Stuff about Things: An Art History Podcast
Stuff about Things: An Art History Podcast
Episode 44: The Gardner Heist, Part I
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Wait, am I recording? You are listening to Stuff About Things, an art history podcast. Alright, let's bango. Hello and welcome to Stuff About Things, an Art History Podcast. My name is Lindsay. Hi, and I have my PhD in art history, which I use here on the internet to tell people like you stuff about things. It is in the admittedly simplistic title, one that I chose seven and a half years ago when I didn't think that this would be a thing seven and a half years later, but here we are. And whether you've been around for seven and a half years or I don't know, what are we at right now? About a minute, I'm very glad that you're here. I also have something much cooler than a PhD. Oh, what could that be? Virtually anything. But in this case, it's a new mug. Why do you care about a mug? Let me tell you. For one, it's got whales on it. Cool. And two, it was made for me by a listener. So shout out to Kate A, who is a very talented potter based in Vancouver, and was kind enough to send me a mug all the way from Canada. And it's a good thing that I have a beverage, because this is about to be a very long set of episodes. Yes, that's right. A set of episodes. You are currently at part one, which will likely be over two hours long, given that one section is currently clocking in at 12,000 words. I have a problem. While most of you tell me that you like the long episodes, I know they're not for everyone, so what I'm going to do is put timestamps in the episode description. That way you can anticipate when would be a good time to stop. If you want to find out more about one thing versus another, you can find it that way. However, you want to use them, they will be there for your convenience. If you haven't had enough of me by the end, part two will be up soon, hopefully in the next two weeks or so, though it might take me just a little bit longer. In which case I ask for a smidge of grace. I do have a full-time job, but I absolutely love making episodes, which is good because it's what I spend most of my free time doing, and I can't wait to bring you more content in the coming months. And I appreciate your patience. I would also appreciate it if you considered leaving the podcast a rating or a review, especially if you like it. And if you really want to support the podcast, I do now have an account on Buy Mea Coffee, which is essentially a tipping platform. I suppose in that regard, this is my version of I'm just gonna turn the screen, it's gonna ask you a quick question. But unlike with those situations, there's genuinely no expectation. There is, however, an immense appreciation. With all of that said, we are now here at the part where I tell you stuff about the greatest art heist in living memory, one that to this day remains unsolved, and that so many of you have asked me to cover. That's right, we're doing it. The Gardner Heist Part 1. Everything, and I do mean everything, but the art. That of duct tape pulling out your eyebrows while you contemplate that this might just be how your life ends. In the basement of your workplace, chained to a sink, with duct tape applied over your eyes and head like a badly wrapped mummy. The guard wasn't even supposed to be at work tonight. A fellow security guard had fallen ill, and so the guard was called back in. He didn't mind, he preferred the night shift. The museum was quiet and the pay was better. He sometimes even had a little bit of time to practice his trombone. On any other night, the guard would have been treated to eight hours of quiet amidst one of the world's greatest art collections. But tonight was no regular night shift. The guard had been doing his first round of the night when a crackle of static burst from his walkie-talkie. Then there was a voice. It was his fellow security guard on duty, Rick. The kid was a bit of an oddball. He'd shown up to work that day in a tie-dyed t-shirt and a Stetson hat, but the guard liked him just fine. When his voice came through the walkie-talkie, however, Rick did not sound fine. Concerned, the guard abandoned his rounds to return to Rick. As he approached the security desk, the guard felt increasingly uneasy. Two police officers stood in the security room, their uniforms cutting a sharp contrast to Rick's tie-dyed shirt, his Stetson hat, and his patterned fanny pack. The guard assumed that the officers had come with regards to the fire alarm that had gone off in the carriage house earlier in the night. That had been a false alarm. But the alarms currently going off in the guards' head were very real. Even if the cops were there about the carriage house, how did they get into the building so quickly? The security guards were under strict instructions to let no one into the museum during the night shift, even the police. But there was another question on the guard's mind. Why had they put Rick in handcuffs? The next few minutes were a blur. Before he could even comprehend the situation, the guard was being handcuffed and told there was a warrant out for his arrest. But as the cuffs clicked into place, the two men dressed as Boston police officers dropped the charade with five fateful words. Gentlemen, this is a robbery. But first, it was an assault. The robbers used duct tape to both blind and silence the two guards. They looped the tape around and around, covering their eyes and mouth with several layers before doing loops in the opposite direction, like a nurse might swaddle a dental patient. Then they were being led down into the basement, where the guard was led off to a separate room from Rick and handcuffed to a pole extending down from a century-old industrial sink. As if things couldn't get any stranger, the man assigned to subduing the guard had been nothing but polite on the journey down to the basement, cautioning him to move carefully lest he hurt himself. It was an odd thing to say, given that he had wrapped duct tape around the guard's head and taken his wallet before cuffing him to the pole. But when the man next spoke, the words chilled the guard to his core. Say nothing. We know who you are, and we know where you live. Then the guard was alone in the dark with nothing but duct tape and fear to keep him company. Over six hours later, real Boston police officers arrived on the scene, but the guard's ordeal was far from over. He had to sit, chained to the pole, duct tape still over his face, while the police waited for crime scene photographers to arrive. Then there were the hours of questioning. At first, the guard was only willing to share the basics. The robbers had taken his driver's license. They had threatened to hunt him down if he talked, but the police officer he was speaking to wasn't having it. He told the guard that while the guard was entitled to his silence, that silence might just be misconstrued by both the police and the public. No matter how scared the guard was of the men returning, perhaps even to his house, he was more scared of being accused of collusion. After all, the museum was one of Boston's most beloved institutions. Anyone who was thought to have harmed it, true or not, would surely become public enemy number one. It was only later that he would learn the extent of the damage. The museum had lost 13 works of art so precious that it was an abstract concept to most people, much less to a 25-year-old who wasn't even supposed to be at work that night. What was not an abstract concept was the feel of handcuffs on his wrists, the pull of duct tape on his eyelids, and the agonizing weight in the silent dark. On any other night shift, the guard would have walked out of the museum at 7 a.m., trombone in tow, looking forward to a good nap, and grateful for a little extra money on his next paycheck. But when the man exited the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on March 18, 1990, he was grateful for one thing and one thing only: his life. And there was no masterpiece in the entire world more precious than that. It has fascinated the public for over 35 years, all the more so because it's never been solved. The heist is by far the most requested topic that I get from listeners. There is not a week that goes by where I don't get a message in my inbox or through the website asking me to cover the topic. I'm not particularly surprised by that, because, hello, everyone loves an art history mystery, including myself. At the same time, I'm always slightly confused because The Gardner Heist has received plenty of popular media coverage over the years, especially in the past decade. In 2018, WBUR Radio in Boston came out with a last scene podcast dedicated to the topic. And in 2021, Netflix premiered a four-episode miniseries called This Is a Robbery. I am very familiar with both of those series because I listened to the first season of the Last Scene podcast several times, even before preparing for this episode. And I absolutely gobbled up the This Is a Robbery miniseries when it first came out, and have since watched that several times. Both of them, I think, are excellent. And so for seven years, I've put off doing the Gardener heist because I don't really know what I have to add to the conversation. But as more people start to listen to this podcast, which is delightful, I'm very happy with that, more people than ever are asking to hear about the gardener. So I figured let's just give the people what they want. I also checked in with my buddy Gene of the What is a Painting podcast, who is also very interested in the heist, and I asked if I was crazy for considering doing an episode. Jean told me that there's no such thing as too much when it comes to the Gardener Heist, and so here we are. We'll see if she thinks that after we're done with the episode. Before I jump into the content, I want to remind you that I am not an investigative journalist. I'm an art historian doing my best, which I might just make my new slogan. I hope that everyone listening to this takes something new away from it, even if it's just a different voice telling you your favorite story. If you are a Gardner Heist junkie and want information that you're not used to getting about the case, part two, which is going to be episode 45, will likely be more your speed. In that episode, I will talk about the stolen artwork, from the concert to the coup. True to its title, this episode is going to cover everything but the art, which is to say, the heist itself, the aftermath, the investigation, suspects, all that good stuff. As we always do on this podcast, let's start with the beginning. The museum commonly known as the Gardner, which is to say the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum, is an absolute jewel of Boston, Massachusetts. It's named after its creator and patroness, Isabella Stuart Gardner, a very wealthy woman turned art collector who spent much of her adult life piecing together an eclectic collection of art, one that at the turn of the 20th century she built a four-story museum to house. But make no mistake, make no mistake, don't make it. This is not your average museum. Anything masterminded by Isabella Stuart Gardner is not going to be average. Least of all, her museum, a place that was as much her home as her heart. The building itself is a spectacle. I do give you that it's it's kind of boring on the outside, but inside it has an aesthetic that can only be described as a Venetian Renaissance palazzo turned inside out. That's literally what Mrs. Gardner asked her architect to do. At the center of that palazzo is a lush courtyard around which each of the museum's four floors wrap. Every one of those contains a series of rooms that Isabella Stuart Gardner curated herself more than a century ago. And for 65 years after Mrs. Gardner's death, that's how it stayed. And for good reason. The indomitable Mrs. Gardner left strict instructions in her will that if those in charge of the museum altered the permanent collection or its display in any significant way, the museum and its collection should be sold off by Harvard University, with the proceeds going to various institutions of Mrs. Gardner's choice. Shockingly, the museum does not want that to happen. But what happens when someone outside of the museum alters the collection? Hmm? What happens then? The answer is nothing good, as was made very apparent one very early Sunday morning 35 years ago. It was March 18th, 1990. I would say that this was the day after St. Patrick's Day, and technically it was, but in the early hours of the morning, many fine people in Boston were still drunk and getting drunker while continuing to celebrate what might just be the city's favorite holiday. That included a couple of teenagers who were out and about near the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum around midnight on the morning of the 18th. The teenagers noticed a hatchback style car parked within a stone's throw of the museum on Palace Road. It caught their attention, not just because it was there for a while, but because the museum obviously wasn't open. But when they approached the car, they saw that there were two people inside, one of whom appeared to be a cop. Understandably, the teenagers decided to keep moving. They had absolutely no idea that they would be among the few witnesses to one of the greatest art heists in history. Equally unaware were the two security guards inside the museum. Despite being barely an hour into their shifts, they already had an inkling that they were in for an interesting night. Two alarms had already gone off. One of the alarms was touchy and went off from time to time. The other was unusual. The same guard, Rick, investigated both alarms, determining that each one was a false alarm. At approximately 1 in the morning, Rick completes his first round and returns to the security desk. His partner, Randy, takes up round two. At 1.24 a.m., while Rick was manning the security desk, two men approached the Palace Road door, the one that leads right into the security area. They appeared to be police officers. They rang the bell, causing Rick to activate the intercom. The men claimed that they had gotten a report of a disturbance on the premises. Rick assumed this was about some of the security alarms going off earlier in the night, and he buzzed them in. As soon as they were inside, they asked Rick if there was anyone else on duty, and he said yeah, there was. And at their request, he radioed Randy to come back to the desk. Then the men's attitude started to change. They claimed that they recognized Rick and that there was a warrant out for his arrest. They then demanded that he step away from the security desk, which Rick did. That also meant he stepped away from the only panic button that if pressed would call the police. But hey, what need was there to call the police if the police were already there? By the time Randy got back to the desk, which was a matter of minutes, Rick was already in cuffs. The men were then on Randy, and in a matter of seconds, Randy too was in cuffs. It had taken the men less than five minutes to get both security guards under their control. Needless to say, the two men at the museum were not cops. They were the opposite of cops, as was made apparent when they dropped the ruse, declaring, gentlemen, this is a robbery. Within 20 minutes, Rick and Randy were chained up in different parts of the basement, their eyes duct taped and their mouths gagged. From here, we have a pretty good idea of what the thieves did in the museum, because despite their best attempts to wipe the security footage and logs, they didn't realize that the museum's alarm system was stored on some kind of internal computer system. At 148, the security system tells us that both thieves used the main staircase to head up to the second floor, where they made beeline for the Dutch Room, so-called for its incredible collection of Dutch Golden Age art, including works by Rembrandt van Rijn and Johannes Vermeer. When it comes to the Gardner case, the Dutch Room is essentially ground zero, the place where the greatest losses of the day were sustained. The men take four paintings, two by Rembrandt, one by Govart Flink, and one by Vermeer. They remove each one from their frames, albeit through different means. The Vermeer and the Flink they remove somewhat civilly, but the Rembrandts they butcher, using a razor blade or knife to cut them out from the front. They also take a small postage stamp-sized etching by Rembrandt, one that was so small that even with its frame it would have fit in a pocket. Instead, the men took their time to use a tool to remove each screw from the frame so they could grab the etching itself. Clearly, they were not in any hurry. The final item they took from the Dutch room is a bronze ceremonial beaker from ancient China, one commonly known as a coup. This work would have first appeared like easy pickings. It was just out on a table, but anyone who would try to grab it would soon find out that the coup was anchored to the table with a series of bolts. Undeterred, the men pried it from the table, something that would have taken a massive amount of effort. While all of this was taking place in the Dutch Room, one of the thieves was scooting back and forth between the Dutch Room and the short gallery a few rooms away. They made several trips, during which they grabbed a truly puzzling collection of five Dugas sketches and an eagle finial that topped a Napoleonic flag. It's a very weird collection of objects, especially when you consider that to get to this room, the man would have passed through galleries containing works worth millions, including paintings by the likes of Michelangelo, Botticelli, and Raphael. He didn't touch a single one, instead, reserving his little mitts for the Dugas sketches and the Eagle Finial. At some point in the night, we're not sure when, because it went completely undetected by the security system. At least one of the men also accesses the blue room on the first floor, where they take a small oil painting by the French painter Edouard Manet. They remove it from Its frame, but unlike all of the other works, they don't leave the frame in the gallery. Instead, they take it with them. The final movement in the galleries is recorded in the Dutch Room at 2.28. We don't know what happens for the next 13 minutes. It could be in this short period of time that the men accessed the blue room, all while somehow evading the security system. The next sign of their movements is at 2.41, when they open the door to Palace Road, the one they used to enter the museum. On their way out, they go scorched earth on the security system, taking any tapes and printouts from their time in the museum. They also leave the empty frame of Edward Manet's Shea Tortoni on the chair of the Director of Security. Then the door to Palace Road opens and closes for a second time. It does not reopen. The time on the clock is 2.45. The thieves had had full run of the museum for 81 minutes. Cut to a few hours later, 6.45, when Karen San Gregory reports bright and early for her shift as a security guard. She buzzes the bell and waits. And waits and waits. Props to her, she doesn't leave. I would have personally left. She's still there at 7.25 when a maintenance worker also reports for duty. They both realize that something is very wrong. Starting to panic, Karen runs across the street to a college dormitory and asks to use their landline. She called her boss, the deputy head of security, Larry O'Brien, urging him to come in. When he arrives, they use his keys to get into the building through a side door. Immediately their suspicions are confirmed. Something is indeed very wrong. The security office door is busted open. The office is a mess, and a small golden frame sits empty on the head of security's chair. But even more ominous than that is the fact that the security guards are nowhere to be seen. Within the hour, the museum is swarming with police, who search the building from top to bottom. They find empty frames and broken glass in several of the galleries. But still there's no signs of the guards. In a moment of panicked vulnerability, O'Brien discloses to a police officer that he fears they might be dead. But finally, after 20 minutes of searching, the police descend into the basement, where they find Rick and Randy exactly where the thieves had left them. When asked to describe the men who did this, Rick and Randy had slightly different accounts, but they estimated both men to be in their late twenties or thirties. Both were white with black hair. One was shorter, around 5'8, and solidly built, and he wore square-rimmed glasses and had a mustache. One of the guards recalls that the mustache looked fake, like it was made of wax. The other thief was thinner and taller, almost certainly over six feet. He too may have had a mustache. Mustache or not, one thing that everyone agreed on was that the thieves and their probably fake mustaches were long, long gone, and they had taken 13 precious works of art with them. News of the break-in hit one person particularly hard, the museum's director, Anne Hawley, who had been making breakfast when the call came through. The caller didn't tell her much, just that she had to get to the museum as soon as she could. Hawley had been director for just six months. After what must have been the longest drive to work in the history of ever, Hawley arrived to the museum midway through the police's search. At first, they wouldn't allow her to enter the galleries. All she knew was that it was bad. She didn't realize just how bad until she walked into the Dutch room, where the floor was covered in empty frames and broken glass. It was nothing short of a nightmare. Her only reprieve was the fact that initially they thought there were three Rembrandt paintings gone, but the third, a self-portrait on panel, had only been removed from the wall and leaned up against it. When she pulled it back, she saw that the painting was still inside. That, however, was cold comfort to Holly, who was only beginning to comprehend the sheer scale of the loss. Of the five paintings taken, two were unquestionable masterpieces. Rembrandt's Storm on the Sea of Galilee, and Vermeer's The Concert. The other paintings included a portrait of a couple by Rembrandt, a landscape by one of Rembrandt's contemporaries, Govart Flink, and a small painting by Edward Manet known as Shea Tortoni, the frame of which was the one left on the security boss's chair. The five paintings were joined by five drawings by Diga, the Bronze Beaker, the Eagle Finial, and the Small Etching by Rembrandt. Every one of these 13 works is invaluable in the sense that they can never be replaced. And while you'd think it'd be difficult to assign a money value to something allegedly invaluable, people do it all the time in the case of the Gardner Heist. The estimated collective value of the 13 objects stolen was $500 million, with Vermeer's The Concert alone representing about half of that. Oh, I can't whistle. There we go. When you read about the Gardner Heist and watch interviews about it, whatever, it's very clear that the paintings are the priority for recovery efforts. Many times people simply refer to the stolen works as the paintings, despite the actual paintings representing less than half of what was stolen. They clearly, though, represent the vast majority of the value of what was stolen, so I guess I get it. I am not going to say much more about the art stolen during the heist, at least not here. I will cover that in part two, where I will talk about each of the 13 works from the concert to the coup. For now though, let's focus on the heist, starting, well I guess continuing, with its investigation. Back in the age of no social media, really no internet, not like we have it today, anyway, the news of the heist didn't immediately rock the city of Boston. They had to wait another day for that, when the heist was on the front page of virtually every newspaper in the city, and many across the country. Imagine showing up to the gardener ready for a fun day at the museum, only to find the place swarming with FBI agents, press, and panicked museum employees. If that didn't tell prospective visitors what they needed to know, the handwritten signs on the door would have to do. They stated the obvious the museum is closed today. Interestingly, though, it did reopen the next day, which I don't know why that surprises me, but it did. In the early afternoon on the day of the heist, a shell-shocked Anne Hawley faced the press. She made a brief statement, one in which she called the heist a quote-unquote barbaric act. She even likened the theft to the death of a loved one. To some that might seem dramatic, but when you're the director of a museum that just lost one of the world's 35-ish Vermeer paintings, uh, it's a pretty apt comparison. To add salt to her wounds, the press conference was not great for Holly, as it became clear that she had little grasp on the museum's security system or its guards. For that and other reasons, the press absolutely dragged her over the coals. I think it is important, however, to note that it's not unusual for museum departments, including security, to be highly compartmentalized. I've worked at a number of museums, and I don't know what curator or director could tell you in-depth information about the kind of system that they had or really tell you all that much about the guards. Is that right? No, but it is what happens. Also, Holly had been at the Gardener for just six months, and she had been primarily hired for her capacity to fundraise. In her over 25-year career at the Gardener, Holly proved remarkably good at that job, but at just six months in, the coffers of the museum were still bare. So not only were they out 13 precious works of art, including highlights of their collection, but they didn't have the money to offer as a reward for the return of those works. That was one of the bigger problems that the museum was facing. And that's saying something, because the museum had 99 problems, and all of them were bad. Enter stage left, board member Arnold Hyatt. Hyatt had friends in high places, including the chairman of Sudby's auction house, Alfred Taubman. On the phone, Hyatt got to the chase. The Gardner needed funds badly. He asked Taubman to put up $1 million in cash on behalf of the Gardener as a reward for the return of the works. Rather unexpectedly, Sudby's Auction House joined forces with its greatest competitor, the auction house Christie's, and both worked together to establish this reward. Sudbeys and Christie's had a vested interest in maintaining the integrity of their profession, not to mention the integrity of the art market on which they both depended. Let's be real, it was also a really good PR move. Whether in the early 1990s or today, the art market, both legal and illegal, is a thriving multi-billion dollar business. To give you an idea of how strong things were in 1990, consider this. In May of that year, just two months after the heist, Christie's New York made the sale of the year when the auction house sold a portrait by Van Gogh for $82.5 million. The sales set the record for the most money ever paid for a work of arts at auction. The final price was double what Christie's had anticipated, which means that the commission of 10% was also double. Not a shabby day in the office. The Van Gogh portrait, however, would have been chump change if Vermeer's The Concert had gone up for legitimate sale. Even in 1990, that work was said to have an estimated value of 200 million. But the Gardner works would not be sold at auction, at least not legitimately. Even black market buyers would have been hesitant to purchase one of the stolen works, even at a steep discount of 90%. That's right, on the black market, stolen goods typically fetch only 10% of their estimated value. Even then, any major art collector, even the criminal ones, would think twice, if not many more times, about buying any of the Gardner works, bargain or not. To use the lingo of organized crime, the stolen works were far too hot to handle. Words that unfortunately have never been used to describe me. Rude. The hope in establishing this $1 million reward was that it would encourage the swift return of the artworks, either by the thieves themselves or people willing to rat on them. But unfortunately, no rats ever came a squeaking. As far as I can tell, one of the earliest breaks in the case came in 1992, when the FBI got a tip that a Japanese businessman had shown guests his art collection, including a seascape by Rembrandt, of which he only ever painted one, the Storm on the Sea of Galilee. The FBI found the tip credible enough to send an agent to Japan to investigate, only to find that the businessman's collection was primarily composed of fakes, including Storm on the Sea of Galilee. Hopes dashed. It's a pretty common cycle when it comes to the gardener. A tip comes in, hopes soar, and then reality just takes you out by the knees. Sucker punch to the gut, right hook to the face. And that's what happened in 1994, when Anne Hawley received a bright, joyous burst of hope. She had received a ransom letter. It was typed and the writing was sophisticated, almost lawyerly. It included details about the heist that no one but those involved would know. Bonafides established, the letter continued with an offer. The museum could have the stolen works back in exchange for $2.6 million, and assurances that the FBI would halt investigations during the negotiation process. The letter writer, the person mediating the return, claimed that he was not responsible for the theft. Or I suppose she, but weirdly enough, there's never been a female suspect really in the Gardner case, so we'll go with him. The person had had nothing to do with it, but they did know where the stolen works were and how to get them back. Hawley and the Gardner Museum were ready to play ball. The FBI was not. As Hawley and the museum started brokering this deal, it was clear that not everyone at the FBI had gotten the message to stop investigating. Hawley had no idea about any of this until a second letter was delivered to the museum. It chastised her for not upholding their side of the bargain. The ransom writer proclaimed that the museum could either get the paintings back, or they could arrest someone who wasn't even directly responsible for the heist. In capital letters, they emphasized, you cannot have both. The person writing these notes had reason to be a little nervous. No matter how many promises were made about immunity from prosecution, seasoned criminals know better than to take those to heart. Even after the Statute of Limitations expired in 1995, there are always a variety of other charges that have longer statutes, like trafficking stolen art across state lines. The writer was just protecting themselves. After that second letter, the museum never heard from the person again. Hawley was devastated. Some of that devastation still lingers today. Hawley has said that the ransom letter from 1994 was by far the most credible lead during her 25 years as director of The Gardener. As far as I know, the year 1995 didn't come with any major breaks in the case. However, that was the year that brought us one of the most iconic aspects of the Gardner Heist. After five years in storage, the museum retrieved the empty frames of the works stolen during the heist and placed them back on the walls in their respective places. The museum did this in part to honor Isabella Stewart Gardner's directive in her will, which again stated that there should be no significant changes to her beloved collection or its display. Hanging the empty frames, though, was also a powerful statement and visual, one that reminds every single visitor of the great losses incurred on that night, or I guess that morning, in March of 1990. Just this year in 2025, the frames from the Dutch Room, so of the Vermeer, the Flink, the two Rembrandts, and presumably the Rembrandt etching, were restored and re-hung as part of an ongoing restoration. That's how long we've been waiting for the return of the Gardner works. Long enough that even the empty frames have gotten a refresh. On the seventh anniversary of the heist in March of 1997, the museum's board of directors upped the reward for the return of the works from $1 million to $5 million. And at this point, I believe all of the reward money, minus maybe the first $1 million, I don't know about that, but all of it seems to have been coming from the Gardener, which was in a much better place financially in the late 90s than they were when the heist took place. In large part because of the heist. Apparently, nothing spurs donations and visitor numbers, like being the site of the most devastating museum heist in history. But hey, whatever drives engagement. I would say that we'll take silver linings when we get them, but this lining seems to have been pure gold. Which is not to say that they would not have preferred to have these precious works of art back. I'm just saying they made a lot of money in the aftermath. Surprise, surprise, the upped reward naturally brought people out of the woodwork. And just a few months later, there was a major swell of hope in the case. When the Boston Herald ran a front page story with a massive headline in bold reading, We've seen it. No one had to wonder what it referred to, because the front page also had a large image of Rembrandt's Storm on the Sea of Galilee. The article was the work of reporter Tom Mashburg, who thought he had cracked the case wide open. Mashburg had followed a lead to a sketchy warehouse in Brooklyn. The source arranged for him to gain access to one of the lockups in the warehouse. The person mediating the visit pulled out a long, heavy cardboard tube, one that contained rolled-up canvas. The man released it from its container and unrolled it. Mashberg swears up, down, left, right, center, that the painting illuminated by a single flashlight in the dark was none other than Rembrandt's Storm on the Sea of Galilee. I'm going to make you wait until part two to hear more about that encounter and its subsequent developments. But I think from context clues, namely that the heist is still unsolved and none of the works recovered, you can probably gander that nothing really came from this. Again, if you are interested, I will go more into that story in parts two. Unrelated to Mashburg's story, in 1997, the FBI reported to the museum that they had a good idea of who had committed the heist, even mentioning a certain crime gang operating out of an auto body shop in the Dorchester area of Boston. We'll get to that in due time, but again, a non-spoiler, spoiler alert. Nothing really comes from this, or at least has not come from it yet. I know that we are almost 30 years removed from 1997, which is an incredibly upsetting realization, but it should become clear over the course of the later part of the episode why following this particular lead has been difficult. It mostly boils down to a lot of people being dead. Ooh. But before we get to those guys, the criminals, allegedly, I want to give a nod to a couple of people who have dedicated much of their lives and careers to getting the Gardner works back. One such individual was Harold J. Smith, an independent art investigator who did work for auction houses like Lloyd's and Christie's. This guy was a character, outside and in. He wore a bowler hat, he had facial prosthetics following his battles with skin cancer, and my favorite part, he had an eye patch. Smith regularly worked 12-hour days, six days a week, as an insurance investigator specializing in arts and jewelry. He was never hired for the Gardner case, and for good reason, that will become apparent shortly. Instead, he followed the case like a dog with a bone for free in his own time at his own dime. From 1990 Until his death to cancer in 2005. Author Ulrich Boser, who literally wrote the book on the Gardner Heist, or I suppose now one of the books, but you know, I still think of it as the book. Boser met with Smith in the lead up to his death when the 78-year-old seemed spunkier than ever despite being severely ill. Boser asked Smith why the Gardner case haunted him so badly. Smith responded, quote, There are hundreds of thousands of people who would be deprived of seeing that art. Losing that art is like losing our history, our culture, but I want it back. End quote. His dedication to getting the works back for the city of Boston was absolute and never ceasing. Unfortunately, his body was not. Harold J. Smith died in February 2005 at the age of 79. If history had been different, Smith finding the Gardner works would have made a story for the ages. But the world doesn't work that way, and Smith went to the grave with the Gardner case unsolved. You can imagine that it might have been a torment for Smith to die without knowing what happened to the Gardner works, much less getting them back. But in his final hours, Smith was surrounded by a loving family, including many children. I think he had like 10 children, some of whom follow in his footsteps as art investigators. It is an important reminder, one that we need often when talking about something like the Gardner case. And I don't just mean this in a cliched way. So many more things. Would I personally throw myself in front of a speeding bus if it meant getting the Vermeer back? Probably. I would also maybe throw myself in front of a bus for Rembrandt's Storm on the Sea of Galilee. The rest of the eleven? Uh-uh. But I would not, in a million years, choose that over the health and happiness of my family. That is something that I think, rather presumptuously, that Harold J. Smith would agree with me on. Now, would Smith have preferred to die surrounded by love, also knowing what happened to the Gardner works? Yeah, of course he would. But one out of two ain't bad. For those wanting to know more about Harold J. Smith and his work on The Gardener, there is a documentary. Uh, it came out in 2005. It's called Stolen, but I can't find it to watch. So if anyone out there knows of a place where I can get it streaming or even on DVD, I still have the technology to play those. Please do let me know because I would absolutely love to know more about the utterly fascinating man that is Harold J. Smith. About six months or so after Smith's death in 2005, the Gardner case got a new injection of life, when the museum hired Anthony Amore to serve as head of security, which also made him chief investigator for the museum into the Gardner heist. Now the FBI are still the ones in charge of the case, but the Gardner remains an active partner in that investigation, all the more so after Amore's arrival in 2005. Amore had previously worked for the Department of Homeland Security, something that earned him the respect of his colleagues at the FBI, who became much more open to sharing things about the case, including very sensitive information that was parts of the police file. There's not a ton uh available to the public about those, naturally, but interestingly, you can find a digitized version of the police report filed the day of the heist. It's handwritten, absolutely riddled with spelling errors, which, whatever, a pen doesn't have a spell check. But at one point an officer does refer to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum as the Elizabeth Gardner Museum, which is uh not very confidence-inducing. But the reports overall is a very not fun, fun's not the right word for an assault and devastating theft, but it is very illuminating and it's very interesting to read. I will link that on the podcast website along with other sources. Anthony Amore, thankfully, is a much better writer than whoever filled out that report. Despite not having any obvious connections to art crime before he was hired at the Gardener, Amore has since written at least three books on the subject. He might have just come out with a with a fourth, including one co-authored with Tom Mashberg, the reporter who allegedly saw Rembrandt's storm on the Sea of Galilee back in 1997. They don't really talk about that in the book Stealing Rembrandt's, because Amori asked Mashberg not to. But still, it's an interesting duo, particularly as Amori seems to have gotten more reticent to talk to the media these days. And that uh that makes it sound like he's not doing any kind of public engagement, which just isn't true. He does talks, he does some interviews, morning shows, various things like that, but everything that he shares in those sort of public-facing events is all old news. He is big into keeping the investigation private and not telling the public much, if anything at all. He seems especially annoyed by the idea of citizen sleuthery, which is to say armchair detectives. That assertion that he's not uh super into that, is based on some of the things he said in an episode of the Last Scene podcast in 2018. His sentiments boil down to butt out and let the professionals do their job. And hey, I get that. But like my buddy Gene said in our WhatsApp conversation, which, let me tell you, is at its absolute most unhinged when we are talking about the Gardner case. But amidst all of that, she made the excellent point that we are 35 years removed from the heist. Traditional investigative methods have not led to the recovery of any of these works. Maybe it's time to try something new. Do I think Amore will agree with that? No! I mean, the guy worked for the Department of Homeland Security. I think it's safe to say that he's a traditionalist. But if it brings back the Gardner works, hmm, might be worth it. In Anthony Amore's time as head of security, there have been some developments in the case, though certainly not as many as one would hope, and nothing that I would personally call a breakthrough. Then again, I only know what's made public, so maybe, maybe there were some massive things that we just don't know about. But to this day, one of the most promising developments, at least it seemed at the time, was a 2013 press conference, one that took place on the 23rd anniversary of the heist. They really like to do that. They like to capitalize on the anniversaries, as they should. At that particular anniversary press conference, the head of the FBI, Richard DeLaurier, joined forces with U.S. District Attorney Carmen Ortiz. They announced that the FBI was entering the quote-unquote final chapter of the investigation. Without naming names, conveniently, they shared that they believed the FBI knew the two men responsible for the theft, and both were now dead. They also said that there was strong evidence for the stolen works having been in Philadelphia and Connecticut in the early 2000s, when they were being moved through a criminal organization based in New England. DeLaurier and Ortiz, however, also admitted that they had no idea where the works were now, you know, 2013. But Ortiz took this opportunity to reiterate the offer on the table. Whoever returned the works or assisted in their recovery would receive $5 million and be immune from prosecution. That alleged final chapter has lasted over 12 years with no end in sight and no major leads to follow, at least not that the public is aware of. That includes the years since 2017, when the museum sweetened the honey pot even further by doubling the reward from $5 million to $10 million, with an extra $100,000 thrown into the mix for the return of the Eagle Finial. At the time, that reward was intended to be a temporary offer, one that would expire on January 1st, 2018. For those on the case, the lead up to the New Year's deadline must have been as exciting as it was excruciating. Imagine the way their hearts would jump every time the phone rang or an email pinged. But January 1st, 2018 came and went, and the reward remained unclaimed. Rather than revert back to the $5 million, the museum has since made the decision to keep the reward at $10 million. But as of July 23rd, 2025, not a penny of that has been paid out. And so the final chapter continues on. While many of the people involved in the investigation have retired, including former director of the museum, Anne Hawley, and several FBI agents who spearheaded the investigation at one point or another, as of 2025, Anthony Amore is still on the case. And he continues, at least outwardly, to have the utmost confidence in the ongoing investigation. In a 2025 interview, he says, quote, the good news about art theft is that more than 70% of them are recovered. And that's a number that will go up when I get the Gardner paintings back. End quote. The man is very confident. I am not so sure. I agree with former U.S. attorney Donald Stern, who once said that he had no idea what more the museum could do to entice those with information to come forward. He said, quote, short of giving them a ride to the museum, I'm not sure what else we could offer them. This is a no-brainer. It baffles me that they weren't returned long ago. End quote. While I agree with Stern, I also hope that I am wrong, which is not something I hope to be very often. Now that you have a broad overview of the heist and its investigation, let's turn our attention to the other question of the hourslash two hours. Who done it? The answer is simple. We don't know. But there is a long list of suspects. Normally, I try to make my transitions a little bit smoother, but I am now transitioning into the aforementioned section that is 11,865 words. It's very long and it contains a lot of names. My original plan was to give like a 15-minute overview of the suspects in the case, but then I started writing and I just didn't stop for like three weeks. And now here we are. Or at least I'm still here. I very much hope that you are too. Here goes something. According to the FBI, about 80% of museum thefts are inside jobs, meaning they are perpetrated or potentially facilitated by someone working for the institution. With the Gardner Heist, police suspected an inside job from the start. It was one of the only ways to explain some of the peculiarities of the crime scene. For example, in the Dutch Room, from which the majority of the works were pillaged, there was a secret door built into the wall on which the storm on the Sea of Galilee hung. That door opened into a private stairwell. This door completely blends in with the wall, and it was opened during the heist. This could have a very simple explanation. Maybe as the robbers took the storm on the Sea of Galilee off the wall, it popped open. But equally likely, if not I think slightly more likely, is that the people doing the crime knew that that door was there the whole time. The robbers also seemed to know quite a bit about the museum's security, including the location of security tapes that would have recorded their arrival. Either they had inside knowledge or they had thoroughly cased the joint beforehand, studying the placement of security cameras, the general systems used to monitor the galleries, etc. If it was an inside job, the most obvious motive would be to claim insurance money. But here's the kicker. Ergo, therefore, there were no insurance claims to make. At first, this might be a real huh moment for some listeners, but it is impractical, if not impossible monetarily, for a smaller collection, or really any collection, to insure a $200 million painting, much less a bunch of them. Now you would think that the Gardner board, which holds the power of the purse, would recognize that, hey, our works are not insured. We should probably listen to our head of security who keeps telling us we need to update our security systems beyond stopgap measures, just in case some thieves try to rob us. I would say that hindsight is 2020, but that should have been painfully obvious at the time as well. Particularly because the head of security did have a record of telling them that the security system wasn't good enough. The museum itself has never been a serious suspect. I'm sure it was probably considered in the immediate aftermath of the heist that the museum might have something to do with it, because hey, when the wife gets murdered, it's usually the husband. In this case, the artwork is the wife, and the museum staff andor board is the husband. Thankfully, that does not seem to be the situation. There are, however, different kinds of inside jobs. The higher-ups and big muckety mucks at the gardener didn't necessarily need to be involved for it to still be an inside job. In this inside job situation, we're talking about crime being carried out by or in collaboration with someone or someone's with deep knowledge of the museum's security systems and working procedures. Enter stage left, security guard Richard Rick Abbeth. To start, it is important to note that there has never been any conclusive evidence that Rick Abbith had anything to do with the heist except being a victim. That's an important point to make, particularly given that Abbath died in February of 2024. So relatively recently, and I have no interest in talking trash about the recently deceased, at least not publicly. It is nevertheless impossible to talk about the Gardner Heist and not talk about Abbith and all of the suspicions surrounding him. I'll repeat, 80% of museum thefts are inside jobs. At the time of the heist, Abbh was 23 years old. He loved The Grateful Dead, and he wanted nothing more than to do drugs and make it big with his band, which was basically a knockoff of The Grateful Dead. In March of 1990, he'd been working at the museum for about a year, and he had recently put in his two weeks' notice. That must have been a huge relief for his boss, because boy oh boy, was Abbott an absolutely terrible security guard. His most common offense was turning up for his shifts while high or semi-drunk, and his most egregious, yes, egregious, act was when he celebrated Christmas Eve 1989 by sipping blue goo made from psychedelic mushrooms. This was directly before he showed up for his guard shift with a few friends in tow. They spent the entire night absolutely off their faces on whatever this blue goo was, and drinking really bad gin in Isabella Stuart Gardner's prized courtyard. Like I said, terrible security guard. His actions the night of the heist, by which I mean the early hours of March 18th, weren't as bad as that, but they are suspicious as heck. The most obvious of those errors was opening the door to the two men, who, yeah, looked like police officers, but it was museum policy not to let anyone in the museum after hours, even police. He claimed that in training, it was not made clear that no one included police. His fellow security guards disagree. I do sympathize with Abbott on this point, though, at least in theory. If the two men are indeed police, I'd be worried that if I didn't let them in, there'd be more trouble. Now, to be clear, as a woman who has read the newspaper a few times in her life and has listened to her fair share of true crime podcasts, you should never open the door or pull over in a sketchy area without first calling the police department, because impersonating police officers is one of the oldest tricks in the book. And as of March 18, 1990, the Gardner Heist became a prime example of that. I should also add that earlier in the night, like an hour, hour and a half before this all went down, a fire alarm had gone off in the carriage house. Abbott responded to that immediately, and it turned out to be nothing. As he would later state, though, Abbith's first thought when he saw the police at the door was that they or someone else had heard that alarm and came to check things out. I can understand that logic. And again, to be fair to Abbit, it's also clear that the whole you don't open the doors after hours thing might have been a little lax. Because the night before, Rick had let someone else into the museum. In 2015, 25 years after the heist, the FBI released what was at that time characterized as a bombshell development in the case. Security footage from the night before, which showed a man arrive in a car that looked remarkably similar to the ones that the thieves had used. The man rolled up to the museum at 12.48 a.m., almost exactly 24 hours before the robbers. He rang the doorbell and he was let in by Abbath. In their 2015 publication, the FBI strongly implied that this man may have been doing a dry run of the heist the night before, and they asked the public for help identifying him. It turns out that this was a big nothing burger because the man in the footage was almost certainly the Gardener's deputy director of security. Abbott was letting in his boss. Should he have? No, probably not. But also, if it's against the rules, why is the boss asking a 23-year-old kid to let him into the museum after hours? Even Holly says that she had plans the night of the 18th to bring some people by the museum. She regrets that she didn't because she would have been there at the time that these phony police officers showed up. It's clear the whole you don't let anyone in the door thing was a little lax, to say the least. What remains inexplicable though, when talking about the door, is that on Abbus's first and only round on March 18th, he opened the door to Palace Road, took a look around, and then closed it. Abbott claimed that he did this every time he did the rounds, but that is something that, to my knowledge, old security logs disprove. Opening a door to the outside, you know, just to check what's going on. On was never part of his routine. On the night of the heist, he did this at 1.04 a.m., exactly 20 minutes before the men came to the door. There is also the fact that on the night of the heist, the security logs show that the one person who for sure entered the blue room was Rick Abbeth. That is the gallery on the first floor that exhibited Shea Tortoni, a small oil painting by Manet. It was the only work taken from the first floor, and the security system never registered any disturbances during the heist. It shows Rick Abbeth entering and leaving the room earlier and nothing else. Later, the museum hired a consultant to figure out what had gone wrong with that particular system, because the ones on the second floor were lighting up like fireworks on the freaking 4th of July. The consultant found that the security system in the blue room was in perfect working order. He tested it something like a hundred times, and every single time it detected his presence. And he was trying to bamboozle it. So either something just happened the night of the heist and the perfectly operational security system in the blue room didn't go off, or the painting of Shea Tortoni was taken by the only person proven to have been in the room that night, Abbith. To boot, the frame of Shea Tortoni was brought into the security office and placed on the chair of the head of security, the man to whom Abbith had given his two weeks' notice just a few days before. That all looks really bad for Abbh, something that Abbith has actively acknowledged. But no matter how suspicious this all looked, he swore to his dying day that he had nothing to do with the heist. His coworkers seem to agree. They agree that, sure, he was a terrible security guard, but a criminal mastermind? Not so much. While they have never publicly accused Abbott of aiding and abetting this crime, it is clear that the FBI and the museum's security people are not convinced of his innocence. In the immediate aftermath of the crime, Abbath seems to have been mostly cooperative, but he also seemed unfazed by the situation. Hours after being let out of police custody, or, you know, whatever you call it when you question people, he rolled up to a Grateful Dead concert and enjoyed the show, seemingly unfazed. As time went on, though, Abbath became significantly less cooperative. I don't blame him for that because at some point, you just want to move on with your life. Naturally, uh, for someone who wanted to move on, Abbith later claimed to be writing a book about the heist from his perspective. He even published some early draft materials online, though the project never seems to have amounted to anything. Mind you, writing a book about your version of events isn't incriminating. The pages, however, do outline just how terrible of a guard Abbott was. He discloses just how many drugs he was doing at the time: LSD, magic mushrooms, cocaine, marijuana, booze. And he readily admits to being drunk and or high on many of his night shifts. This, my friends, was the best that the Gardner board was willing to afford. Abbus admissions, which I mean they're not admissions, he was never quiet about these things, but they do bring up a possible motive. In 1990s Boston, and I don't know, maybe today, drug deals were the bread and the butter, the meth and the pipe, if you will, of the Boston Mafia. Anyone doing a lot of drugs in 90s Boston was in fairly frequent contact with at least low-level mafia figures. Maybe Abbott had a debt that he needed paying. Maybe he inadvertently shared the wrong information with the wrong people while high or drunk. But are all of those things a coincidence? Something that would suggest he wasn't actively involved is the fact that Abbott lived a modest and seemingly normal life after the heist. There were never any signs of suspicious payments or activity that one might expect if he had played an active role. He moved to Vermont, he got married, had two kids, went back to school, got along with his neighbors, and all without losing his hippie sensibilities. When talking to Story Core in 2015, Abbott hoped that he would be remembered not for his actions as a 23-year-old kid, but for all of the good things he had done and achieved in the decades after. While those close to him will hopefully fulfill that request, it is clear that Rick Abbith remains one of the more compelling figures in the Gardner case, even in death. For all that you hear about Rick Abbith, you don't hear virtually anything about the other security guard on duty. While his full name is out there, he has previously asked other outlets not to use it, so I'm just going to refer to him by his first name, Randy. You heard about his experience of the heist at the top of the episode. Or should I say I wrote that using information we have from Randy about the heist. I chose to do that because I believe Randy is the person who lost the most. I say that not to downplay the losses of the museum or the violation that the museum and the public felt when these things were stolen. That is all very valid. I instead mean to emphasize the pricelessness of things like psychological well-being, the feeling of safety in your home, and the luxury of not having your name attached to the greatest art heist ever. Randy wasn't even supposed to be working that night. He was doing a favor for a sick colleague. Instead, he wound up handcuffed with duct tape around his head and cuffed to a sink in a basement for over six hours, during which he genuinely thought that he might die. What is weird, and what I didn't, I don't know if it's weird, but it's weird to me, which is that the FBI has never released images of Randy in the aftermath of the heist. The photos that you see of a man cuffed and with duct tape around his head, those are all Rick Abbeth. I don't know why they haven't released images of Randy. Do they show something that only the, you know, the perps would know? I don't know. But if his experience was even half as nightmarish as Rick Abbeth's looked, he too had a rough night. Unlike Abb, and perhaps in direct contrast to him, Randy has never been painted as anything more than a victim. And from what little is out there about his post-heist life, he seems to have been profoundly affected by the events of that night. I don't know whether or not it's true, but in the draft pages of his book, Rick Abbott claimed that Randy now spends most of his time at sea working as a musician on a cruise ship, and that he seems to be actively avoiding spending time in the US. In early reporting, there was a bit of an undertone, if not an overtone, of why didn't the guards do more? These guys were in their early 20s making $11 an hour. As Randy himself has said, he cooperated with the thieves because the museum didn't pay him enough to get hurt. I don't know what the hourly rate for that would be, but it sure as hell ain't 11 bucks. Even if Rick Abbith was an inside guy, or potentially inadvertently gave someone bad information, or I suppose depending on who you were, good information, we know for sure that two men dressed as Boston cops entered the museum on that night. Who were they? Who sent them? Who helped them get away? There are so many theories when it comes to this particular aspect of the gardener who done it. Far too many to go into here, though I tried to pick out the main ones. And by main ones, I'm pretty sure that I talk about at least a dozen people. Having research, OCD, and a little touch of regular OCD, not to brag, but I'm diagnosed, means that sometimes, oftentimes, all the time, this type of thing does have a habit of happening. But you know what I always say? Other than I'm an art historian doing my best, better a research habit than a drug one, which is a piece of advice that some of the people that I'm about to talk about could have benefited from once upon a time. One thing that most of the people I'm about to talk about have in common is their ties to the mafia scene, specifically the Boston Mafia, which comprised several crime gangs that were always trying to murder each other. That's an oversimplification, but go with it. If there is one thing that you learn while researching the Gardner heist, it's that you never, ever want to get involved with the Boston Mafia. Because you might just end up as a corpse in the trunk of a car. And no, that's not one of my terrible jokes that happens to several people involved in this story. Let's start with a name that some of you may have heard of: Whitey Bulger. Bulger was an infamous member of the Irish mob in Boston, and he is a man who has pulled off many high-profile crimes over the course of decades. He is perhaps best known for eluding the FBI for 16 years between 1994 and 2011, and for serving as an FBI informant in the 70s and 80s. In the immediate aftermath of the heist in 1990, Bulger was one of the first people under suspicion. As a very proud Irish American, particularly one with a strong penchant upon champ for violence, Bolger maintained strong ties to the Irish Republican Army, the IRA, who in the 90s were wreaking havoc in Northern Ireland and the UK, all in their bid, of course, for Irish independence. For more, see one of my favorite TV shows, Dairy Girls. You'll get the gist. The suspicion was that Bulger may have arranged the theft at the Gardner Museum in order to ransom the paintings to fund IRA efforts across the pond. It's a good theory. But Bolger told his contacts at the FBI that he had nothing to do with the heist, and in fact was trying to figure out who did it himself. Not for the good of the public, but because Bulger was pissed as heck that this had taken place on his turf without him knowing. He wanted his cut, and so he put his own crew on a mission to figure out who did it. Only to come up with dead ends and competing information, all of which led nowhere. Whether or not that is true, uh maybe, but also maybe not. One of the many recurring themes in our discussion of potential perpetrators is men with a history of being awful, and I mean like awful, criminally and otherwise, swearing up and down that they had nothing to do with the Gardner business. Are these individuals trustworthy? No. But does that mean they're lying? Also, no. And that makes this really difficult. One such man is Brian McDevitt, or was Brian McDevitt, as he is believed to be deceased. The fact that I just said it that way should tell you everything that you need to know about McDevitt. He was the kind of person who lived his life in such a way that even in death, you wouldn't be all that surprised to find his grave empty, and two days after his funeral, find him on your doorstep asking for money. I've got a couple of family members like that, but thankfully, given that I have my PhD in art history, they know better than to ask me for money. McDevitt was a talented con man and art thief. One FBI agent even described him as being on the same level as Bernie Madoff, the best of the best at being the worst. In the early 1980s, McDevitt had tried to wipe out an art collection in Glen Falls, New York, where he'd been posing as a member of the Vanderbilt family. After weeks of casing a museum, McDevitt and an accomplice dressed up like delivery men kidnapped a FedEx driver for access to her vehicle and were en route to the museum to carry out their plans only to get stuck in traffic. In the meantime, the museum had closed and the staff had gone home. There was no one there to receive a phony package and presumably get chloroformed like the poor FedEx driver. McDevitt and his accomplice were caught and both spent several years in prison, as they should. In March of 1990, McDevitt was living in Boston. Naturally, the FBI suspected him immediately and interviewed him soon after the heist. And then they interviewed him again. The attempted robbery on the Hyde Collection in Glen Falls and the Gardener had certain things in common. In addition to the costumes they were wearing on their way to the botched heist, McDevitt and his accomplice also had duct tape and tools for cutting out paintings. His main victim, the FedEx driver, had also said that for a kidnapper, McDevitt had been strangely polite and reassuring. He reiterated several times how sorry he was, tried to keep her cuffs comfortable, and said that no harm would come to her. Then again, McDevitt had subdued her by gassing her with ether, so, you know, maybe not the most trustworthy guy. McDevitt absolutely lapped up the attention he got following the Gardner robbery, capitalizing on rumors that he had participated in the heist by talking to reporters. He told them he'd been questioned and fingerprinted, something that was no nevermind to him because he had nothing to hide. Two years later, however, he told his girlfriend, Stephanie, that he had committed the heist and had been paid $300,000 to do so. Our girl Stephanie was a meticulous journaler. She referred back to the entries from around the time of the heist, and they attest that McDevitt was acting sketchy as hell. In the days leading up to March 18th, she wrote that McDevitt had been, quote unquote, dicky on the phone, a girl after my own heart. She also said that he had been agitated and cagey, telling her she wouldn't hear from him for a few days while he was away in New York for a conference. Stephanie later learned that that conference was on a completely different weekend. Then, miraculously, just three days later, on March 18, 1990, she wrote that McDevitt was in a much better mood, even calling him cheery, and she had no idea what had caused the change of heart. A heist gone right, mayhaps? By the time that McDevitt had, quote unquote, disclosed his role in the Gardner heist to Stephanie, she knew that she was in deep with a con artist. That became all the clearer when McDevitt asked Stephanie to provide an alibi for the day of the heist. She told him no. As they usually do when your boyfriend asks you to provide him with an alibi, things escalated from there. A few months later, McDevitt told Stephanie that not only was the FBI after him, but so were the people who had paid him for the heist. He knew too much, and he needed to flee the country to keep himself safe. He asked her to go with him. Again, she said no, which was the correct answer, and she never saw or heard from him again. On the bright side, your con man boyfriend fleeing the country is about as close to a clean breakup as you can get. Then again, Stephanie herself became the next best person to McDevitt, and she was soon being questioned by the FBI. While he was perfectly fine fleeing the country, McDevitt was not ready to extract himself from the Gardner investigation. He just couldn't help himself. He was even featured on an episode of 60 Minutes in 1993, in which he acted as a kind of consultant expert on art heists, which is weird because his most high-profile art heist was a botched one. On TV at least, he still denied his involvement in the robbery, though he said, quote, this was clearly an operation that somebody paid for. He implied that someone must have told the thieves exactly which works to steal, even admitting, quote, that's what I used to do, end quote. In the 90s and early 2000s, McDevitt was also in frequent contact with a reporter, Nat Segoloff. That is how Segoloff learned that McDevitt was living in Medellin, Colombia, where he continued to con people out of money. In their conversations, McDevitt talked often about art theft and the Gardner in particular, but he never admitted directly to doing it himself, as he'd done with Stephanie. For his part, Segalov believes that McDevitt was responsible for the Gardner, and he's not alone in that suspicion. Several people involved in the Gardner case believe McDevitt was indeed responsible. That includes Randy, the security guard, who, like the kidnapped FedEx woman, described one of the thieves as being oddly polite. He even identified McDevitt in a photographic lineup, saying that he was 90 to 95% certain that the person who cuffed him was McDevitt. One person who does not believe that McDevitt did it is Anthony Amore, who is again the Gardner's director of security and their chief investigator on the heist case. Amore believes that if McDwitt really was responsible for the heist, he wouldn't have been able to keep it a secret from the world. His mouth was just too big and his desire for infamy too strong. Once the Statute of Limitations was up in 1995, when McDevitt had allegedly already fled the country, he was free to blab as much as he wanted, but he didn't. Brian McDevitt is said to have died in Columbia in 2004, something that Nat Segoloff has not been able to confirm but believes is true. Because like so many years before with Stephanie, Sagalov never heard from McDevitt again. As we have already established, McDevitt was not the silent type. If he wasn't talking, it was because death had deprived him of his voice. From theft and kidnapping to being an absolutely horrific boyfriend, it is crystal clear that Brian McDevitt was responsible for many, many crimes in his lifetime. What remains unclear is if the Gardner heist was one of them. If Brian McDevitt was more con man than art thief, our next suspect is the opposite. He is a con man, yes, but unlike McDevitt, he had actually pulled off art heists, many of them. So many that he is frequently referred to as one of, if not the greatest art thieves in the world. Miles Connor Jr. But I'm not going to go into his whole backstory because there is absolutely no way that Miles Connor Jr. committed the Gardner heist, because he had the extremely good alibi of being in prison. Another person who definitely didn't do the heistin was Connor's sometimes friend, sometimes enemy, William Youngworth III. Youngworth was also in custody at the time of the heist, and yet his name comes up almost as frequently as Connor's does in discussions of The Gardener. Now I can hear you asking, Lindsay, why do people suspect two men who were in prison at the time of the heist? The answer is simple. Miles Connor Jr. was a renowned art thief who stole a Rembrandt in broad daylight from the Museum of Fine Arts Boston about 10 years before. Connor then used the painting as a bargaining chip, negotiating not just no charges for the theft of the Rembrandt, but also a lighter prison sentence. For another art-related crime. The man knew what he was doing. When $500 million in precious art objects go missing, Miles Connor is usually the name at the top of everyone's list. Even if he could not have actively participated in the heist himself. As for William Youngworth III, also known as Billy, Youngworth is often described as an antiques dealer and an art connoisseur. He also has a permanent record that includes drug charges, weapons, possessions, and armed robbery. You know, your average activities for an antiquitarian art connoisseur. Youngworth and Connor were friends and associates, at least for a time. When Connor embarked on an extensive prison sentence, he entrusted his art collection to a shared acquaintance of his and Youngworth's. That person, David Houghton, died while Connor was in prison, leaving Connor's collection in the hands of Youngworth, who proceeded to sell it off bit by bit to support a newfound extracurricular activity, cocaine. By 1997, most of Connor's collection was gone, and he was languishing in prison. 1997 was also when Youngworth was facing a hefty prison sentence for possessing a variety of things that he should definitely not have had. In a last-ditch effort to avoid prison and bring himself back into Connor's good graces, Youngworth made an interesting life choice. He started talking to reporters outside of the courthouse where he was set to be haranged on drug and firearms possession charges. Youngworth told the press that he could facilitate the return of 11 of the 13 stolen works from the Gardner. He did, however, have conditions. Four of them. One, no prison sentence for his current charges. Two, the reward, which at this point was $5 million. 3. Immunity from any prosecution related to the heist or any of the stolen works. And four, the immediate release from prison of his friend Miles Connor Jr. Negotiations for the return of the works started immediately, with journalist Tom Mashberg playing a key role in hunting down and following this particular lead. You heard Mashberg's name earlier. As a longtime reporter for the Boston Herald, Mashberg is now a household name in the Gardner Heist, not because he perpetrated it, but because he's been writing about it for decades. But as of 1997, he was still relatively new to covering the case, and he had basically stumbled onto this particular lead. After someone he was interviewing in prison mentioned that Miles Connor Jr. knew who had perpetrated the Gardner heist. The source even named some names, including David Houghton, Connor's longtime but now late friend, who he had entrusted with his art collection when he went into the clink. As for the second person, we will talk about him shortly. Mashberg followed this lead hard. One of the first people he put through the ringer was Youngworth, who Mashberg saw as a gateway to Connor. But from Mashberg's reporting, it's clear that Youngworth knew absolutely nothing about the heist. What Mashberg never doubted was the fact that Youngworth had inside information about where the works were as of 1997. Why else would he host a press conference proclaiming that he could broker the return of 11 of the 13 works? An oddly specific number. Youngworth even arranged to show Mashburg proof of life for one of the Gardner paintings, Rembrandt's Storm on the Sea of Galilee. You heard a little bit about that earlier, and you'll hear more about it in episode 45. For a variety of reasons, some of them good and some of them, in my opinion, unfounded, the museum and the FBI were very hesitant to believe Youngworth's claims, even with Mashberg swearing that he saw the Rembrandt. They wanted more proof, proof that Youngworth provided, but that the FBI deemed untrustworthy and inconclusive, and negotiations quickly soured. Mashberg, however, was not ready to give up. He teamed up with a few private citizens, including an anonymous trustee of the Gardner Museum, and continued to work with Youngworth to arrive at an agreement, one that included a $1.5 million payout if he could provide significant information about the location of the works. In a Vanity Fair article from 1998, Mashberg asserts his theory. Youngworth accidentally came across the works over the course of his very poor custodianship of Miles Connor Jr.'s collection. In the end, though, it came to nothing, and Youngworth spent significant time in prison, something that could have been altogether avoided if he had simply given up the goods. That is another constant in discussions around the who-done it of the Gardner heist. Many of the men who are suspects in the case have endured very long prison sentences that could have been avoided if they simply coughed up reliable information or proof of life about the Gardner works. There's really no good explanation for why someone who had this kind of information wouldn't share it, at least in theory. The stolen works weren't just a get out of jail free card, they were a get out of jail and collect five million dollars kind of card. And if you had that in your hand, you'd think you'd play it, especially when facing something like, I don't know, a 20-year prison sentence. Speaking of 20, 30, 40-year prison sentences, the next group of suspects are those related to the Merlino crime gang. Now, I have to make a confession here. This is Lindsay coming back during the editing process. While recording, I kept thinking the Merlino Crime Gang sounds like such a stupid name for a criminal organization, even if it's just a name that like reporters use. That is when I realized that I am pretty sure I have just taken to calling it that. I am the stupid name giver, but I've already recorded everything, so yeah. They are now the Merlino Crime Gang. You heard it here first. Now that I have confessed, past Lindsay, take it away. This is where things get a little bit more complicated with the different people and names involved. So if you're if you're already slightly confused, buckle up. I will try to keep it as straightforward as possible, but if you do get confused, and you probably will, I would recommend watching the Netflix documentary, This is a Robbery, which puts faces to names, something that I always find very helpful. I'm also going to try to put a suspects board on the podcast website so that you can again associate faces with names. The Merlino Crime Gang operated out of a fake auto body shop in Boston, but these men were not mechanics. They were straight-up criminals with direct ties to one of the most powerful mafia families in Boston. I would estimate, very roughly, that about 80% of the names that you encounter when researching the Gardner heist can be traced back, some way or another, to the Merlino crime gang. There's not only a lot of these men, but at least three of them are named Bobby. It's what makes it really hard to keep everything straight. In the early 90s, the FBI started to investigate the Merlino Crime Gang for their potential involvement in the Gardner heist. A little bit like with Brian McDevitt, the heist had a lot of the hallmarks associated with the Merlino Crime Gang members, such as planning to carry out their scheme on a big holiday or holiday-like event, when police attention is typically concentrated elsewhere. Events like Thanksgiving, the Super Bowl, and potentially St. Patrick's Day, which in Boston is basically Drunk Christmas Part 2 dressed in green. There's also the fact that at least one member of the gang had previously cased the gardener with the intention of eventually robbing it. While that might sound like a, you know, case closed situation, just because a person wanted to do a heist does not necessarily mean they did the heist. Not only was this particular person in prison as of March 18, 1990, but also many other gangs had cased the Gardener, which a lot of criminals seem to know had pretty lax security. I mean, for Pete's sakes, Miles Connor Jr. openly admits that he too cased the Gardener at some point. The fact that it took until 1990 for the museum to get robbed is actually quite impressive. The FBI, however, had plenty of other reasons that they were interested in the Merlino Crime Gang. They went so far as to plant someone undercover at the autobody shop, an incredibly dangerous job that lasted months, if not years. At one point, the guy even started wearing a wire, which must have been utterly terrifying. The men of the Merlino crime gang were hardened criminals. If the man was caught wearing a wire, or his real identity discovered, he would have almost certainly been killed, and before that, likely tortured. Thankfully, he was not caught. Several of the conversations that the man managed to record directly mention the Gardener, including one in which Carmelo Merlino himself, the namesake of the gang, said, quote, The museum will pay. They want those motherfuckers bad. End quote. In case you missed the context clues, the motherfuckers in question are the stolen gardener works. And while I have personally never referred to artworks as motherfuckers, I might just start, because I can't deny it has a little ring to it. It was that undercover agent that helped orchestrate a sting on the Merlino Crime Gang in 1999. The gang spent months arranging to break into and rob the Loomis Fargo armored car facility, a plan that included the use of heavy weaponry such as grenades. Instead, on the day that this was all set to go down, the men were intercepted, evidence was gathered, and all of them went away to prison for a very long time. We're talking decades. The idea was that in facing these charges, which for some of these men would have amounted to spending the rest of their lives in prison, that the men might be encouraged to share whatever it was they knew about the Gardner works, something that would have certainly saved them from spending decades rotting behind bars. In addition to Merlino himself, the sting also included the apprehension of a young man known as the Golden Boy Gangster, David Turner. Other people used different words to describe Turner. One of my favorite lines that I encountered while researching for the episode was from a former high school classmate of Turner's, who described Turner as, quote, big, loud, dumb, and pretty, end quote. The man contains multitudes. Turner was also dangerous. For someone so young, he was in, I think, his uh early 30s at this point, Turner had quite the rap sheet, with crimes including robbery and, allegedly, murder. Rather conveniently, at the time of the Gardner heist, Turner was renting an apartment just 15 minutes down the street from the museum. But on March 18th, he was in Florida. Or at least, he claimed to be in Florida. Now we do know that Turner was in Florida in the days before the heist. On March 15th, someone did see him in Miami. What was David Turner doing in Miami? He was spending hundreds of dollars at a store called Spy Shops of Miami. After that purchase, between the 15th and the 20th, we have no idea what Turner was doing or where he was. Then, on March 20th, someone used Turner's credit card at a car rental company. They were returning a vehicle. But, but, the driver's license number on the receipt is not Turner's. Investigative journalists Stephen Kirchchen and Kelly Horen discussed Turner's movements at this time in episode 4 of the Last Scene podcast. Both of them agree that Turner may have manufactured himself an alibi by leaving his credit card with an accomplice in Florida, making it seem like he had spent more time in Miami than he actually had. Between spending $600 plus dollars at a spy shop and an iffy car rental receipt, this all looks very fishy for Mr. Turner. The FBI clearly thought so as well, particularly after they received a tip in 1992 that Turner had access to some of the stolen Gardner works. It seemed like pretty good information at the time, because in the early 90s, Turner made quite the effort to get his hands on said artworks in order to barter his crime gang overlord, Carmelo Merlino, out of jail. In case you haven't noticed, these people are in and out of jail quite often. Despite his best golden boy gangster efforts, Turner failed to get any of the artworks. But the fact that he tried to get them suggests that he knew something. He even told Merlino's lawyer, quote, I was close, but someone got spooked. The best I can tell you is that they were in the basement of a church in South Boston. End quote. That tidbit of information sent the FBI a dig-in, but they found nothing in any of the churches that they searched. If we take Turner's word at face value, which probably not the best idea, but if we do, he clearly did not know the exact location of the works in 1992. But at one point, he may have known everything, because David Turner is one of the quote-unquote favorites for having been one of the robbers at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. There was even an FBI informant from the Merlino Crime Gang who swore that Turner was one of the guys. Turner was also selected from a photographic lineup by the high school students who had walked by the sketchy parked car around midnight on March 18th. Mind you, once those kids saw that the men might be cops, they scooted their boots right away from there. It's unclear how well they saw the men. Turner himself has always denied any direct involvement in the heist, at least to the FBI, the Gardner investigators, and journalists. That includes Ulrich Boser, who, while he was writing his book on the Gardner Heist, corresponded with Turner in prison. In one letter to Boser, Turner included a poem. He had even given it a title, Storm on the Sea of Galilee. It's hard to read this as anything but a taunt, perhaps even the poem equivalent of leaving an empty frame on the chair of the Director of Security. David Turner was released from prison for his role in the planned Loomis Fargo robbery in 2019. He had been behind bars for over two decades. Even then, though, the release came as a bit of a surprise, because it was 18 years earlier than expected. For a time, there was some hope that maybe, just maybe, Turner had finally decided to share information about the Gardner heist in exchange for a reduced sentence. But over the course of the last six years, nothing new has come to light. There's also the question of why Turner would have waited so long to share that information, if he indeed had information to share. But hey, people work in mysterious ways. There are, of course, several other individuals who journalists and the FBI and armchair sluice from around the world have suspected of being the potential Gardner thieves. And for the record, I say armchair sluice with great respect. Alongside David Turner, two names that you often see floated for the two thieves are Leonard Di Muzzio and George Reisfelder. One of the people who believes that DiMuzio and Reisfelder were responsible, and not Turner, is Jeff Kelly, the FBI agent who led the Gardner investigation for 22 years before he retired from the force in 2024. He is now a security consultant, and free, at least to some extent, to discuss the Gardner heist more freely than he has been able to do in the past. Earlier in the episode, you heard me mention a 2013 press conference held by the Boston FBI, the one in which they state with confidence that the two men they suspected of the heist were long dead. They did not, however, name names. Though journalists like Tom Mashberg and Stephen Kirkgen were able to deduce that the FBI was probably talking about DiMuzio and Reisfelder. Now, over 10 years later, Kelly confirms that those are indeed the two men he believes committed the heist. But he also strongly believes that they did not work alone. For one, several of the paintings would have been too large to fit in Reisfelder's Dodge Daytona, the very model of vehicle that the high schoolers recall seeing idling on Palace Road an hour or so before two men dressed as police buzzed the gardener's door. There had to have been another vehicle in wait, like a truck or a van. Kelly also believes that Rick Abbeth, the hapless security guard, had to have been in cahoots with these Boston criminals. Cahoots is a good word. Cahoots? As for the mastermind behind it all, Kelly thinks that it was none other than Carmelo Merlino. After the robbery, DiMuzio and Reisfelder were not long for this world. They both died over the course of the next year. Reisfelder was the first. He died in an alleged but highly suspicious overdose in March of 1991, exactly one week short of the first anniversary of the Gardner Heist. Almost 20 years after his little brother's death, Reisfelder's brother Richard came forward with a bombshell claim. He had seen a small oil painting in his brother's apartment, one that featured a man with a top hat, a description that aligns perfectly with Manet's Shea Tortoni. Reisfelder's ex-wife confirmed that she too remembers the painting. It stood out because it wasn't something that Reisfelder would otherwise have. Neither of them have any idea where the painting might have gone after Reisfelder's death. Richard, however, remains convinced that his brother was one of the men who robbed the gardener, all the more so after seeing police sketches of the men. When he saw the composite drawing, Richard immediately pointed to the slim-faced man and said, quote, That's my brother. The eyes are his. The back with a shotgun. It's hard to imagine that his death shortly after boasting about the gardener is just a coincidence. After all, bullets are as good a way as any to keep men silent, as is a lethal dose of liquid cocaine injected into the veins of a man who was said to be terrified of needles. Di Muzio, Marx, and Reisfelder. And then there's the fourth, Robert Bobby Donati. It's a name that you see constantly when reading about the Gardner Heist, and for good reason. In addition to being parts of the Merlino Crime Gang, Donati was also a close associate of Miles Connor Jr., the infamous art thief who was in prison at the time of the heist. Connor and Donati had even partnered on art thefts in the past. And Connor claims that when he cased the Gardener in the 1970s and 80s, Donati was by his side. They went so far as to identify the works that they personally liked best: a bronze Chinese vase for Connor and an Eagle Finial for Donati, both of which were taken during the heist and are among the more puzzling choices made by the thieves. After seeing a list of the objects taken, Connor claims he was convinced that Donati was one of the people who perpetrated the crime, even grabbing the Chinese coup that Connor had so admired decades earlier. In his autobiography, The Art of the Heist, Confessions of a Master Thief, Connor claims that he was visited by a mutual friend of his and Donati's in the wake of the Heist, David Houghton, the man that Connor had entrusted with his own art collection, before, of course, it was taken over by William Youngworth. Connor says that Houghton told him he and Donati were two of the key figures in the heist. Now there's no way that Houghton could have been one of the two men to enter the museum. He was morbidly obese, which doesn't fit the description of either thief. But as investigator Jeff Kelly himself has said, it has always been suspected that there were other people involved in the heist. Two thieves taking the works, and others helping with the getaway and the immediate storage of the art. Connor writes that he felt conflicted and uneasy after Houghton's visit. He did not think his friends knew just what they had gotten themselves into. Given what happens in the coming years, Connor was right to be disquieted. As much as Connor might like to think so, if Donati did do the Gardner heist, his chief motive was not to get Miles Connor out of jail, though that would certainly be a bonus. Donati instead wanted to use the art to leverage the release of another bobster, Vincent Vinnie Ferrara. Donati had served as Ferrara's wheelman, aka driver, for much of the 1980s, and this wasn't a limo-type situation with a glass partition. Donati drove a two-seater and Ferrara rode shotgun. In late 1989, Ferrara was arrested in relation to various crimes, including murder, and he was looking down the barrel of a very, very long prison sentence. Instead, he struck a plea deal, one that would put him behind bars for 22 years. He ended up serving just two-thirds of that sentence due to, you know, reasons, and was released in 2005. Unlike virtually every other mob-related person in this story, Ferrara has gone straight since his release from prison 20 years ago. And he seems, at least to me, like one of the more reliable narrators in this story. Then again, maybe I'm just a sucker. When he was investigating the Gardner heist on behalf of the Boston Globe, reporter Steven Kirkjin wrote a letter to Ferrara. It went unanswered for months. But then Kirkjin got a phone call. The man on the other line claimed that Ferrara wanted to relay some information, but not directly. Ferrara is incredibly smart, and he was being very careful in how he navigated this situation. Kirkjin confirmed the intermediary's identity and his ties to Ferrara. He believes that the man on the phone was telling the truth. First, Kirkchin shared, telling the caller the FBI's theory about David Turner's role in the heist. The caller was quick to correct him. Quote, they don't know what they're talking about. David Turner didn't have anything to do with this. If he did, he wouldn't be spending the best years of his life behind bars. End quote. Ferrara knew Turner, and he believed that the FBI had coordinated the Loomis Fargo sting in order to target Turner so that they could shake him down for information about the Gardner. It was a put-up that got Turner a 38-year sentence. But Ferrara knew that Turner didn't have anything to do with the Gardner heist. The intermediary relayed Ferrara's side of the story. He claims that Bobby Donati visited Ferrara in prison in early 1990, telling Ferrara not to worry. Donati had a plan for getting Ferrara out. Ferrara claims that he told, even begged Donati not to do anything stupid. Again, Ferrara was smart. He knew that the Boston police and FBI wanted to make an example out of him and other mobsters. There was no way that anyone was going to let him out of prison. Donati simply assured him, they will for these. You'll see. Three months later, Ferrara saw the headlines. The Gardner Museum had been robbed. He had an ugly sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach. He thought he knew who had done it. That very man, Bobby Donati, visited Ferrara one more time. Talking in vagaries lest they be overheard, Ferrara asked him, Was it you? Donati responded, I told you I was going to do it. Ferrara told Donati that he was insane. Did he not realize that the Boston PD, the FBI, and anyone who wanted a cut of the then $1 million reward were out looking for the works? But again, Donati told Ferrara not to worry. He had buried the loot, and he was just waiting for things to settle down before he started negotiating for Ferrara's release. It was one of the last conversations the men ever had. Like Leonard DiMuzio, Donati's body was discovered in the trunk of a car in September of 1991. His murder had been brutal, even for the Boston Mafia. This was no clean execution. Donati had been hogtied and stabbed dozens of times. David Houghton, the man who claimed he had a hand in the heist alongside Donati, followed a year later, though he is one of the few people in this story who definitely died naturally. He had a heart attack. Before his death, Donati had a conversation with another man, Paul Callantropo, a jeweler who came forward with a story in 2020, though he shared it with police a few years before. And I do apologize to this gentleman if I'm saying his last name wrong. Callantropo had known Donati since they were teenagers, and he had since become Donati's go-to guy to appraise things like diamonds and jewels. On this day in spring of 1990, Donati came to Callantropo's office with yet another object. He pulled out a package and started to unwrap its contents. Callantropo watched with mounting dread as an eagle finial peeked out from the wrappings. His flabbers were gasted. He sputtered, quote, Jesus, Bobby, why didn't you steal the Mona Lisa? End quote. In other words, what have you done? Donati asked Callantropo if he would like to hold the finial, to feel its sheer weight. Callantropo declined, more acutely aware than ever, of his fingertips and the patterns that they bore. It was one of the easiest appraisals in Callantropo's career. The finial was worth nothing, because no one in their right mind was going to pay money for such a high-profile stolen good. Donati left with a finial in tow. Callantropo never saw him or the finial again, and he didn't speak of the interaction for another 25 years. It turns out that there are more ways than bullets and liquid cocaine to ensure a man's silence. One of them is stabbing to death his childhood best friend and putting his corpse in a trunk. Callantropo has since joined forces with Kirkchen and two former convicts who are determined to work together to solve the heist. The names of the two former convicts have never been released to the public, though I am personally curious as to whether one of them is Vinnie Ferrara. This group even has an official signed agreement with the Gardner Museum. If the group's efforts lead to the return of the artworks in at least a restorable condition, the four members will share equally in the reward money. For their part, the FBI did take into consideration these new pieces of information about Donati, and they've treated it with various degrees of seriousness. After Callantropo shared his story, the FBI searched at least one of Donati's old addresses, but after decades, they found nothing. One prevailing theory of the Gardner heist, and the one that I personally find most convincing, is that Donati stashed the works somewhere he considered safe. If so, he chose the location well, given that there have been no verified sightings of any one of the 13 stolen objects for 35 years. When Donati was murdered, the location became safer than ever, given that its keeper had been rendered silent. Those who know the Gardner Heist well know that there are also two other Bobbies associated with the case, Bobby Gentile and Bobby Gorrente. As far as I know, neither of these men were ever thought to have perpetrated the robbery itself. They may, however, have been involved in the aftermath. Contrary to what I just said about Bobby Donati potentially squirreling away all of the works, this angle depends on the opposite of that. Let's start with Bobby Garente. Bobby Garente, too, was part of the Merlino crime gang. Shocker. Working for WBUR Radio in connection with the Last Scene podcast, Steven Kirkchen reports that not only was Garente like a father figure to David Turner, but that Carmelo Merlino himself walked Garente's wife down the aisle at their wedding, which is wild. Needless to say, Guarente was very close to that entire operation. While never suspected of being one of the thieves in the heist, Guarente was rumored to have been in possession of some of the stolen works in the late 1990s and the early 2000s. Garrente's potential role in all of this did not come to the light of the public until about 2010, six years after his death to cancer in 2004. However, Kirkchen reports that tips about Garrente's involvement were being reported to the FBI as early as 2005. One of those people calling in was Garrente's own daughter, Janine. A year after her father's death, Janine went to the FBI. She said that her father had kept several of the Gardner paintings stashed away at their family farmhouse in Maine. When challenged to provide proof of this, she handed over vials of paint chips that turned out to be a bunch of bologna. I think they ended up being something like shredded newspaper or magazines. The FBI wrote Janine off as a quack who was trying to fleece them for the reward money. In 2010, their opinion changed, at least, kind of. Six years after her husband's death, Garente's widow Aline agreed to talk to investigators for the first time. All it had taken was the FBI paying for her car to get fixed. It was $1,000 well spent. Aline told Jeff Kelly of the FBI and Anthony Amore of the Gardner that she knew that her husband had been in possession of at least some of the Gardner paintings, but she had no idea where they were now. She could tell them, however, about a strange interaction that she had seen in 2001, just after her husband had been diagnosed with cancer. She recalled watching from the window of a Connecticut restaurant as her Bobby transferred several paintings into the car of another man, also named Bobby. In that same conversation with Amore and Kelly, Aline also asserted that her Bobby was responsible for the murder of Jimmy Marks, the man who had boasted about his role in the Gardner heist only to be assassinated a few days later. Garente had been in town at the time of Mark's murder, or at least in the days after it. An FBI agent had randomly run into him at a local Boston diner. Garente had been eating lunch with the man, who ten years later he would meet in a Connecticut parking lot, seemingly to transfer some artwork. He is the third and final man in our trifecta of Bobbies, Bobby Gentile. In his book Master Thieves, Stephen Kirkgen describes Gentile as a low-level crime associate, one who primarily operated out of Connecticut. He was still there in 2001, when Aline Garrente watched her husband hand over several paintings to him in that restaurant parking lot. In 2012, the FBI arrested Gentile for drug trafficking offenses. They took the opportunity to question him about the Gardener, all while Gentile was connected to a polygraph machine, aka a lie detector. These days, lie detector tests are not considered super reliable, so you'll have to take this all with a grain of salt. The long and short of it is that Gentile failed the polygraph test miserably. According to the test, he knew about the Gardner heist before it happened. He had been in possession of some of the stolen works, and he knew their present location. Gentile claimed the test was all bullshit, and that he was being set up by the FBI. One thing that Gentile did give up over the course of the interrogation was that Aline Garrente had shown him one of the Gardner works, the tiny etching of the Rembrandt self-portrait. Gentile claims she pulled it out of her bra. As someone who has stored some things in a bra from time to time, mostly dollar bills, but also the occasional chapstick, I can guarantee you that if true, that self-portrait is probably now in a very poor state of being. Aline Garante denies his claim. Shortly after Gentile's interrogation, the FBI raided his house in Connecticut. Gentile's lawyer, Ryan McGuigan, described the number of agents at the house as, quote, enough agents to fight a war, end quote. Their choice of weapon was shovels. In the search, the agents found two things of interest. The first was an old piece of paper in Gentile's basement, one wrapped in a Boston Herald newspaper. It had a typed list of the stolen Gardner works, complete with estimates of how much each one would sell for on the black market. The second thing that the agents found was that the shed in Gentile's backyard had a false bottom, one that hid a pit. Gentile's son recalled that his father often kept a large tupperware container under the shed, one that he'd use to stash anything that he didn't want people to see or to find. On that day in 2012, however, the Tupperware container was empty. Gentile's son also shared that a few years before, the backyard had flooded, including the compartment with a Tupperware container. Whatever it had held must have been important, because Bobby Gentile was in absolute pieces over the loss. His son said that he had never seen his father so upset. Investigators, of course, asked Gentile about all of this, including the story about the flooding. Gentile claimed that he couldn't remember. What he did remember was that he had never ever had possession of the Gardner works. Oh, and that typed list they'd found, the one with all of the Gardner works and their black market value? That was just something given to him by a friend. It wound up in the basement along with a newspaper talking about the heist. Big frickin' deal. As of the 2010s, the lead was one of the best that the FBI had had in a while, but searches of Gentile's Connecticut property and at least one other in Florida never turned up any signs of the works or anything else suggesting that Gentile had ever had them. There's also the fact that Gentile served time in prison in his 70s, during which he got very ill and almost died. On the last scene podcast, Ryan McGigan, Gentile's lawyer, recalls a conversation that he had with his client when they both presumed that he was on his deathbed. McGwigan told Gentile that if he had the paintings or knew anything about them, now was the time to talk. If he did, McGwigan promised that Gentile would be home in a matter of hours, holding the hand of his beloved wife as he met his maker. In response, Gentile looked McWiggin in the eye and said, quote, but there ain't no paintings. End quote. But that was not the end of Bobby Gentile. He eventually recovered and was released from prison in 2019, right around the same time as David Turner. Gentile enjoyed two years of freedom before dying in 2021. He was 85 years old, making him one of the very few suspects in the Gardner Heist to live into old age. All of the men who I just spent 45 minutes talking about are just some of the main individuals suspected of doing, aiding, and abetting the Gardner Heist. It is not a comprehensive overview, but it's comprehensive enough. And quite frankly, I can't handle one more person named Bobby or anyone with an Italian last name that's not actually pronounced like you would in Italy. Bobby Gentile is both. Every time I see his name, I hear it in my head as Roberto Gentile. Nope. Bobby Gentile. In case you haven't noticed, I'm starting to get squirrely. That's what recording nonstop for five days gets ya. It gets you squirrely and it gets your vocal fry going. But we're not finished with the suspect stuff just yet. And while Bobbies are off the board, Bob's are not. In 2004, the FBI formed the Art Crime Unit, also known as the FBI Art Theft Program. They formed this unit after recognizing that art crime, long treated like property theft, which it is, but it's a very particular kind of property theft, one that requires investigators to use different skill sets and have different kinds of expertise. Anyone who is aware of this unit is probably also aware of a man by the name of Robert Whitman, also known as Bob, not Bobby. Whitman was named a senior investigator in this unit and worked there until his retirement from the force in 2008, at which point he had been with the FBI for over 20 years. I once had the pleasure and the privilege of seeing Whitman speak. He came to my grad school, I think in 2015, and I found him incredibly engaging, and I highly recommend his book, Priceless. That's the name of the book, which documents his work. As an FBI agent and private investigator specializing in what else? Art crime. In that way, this guy is the antithesis of Miles Connor Jr. Bob Whitman finds the Rembrandts, he doesn't steal them. And he has indeed recovered at least one stolen Rembrandt, and he thinks got pretty close to recovering another. In 2006, while he was based in Philadelphia, Whitman received a tip. There were two Frenchmen living in Miami who claimed to be working for members of the Corsican Mafia. They were brokering the sale of two major masterpieces, both of which had been stolen. A vermeer and a Rembrandt. There's only so many Vermirs in the world, very few of which are missing. That means this tip was talking about the concert, while Whitman believes that the Rembrandt was Storm on the Sea of Galilee. Whitman embarked on a delicate and dangerous operation to recover what he believed were two of the Gardner's most precious paintings. The investigation required extensive undercover work and took him to Miami, Paris, and even Barcelona. In the end, it did not result in the recovery of any artwork, Gardner-related or otherwise. Whitman asserts that the failure of the mission was in large part due to the Boston FBI's handling of the case. International crimes require international collaboration, especially when you're in a foreign country. But the Boston FBI couldn't seem to handle the prospect of giving up their control of the Gardner investigation. Not even if it meant the recovery of the two most valuable of the stolen Gardner works. I think that would qualify as irony. I don't know how much to buy into this idea that members of the Corsican Mafia have several of the Gardner works, especially as Whitman's criminal contacts, the two French guys, never presented proof of life or any other surefire evidence that they had what they claimed to have. I do believe Bob Whitman. If he says that this lead was legitimate, it was legitimate. And he takes it one step further. He thinks it's the best lead that the FBI has ever had in the Gardner case, and the closest that we have ever come to recovering some of the works. In a weird way, I hope that he's right. It means that at least two of the Gardner paintings survive. Sure, they might be in the possession of the Corsican Mafia, but I would much rather they be there than in the Tupperware container beneath Bobby Gentile's shed during a flood. If you want to hear more about Bob Whitman's experience tracking what he believes to be the Gardner works, I highly recommend that you check out his book, Priceless. The audiobook is also very good. That's how I quote unquote read it. Whitman himself is not the narrator, which I was a little bummed about, but if you do want to hear Whitman talk about the experience directly, you can do so on season one, episode six, of WBUR's Last Scene podcast. It is now 2025, over 35 years since the heist that rocked Boston. After six months of research into the heist, I can't help but feel like we are at once closer and further away than ever from determining what happened that night in March of 1990. Much less where in the world the works are now. That begs the question, what are we supposed to do now? I'm asking that of you, like, hey, what what what do we do here? I don't know. Like I said, I'm an art historian doing my best. What do we do? That is also one of the reasons that I put off covering the Gardner case for so long. I love a mystery, but I like a mystery with an ending. I like resolution, and that is one of the many things that the Gardner case doesn't have. At least, not yet. I don't know if the Gardner works will ever be recovered, but I do know how quickly things can change. If thieves can commit the greatest art theft in history in just 81 minutes, who knows what can happen in a week, in a month, in a year. Especially as public interest in the heist grows. But it's not enough to just focus on the details of the heist, or even the list of works stolen. You need to know their contexts, where they came from, what they show, why they're precious, and how they got to the museum in the first place. In other words, you need to know their stories. But for that, you'll have to wait for part two. That is all I have for you, at least for now, on the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist. The next episode, part two, will be up in about two or three weeks. I need a little break from what is probably my longest episode ever, and I've been recording. I'm not, I'm not kidding, I have been recording for about seven days. There is not enough honeyed tea in the world that can keep the vocal fry out after that. I will post a list of sources and images related to the episode on the podcast's website, stuff about thingspodcast.com. I used so many sources for the episode, far too many to list here or even on the website. I even got subscriptions to the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald archives. That's how serious I was. For right now, I want to shout out Ulrich Boser, Steven Kirkchen, Tom Mashberg, and Shelly Murphy. Ulrich Boser and Steven Kirkgen both have books on the Gardner heist. As you have heard throughout the episode, Kirkgen is also a prolific reporter on The Gardner, as are Tom Mashberg and Shelly Murphy. I read so much of their work in the Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, and other sources. I also highly recommend Robert Whitman's book, Priceless. I would also be remiss if I didn't shout out Carrie Joyce, who runs the website GardnerHeist.com. As its URL suggests, it's a blog dedicated to the heist and its investigation. I found that website particularly helpful for finding other sources or figuring out where certain pieces of information came from over the years, which I then traced back, if I could, to the original source. Finally, I want to give one last acknowledgement to WBUR's last scene podcast, specifically season one, and the Netflix limited series This Is a Robbery. If you haven't already seen or listened to those, you absolutely should. For the people in the back or who aren't listening, all of those sources will be listed for you at stuffaboutthingspodcast.com. If you enjoyed this episode, I would really appreciate it if you took just two minutes to leave it a rating and a review. I see every review, and 95% of them absolutely make my day. I also love hearing from listeners directly if you so choose. You can reach out to me through the podcast email, stuffaboutthingspodcast at gmail.com, or using the contact me tab on the website, stuffaboutthingspodcast.com. As you heard at the top of the episode, those who enjoy the podcast and have a little pocket change to spare can now buy me a coffee. This is a brand new thing I started 44 episodes in that allows listeners to support the podcast by sending as little as $1 my way. This is not a Patreon situation. There's no extra content involved. It's just a way to show a different kind of support for the podcast if you are able. You can find the link to do so in the description of the episode and the description of the show wherever you listen. You can also just Google Steph About Things Podcast, buy me a coffee, and it should come right up. There is no expectation, but there is immense appreciation. I have to cut it off there. I'm tired, my throat hurts, and I have to edit down seven hours of audio. Seven hours of audio into something resembling an episode. And then I have to do it again. But don't you worry, I'm not going anywhere, and I will be back soon with episode 45. The usual thanks go out to hooksounds.com and freemusicarchive.org for the royalty free music that you hear in the episode. The first song that you hear is a version of Box Brandenburg Concerto number four by Kevin McLeod. And the second, Jauntier tune, is called Success Dreams. The episode also features another song from Kevin McLeod, one called Aftermath. Thank you for listening for making it until the bitter end. I really appreciate it. And as always, I shall remind you to look at something beautiful today. I'm leaving. Adios. Bobby Gentile. Goodbye.