The Case of the Mysterious Screenwriter : Movies: Brian McDevitt’s past was suspect to some members of the Writers Guild. A new inquiry reveals an unexpected plot twist.

It was news to send screenwriters all over town scrambling to their computer keyboards: Brian McDevitt, a member of the Writers Guild of America and the chairman of one of its committees, had been questioned in connection with one of the largest art thefts in history.

McDevitt’s name was far from unknown to users of the union’s computer bulletin board, a communications system linking 1,200 guild members. For months he had come under fire from a group of screenwriters who had questioned his credentials. So strident were the attacks that the union leadership had ordered the screenwriters to desist.

Suddenly, however, a parochial intra-union dispute had developed into a story with potential international dimensions.

To all appearances, McDevitt, 32, was doing well for a little known screenwriter. He had his own production company, and on the strength of what he reportedly said was a distinguished writing career back East, including articles in such magazines as the New Yorker and Harper’s and a couple of prestigious awards, he had been elected chairman of the Grants and Foundations Committee of the Writers Guild America West. He was preparing to enter a script for competition at the Sundance Institute.

But McDevitt’s most creative work may have been the role he invented for himself.

Last week, news reports revealed that McDevitt is a convicted felon who was questioned in one of the largest art thefts in history--the 1990 heist at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, involving a dozen masterpieces worth more than $150 million. No charges have been filed in the Gardner case, a crime bearing some similarity to a failed robbery in 1981 of another art museum, the Hyde Collection in Glen Falls, N.Y., for which McDevitt served time. The Gardner thieves were disguised as Boston police officers, while McDevitt and his accomplice wore Federal Express uniforms in the Hyde attempt.

William J. McMullin, a spokesman for the FBI’s Boston division, said it is not the agency’s practice to name a suspect before a warrant is issued. “I do know from talking to the agents on the Gardner case that they are familiar, and have been for a long time, with the attempted theft at the Hyde,” he added.

McDevitt also spent time in jail in connection with the 1979 theft of more than $100,000 in cash and bonds from a Boston bank and was charged with two separate felony thefts from Massachusetts department stores in 1989 and 1990. He was convicted of one and pleaded guilty to the other.

To the surprise of some guild members, this news seemed to confirm suspicions aired months ago by another controversial guild member, Peter A. Lake, who was subsequently rebuked by the union’s leadership for using the guild’s computer bulletin board to vituperatively raise questions about McDevitt’s character.

While Lake, who said he was ignorant about McDevitt’s criminal record until last week, was savoring vindication, one embarrassed guild official said the union was--and may still be--powerless to remove McDevitt from his committee post.

“We don’t have a morals clause for our members,” said guild Vice President Carl Gottlieb. “Nobody anticipated we would have a convicted felon in our midst. . . . All the rules we have are written to give a very high degree of protection to the individual.” He described these protections as “a legacy from the blacklist days, when we behaved badly.”

McDevitt’s Boston-based attorney, Thomas E. Beatrice, said his client is being harassed by “malicious and unstable people” who have a vendetta against him because of his past. He added that McDevitt is “definitely not the chief suspect” in the Gardner theft.

Beatrice said McDevitt “has paid his dues” for the earlier crimes and “shouldn’t be ostracized” on account of them.

To some union officials, the McDevitt affair is a tempest in a terminal, of consequence only to half a dozen or so contentious and disgruntled guild members able to spend many hours logged onto the electronic bulletin board.

Born just before the five-month guild strike in 1988 and available free to any member with a computer and a modem, the bulletin board is a 1990s equivalent of a watering hole, giving isolated writers a way to vent their frustrations, exchange information or simply pass the time.

In a formal statement issued last week, the guild pointed out that the committee chaired by McDevitt is a research organization that “neither handles nor deals directly or indirectly with guild assets or money.” The committee has met only once in the past year, according to union officials.

McDevitt himself took to the bulletin board last week to announce that he had no intention of resigning his committee chairmanship.

McDevitt first ran afoul of Lake last year when he became embroiled in a dispute involving a separate bulletin board available only to certain screenwriters, which enabled them to secretly attack other writers who did not have access to it.

A sometime free-lance investigative reporter, Lake has been in the news before for infiltrating the Aryan Nation and testifying against them and other white supremacists. Last year, his testimony helped convict Ku Klux Klan leader Tom Metzger of misdemeanor charges for his role in a 1983 cross burning in a racially mixed San Fernando Valley neighborhood.

Lake said his suspicions about McDevitt deepened after Jeffrey Bydalek, McDevitt’s partner in his now-defunct company, Inkwell Productions, was arrested last October by FBI agents in connection with a scheme in Illinois. Bydalek pleaded guilty to unlawful offer of securities and was ordered to serve six months in jail and pay $42,000 in restitution.

Following his hunch, Lake started looking into McDevitt’s credentials and determined that “nothing he has said or written was true; it was one lie after another.”

McDevitt referred a reporter’s telephone calls to his lawyer, who described Lake’s allegations about McDevitt’s credentials--the New Yorker and Harper’s articles, and a claim that he was represented by the powerful Creative Artists Agency--as “total fabrications . . . (McDevitt) never made those claims in the first place.” But Lake and other guild members say McDevitt bragged often of specific past achievements.

Subsequently, Lake began sending McDevitt private electronic messages designed to smoke out information. “I was speaking to some law enforcement people and your name came up,” he wrote McDevitt at one point.

“They were bluffs because I didn’t know what was in his past,” said Lake, who concedes that the messages had a menacing tone. From McDevitt’s alarmed reaction, Lake determined he was hiding something. Alerting guild executive director Brian Walton and other union officials, Lake said he told them, “This guy is a walking time bomb. He’s going to embarrass us some day.”

But after meeting in January, the guild’s board decided it did not have the “power, authority, obligation, resources or inclination to arbitrate, rule upon or judge the personal behavior or alleged improprieties” of guild members in the absence of formal charges that the union’s rules had been violated. Instead, the board unanimously voted that Lake had engaged in “inappropriate and unacceptable behavior” and ordered members to stop using the bulletin board to threaten one another, according to minutes of the meeting.

Lake has since filed formal charges against McDevitt, charging him with violating the guild’s constitution by engaging in “unfair dealing with other writers.” Among those writers is Benjamin Pollack, who has accused McDevitt of harassing him with 30 to 40 phone calls a day over a five-week period after they had a falling out. McDevitt has denied the allegations, and deputy Los Angeles city attorney Robert Pingel said the case is under investigation.

Lake’s charges of guild rules violations, including allegations that McDevitt signed on to the bulletin board in the guise of other writers, are pending. Walton will not publicly discuss the McDevitt affair, but he wrote Lake last week that he expects some resolution by the end of the month.

Some guild members are wondering whether McDevitt told the truth when he applied for membership in the union through the East Coast branch. According to McDevitt’s recent bulletin board communications, he got into the guild “legitimately by working on a rewrite of a public television show.”

But Martin Waldman, spokesman for the Writers Guild of America, East in New York, said McDevitt’s application “indicated that he had written screenplay revisions and polish for motion pictures. It doesn’t say anything about television.”

Adding to doubts about McDevitt’s credibility, Beatrice said earlier this week that a script written by his client from the Evelyn Waugh classic “The Loved One” was “well received” by the Sundance Institute in Utah. But Michelle Satter, director of the institute’s feature film program, said that although McDevitt was invited to enter a screenplay based on a synopsis he submitted, the script was not forwarded to the committee that determines who will be invited to the institute.

“When something is well received or well thought of it goes to the selection committee,” she said.

Meanwhile, screenwriters are speculating about what could have prompted McDevitt to reinvent himself as a screenwriter. “We write about criminals. We don’t usually consort with them,” said screenwriter Terry Curtis Fox. “What I find amusing about all this is that McDevitt thinks becoming a member of the Writers Guild has some kind of cachet.”