The Many Dead Ends of the Gardner Heist Investigation
Two thieves, 13 stolen masterpieces, and a 25-year search for justice.
By Allison Pohle, Sara Morrison and Nik DeCosta-Klipa
Boston.com Staff | 03.18.15 | 10:37 AM
Twenty-five years ago, in the early morning hours of March 18, bartenders kicked tipsy St. Paddy’s day revelers out onto the streets and locked the doors of their pubs. Around the same time, two men dressed as police officers walked up to the side door of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Eighty-one minutes later, they left with $500 million worth of stolen art. It remains the biggest art heist in history, and no one has ever been charged with the crime.
The bizarre robbery and murky details surrounding it touched off a 25-year chase filled with false starts, close calls, and dead ends. But, as the empty frames await the return of their missing art, FBI officials say they’re determined to solve the case that has baffled them for decades.
“This artwork belongs not only to the Gardner museum, but to the city of Boston and the art world as a whole,” FBI special agent Geoff Kelly, the bureau’s lead investigator on the case, told Boston.com. “To be able to recover these pieces and return them to the museum would finally close the last chapter of one of the most enduring and perplexing mysteries the FBI has ever worked.”
Here’s a look back at the twisted tale of the Gardner heist:
THE THEFT
March 18, 1990 1:24 a.m.:
Richard Abath, the security guard on duty, sat in a tight office, occasionally looking up at four monitors. The doorbell rang. Abath said two men in police uniforms told him they needed to come inside to investigate a disturbance. Abath buzzed them in. According to the Gardner museum’s website, he “broke protocol” by doing this. Abath would later tell The Boston Globe that he didn’t know the museum’s policy against letting in uninvited guests applied to police officers.
Abath told NPR recently that the thieves had him call his partner back. The thieves then took both men to the basement, where they covered the guards’ eyes and mouths with duct tape and handcuffed them to a pipe and a workbench.
At this point, the thieves had the run of the museum. According to The Globe, there was only one button in the entire museum to activate the alarm, and it was at the guard’s desk. There was also a system of motion sensors throughout the building that could track their movements, which the thieves (unsuccessfully) tried to disarm, allowing investigators to trace (most of) their steps after the fact.
The thieves moved slowly and deliberately. As The Globe said at the time, “the thieves appeared to have set their sights on specific works, having left behind many of equal or greater value.”
WHAT THEY STOLE
Motion sensors indicated the thieves first entered the second-floor Dutch Room, where they took six paintings. They dropped the frame of Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn’s painting on the floor, and smashed the glass covering the canvases of Johannes Vermeer’s “The Concert” and Govaert Flinck’s “Landscape with an Obelisk.” The Rembrandt hung on a secret door that looked like a wall panel. Investigators found the door open, which they said indicated the thieves had inside knowledge.
The sensors showed that one of the thieves went into the Short Gallery, which is also on the second floor. He took the Degas sketches, as well as a flag finial.
The Blue Room, on the ground floor near the museum’s public entrance, may have been the thieves’ last stop, though it’s impossible to know for sure; the Blue Room’s sensors never detected anyone in that room after a guard’s rounds at 12:53 a.m. But, at some point, the thieves took a Édouard Manet oil, “Chez Tortoni,” removing the security bolts that fastened it to the wall.
2:41 a.m.:
The first thief left the building through the side entrance. Four minutes later, the second thief exited. With them were 13 out of the 2,500 pieces housed in the museum. The art varied in scope and size, and was initially valued at $200 million. That figure was updated to $500 million by 2005.
None of the artwork was insured.
7:30 a.m.:
Abath and the other guard remained bound and gagged in the basement for several hours. Abath later told NPR that he stayed calm during this time by singing Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released” to himself. When a maintenance worker and a daytime guard arrived for their shifts and no one was there to buzz them in, they knew something was wrong.
“As they stood there, puzzled, a security supervisor arrived with keys. He opened the door; no guards were in sight.
‘My guards are missing!’ he told [Lyle] Grindle, the museum’s security director, in a phone conversation made shortly after walking in the door. ‘We’ve been robbed . . . and it’s very serious.’
‘Have you called the police?’ asked Grindle.
‘Yes.’
‘Secure the building; I’m on my way,’ Grindle replied. He was so frantic to get to the museum that he cannot remember which car he drove.
The call to 911, on a quiet Sunday morning, crackled over the police radio. Boston police Detective Sgt. Paul Crossen had just exited from the Southeast Expressway when he heard it. Crossen immediately spun his steering wheel and headed toward the Fenway. The phone call bearing news of the theft jangled in Anne Hawley’s kitchen, catching her in midconversation. Edward M. Quinn, the supervisory special agent of the FBI’s Reactive Squad, was sitting in church when his beeper summoned him to the scene of the heist.” (The Boston Globe, May 13, 1990).
They’ve been working on the case ever since.
THE INVESTIGATION
Just after the robbery, the museum offered a $1 million reward for the returned artwork. The investigation initially focused on the guards and three unknown individuals whom, The Globe reported, tried to create an early-morning “disturbance” outside the museum two weeks prior to the robbery.
Security officials were quick to comment on the lack of training the museum guards had.
“There is not enough pay, not enough training, not enough maturity,” Steve Keller, a national consultant on museum security, told The Globe, adding that Gardner administrators “didn’t cut corners on equipment. They didn’t buy the cheap brand. The equipment didn’t fail. Someone made a human error and let someone in.”
“You know, most of the guards were either older or they were college students,” Abath told NPR. “Nobody there was capable of dealing with actual criminals.”
“They tell you exactly what to do if someone is damaging a painting,” a guard told The Globe a few days after the heist. “You put your hands up in the air and blow your whistle.”
But it was soon revealed that the museum itself wasn’t equipped to deal with criminals, either. The only burglar alarm in the entire museum, inside and out, was a “panic button” by the front desk, which was effectively useless as soon as the guards left the area. And none of the artwork was insured.
About two weeks after the robbery, the museum formed a security panel. The Globe published an article further illuminating the many problems the museum had before the heist:
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Originally published at www.boston.com on March 18, 2015.
