Son Discovers His Father’s Life of Crime Is Now a Work of Art by Warhol

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George Lawler always knew his father was a criminal — his mug shot had been on New York City’s most wanted list in 1962. What he did not know was that his father had been a muse, of sorts, for Andy Warhol.

Mr. Lawler’s father, Thomas Francis (Duke) Connelly, was one of Warhol’s subjects in the installation “13 Most Wanted Men,” which was briefly displayed at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. He was sought for robbing at gunpoint a Chase Manhattan Bank branch in Woodside, Queens, in 1955, and making off with over $300,000.

He and his wife, Ann Connelly, went on the run with their two children, whom they later abandoned. The couple were never found.

Now, Mr. Connelly’s portrait, or police photo, depending on how you look at it, is one of nine on view at the Queens Museum as part of an exhibition titled “13 Most Wanted Men: Andy Warhol and the 1964 World’s Fair.”

Mr. Lawler and his wife, Deb Lawler, happened to read a review of the show in The New York Times in April, and were shocked when they saw a photograph with Mr. Connelly’s portrait. They had never heard of the Pop Art dimension of his life of crime

Along with other Pop artists, including Robert Rauschenberg and James Rosenquist, Warhol had been commissioned by Philip Johnson, the architect of the New York State Pavilion, to make a work of art for the exterior of the pavilion’s Theaterama. To put a New York spin on his work, Warhol made screen prints of the 13 pictures in the city Police Department’s most wanted brochure from 1962. The portraits were printed on Masonite panels.

The artwork was almost immediately covered over with silver paint on the orders of Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller, who deemed it too controversial for the fair. At the time, Warhol said he liked the silver paint: “Because silver is so nothing. It makes everything disappear.” Then, he made another set of the portraits that went into collections around the world, with all but four of them recollected and now on view in Queens.

On Thursday, Mr. Lawler and his wife traveled from their home in Essex, Conn., to view his father as a work of art. “I still can’t believe that my father, the bank robber, is associated with Andy Warhol,” he said. “That completely blows my mind.”

Mr. Lawler and his sister, Veronica Gural, a nurse at Jamaica Hospital Medical Center, never saw their parents after 1955, when Mr. Lawler was left by his mother in a church in Wilmington, Del., and his sister at a 5 & 10 store in Baltimore.

“I was only 2 years old at the time,” Mr. Lawler said, “and I swear I remember this, although my wife doesn’t believe me, but I knew my mother was full of soup when she left me at that church and said she’d be right back.”

Mr. Lawler and his sister were adopted by their mother’s sister and her husband, Mary and Joseph Lawler, and raised in Richmond Hill, Queens. Joseph Lawler was a police officer. When the younger Mr. Lawler was 14, his adopted father told him who his real father was: a thief who had run with a much tougher group of Irish gangsters and hit men on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

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