My Art Was Stolen and Used in a Concert
From start to stop, the biggest fine art heist in modernistic history lasted only 81 minutes. At 1:24 a.thousand. on March 18, 1990, ii men dressed as police officers walked into Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. They overpowered two unsuspecting dark security guards, then duct-taped their victims to a pipe and a workbench in the museum basement.
"Gentlemen, this is a robbery," the criminals appear.
The pair proceeded to remove thirteen treasured artworks on display in the lavishly decorated gallery, nifty the protective glass of 2 Rembrandt paintings and cutting the canvases from their aureate frames. But over an 60 minutes later, the thieves made off with a staggering collection of art that'south valued today at $500 million.
Despite a flurry of press attention—and the $10 million reward offered by the museum for the items' safe render—the stolen works have never been recovered. Now, a new Netflix docuseries, "This Is a Robbery: The World'south Biggest Art Heist," takes a deep swoop into the thorny mysteries surrounding the crime. As Adrian Horton reports for the Guardian, the four-part bear witness builds on the reporting of the Boston Globe and WBUR, as well as the FBI's ongoing investigation.
For amateur sleuths and art lovers alike, here are five key things to know about the infamous heist.
i. The thieves likely succeeded due to canny planning, luck and lax security.
Wealthy American art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner constructed her namesake museum out of her private, Venetian palazzo–inspired home in the hope that it would provide "for the education and enjoyment of the public forever." Simply after her death in 1924, the museum savage into financial disrepair. By 1990, the museum's security flaws were common cognition among Boston'south criminal elite, making it a chip of a "sitting duck" for a heist, per the Guardian.
Late on the night of March 18, the ii thieves tricked the young guards on duty, 23-twelvemonth-old Rick Abath and 25-year-former Randy Hestand, into buzzing them inside. Dressed in stolen police uniforms, the burglars pretended to be cops responding to a disturbance telephone call linked to the rowdy Saint Patrick's Twenty-four hours celebrations taking place outside.
Once inside, the criminals overpowered the hapless guards, disabled the security cameras and got to work removing precious works of fine art from their frames. The thieves departed at 2:45 a.m. subsequently making two split trips to their car with the artwork in tow; the night guards, their mouths duct-taped shut, remained trapped in the museum basement until the police, called in past the next set of guards to go far at the museum, found them around 8:15 a.chiliad.
2. The perpetrators stole masterpieces by Vermeer and Rembrandt
but left the most expensive painting in the building untouched.
The thieves made a beeline for some of the museum's greatest treasures, including Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee, the just known seascape painted past Rembrandt; A Lady and Gentleman in Black, also by Rembrandt; and Johannes Vermeer'south The Concert, one of just dozens of the Dutch Sometime Master'southward paintings to survive today. They besides picked upwards a cocky-portrait sketch by Rembrandt, five sketches by French Impressionist Edgar Degas, a modest portrait of a human being by Édouard Manet and an aboriginal Chinese bronze vessel.
Bizarrely, the burglars attempted to remove the flag of Napoleon's Purple Guard from its frame but failed to do so, instead settling for a bronze, eagle-shaped finial, or ornament. Stranger still, the perpetrators left possibly the most expensive work in the museum untouched: Titian's The Rape of Europa, which was hanging in a third-floor gallery.
Per Robert M. Poole of Smithsonian magazine, the seemingly random assortment of stolen appurtenances has confused authorities and journalists for decades.
"What continues to perplex those investigating the Gardner mystery is that no unmarried motive or design seems to emerge from the thousands of pages of prove gathered over the by 15 years," wrote Poole in 2005. "Were the works taken for beloved, coin, bribe, glory, barter or for some tangled combination of them all?"
Today, museumgoers can visit the Gardner in person or take a virtual tour showing what the thieves left behind: empty frames that hang eerily on the walls as a reminder of the loss.
3. The FBI has named suspects in the crime, but the works remain missing.
In 2013, the FBI announced that information technology had identified the ii thieves with a "high degree of confidence." In 2015, the system revealed the names of its principal suspects: George Reissfelder and Leonard DiMuzio, ii associates of the late mobster Carmello Merlino. Both resembled constabulary sketches of the criminals and died inside ane year of the heist.
The investigators likewise said that they suspected the art was transported via organized law-breaking networks to Connecticut and the Philadelphia region, where the thieves attempted to sell the works on the blackness market. After those attempted sales, withal, the artworks' trail goes common cold.
Government were initially suspicious of the ii immature guards on duty that night. Abath, a self-described hippie and rock guitarist, was a regular on the night shift. Because fine art crimes of this nature typically require an within source, he was high on the listing of possible conspirators.
Abath, for his part, has long denied any role in the heist, and regime take generally cleared him every bit a person of interest, reported Tom Mashberg for the New York Times in 2015.
"I was just this hippie guy who wasn't hurting annihilation, wasn't on everyone's radar and the side by side twenty-four hour period I was on everybody'due south radar for the largest art heist in history," he told NPR that aforementioned yr.
In another wrinkle, Abath's role in the drama again came under scrutiny in 2015, when the Usa Chaser'southward office in Massachusetts released a rare security camera video. The grainy footage shows Abath, who was on guard during the solar day of March 17, opening the aforementioned side doors used by the thieves and admitting an unidentified man in a waist-length glaze and an upturned collar, equally the Times reported.
Overall, the museum's security director, Anthony M. Amore, told the Times , the video "raises more questions than it answers."
4. Theories big and small grow, but sure answers are hard to come up by.
As the Guardian reports, dozens of theories ranging from conspiratorial to credible have cropped upward over the years. Almost people, including the FBI, argue that the works traveled through organized offense networks in Boston: namely, the mob.
"This Is a Robbery" is less interested in "whodunnit" and more than interested in tracking where the paintings might have ended up. The narrative centers on Bobby Donati, a mobster who may have organized the theft with fellow criminal Robert (Bobby) Guarente in order to use the art equally a bargaining flake to get their friend Vincent Ferrara out of jail, per Lauren Kranc of Esquire. Both Donati and Guarente are at present dead.
Some other one-time mobster, Robert Gentile, has long maintained his innocence despite a bevy of bear witness pointing to his involvement in the crime. The octogenarian was released from prison in 2019 afterwards serving 54 months on an unrelated charge. He remains the simply living person who likely has firsthand knowledge of the 1990 heist.
The series briefly considers several wilder suggestions, including the theory that members of the Irish Commonwealth Army (IRA) were involved in the crime, notes Esquire. The directors also interviewed Myles Connor Jr., a colorful character and convicted art thief who was in jail at the time of the robbery. Connor provides essential context well-nigh how the hole-and-corner fine art market operated during the 1990s.
"Researching the case was like learning the game of chess," docuseries director Colin Barnicle tells Town & Land's Norman Vanamee. "The more y'all know about it, the more options you run into."
v. If you have data about the robbery, the regime and the Gardner Museum want your assist.
People with information near the stolen artworks should contact security chief Amore at [email protected].
The museum is offering a $10 million advantage to anyone who provides information leading directly to the safe return of the stolen works. Individuals whose information leads to the restitution of some, merely not all, of the works will receive a partial reward. Anyone who helps return the Napoleonic hawkeye finial will receive a separate $100,000 advantage.
Fifty-fifty someone involved in the theft itself can come forward; per the Times, the statute of limitations on the crime has expired.
The Earth and WBUR's investigative podcast "Last Seen" helped publicize the theft upon its debut in 2018. Barnicle says he hopes the new series volition bring the plight of the paintings to an even wider audition—with the lingering hope that someone watching might know something new about the art's whereabouts.
"I think if the docuseries doesn't help, then they're gone," Barnicle tells Boston.com's Kevin Slane. "This [evidence] is like the biggest wanted affiche in the world."
Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/five-things-know-about-isabella-stewart-gardner-art-heist-180977448/
0 Response to "My Art Was Stolen and Used in a Concert"
Post a Comment