helped Trotta decide whether to bring his DeWalt grinder, Estwing camper’s ax, or center punch on heist night. With each successful job, Trotta became more convinced that his “dorky” face—together with the button-down shirts he wore on museum visits—made him look like the most generic of American tourists.
When the weather app on their phones showed storms nearing a target, Dombek, like a football coach, would chalk arrows and X’s on his garage floor, diagramming Trotta’s path through a museum. Then, in Dombek’s yard, Trotta would rehearse the moves at full speed, tracking his times on a stopwatch.
Dawn did her part by renting cars at the Scranton airport, then handing the keys to her brother. Not only did rentals rarely break down; they were so new and clean that police tended to overlook them, even in the immediate aftermath of a heist.
Trotta’s system left almost no detail unconsidered, from the way he activated burner phones and bleached his burglary tools to the music he psyched up with—AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” or Metallica’s “Enter Sandman”—before crashing through a window. A trophy could be stolen from a museum at 3 a.m., melted in Dombek’s furnace by 8 a.m., and sold in Manhattan by 1 p.m.—enough time to enjoy a vodka with the Russian dealers they sold to and to pick up a new batch of ski masks at the Army-Navy store on their walk back to the Port Authority garage, where they’d parked.
From the summer of 2011 through late 2013, as gold prices hit record highs, Trotta’s crew made nearly $500,000, more cash than they’d seen in their whole lives. Trotta had launched nearly flawless heists on the Sterling Hill Mining Museum, in Ogdensburg, New Jersey; the United States Golf Association museum, in Liberty Corner, New Jersey; the Harness Racing Museum and Hall of Fame, in Goshen, New York; and the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame, in Saratoga Springs, New York. Among the objects melted into oblivion were golf’s historic U.S. Amateur Trophy; a replica of the golfer Ben Hogan’s 1953 Hickok Belt, a diamond-studded gold strip given to the best professional athlete of the year; an 18-karat Memphis Gold Challenge Cup awarded in 1902 to the trotting horse Lou Dillon; a silver Fabergé tureen that Czar Nicholas II gave to Dillon’s American owner in 1912, to thank him for introducing harness racing to Russia; and two 1903 trophies designed by Tiffany, one for the Brighton Cup, the other for the Belmont Stakes.
By late 2013, the FBI and the sporting press started to suspect a connection among the heists. Theories ranged “from the common street crime variety to complex schemes worthy of ‘The Sopranos,’ ” The New York Times reported that October. A year later, Trotta was in and out of the Yogi Berra Museum so fast that nothing looked amiss from the front doors when the police got there, about five minutes after the alarm sounded. “Because of the rain and wind,” one officer wrote in a report, “our visibility was limited.” Not until Berra’s son Dale arrived at the museum the next morning—he kept an office there—was the theft discovered.
When Trotta disappeared, sometimes for days, to case or burglarize a museum, he’d lie to his wife. He’d say he was in New Jersey doing HVAC work with Joe Atsus and Joe’s brother, Al, who had a contracting business. On their marriage certificate, in 2009, Trotta listed his profession, falsely, as “plumber.” Trotta told me that his wife never asked questions, so long as money came in. Trotta’s parents’ relationship had worked much the same way.
The trouble began after they had children. Trotta’s wife started to resent his frequent absences, which left her with too little help around the house. One night, while Trotta was on his way to a museum, she called to demand that he immediately return with supplies for their 1-year-old son. “She’s like, ‘Thomas needs diapers, you motherfucker,’ ” Trotta recalled. (His wife, who filed for divorce in 2018, told me that she preferred not to involve herself in this story, writing in an email, “I am ok with whatever Tommy stated.”)
Money was becoming tighter, too. Berra’s 16 rings and two MVP plaques—valued at $1.5 million intact—had grossed Trotta’s crew just $10,300 after melting. The more he and his wife fought, the more he wondered how long he could keep it up: the burglaries, the lies, all of it. He thought about day-trading or opening a restaurant. If he could pull one last job—a really big one—he’d have the capital to start an honest business, draw a steadier income, do better as a husband and dad. He was turning 40. It was time.
He found an exit the way he’d found everything else: on Google. In 1894, the Russian Empress Alexandra wore a spectacular crown at her wedding to Czar Nicholas II, the same Nicholas, incidentally, whose Fabergé tureen Trotta had stolen from the racing museum in Goshen. Some 1,535 diamonds covered six velvet-draped silver bands, which converged beneath a cross made of six larger diamonds. Trotta believed he could get $5 million in the Diamond District by scrapping the crown’s stones.
The crown, he discovered, sat shockingly close to a first-floor window in a Washington, D.C., mansion once owned by one of America’s wealthiest women. Marjorie Merriweather Post—the cereal heiress, businesswoman, and philanthropist—had purchased Hillwood, as the 25-acre estate was called, in 1955 and filled it with fine art and collectibles from 18th-century Russia and France. In 1977, four years after her death, Hillwood opened to the public as a museum and gardens.
Trotta had cased it more than a dozen times before returning in the summer of 2015 for a crucial, final step. He called it a “night check”: hours spent in a car or in bushes, searching through binoculars for guards and other nocturnal activity. Trotta was a few minutes from the night-check spot when he got into a shouting match with his wife over the phone. He was jolted out of it by a flash in the street: A speed camera had photographed his vehicle, placing it uncomfortably close to Hillwood. He called off the night check and drove the four hours home, furious.
Back in Pennsylvania, he grew so impatient that he dispensed with his usual caution. Forget the night check, he thought. He’d return to Washington with a single mission: to take the crown and retire. He could misdirect the police by setting fire to—or, as he put it, “cooking”—a Hillwood outbuilding as a diversion. But Boland and Ralph Parry, another friend who’d agreed to accompany him, talked him out of the fire. “You want more charges?” Parry said, according to Trotta.
In the darkness of an August morning in 2015, Trotta used fence cutters to enter Hillwood’s grounds and a grinder to cut a bulletproof window some eight feet from the empress’s crown. As Trotta reached for his ax to smash open the display case, he heard a voice shout “Halt!” In the red glow of his headlamp, he glimpsed a man in uniform down the hall. The Hillwood, it turned out, employed night 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 toward Rock Creek Park and forded the creek to Parry’s waiting car. (In a statement issued through his lawyer, Boland called Trotta an “inveterate liar” with “no credibility.” Parry’s lawyer did not comment.)
The failure drove Trotta into a depression. Why hadn’t he returned for a night check? Why had he let his less experienced friends talk him out of a diversion? What was wrong with him?
Since childhood, he’d tried to abide by the one scruple his father seemed to have: Don’t do drugs. But after Hillwood, as his marriage crumbled, he needed release. He began taking Percocet, a narcotic painkiller, and became hooked, paying as much as $50 on the street for each 30-milligram tablet.
The money he made from a 2016 heist of the Roger Maris Museum—all the way out in Fargo, North Dakota—hardly seemed worth the hours of travel. And the drugs were making him sloppy. He cut himself so badly breaking into the International Boxing Hall of Fame, in Canastota, New York, and the Franklin Mineral Museum, in Franklin, New Jersey, that he trailed blood on the windows and floors. All for nothing; the boxing belts turned out to be made of a cheap alloy, and the mining stones—tourmaline, zircon, alexandrite—were worthless. Some malignant force seemed to be conspiring against him. When he entered Harvard’s Mineralogical & Geological Museum, disguised as a Hasidic Jew and ready to snatch a large diamond in the middle of the day, the stone, which he’d seen every time he’d cased the museum, was no longer on display.
His edge dulled by narcotics, he returned to the petty thievery of his youth: houses in his own neighborhood, dinky antique shops, convenience-store ATMs—whatever, whenever, for another handful of pills.
Trotta was driving to a friend’s apartment in the snowy early morning of March 4, 2019, when a Pennsylvania state-police cruiser came up behind him. His Pontiac had been fishtailing on the slicked roads, but the troopers didn’t make a traffic stop until he inexplicably pulled over. (Trotta told me he’d wanted to let the car pass, not seeing its police markings until too late.)
Trotta failed a field sobriety test and was charged with a DUI, illegal possession of controlled substances, the unauthorized use of someone else’s car (his cousin’s), the use of a different car’s license plates (his sister’s), and other motor-vehicle violations. He kept it together enough to refuse a blood-alcohol test: The last thing he needed was anyone tying his DNA to the blood he’d shed at various crime scenes. At the police barracks, however, he asked for water. A trooper fished his cup out of the trash and sent it to a forensics lab.
When troopers opened the Pontiac’s trunk the next day, they realized that the driver might be someone other than their usual yahoo out past his bedtime. Inside the vehicle were bolt cutters, a sledgehammer, a headlamp, ski masks, walkie-talkies, burner phones, bits of jewelry, a checkered shirt that had been caught on security cameras during a recent jewelry-store heist, and brochures for sports museums. When Trotta met his lawyer, he asked what the police had found in the car. The lawyer, a seasoned defense attorney named Joe D’Andrea, replied, “Everything but Jimmy Hoffa.”
Nine days after Trotta’s arrest, FBI agents gathered at a state-police barracks with law-enforcement officers from New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. They’d come to review a long list of burglaries with similar MOs and to figure out whether Trotta was their missing link. The DNA results that came in after the meeting erased all doubt.
Trotta was turning 44 that year. He’d known the core members of his crew since Ronald Reagan was president. They’d seen one another through graduations, marriages, kids, joblessness, substance abuse, divorce. Joe and Al Atsus were godparents to Trotta’s children. “If you’re robbing stuff at 11 or 12 with people, and at 40 you’re still robbing stuff with these people,” Trotta told me, “you can’t actually get a closer bond than that.” He estimated that over their lives together, they’d done more than 1,500 burglaries.
But when he was arrested, he said, not one of them came to his aid. No real money for lawyers or bail. No sympathy for the years of prison he might face—for crimes that had enriched them all. “He’s a big boy; he’ll eat it,” one of them told his sister. Dombek, claiming to be broke, gave Trotta a handful of screws, suggesting that he scrap them for a bit of cash, according to Trotta. The police, meanwhile, started using evidence from the Pontiac, and interviews with at least one associate, to charge Trotta with a series of local crimes: a 2016 ATM theft, a 2018 house burglary. “My friends,” Trotta concluded, “were prepared to bury me.”
In April 2019, with his lawyer’s encouragement, he began cooperating with state police and prosecutors, and eventually with the FBI. The police fitted him with a listening device, and he recorded damning conversations with Dombek, a man he loved like a brother. In one of those conversations, Dombek said that if anyone turned on him, he’d “sneak on their property, turn off the well cap, and pour a gallon of some kind of substance down their well and would kill that person and their whole family,” according to a police summary of the recording. Dombek also talked about destroying evidence of their crimes, and about plans to kill one witness by mixing fentanyl into his cocaine or by poisoning him with a toxic plant called false hellebore.
In August of that year, the state police raided Dombek’s property, discovered the makeshift chemistry lab, and charged him with burglarizing a house with Trotta. Released on bail, Dombek stormed over to the homes of Trotta’s mother and sister. He called Trotta a “fucking rat,” according to court records, and threatened violence if Trotta didn’t shut up or change his story. The police promptly charged Dombek with five counts of witness intimidation.
U.S. attorneys, meanwhile, persuaded their state counterparts to let them mount a single prosecution of nearly all the museum heists. As federal agents gathered evidence, Dombek and Trotta remained in a Pennsylvania prison on state charges: the former for three years, until he pleaded no contest to a single charge each of witness intimidation and home burglary; the latter for almost four years, until he pleaded guilty to the DUI, the ATM theft, and two home burglaries.
Then, in June 2023, the U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Pennsylvania announced federal charges against Trotta, Dombek, and seven other alleged ring members, including Joe and Al Atsus. (Al Atsus’s lawyer told me that any criminal allegations against his client were “absolutely ridiculous and patently absurd”; Joe Atsus’s lawyer declined to comment for this story.) Investigators had linked the ring to 21 burglaries across five states over more than 20 years. A press release credited 20 state and local police departments, as well as the FBI, for helping solve the case.
Boland and the Atsus brothers have pleaded not guilty. Dombek vanished into the woods when he learned of his arrest warrant but reappeared after six months and pleaded not guilty. Tommy and Dawn Trotta, Ralph Parry, and two others pleaded guilty as part of cooperation deals. “Very guilty, Your Honor,” Trotta assured a federal judge.
“We ripped the guts out of people emotionally,” Trotta told me. “I know that now.” In May 2019, while out on bail on the state charges, Trotta broke into a vacant house in New Jersey that the Atsus brothers owned. It was the last place he’d seen the Mathewson memorabilia, the Pollock, and the Warhol. He’d hoped to restore them to their owners, he said. But if the items were there, he couldn’t find them. Their whereabouts remain unknown.
In the days after the 1999 Mathewson heist, two of the pitcher’s biggest fans were among the most heavily interrogated. Eddie Frierson, an actor who’d written and performed the one-man show about Mathewson that night, endured searches by the state police and grillings by the FBI while still deep in grief himself over the loss to the college and to baseball history. “I was aching,” he told me.
Terry Wise was the Keystone College official in charge of the Mathewson display that weekend. When she’d been hired as athletic director a few years earlier, she’d encouraged the college’s president to do more with the memorabilia: How many schools could claim as an alumnus an inaugural inductee of the Baseball Hall of Fame? It was Wise who had opened the case that night to give visitors—including Trotta, she now realizes—a better look at Mathewson’s contracts and jersey. Worse than being questioned by six cops the next day are the feelings of guilt and naivete she still lives with. “I can’t believe it’s 25 years,” she said as we spoke in the gym parking lot, a few steps from the door where Trotta had let himself in.
Haley Zale launched a “Bring Back the Belts” campaign on social media after her great-uncle’s championship belts were stolen in 2015 from the International Boxing Hall of Fame. Tony Zale had beaten Rocky Graziano in 1948 to become the middleweight champion of the world. After Tony’s death, in 1997, Haley visited the museum every year to say her Hail Marys and Our Fathers, and to remember the shy man who’d come up from nothing, beaten Graziano, and been a grandfather figure to her—teaching her boxing stances, applauding her childhood ballet routines, and calling her Miss America. “Visiting Uncle Tony’s belts,” she told me, “was like visiting his grave.”
Lindsay Berra told me that her grandfather Yogi reacted to the disappearance of his rings and plaques with his familiar good humor. “Well, I know I won them,” he said. He worried only about the schoolchildren who visited the museum: Could the broken glass be cleaned up so the kids didn’t get cut?
Berra’s relatives took the theft harder. “Every one of those rings has a story behind it, and it’s about him and a team and the Yankees and a time in our country,” Lindsay told me. “You’re taking little pieces of American history when you take them. They belong to all Americans, not just the guy who won them.”
When the museum’s director called in 2023 to tell her that the alleged culprits had melted the rings for the sake of a few thousand bucks, Lindsay cried as much in sorrow as for the stupidity and waste. Wouldn’t it have been easier and more lucrative to knock off a Kay Jewelers? she thought. She couldn’t understand how Trotta could try on her grandfather’s rings—claiming to be a fan—only to moments later destroy them.
I asked if she believed Trotta’s professions of remorse. “No,” she said. “I think he’s sorry he got caught.”
Even after the police had found “everything but Jimmy Hoffa” in the Pontiac, even after he’d agreed to cooperate, Trotta burglarized a New York jewelry store and came close to ransacking the Saratoga Springs racing museum a second time. He aborted only because he’d spotted a guard during a night check. Then, in January 2024, as half his crew was headed for trial—with himself the star witness for the prosecution—Trotta allegedly stole gift cards, cash, and jewelry from the house of a woman he’d driven home from a bar. The police dropped the charges after Trotta’s lawyer gave the home’s owner a $7,500 check for the missing items, the local police chief told me. Trotta claims that it was a misunderstanding, but the federal judge overseeing the heist cases was displeased enough to revoke Trotta’s pretrial release.
The instinct to steal remains so strong, Trotta told me—so “in the blood”—that he feels as if his brain needs rebuilding. Like a recovering addict, he has to stay constantly on guard against his own impulses. He worries, too, about his son. At 11, he’s now the age Trotta was when Big Tom led him into a life of crime. When Trotta calls from jail, he talks with his son about the misery of incarceration: the bad food, the piece of metal with a half-inch mat that passes for a bed.
For a couple of years in the early 2000s, to satisfy probation on a minor theft charge, Trotta held a part-time job loading Walmart trucks. It was the only steady paycheck he’d earned in his adult life; he was miserable. “It was like the coal mines of old,” he told me. “It’s honest and you could wake up and feel proud, but, like, you’re in a category now of real broke-ness.” Guys could live paycheck to paycheck there for 20 years and never save enough for even a little self-indulgence.
Trotta had never grown rich as a thief. He’d taken some nice vacations, eaten some expensive steaks. But he drove junkers, dressed plainly, and had owned a house for just a couple of years before the payments became too much for him. His sister’s place, where he’d lived in a basement bedroom before and after his marriage, was perhaps the closest thing he’d had to a stable home. Yet a thief’s life—like a gambler’s—made wealth something other than impossible. Months would pass in which Trotta would scrape by on penny-ante burglaries. “Then, all of a sudden, a big thing would hit: Boom, we’re good.” And for however many days the money lasted, he felt free.
This article appears in the February 2025 print edition with the headline “Trophy Hunters.”
The post The Childhood Friends Behind the Most Audacious Sports-Memorabilia Heists in American History appeared first on The Atlantic.
