Odd this day
18 March 1990
On this day 35 years ago, in 1 hour and 21 minutes, two thieves carried out the biggest art theft in history and vanished into thin air/the annals of crime/etc.
It was 1.24am when one of the two 20-something-year-old security guards who worked the night shift at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston went to answer their doorbell. Two people in uniform stood on the other side of the glass, one of whom said:
Police! Let us in. We heard about a disturbance in the courtyard.
There had not been a disturbance, and neither guard had called the police. Going against protocol, he opened the door. He and his colleague were swiftly handcuffed, duct-taped, and stuck in the basement.
The thieves waited until 1.48 before going into the galleries, possibly to see if any police had been alerted. None had. They left at 2.45 with art worth $200 million — in 1990. The figure is now reckoned to be well over half a billion, with one of the paintings, Vermeer’s The Concert, currently worth over $200m on its own.
They also got away with three Rembrandts, five works by Degas, and a Manet (but left behind Titian’s Rape of Europa, the most valuable piece in the building).
Apparently, the museum’s
security flaws were common knowledge among Boston’s criminal elite
…who were generally reckoned to have been behind the theft, with the FBI saying in 2013 that the art had
changed hands through organized crime circles while moving from Boston to Connecticut to Philadelphia, where the trail went cold.
Indeed, the FBI have named several people believed to have been involved either in the burglary itself, or in spiriting away the loot. This being US organised crime, many had Italian surnames, most are dead, and few met their ends due to natural causes or old age.
The reward was $1m, increasing to $5m in 1997, and $10m in 2017, but the works are all still missing — represented by empty frames in the rooms from which they were taken — despite this being the largest reward ever offered by a private institution. It’s only ever been exceeded, in fact, by the US government’s $25m bounty on Osama bin Laden (which wasn’t paid, because the raid in which he died came about after electronic surveillance, rather than anything from a human informant.)
Suspicion fell on the two security guards, one of whom has been told that he’s never been ruled out. Mind you, in 2015, the FBI released museum security camera footage showing a security guard letting someone in the same door at 12.49am the night before — and the night of the robbery was the other guy’s first on the job.
As you can see from the links above, every now and then someone writes about it, looking for undiscovered clues, and everyone who reads about it comes away none the wiser. It must have been carefully planned, but there must also have been a significant element of sheer dumb luck.
It’s pleasing to imagine, of course, that a Bond villain type has it all somewhere, like Dr No with his Goya Duke of Wellington.
…or that another version of Sean Connery, the one in William Goldman’s imagination, was involved:
That’s from 2000’s Which Lie Did I Tell?, and really concerns the theft of the Mona Lisa, but that’s how we picture the scene, I think. I’m afraid the reality is almost certainly far more tawdry and prosaic, because true crime usually is. Somebody obscenely rich and unpleasant probably has the works and barely looks at them — or a crime family has them stashed somewhere, never having been able to fence them (and they also don’t look at them). Sorry.
Still, art crime doesn’t have to have an unhappy ending…
