Lost Rights, an Excerpt for Nantucket Magazine

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Excerpt from Pages 51-57 with permission

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Introductory Comments from N Magazine: Few summer residents of Nantucket have cut a wider swath over the past decade than Bob Matthews. From his lavish home, flashy parties, and high profile failure of his Point Breeze development, Matthews’s persona has been a mix of P.T. Barnum, Harry Houdini, and Jay Gatsby.

This new and fascinating book details Matthews’s rise and fall through his acquisition, along with the late Wayne Pratt, of a stolen copy of the Bill of Rights. Houghton Mifflin granted N Magazine the rights to excerpt a section of this gripping tale about one of the island’s most colorful and controversial summer residents.

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LOST RIGHTS Excerpt from Pages 51-57

Bob Matthews was born in France, the fourth of six children; his father was a career government-service officer. They lived in Turkey and Morocco, among other far-flung locales, before finally settling on Cape Cod. The family was not well off despite the exotic settings of his early youth – all those kids on a government paycheck – so young Bob was a scrapper. At his father’s urging, he spent his senior year of high school at a vocational-technical school, where he learned carpentry and other skills.

But Matthews knew very early on that a workaday, clock-punching trade would never fulfill his searing ambitions. Much like his buddy Wayne, Bob came packaged with his own hagiography – a gregarious tale of luck and derring-do honed through many telling. In one chapter he works his way up from dishwasher to cook at a Cape Cod lobster house, saving every penny, so he could buy a red convertible when he turned sixteen.

But Bob wasn’t about to stop there. He planned to become a millionaire by age twenty-two, his lucky number.

Somehow, the legend holds, after high school he earned a community college degree, traveled out West and worked as the foreman of a coalcrushing team in Wyoming, hitchhiked through Central America, briefly attended music school in California, and returned home for a year at the University of Massachusetts – and still earned his first million by that enchanted age.

The path to his outsized aspirations led down the gilded pavers of real estate development. While Matthews was attending UMass, studying economics, he and his brother Gerry scraped together $2,000 – they saved cash by hiding it in a freezer, under a turkey – for a down payment on a beat-up four-family colonial in Belchertown. They refurbished the house themselves, Bob’s carpentry skills proved handy, and upped the rent from $80 a month to $400 for the college students living there – “spoiled kids”, as Matthews put it.

Matthews refinanced the property and made $45,000, just like that. “I said, ‘What can beat this?’ I just made forty-five grand,” Matthews later told the Hartford Courant. “Economics major? Forget about it.”

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He took that money and moved to Waterbury, Connecticut, where another brother, David, was already embedded as an insurance agent. A city of 108,000 situated in the winding Naugatuck River valley, Waterbury was an intriguing landing spot for a mogul in waiting. During the early and middle twentieth century, Waterbury boasted the nation’s largest brass factories, and the explosive demand for the metal brought immense prosperity. Downtown featured an expansive green and elegant, stately buildings; mansions loomed in the hills above. But as other metals replaced brass, and labor became cheaper on foreign soil, the mile-long factories began to close. The last of them had been shuttered by the time Matthews alighted in 1980.

When the local economy cratered, the real estate market went down with it. Everything was a bargain when Matthews arrived. He and his brother started by scooping up several derelict apartment buildings and presciently converting them into low-price condominiums. These were the first such conversions in town, and they went on sale for $29,900 – with $300 down – just ahead of the incipient condo boom. That project was the first of a string of emboldening successes. “Interest rates were above 20 percent in some cases,” Bob Matthews said later, “and popular wisdom had it that you couldn’t make a dime in real estate. ‘Popular wisdom’ had it all wrong; you can always make money if you choose your projects carefully. I look for undervalued properties that could stand with a bit of improvement.”

Such cocksure pronouncements were a Matthews staple. Still only in his twenties, the young developer was brash and cartoonishly arrogant. A former employee recalls meeting Matthews and his brother in an elevator in the office building where they’d set up headquarters. Just after exchanging introductions, the Matthewses began detailing the properties they’d bought and the profits they’d reaped. “They were saying, ‘We’re from Massachusetts, and we’re gonna take this one-horse town and fix it up,’” the ex-employee recalled. “I thought, You guys are [expletive], is what you are.”

In a typical moment of bombast, Bob and David Matthews threw a party at the downtown Mattatuck Museum and invited the city’s power brokers. The brothers flew in on a rented helicopter, timing the landing so they could stroll off the bird, like dignitaries at Camp David, just after all the guests had arrived.

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Mayor Edward D. Bergin Jr. was serving his third term in office when the Matthews boys arrived in town. At their first meeting the brothers strode in and demanded federal rent-assistance money for a building they’d recently purchased. “They thought the subsidy had been assigned to their building, but that was not the case,” Bergin said. “For two out-of-town guys, that was highly unusual behavior. It wasn’t the normal way developers acted in Waterbury. Usually you’d come in before you bought the building and ask if it’s eligible, or can the city do something here to help.”

Bergin, who lasted fourteen years in office in a famously bruising political environment, sent them packing.

Banks were there to fill the cash void. The Reagan renaissance was ideal for go-getters in need of extended lines of credit. The Matthewses acquired major historic properties like the Rectory Building, a grand example of Richardson Romanesque architecture. Striking out on his own, Bob Matthews bought the Frederick Buildings, situated on either side of the historic Palace Theater, and the Farrington Building – both of them downtown landmarks. By the end of the eighties, Matthews controlled nearly a quarter-million square feet of commercial space. People began calling him the Donald Trump of Waterbury – a moniker he did not discourage.

Matthews endeared himself to longtime Waterburians for his judicious renovations of prized edifices. “I think he’s brilliant,” said the ex-employee who first met Matthews on an elevator.

“He’s way beyond lucky. He really was all about quality; he didn’t do anything halfway.”

To the wider world Matthews projected a Horatio Alger-like quality: the scrappy and ambitious young go-getter, building an empire out of smarts and ingenuity, almost a little wide-eyed at

Bob Matthews and wife Mia on Nantucket.

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his own success. In 1986 the New York Times bestowed on Matthews partial credit for Waterbury’s rebound from the brass collapse, noting that he “has been buying up buildings along East and West Main Street like adjacent spaces on a Monopoly board.” “He was the star of the scene,” a city official recalled. Waterbury officials could scarcely get the attention of state leaders in Hartford, but Matthews and his brother David flew in U.S. Senator Bob Dole and his wife, Elizabeth, to attend the launch of a side business.

In postindustrial Waterbury, where hope drained away like an ebb tide, people bought into the wunderkind. Between the prolix narrations of his nearly superhuman feats, Bob loved to throw a good party, which he often did at the Brass Horse, a restaurant he’d acquired on the Green. In a city fascinated by, and in some ways stuck in, its own history, Matthews was a gust of fresh air. “I love old buildings,” he told Charles Monagan for a book about the city’s history. “Restoring them to what they used to be – that’s our niche. If it means digging into the pockets a little deeper to save a stained-glass window, it’s still worth it.”

Wayne Pratt and Bob Matthews met in the early 1980s at a huge flea market in Brimfield, Massachusetts, where Pratt was selling antiques.

Matthews, walking the grounds with a girlfriend, approached Pratt’s booth and introduced himself.

Once they started talking, they recognized how much they had in common. They were both eastern Massachusetts guys who’d started out with nothing but dreams and boundless energy. And they both begrudged the trust-funded gadabouts who sometimes outbid them for an object or property. “We both came up the hard way,” Pratt said, pronouncing the word hahd. “I could understand how he felt about people having money who didn’t have to work for it.”

They were natural salesmen who could talk their way into almost anything. Pratt was struck by the younger man’s incandescent charisma and catlike intensity. Matthews couldn’t sit still; he was constantly prowling the room during conversations. “He was outgoing, flamboyant, and a bit of an asshole,” Pratt Said. “But I liked him.”

As their careers blossomed, Matthews became a regular at Pratt’s shop.

Eager to emit the scent of affluence, Matthews chased the traditional

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trappings of wealth – antiques included. In the late eighties he bought a small plane and started riding horses and playing polo. He purchased a gated estate, complete with bridle trails, in Middlebury, the wealthier town on Waterbury’s western border.

His friendship with Pratt intensified after the antiques dealer opened his seasonal shop on Nantucket in 1991. Matthews purchased a house there two years later, and the two began spending big chunks of their summers together. Every Fourth of July they threw a bash at Matthews’s estate.

Wayne bought the lobsters, and Matthews bought the booze. Matthews chartered yachts to race in the Figawi and Opera House Cup races, and Pratt manned the sails. He wasn’t a sailor per se, but his brawn made him a useful deck hand. “There was always some sort of interesting thing you could do with him,” Pratt said. “When he did something, he did it fully.”

A fraternity of two, they lit out for many adventures on Matthews’s plane.

When Leslie Hindman was dating Pratt, he and Bob once picked her up at New Jersey’s Teterboro Airport in Matthews’s plane. “It was a [expletive] little plane – not even a nice one,” Hindman recalled. “I grew up around airplanes, so I know. So Bob starts flying, and all of a sudden the instrument panel goes out, just goes black. And we’re flying over New York, no contact with any tower, and I was just, ‘Oh, my God, we’re gonna cross into some other airspace, get hit by another plane. No one even knows we’re Bob Matthews helming his yacht Weatherly. up here.’

They just said, ‘Aw, who cares? We’ll be fine, no problem.’” She shook her head, grinning. “They were crazy guys.”

Pratt’s move to Connecticut in 1993 meant close year-round proximity to

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Matthews. Woodbury is a short drive from both Middlebury and Washington, another town in which Matthews had purchased a home. Bob hooked Wayne up with the real estate broker with whom Pratt bought the Main Street South shore. “He’s a good negotiator,” Pratt said. “That was where I wanted to be.”

Pratt, in turn, filled Matthews’s houses with antiques. They never had a traditional dealer-customer relationship. When they first started doing business, Matthews acquired furniture from Pratt on promises to pay later. Sometimes he made good. Sometimes he showed up with a check when Pratt was going through a dry spell.

Other times, though, when Pratt requested payment, Matthews reported that he was on the verge of a huge transaction, and that he would be able to pony up any day – but then the big payday would slip through his fingers. “He usually didn’t have enough money to buy the things he wanted,” Pratt said. “His tastes always exceeded his means. A lot of times the deal never came through.”

When Matthews did pay, Pratt gave him significant discounts. They were good friends, and Pratt often just wanted to get the deal off the books.

“It would end up being a fraction of what a normal customer would pay,” Pratt said. “It got to the point of ‘All right, give me X amount of money and let’s be doing with it’ kind of thing.”

Pratt’s fondness for Matthews eclipsed these moments of exasperation.

They talked long and often. They commiserated about their businesses, served as cheerleaders for the other’s dreams. They talked about girlfriends. After a few years of extending Matthews lines of credit, Pratt decided to do business with him differently – to treat him more like family than a customer. Who wants to be constantly haggling over money with a buddy? “I thought, [expletive] it – I like him as a friend,” Pratt said, “and I’m never going to make any money off this situation. I determined I’d do that with Bob because he was such a pain to deal with.”

To Pratt, this was a clear line of demarcation. Matthews from then on could buy antiques at cost – with the proviso that he split the profit with Pratt if he sold an object later. Wayne even began loaning Bob antiques outright. The dealer justified it: Matthews had big houses near his stores; Pratt thought of the furniture in Matthews’s homes as being in storage.

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Eventually Pratt returned the pieces to his showroom unless Matthews decided to pay.

As the years passed, the two began to buy together. This is a common practice among dealers, particularly as the market has spiked upward, the elite objects often eclipsing seven figures. Pratt began showing Matthews list of antiques. One of the items might be a highboy priced at $100,000 that Pratt thought he could move for $150,000. They shared the cost. “He would resell it, because he was the expert,” Matthews explained. “I don’t know about the highboys. And he would give me $25,000, and he would have $25,000.”

One day Pratt brought up a different kind of deal: There was a document available, an original Bill of Rights. Pratt explained about the Indianapolis family, about the high asking price that he was trying to chip away at, about the profits they could reap if he found the right client. Pratt told him about the Declaration of Independence found in a $4 picture frame that sold for $2.42 million at Sotheby’s.

Matthews was interested. But before he committed, he wanted to see the Bill of Rights with his own eyes.

Charlie Reeder led Pratt and Matthews into the bank vault where the Shotwell sisters were storing the parchment.

Reeder liked Pratt and found the fast-talking Matthews strangely mesmerizing. “He was clearly a big BS-er,” Reeder said. “But he also seemed to be a very wealthy man.” The airplane, in particular, made an impression.

Roughly two years had passed since Pratt’s first visit. In that time, as a result of Pratt’s persistent prodding, the asking price had dropped from $2 million to about $1 million. Now, Reeder hoped Matthews’s appearance meant a deal might be consummated.

Pratt and Matthews had clawed their way upward partly by being unflinching negotiators. And good negotiators look for any reason to drive a price down – small flaws, perceived warts. On a house, Matthews might find loose paint or peeling shingles. In this case the two men assessed the Bill of Rights doubtfully.

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Unlike the historians in Washington, they ignored the document’s plainstated elegance, its timelessness, its bedrock significance. What they saw was a poorly preserved sheepskin that was hard to read. That’s what they told Reeder.

“Wayne looked at it,” Matthews recalled. “He looked at the writing, and he commented that it was kind of faded, and it was kind of in a crappy little frame.”

Matthews wasn’t even sure the document he was looking at – encased in a “little skinny wood frame” – was real. “Bob did his dance around all over the place – ‘It isn’t worth this, it isn’t that,’” Pratt recounted.

When the two men were done with their evaluation, Reeder drove them back to the airport. Before Pratt disappeared into the plane, he pulled Reeder aside to ask whether the Shotwells might lower the price further.

He reminded Reeder that the Bill of Rights had been looted from North Carolina. The state might try to get the document back – which was no small matter. A lower price would help attract potential buyers like Bob Matthews.

Reeder agreed to speak with the family and get back to Pratt soon.

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