A mother leaves her daughter a tangle of lies to unravel.Big Time is an Apple Original podcast, produced by Piece of Work Entertainment and Campside Media in association with Olive Productions. Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.apple.co/BigTimePod
Chapter 1: Who is the Stupendous Shirley S. and why is she intriguing?
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, Shirley 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 Buscemi, 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 Roadshow.
You have one of the best New York tables I've seen. It's very fine craftsmanship. A beautiful example.
Fine furniture was a family business for the Sacks, 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 Barbra 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 Zaks 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.
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Chapter 2: What was the relationship between Shirley and Albert Sack?
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.
Chapter 3: How did Shirley's past lead to her 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. Debra 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 beautiful Emilio Pucci dresses, the best of what he was producing at that time. She created a fire in that closet with all those poochy 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 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.
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Chapter 4: What was Shirley's involvement in the art world?
That's Anthony Amore. He's an art theft and security expert and New York Times bestselling 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. Debra 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 make the greatest burgers there.
Debra says Shirley was such a regular, she made a new friend there. Eddie. Eddie.
Eddie DiPietro. He's a dangerous guy. A violent guy.
Anthony Amore 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.
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Chapter 5: Who were Shirley's accomplices in her art heists?
Shirley was the brains. She became Eddie's fencer, the person who sells the stolen goods. In this case, fine art.
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.
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.
Debra 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 7, 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 Beaudin 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 mensches. 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.
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Chapter 6: What was life like for Shirley after prison?
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 visit it 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 grandpa. 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?
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