The Biggest Art Heist Ever: Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

UPDATE 3/17/2015: The Boston FBI claims they know who pulled the job off, but they are deceased:

“We have a high degree of confidence that we know who did this,” said Pete Kowenhoven of the FBI in Boston.
Kowenhoven says the two suspects are now dead. “Two individuals that dressed up like the Boston Police officers are deceased,” he said.

I visited the Isabella Stewart Gardner Musuem for the first time today and started to dig into the theft that happened there on March 18, 1990. It is the largest art theft in history — involving 11 paintings, including 2 Rembrandts — and it is estimated that the stolen works could be worth $300 million.

During my visit I came across the area in the picture above, which has an empty frame that contained the Rembrandt painting "Storm on the Sea of Galilee" before it was stolen. It really stuck me how much the theft still hangs over the musuem.

Background on the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

The Gardner is different from any musuem I've ever been in as it is built as a Venetian palace — complete with courtyard — with art dispersed throughout. Here's some background from Wikipedia:

After her husband John L. Gardner’s death in 1898, Isabella Gardner realized their shared dream of building a museum for their treasures. She purchased land for the museum in the marshy Fenway area of Boston, and hired architect Willard T. Sears to build a museum modeled on the Renaissance palaces of Venice. Gardner was deeply involved in every aspect of the design, though, leading Sears to quip that he was merely the structural engineer making Gardner's design possible. After the construction of the building was complete, Gardner spent a full year carefully installing her collection in a way that evokes intimate responses to the art, mixing paintings, furniture, textiles and objects from different cultures and periods among well-known European paintings and sculpture.

The museum opened on January 1, 1903 with a grand celebration featuring a performance by members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and a menu that included champagne and doughnuts. During Gardner's lifetime, she welcomed artists, performers, and scholars to Fenway Court to draw inspiration from the rich collection and dazzling Venetian setting, including John Singer Sargent, Charles Martin Loeffler, and Ruth St. Denis, among others. Today, the museum’s vibrant contemporary Artist-in-Residence program, courtyard garden displays, concerts, and innovative education programs continue Isabella Gardner’s legacy.

When Isabella Stewart Gardner died in 1924, her will created an endowment of $1 million and outlined stipulations for the support of the museum, including the charge that her collection be permanently exhibited “for the education and enjoyment of the public forever” according to her aesthetic vision and intent. Gardner stipulated that if her wishes for the museum were not honored, the property and collection were to be sold and the money given to Harvard University.

Here's a peek inside the musuem. There aren't many pictures available as they don't allow the use of cameras inside:

The Famous 1990 Heist

The OpenCase has some details on the crime including images of the pieces that were taken:

An hour or so after midnight on March 18, 1990, two men dressed as police officers arrived at the side entrance of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The men told the night guard that they were investigating a disturbance and were buzzed inside at exactly 1:24 am. The thieves then bound the guard and his partner in the basement of the museum.

The thieves looted the museum for more than an hour and stole a dozen paintings as well as a Chinese vase and a finial. The police were never notified of the heist as it happened. The museum had an internal alarm system, and the panic button–the only line to the outside world—was never activated during the heist.

There were many curious aspects to the caper. The thieves never went near the museum’s most valuable art work, Titian’s Europa. The thieves also handled the art quite poorly and cut two of the Rembrandts out of their frames. The museum crooks also appeared to know little about art. After taking control of a museum filled with masterpieces, the men spent a quarter of an hour in the Short Gallery, pocketing five unpolished Degas sketches. The works are haphazard doodles, little nothing more than a few barely imagined faces and legs.

The thieves did appear to be expert criminals, however. They didn’t brandish handguns or scream at the guards or appear edgy like a first-timer might.

The pieces are estimated to be worth up to $300 million now. Many experts wonder if they will ever be recovered. They worry that the thieves destroyed the pieces to cover up their tracks, or they died with the pieces still hidden away somewhere. Others feel the pieces will show up some day under the theory that the new owners will eventually pass on, or try to move the pieces through back channels to raise money if they are desperate.

WBUR did a bit of a documentary outlining the theft:

The Stolen Paintings

Here's a set showing the paintings that were stolen. There were a couple of other items also stolen including a bronze eagle on a Napoleonic battle flag and a Chinese beaker from the Shang Dynasty.

The Investigation

The investigation is over 20 years old now and it is estimated the between the Boston Police and the FBI that over $20 million has been spent trying to track down the theives. The statute of limitations has run out on the original theft, but people holding the stolen items, or have helped move them recently, can still be prosectuted

Boston Magazine outlines the status of the investigation:

No one has ever been arrested in the heist, though the FBI has looked hard at a slimy lineup of guys, half of them now dead.

Investigators have chased leads from Milton to Maine to Las Vegas to Japan. They’ve convened a grand jury. They’ve reminded the public, year after year, about the Holy Grail of incentives to come forward with information: a $5 million reward from the Gardner, plus immunity from the feds. At this point, everyone just wants to see the art back where it belongs.

What are the chances? “If this were any other type of property, I’d be pessimistic about getting it back,” says special agent Geoffrey Kelly, the FBI’s lead investigator on the case for the past nine years. “But art can stay hidden for decades before it comes back.”

There are some real characters in the list of possible suspects including Whitey Bulger (many hope that some information will ultimately come from his being caught). WickedLocal looks at the main suspects here.

The Boston Herald has a great interactive graphic with sketches of the suspects and what they may look like 20 years later.

Here are the original sketches:

Suspect: Myles J. Connor Jr.

Other than the infamous Whitey Bulger, Myles Connor is the most notorious and hysterical character to be suspected in the case. He is a well known art theif, calls himself The President of Rock 'n Rolln, was in the band Sha Na Na, claims to be a descendant from those coming over on the Mayflower, and is a Mensa member. He told one of his old prison cell mates that he was inspired to get into the art theft racket after seeing the movies "Topaki" and "The Thomas Crown Affair" in the 1960's.

The Herald summarizes some of Connor's connections to the case. Many feel he may have masterminded the job from prison.

Connor, 65, has told the Herald that he cased the Hub museum and believes some of his associates are behind the March 18, 1990, theft.

Connor, the son of a Milton cop, was first linked with efforts to recover the stolen masterpieces in 1997. At the time, Connor was serving a 15-year sentence in a Pennsylvania federal prison for interstate trafficking in stolen antiques and drug charges.

“I know emphatically and beyond any doubt who stole the art,” Connor once told Time magazine, ABC News and other media outlets. It was a repeat of a tale Connor had told the Herald many times as well.

In those interviews, Connor described how he and “flim-flam artist” Robert A. “Bobby” Donati cased the Italian palazzo-turned-museum during a visit in 1974. (See “Meet the Suspects” for March 29.)

“I took a walk through the place and saw what was there,” Connor said. Connor added that Donati was intrigued by an item that was later stolen – the golden eagle atop a Napoleonic flagstaff.

Connor joined briefly with a shady Randolph antiques dealer, William P. Youngsworth III, in offering to help “broker the return” of the art to baffled museum and FBI officials.

A Full List of Known Suspects

CharGirl has an amzing chart of all the known connections in the case. Click here or on the image for the larger version.

Books and Movies about the Heist

The definitive book on the heist is "The Gardner Heist: The True Story of the World's Largest Unsolved Art Theft" and there is also Myles Connor Jr.'s book "The Art of the Heist"

There's also a documentary on the heist which is streaming on Netflix. Here's the trailer:

The Biggest Art Heist Ever: Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum – March 1990