‘A stunning update.' Stolen Somerville art has been returned.
The Globe
Then, early on Saturday morning, he got a phone call, which rang to his voicemail. The caller left a message.
'I can get your paintings returned to you,' it said.
Advertisement
Fifteen minutes later, Leveille said, a neighbor came to his door and told him she'd seen a man delivering the artworks to his building's lobby.
'I ran down in my pajama pants,' said Leveille, a Somerville resident. 'And lo and behold, both pieces were there!'
His painting, called 'Nissenbaum, midday,' is an oil-on-linen depiction of Somerville's now-shuttered Nissenbaum's Auto Parts.
This painting by local artist Adam Leveille, called "Nissenbaum Midday," was among those recently stolen from a gallery.
Adam Leveille
Both it and the other artwork, a photograph of a local laundromat, were unscathed, he said. The photographer whose work was stolen has opted not to come forward publicly.
Leveille knows he's lucky this tale ended the way it did.
'I think it's rare that stories about art theft have happy endings. Boston
Somerville Police confirmed Tuesday the paintings had been returned but declined to comment further 'as the identity of the suspect remains under investigation,' city spokesperson Grace Munns said in an email.
According to Leveille, the neighbor who saw the person deliver the artworks hadn't realize anything out of the ordinary was afoot. Their building is home to many artists, and it isn't unusual for paintings to be delivered to its lobby.
They can't say for certain if the person who returned the painting was the alleged thief who stole them in the middle of the night back in early January. But Leveille said the neighbor's description of the man who delivered them seemed to match that of the person seen in security footage of the incident released last week by the Somerville Police Department.
Advertisement
For the artworks' safe return, Leveille credits the swell of media attention that came after he revealed publicly on social media that his painting had been swiped, and received a wave of support from neighbors and other artists in the area.
The footage from the police — which appeared to show a masked person cutting down the the paintings, putting them in a car, and driving away — may have also turned up the pressure, Leveille said.
Security footage appears to show Somerville art theft suspect
Share
Security footage appears to show the suspect in a small-scale Somerville heist that has puzzled the local arts community.
Leveille isn't sure how to feel about what ought to happen next. He isn't eager to see a suspect charged, especially since they apparently opted to do the right thing.
'I don't know that I want to see him punished, per se, but it's still a pretty violent violation of trust,' he said. 'I'm kind of conflicted here.'
In the meantime, people who have followed this saga closely may soon get a chance to see it for themselves.
Leveille said he is offering his painting up for inclusion in a new, soon-to-open exhibition in the same building as the original one.
This time, it'll be behind glass, said Peter Belford, who sits on the board of directors for Somerville Open Studios, the nonprofit that curated the original exhibit in the building and is now organizing this new one.
The follow-up gallery will be displayed inside an empty storefront and will be visible to passersby outside the building who can peer at it through the exterior window. Some artworks were set to be hung as early as Tuesday evening. It's expected to run through early April, people involved with the exhibit said.
Advertisement
Belford said he is glad to see the story come full-circle. But the damage is done, he said.
'It doesn't make the incident any less unfortunate,' Belford said. 'They still really put a big crimp in an effort to bring local art to the public and highlight local artists.'
As for what the future holds for Leveille's painting long-term, he said he is still open to selling it, if someone wants to procure it the legal and fair way.
For now, he's just happy the painting's possible return to the gallery might stir up some more interest in local creatives' work.
'I would hope people would come see [the exhibit] just because it's a good show, but I think the kerfuffle and the happy ending is really a nice positive spin on what is otherwise usually a pretty sad story,' he said.
Spencer Buell can be reached at
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Yahoo
Kalus accuses McKee of ‘coordinated smear campaign' after settling lawsuit over texts
PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) — Former gubernatorial candidate Ashley Kalus has reached a settlement with the Illinois contractor who distributed politically damaging text messages in 2022, and now she says she wants an apology from Gov. Dan McKee over how the episode played out. The recent settlement between Kalus and the contractor, Michael Gruener, involves his release of vulgar and insulting texts she had allegedly sent to him during a prior business dispute over a construction project. During the campaign Kalus publicly defended the texts — in which she referred to Gruener as, among other things, 'Mr. Mom' and 'a bottom' — amid a drumbeat of criticism from the McKee campaign and its allies. Kalus sued Gruener the day after the election, alleging he had violated a November 2019 settlement that resolved their business dispute. That agreement included a provision barring either side from disparaging the other publicly, including to the news media. Kalus and Gruener finalized a fresh settlement on May 7, two weeks before the suit was set to go to trial and three months after a judge imposed sanctions over Gruener's failure to comply with demands for documents. Kalus provided Target 12 with a copy of a notarized statement signed by Gruener in which he offered Kalus 'my sincere apology' and laid out his version of events. 'I regret allowing myself to be used as a political weapon,' the statement said. 'Political operatives — specifically the McKee campaign manager — exploited my emotions during a period of frustration.' The terms of the settlement, including the notarized statement, were not filed in court. Gruener's lawyer, Larry Mishkin, did not respond to a series of phone calls, text messages and emails. The person who answered a phone number associated with Gruener hung up after being told the caller was a reporter from Rhode Island. Kalus said she sued Gruener because she 'wanted to know what the truth was.' 'This was a coordinated smear campaign by the McKee operatives, and I assume McKee, too, because he's responsible for the people that work for him,' Kalus told Target 12 last month during an interview at a house she just bought on Providence's East Side. A spokesperson for the McKee campaign made no apologies. 'Ashley Kalus can't keep her story straight,' the spokesperson, Mike Trainor, said in a statement. 'Before her 19-point loss to Governor McKee, Ms. Kalus wore her menacing text messages as a badge of honor, arguing that 'what they show about Ashley is that she is a fighter.'' The article at the center of the controversy was published by The Boston Globe on Nov. 1, 2022, a week before the election in which Kalus, a Republican, was seeking to unseat McKee, the Democratic incumbent. (The Globe is a WPRI 12 news partner.) The newspaper remains confident that the story was accurate. 'The Boston Globe stands by its reporting,' Globe spokesperson Carla Kath told Target 12. The Globe quoted Gruener as saying Kalus's treatment of him was abnormally harsh, and interviewed several others who expressed varying recollections about her behavior during the construction project. But the off-color language and bullying tone in the text messages — which The Globe confirmed it obtained from Gruener — became the biggest headline. The McKee campaign sought to capitalize on the controversy, with Lt. Gov. Sabina Matos headlining a campaign rally that assailed Kalus's character. 'As a woman and as a mother, having watched this campaign play out, I have been deeply, deeply troubled by Ashley Kalus's patterns of conduct,' Matos said, adding that the texts 'paint a disturbing picture of how she does business.' Kalus defended herself over subsequent days, describing Gruener as 'a seedy Chicago contractor' during a debate and telling WPRO host Tara Granahan that the texts showed her toughness. 'When I'm governor, nobody's going to take advantage of the taxpayers, either,' she said. As for the specific text where she described Gruener as 'a bottom,' Kalus told Granahan she had not meant the term with a sexual connotation, but rather that he was 'a bottom feeder' or 'bottom of the barrel.' Kalus's lawyer, Richard Hellerman, continued to suggest the text messages were authentic in court papers, but argued that Gruener shouldn't have shared them because doing so violated the terms of the 2019 settlement. In a filing on Nov. 27, Hellerman wrote that the texts were 'now in the public domain,' making it impossible to 'unring the bell' or 'otherwise repair the damage to Ms. Kalus.' Gruener's lawyer, Lawrence Mishkin, made a similar assertion a month later, writing in a court document: 'Plaintiffs, including Ashley, have long admitted to Ashley having drafted and sent Ashley's disparaging texts to Gruener. … [T]here is no question of fact that Ashley drafted Ashley's disparaging texts.' Today, however, Kalus is casting doubt on whether the texts were authentic and defensible. Asked directly whether she sent them, Kalus told Target 12, 'I don't believe that I did.' 'If you know me, I do say things — I just didn't think I said those specific things,' Kalus said. 'It didn't seem like my sort of messaging.' 'It's generally not how I talk when I'm upset,' she added. 'Usually you'd get just, like, a really long email from me.' So why did Kalus defend the texts when the Globe article came out, rather than cast doubt on them? Kalus pointed to the fact that the story emerged during the frantic final days of the 2022 campaign, and specifically what she was told about where the texts had come from. The question of who had access to the text messages involves yet another court proceeding. Gruener's 2019 settlement with Kalus wasn't the end of the legal issues stemming from their renovation project; Gruener was also taken to court by the company that provided doors for the project. Kalus's husband — Dr. Jeffrey Weinzweig — testified as a witness against him in that case. Kalus said her campaign was under the impression that the text messages had been filed as evidence during the doors litigation in a publicly accessible court document, meaning anyone could look them up. In a court filing, Gruener's lawyer indicated that his client had uploaded the text messages to a Dropbox which was then sent to all lawyers involved in the doors case, including Weinzweig's, as well as the court clerk. But there is no evidence they were presented in a publicly available filing. Gruener appears to have wanted Kalus and her husband to think the texts were accessible at the courthouse. Court documents show he stressed that to others, including in a message he sent to Weinzweig during an argument in the days before the Globe article's publication: 'Only thing is foia material presented at door trial which is public record.' (FOIA is the federal Freedom of Information Act.) Kalus said that since she believed the texts could be obtained by anyone from court, 'I didn't feel that I could deny them and not look crazy.' A campaign staff member said a First Amendment lawyer gave them similar advice. Kath, the Globe spokesperson, questioned the significance of the issue. 'Ms. Kalus has repeatedly acknowledged the authenticity of the texts,' Kath said. 'Whether she and her campaign would have responded differently had they better understood where the texts were stored doesn't change the accuracy of The Globe's reporting.' In Gruener's notarized statement, he expressed regret over the effort to mask where the texts came from. 'This was a manipulative and unethical tactic by me that denied [Kalus] a fair opportunity to respond,' he said. 'There are no original, actual text messages that can be viewed and verified, as I have deleted all of what I had claimed were the messages from my phone from that time frame, and Ashely did not have her phone from that era.' Kalus was new to Rhode Island politics when she sought the governor's office in 2022. Her company had landed a COVID-19 testing contract with the state during the pandemic, and she registered to vote in the state early in the year of the election. She had previously worked for the governor of Illinois and said she came to know Rhode Island through her husband, who trained at Brown University's medical school. She spent millions of dollars of her own money and ran an aggressive campaign, regularly assailing McKee over the FBI investigation into the controversial state contract he gave to the ILO Group, an education consulting firm. But she lost the race 58% to 39%. In mid-September 2022, at the the same time that Kalus's campaign against McKee was heating up, Gruener lost the doors case in which Kalus's husband had testified. Hellerman, Kalus's attorney, said he obtained phone records showing Gruener immediately started reaching out to McKee's office, the Democratic Governors Association and the Rhode Island Democratic Party. (In earlier court filings, Gruener had claimed he hadn't known about Kalus's candidacy until a Globe reporter reached out to him.) In his notarized statement, Gruener confirmed he proactively worked to make contact with McKee's team at the time, and said he eventually connected with McKee's campaign manager, who 'helped me shop pre-packaged stories to the media' as part of 'a coordinated, untruthful political attack.' It's not unusual for campaigns to try and convince reporters to write about derogatory information uncovered about their opponents. But Kalus suggested the McKee campaign crossed the line due to the timing of the text messages' release, the issue of where the texts had been filed, and the repeated accusation that the texts showed she was homophobic. 'I am in a lot of ways not a traditional Republican, and to try to do this whole identity [politics] attack thing was horrible and horrific to me,' Kalus said. Trainor, the McKee campaign spokesperson, dismissed Kalus's comments. 'It's classic MAGA: deflect, blame, and accuse,' he said. 'Throughout his reelection campaign, Governor McKee looks forward to continuing to hold politicians like Ashley Kalus to account for maligning good journalism and hiding the truth from Rhode Islanders.' Kalus's new lawsuit against Gruener — alleging he had violated their 2019 settlement agreement by releasing the texts and speaking out against her during the campaign — began a day after the 2022 election in the Cook County Circuit Court. The case moved slowly, in part because Hellerman suspected Gruener was withholding many of the text messages he exchanged with the Globe reporter as the story was coming together. 'What [Gruener] produced instead,' Hellerman later wrote, 'was a carefully curated version of the texts, which he doctored to remove statements that were inconsistent with his defense in this case and were clearly disparaging of Plaintiffs (which Gruener had steadfastly denied ever having made, at any time).' Gruener provided more text messages in March 2024, but Hellerman still believed the record was incomplete, so he successfully subpoenaed the same conversations from The Globe. When The Globe provided its copy of the conversations, they revealed various messages Gruener hadn't disclosed. Additionally, Gruener's lawyer repeatedly sent emails to Hellerman falsely claiming that Gruener hadn't given the texts to The Globe, according to court filings. Hellerman eventually asked Cook County Circuit Judge Patrick Sherlock to impose sanctions on Gruener's company — the named defendant in the lawsuit — as well as Gruener individually and Mishkin. Mishkin admitted he could 'make no excuse' for the lapses, saying Gruener 'simply did not focus on the scope of production.' He also asserted that Gruener's phone 'periodically deletes text strings' to save space. On Feb. 4, the judge ruled that Gruener's company 'was not honest' in providing documents to Kalus's lawyer, and ordered him to pay various legal fees incurred by Kalus. The judge denied the request to impose sanctions on Gruener as an individual or on Mishkin. The court battles with Gruener are one of a number of conflicts involving Kalus that have made news since she entered Rhode Island politics. She is currently in active litigation against the McKee administration over her COVID-19 testing contract, and other past incidents came to light during her 2022 campaign. Kalus said she is 'not litigious,' but also made no apologies for going to the courts when she decides such a step is necessary. 'There are certain cases when somebody does something that I view as morally wrong, and [if] the only way to get to justice is through the justice system, I will pursue it that way,' she said. As for whether she'll make another run for governor in 2026, Kalus was noncommittal. 'I honestly don't know,' she said. 'A lot of what I'm doing is asking for there to be new candidates. I really don't like the current slate.' Ted Nesi (tnesi@ is a Target 12 investigative reporter and 12 News politics/business editor. He co-hosts Newsmakers and writes Nesi's Notes on Saturdays. Connect with him on Twitter, Bluesky and Facebook. Eli Sherman contributed to this report. Download the and apps to get breaking news and weather alerts. Watch or with the new . Follow us on social media: Close Thanks for signing up! Watch for us in your inbox. Subscribe Now Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Boston Globe
04-06-2025
- Boston Globe
NAACP reports former Providence branch president to police, alleging financial irregularities
He confirmed to the Globe the report is about Catala, not any other former leaders. Related : Members were notified in an 'emergency meeting' Tuesday evening, where officials from the national office said all former officers of the branch have now been removed following an internal investigation. Get Rhode Map A weekday briefing from veteran Rhode Island reporters, focused on the things that matter most in the Ocean State. Enter Email Sign Up 'There were some things that did alarm us about our bylaws and our rules not being followed,' Ericka Cain, a vice president from the national office, said in a recording of the meeting obtained by the Globe. 'As of today we did escalate this to law enforcement, and we wanted you to be aware of that.' Advertisement Cain said the national office is seeking records, and asked members who had meeting minutes, treasury reports or other documents to provide them to the organization. In the meantime, she said, 'there will be no election, there will be no events.' Providence Police Commander Timothy O'Hara said police received a report of financial irregularities Tuesday from the NAACP. He declined to name a specific suspect while the case is under investigation, and emphasized that police have not yet begun reviewing any financial records. The case may be referred to federal authorities because of the nature of the allegations, O'Hara said. Advertisement The NAACP Providence branch has been in The Globe previously reported that the organization had failed to The organization's most recent landlord, also Reached by phone, Catala said he had not been informed of any report to law enforcement, and said he did not know what it was about. 'I've been away from the NAACP for quite some time now, so I can't really speak to who it's about,' Catala said. 'I think you're trying to destroy Black men,' he added. 'Fake news, just like President Trump says.' Advertisement Catala was Richard Thornton, the campaign finance director at the R.I. Board of Elections, says Catala still has 13 campaign finance reports in arrears and owes more than $42,000 in fines, which increase by $26 each day he doesn't file the reports. In the meeting with members, Cain said she would not answer questions about Catala or the investigation, but said Tanisha Sullivan, the New England Area Conference president, would help rehabilitate the branch so it could begin operating again. Whitehead said the 'number one goal' is the get the branch back up and running. She also repeatedly told members they could not speak publicly about the organization, and criticized whomever shared news of the meeting with reporters. 'There should be no one doing any interviews,' Cain said. 'If you leave this meeting and you speak on these issues, it is a violation of our rules and that can lead to disciplinary action.' 'I hope after this meeting we can learn that what happens inside our house stays in our house, unless we allow it outside our house,' she continued. The historic organization's secrecy has alarmed some members, who Whitehead said the national NAACP office has recently seen an 'increase in the attacks on civil rights coming from all levels of government.' 'Leadership of the Providence Branch has not complied with NAACP's bylaws, procedures and legal obligations," Whitehead said. The branch removed all officers effective June 2. Advertisement He declined to comment on the nature of the violations. 'We don't discuss the details of internal disciplinary matters, but we can say that we are treating this situation with all due seriousness in accordance with our bylaws, procedures, and legal obligations,' Whitehead said. 'In the face of our nation's unprecedented challenges – from the economy to threats on voting rights and more — the NAACP is needed now more than ever." Steph Machado can be reached at
Yahoo
07-05-2025
- Yahoo
Somerville Police Department asking for help finding man involved in domestic-related investigation
SOMERVILLE, Ala. (WHNT) — The Somerville Police Department said it is asking for the public's help finding a man involved in an ongoing investigation. On Wednesday, SPD said it is asking for help locating 35-year-old Dustin Joe Brown. They said he is a resident of Somerville but is known to visit the areas of Eva and Falkville. The department said he is currently wanted in an ongoing domestic-related investigation. Below is a picture of Brown, provided by the Somerville Police Department. (Photo: Somerville Police Department) If you have any information on Brown's whereabouts, contact the Somerville Police Department through Facebook Messenger or call the Morgan County 911 non-emergency line at 256-350-4613 and request to speak with a Somerville officer. All tips and information will be handled confidentially. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to
