The Stupendous Shirley S. | 7

One thing I've always loved about the movies is the way that they can take you on a journey, an escape from real life.

You get the rush of the bank robbery or the romance of a Tarat affair without having to risk it all.

And it seems like, for a lot of us, that's enough.

But then you come across someone like the star of today's episode, the stupendous Shirley S, and you realize that she needed to be the character in the movie to feel alive.

And not just one of those movies, all of them.

The love affairs, the robberies, the secret spy missions, surely lived them all.

I have to say, for someone who got arrested a lot and had a husband drop dead, I do kind of love this lady.

So settle in and get ready to hear the tale of The Finger, a woman who seemed to want to be a criminal purely for the adventure.

I'm Steve Bassemi and you're listening to Big Time, an Apple original podcast from Peace of Work Entertainment and Campside Media, in association with Olive Productions.

Here to tell us more is reporter Abby Ellen.

Albert M.

Sack was a pioneer of American antiquing.

He was born in 1915 and he's helped turn collecting old stuff into a hobby thanks to his popular guidebook, The Fine Points of Furniture.

He was even a regular on Antiques Rocho.

You have one of the best New York tables I've seen.

It's very fine craftsmen show a beautiful example.

Fine furniture was a family business for the Saks, but for Albert, it was more than that.

It was his life.

This was a man who'd happily travel hundreds of miles to hunt for a rare side table or stool.

He had celebrity clients like Barber Streisand.

Harrison Ford knew him by name.

There's even a section of the Metropolitan Museum of Art dedicated to his family furniture collection.

At the height of his career, Albert was an eligible bachelor.

But that would change when a colleague introduced him to a woman named Shirley Dorothy Zach Silberg Silton machinist.

Shirley was a successful art dealer in Boston.

She was elegance incarnate.

She looked like Grace Kelly and she had the air of a movie star too.

As the story goes, on their first date, Shirley met Albert at the airport in a frilly dress.

She looked at him and said, half jokingly, Will you marry me?

He was hooked.

They became a couple right away.

But then, one fall day, when the relationship was still new, there was a knock at the door.

It was the FBI.

Shirley, glamorous, charming, perfect Shirley, was under arrest.

It was all the bold, colored headlines with my mother and the Boston Herald and the Boston Globe.

And I remember thinking to myself,

everyone knows about my mother now.

That's Deborah Friedman, Shirley's oldest daughter.

Shirley had two daughters, Deborah and Donna.

Donna passed away a few years ago.

Deborah knew her mom always wanted to be noticed, but not in this way.

I know that people were always asking her, what do you think?

And people were very impressed with her, her style.

She really knew how to put things together and understood how to dress up a house.

Like you dress yourself up and accessorize.

Shirley wasn't born into this elegant lifestyle.

Her parents were Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Russia who moved to the States in the early 1900s.

They lived simply, but somehow Shirley got the taste for the finer things.

She had an insatiable appetite for design and decorating, which led her to pursue a career as an art consultant in Boston.

She'd had several failed marriages and needed to support herself.

Deborah remembers her mother being hardworking, sure.

But she also remembers her mom approaching things differently.

For example,

my mother had some some beautiful Emilio Poochie dresses, the best of what he was producing at that time.

She created a fire in that closet with all those Poochie dresses, and she was supposed to get a return for that,

like an insurance scam.

Deborah says Shirley managed artists too, helping them commission and sell paintings.

Like a man man named Desi, who sometimes drank on the job.

She'd employ young Deborah to supervise him.

She had his canvas, his easel, his paints, everything set up for him to just come in and paint.

And here I am, I don't know, I'm eight or nine, and I thought I'd have some fun with a drunk artist.

So he says, You have a cigarette?

You have a cigarette?

I gave him candy cigarettes

and he was trying to light them up.

It was a particularly dramatic time to be involved in the art world, especially in Boston.

Police said today that they have recovered four paintings worth up to $2 million that were stolen last month from the Worcester, Massachusetts Art Museum.

In 1972, the first art heist ever pulled off at gunpoint happened just outside the city.

Shirley saw an opportunity.

She watched how these thefts played out.

The insurance company would rather negotiate with a thief than have to pay out the claim on the insurance.

So my mother thought that it was a viable way of doing business.

Other people were getting away with it.

Why not her?

She had a pretty active career in legitimate work and illegitimate work.

And because of that, she had a lot of connection.

That's Anthony Amore.

He's an art theft and security expert and New York Times best-selling author on those subjects.

When he started doing research for his books, Shirley's name would come up a lot.

Shirley's entrance into the art underworld started, innocently enough.

Deborah remembers her mother was working at an antique store in the swanky Beacon Hill neighborhood of Boston.

There was a burger joint around the corner.

My mother loves to eat and loves a grilled burger, and the smell from the grill a block away would waft in.

She used to say, they meet the greatest burgers there.

Deborah says Shirley was such a regular, she made a new friend there.

Eddie.

Eddie DiPetro.

The dangerous guy, a violent guy.

Anthony Amori again.

From what I understand, he appears to have been a crook involved in all sorts of career criminal type activities.

He's the guy that would go into the house and steal the painting.

He's more of the muscle than the brains.

Shirley was the brains.

She became became Eddie's fencer, the person who sells the stolen goods.

In this case, fine art.

You have a little bit more of a leg up because she's known in the art world and she knows what she's talking about.

So it gives you a bit more promise in terms of going and stealing art or maybe knowing what to steal.

Shirley grew close with Eddie and his crew of shady characters.

When you think about Shirley, you think, boy, for somebody to be willing to be involved with these bad guys, and they were very bad guys, she had a lot of guts.

Like, you could call her a lot of things, but you couldn't call her a coward or, you know, a wilting flower.

Deborah remembers these guys coming over to their place a lot around this time, bringing Chinese food or pizza for dinner.

We don't know everything this crew got up to, and we probably never will.

But we do know of one big job:

a heist.

they would steal art from Harvard University actually from the president of Harvard Derek Bach Bach lived in a private residence in Cambridge a sprawling mansion with 12 rooms and walls covered in art from Harvard University's own collection on the night of July 7th 1976 some of Shirley's buddies found an inconspicuous rear window at Derek Bach's house and forced it open they took a colorful French Impressionist painting by Eugene Baudin and a moody landscape by Sanford Robinson Gifford, among a few other pieces.

In,

out,

done.

They made off with over $350,000 worth of paintings, all while the Harvard president and his family were sound asleep.

Afterwards, they broke the paintings out of their frames.

It was like their version of cutting off the price tags on shoplifted clothes.

Now it was Shirley's turn to try and fence the paintings and turn a profit.

It's around this time when Shirley is introduced to Albert Sack.

Right away, Albert won over Shirley and her daughter, Deborah.

I thought, this is a mensch above all menses.

This is an uber mensch.

What were they like together early on?

Albert was like a schoolboy.

I mean, he would look at her with these eyes.

He never saw her ugly qualities at the beginning

then there was that knock at the door the fbi had caught on to shirley and eddie's plans to sell those stolen paintings from the president of harvard shirley was found guilty of conspiracy to transport stolen property

in addition to a short stint in prison she'd earned a nickname for her role in the harvard theft

Deborah says the FBI called her the finger.

What would become of Albert and Shirley's budding relationship?

This well-respected antiques dealer was now associated with the finger.

The optics were not great.

This is when things could have gone very differently for Shirley.

She could have had a terrible time in prison.

She could have been sad, heartbroken, scared.

But Albert Sachs stayed by her side.

He read her love letters and visited her in prison.

Every weekend, Albert would religiously visit my mother and bring Dunkin' donuts and pizza and nail polishes and beauty products.

Albert remained devoted.

They even married.

Despite the disapproval from his family, they would say, why can't you find a woman who can make chicken soup?

Why did you pick such a complicated, crazy woman?

And Albert was defiant.

He loved her and he thought she was the most exciting, gorgeous, entertaining, charming, brilliant person.

No one wants to plan a honeymoon around a prison sentence, but Albert accepted Shirley's eccentricities.

He said he thought the price of marrying a beautiful woman was to marry a crazy one.

For Shirley, her time in prison seemed like a generally positive experience.

Her records detail a pretty active and rich time.

Prison staff list her as polite, friendly, cooperative.

She takes classes and maintains her social life.

Family and friends visited often.

My mother was having her hair done there, her nails.

She sat in the sun so she had a nice tan there.

She looked like she was in a resort.

After a year in prison, Shirley was released into Albert's arms.

He drove her to their new apartment in Manhattan.

It was in a building on East 56th Street called the Bristol.

Deborah and Albert had painstakingly fixed it up for her.

It's around this time that Shirley becomes a grandmother and Deborah becomes an aunt.

Alyssa was Shirley's first grandchild.

She used to push me around Central Park every day.

When the weather was nice, she'd take me in the stroller and, you know, roll me around Central Park.

Her and Albert taught me how to walk and crawl and talk.

So Albert was your grandfather.

I mean, you thought of him as your grandfather.

He was the only grandfather I knew.

To Alyssa, Albert and Shirley's home was the epitome of posh.

Bougie, glamorous.

It had these big, huge bay windows in the living room that just overlooked the whole entire skyline of Manhattan.

The bedroom is what I remember the most.

Mirrors everywhere.

The bed.

That bed, that duvet cover was all monogrammed.

Everything was SDS and baby blue, the pillowcases, the duvet, the towels, everything.

SDS.

What was Shirley D.

Sachs?

Is that what it was?

Shirley Dorothy.

Dorothy Sachs.

So it was all Shirley.

It was, there was no Albert in the monograms.

It didn't say like Shirley.

Oh, no, no, no.

No.

Yep.

There you go.

That's hilarious.

Gotta love her.

Even with a new last name, Shirley couldn't quite shake her past.

Word got around about Albert's new wife and what she'd done at Harvard.

Deborah again.

There were people that shunned him.

There were people that would invite him to things and not invite her.

He would not allow that.

I think she felt like being Albert Sachs' wife, she would achieve the level of respectability that she always wanted.

That she would reach a certain upper echelon that she had always desired.

But as much as she cared about Albert, it bothered her that it wasn't her,

that she wasn't the one that was getting the acclaim,

she wasn't the one that was getting all the attention.

Shirley needed to find a way to strike out on her own, to get the spotlight back on her.

So she became a gemologist.

Rubies, sapphires, diamonds.

If it shimmered, Shirley knew all about it.

She designed this gorgeous, gorgeous necklace so she really did have exquisite taste.

It was sapphire and diamond.

It was beautiful.

By the late 80s, her interest in gems brought her back to the Boston art underworld.

Through her unsavory contacts, she eventually hooks up with someone who has access to really valuable rubies, a man named General Kun Saw.

Kun Saw was a military leader in Myanmar, which was known as Burma.

Deborah says Shirley's interest in Myanmar was largely humanitarian.

Shirley knew that General Kun Sa and his people were involved in the opium trade.

She also knew there were rubies in Myanmar.

She was going to help them sell gems instead of drugs.

Of course, there was something in it for Shirley.

She'd bring home the rubies, make millions of dollars on them, and step out of her husband's shadow.

Ruby was like the cashmere sapphire to her.

There was a romantic allure.

So Shirley flew down to Myanmar to visit Kun Sa and help orchestrate a deal.

Albert stayed home, but he was thrilled for his wife.

This trip would be a fabulous new adventure for her.

Shirley records the whole trip on a camcorder.

Later, she'd make DVD copies for her family.

The entire village, like 1,200 people line up on this dirt road.

And they hold up signs.

God also provides me a mountain with this he.

Shirley DeSac, welcome to the Sean.

The Sean people love you.

Welcome.

It was insane.

I think that my mother was even shocked.

With what we have in our potential, if we rely on you, ma'am, and you gentlemen.

The general is going to kiss you, ma'am.

She's sitting there in her little Chanel suit and gloves like butter couldn't melt in her mouth.

And she is so elegant and she's just in her glory.

She was treated with such respect.

She was at the zenith of her existence.

And

everything that happened after that had to be so anticlimactic and so hurtful.

Now, as you might have already guessed, Shirley Sack, alas, could not influence one nation's whole economy.

And General Kunsaw, on top of being a drug trafficker, was a warlord.

One diplomat had referred to him as the worst enemy the world has.

described as the biggest heroin trafficker at large today.

He is known simply as Kun Sar.

He claims he's fighting a war to liberate the Shan people.

America calls him a criminal.

Beyond that, Deborah says the ruby deal Shirley was hoping for fell through.

The gems weren't as valuable as everyone had hoped.

It was cut and it exposed all these flaws and she ended up losing all this money on it.

She returns home from Myanmar defeated.

This was a woman who survived and thrived in prison.

But after this major loss, something changed.

This was the first time Shirley couldn't charm her way into a better situation.

After this failed ruby scheme, she's drowning in debt.

She has to close her once lucrative jewelry business.

So Shirley, now almost 70, goes back to art dealing.

Albert continues to help his wife, connecting her with wealthy clients, his own contacts and associates.

She rebrands herself.

Shirley Sack, who never made it past 12th grade, would recount tales of going to Radcliffe and studying art history, which wasn't true.

But the problem, Deborah says, was that Shirley was in a lot of credit card debt.

She would go on shopping sprees to alleviate stress, and it got out of hand.

Not even Albert's high-end antique sales could pay off her bills.

Shirley's granddaughter Alyssa, now a preteen, would catch whispers of the adults talking.

I always heard, you know, scam,

things like that.

Like, don't get yourself set up in that.

You're going to get yourself somewhere where you don't want to be.

Don't get involved with people like that.

If Shirley was always involved in some sort of scam or scheme or something.

Shirley leaned on something she'd been doing her whole life scheming and scamming in the art underworld in 2001 Shirley teamed up with a man named Arnold Katzen they hatched a plan to sell two paintings to a drug dealer they just met this guy's name Katz

Katzen Katzon K-A-T-Z-E-F-N

Do you know how much he was he was asking for those two paintings?

Five million.

This is Shirley on a phone call with a conspirator trying to set the terms of the deal.

You can hear her pushing for what she wants,

but she's nervous.

Something to know about art sales, or at least high-end art sales, is that they're monitored very, very closely.

Because buying art is such an easy way to launder money, the government keeps close tabs on these deals.

Especially if they're in cash.

The sale of these paintings was supposed to take place at the Ritz Cartland Hotel in Boston in cash.

This is Special Agent Stephen Dew of the United States Customs Service.

Today's date is May 30th, 2001, and the time is approximately

1448.

There was a catch.

This drug dealer she was planning to sell to was actually something worse for Shirley.

He was an undercover agent.

The FBI was after Shirley again.

Recorder in anticipation of a

Shirley's sitting on the couch in a Ritz-Cartlin hotel room, her hair piled high in a ponytail.

Arnold Katzen and the undercover agent are there too.

There's nothing wrong with them.

It's tense.

You haven't been sure.

They're perfectly fine.

Okay, here you have been sure.

You know, people, we, we, we, this is a very trust business.

Painting business is also trust.

Oh, trust.

It's trust.

It's as much trust from your side as my side.

It's goes, it's just because paintings are here, right?

It's clean, it's nothing.

I have an invoice for you.

Where's the invoice?

And basically, he's saying to her, Is it a problem?

Can you move this money?

I mean, they show up with a cash machine.

And we'll all make money.

Yeah.

Oh, it sounds like an ideal way to launder my money, that's for sure.

It's the only way.

I don't know any other way.

I'm thinking how the hell could you do it?

It's the only way.

Right after the video ends, the FBI swoops in, and Shirley and Arnold are arrested.

They're charged with attempting to sell two paintings for $4.1 million to an undercover agent.

Deborah gets a call later that day about what had gone down in Boston.

I remember feeling very angry.

I remember feeling that she risked my husband, my family's safety.

She would have risked us all.

After the dust settles and reality hits, the anger dissipates.

I was angry, but I was very sad for her too.

You know, because I had hard for her.

There's my mother.

The evidence is all there against Shirley.

The FBI recorded her talking about money laundering and skirting around laws.

Combined that with her previous conviction and friendliness with General Kumsa, and Shirley doesn't exactly come across as a Girl Scout.

She was so close to spending years in prison, and that would have been the end of it for her.

If convicted, 73-year-old Shirley Sack could have faced up to 20 years in prison.

But the case never makes it to trial.

She pleads guilty for her participation in the scheme, and she has good lawyers.

They argue that she was a victim of entrapment by an FBI informant.

And she agrees to a sentence of three years probation.

Katzen pled guilty to a misdemeanor charge for conspiracy to fail to pay estimated taxes on the attempted sale of the paintings.

He got three years' probation, the same sentence as Shirley.

From initial arrest to final plea agreement, Shirley's legal battles took over three years.

The whole ordeal was incredibly costly for the couple.

He was so upset that my mother was complaining that they had no money, and she had been arrested in 2001, and he had to to get rid of their life insurance policy and they he had to spend a fortune of money on lawyers to get her out of this

and she was complaining that she didn't have life insurance that she didn't have money and he was like i did it for her she got herself in trouble what was i going to do

after all this albert and shirley are broke so they pack up and move to north carolina to live with deborah Deborah and her family.

Watching Shirley self-destruct with Albert in the passenger seat was incredibly frustrating for the whole family.

Albert's love for Shirley was so fucking blind, excuse me.

Shirley's granddaughter, Alyssa, again.

She could do no wrong in his eyes.

When she got thrown in jail for, what, 19 months, Albert was driving from Manhattan down to Framingham every weekend to visit her ass in jail.

I mean, that's true love.

That's commitment right there.

He doesn't leave her.

It's fascinating.

Deborah was also also in awe of Albert's devotion.

Did you say to him, Albert, what the fucking fuck?

Yeah, I did.

Okay, good.

Staying with Shirley might have been the only time anyone ever questioned Albert's judgment.

He had built his reputation on his integrity and eye for excellence.

He could spot an original Tiffany lamp in a sea of stained glass fakes.

He wrote the rulebook for collecting American antiques, because, in his world, following the rules is how you were successful.

Shirley Sack didn't follow the rules, but that was never something she tried to hide about herself.

When Albert met Shirley, his sensibility went out the window.

In his world of dusty old antiques, Shirley was a live wire.

She was the most exciting find of all.

Their fancy New York apartment was a peek into their baffling relationship.

It was impeccably decorated, and the walls were covered in famous paintings.

A Mary Casside,

Picasso, did Toulouse Lautrec.

But none of those paintings were real.

There are these fantastic copies and all these people that are dealers and very wealthy people who come into the apartment.

I always wondered, what the hell are they thinking?

You know, my mother wouldn't say anything.

Shirley's fake masterpieces displayed next to Albert's priceless antiques.

I bet the room looked pretty fabulous.

Albert died in 2011 at the age of 91.

Shirley in 2019 at 96.

After their deaths, their belongings were packed up.

Albert's furniture got sent off to archives and museums as pieces of history.

As for Shirley's fake paintings,

they're still with Deborah, proudly displayed on her walls.

Next week on Big Time, an incredible investment opportunity.

This has been Big Time, an Apple original podcast produced by Peace of Work Entertainment and Campside Media in association with Olive Productions.

It's hosted by me, Steve Bussemi.

This episode was reported and produced by Abby Ellen and senior producer Amy Padula.

Our story editor is Audrey Quinn.

Lane Rose is our showrunner and managing producer.

Our production team includes Rajiv Gola, Morgan Jaffe, and associate producer Danya Abdalhanid.

Fact-checking by Mary Mathis and Lindsay Kilbride.

Sound design and mixing by Shawnee Aviron.

Our theme was written by Nicolas Principe and Peter Silberman of Spatial Relations.

Production helped from Craig Russo and Todd Adlis at Sound Pure and Ida Hardin, as well as Post Pro.

Special thanks to Wendy Kaufman and Linda Goldman Katz.

Campside Media's executive producers are Josh Dean, Vanessa Gregoriatis, Adam Hoff, and Matt Scher.

Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.

Thanks for listening.