It has now been nearly 25 years since the theft of 12 works from the Isabella Steward Gardner Museum in Boston. With that the NY Times looks at some theories on the theft and what may have happened to some of the paintings.
The NY Times reports
Source: The NY TimesBOSTON — The hallway in the Brooklyn warehouse was dark, the space cramped. But soon there was a flashlight beam, and I was staring at one of the most sought-after stolen masterpieces in the world: Rembrandt’s “Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee.”
Or was I?
My tour guide that night in August 1997 was a rogue antiques dealer who had been under surveillance by the F.B.I. for asserting he could secure return of the painting — for a $5 million reward. I was a reporter at The Boston Herald, consumed like many people before me and since with finding the “Storm,” a seascape with Jesus and the Apostles, and 12 other works, including a Vermeer and a Manet, stolen in March 1990 from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, a cherished institution here.
The theft was big news then and remains so today as it nears its 25th anniversary. The stolen works are valued at $500 million, making the robbery the largest art theft in American history.
Which explains why I found myself in Brooklyn, 200 miles from the scene of the crime, tracking yet another lead. My guide had phoned me suggesting he knew something of the robbery, and he had some street credibility because he was allied with a known two-time Rembrandt thief. He took me into a storage locker and flashed his light on the painting, specifically at the master’s signature, on the bottom right of the work, where it should have been, and abruptly ushered me out.
Call me Inspector Clouseau — I’ve been called worse in this matter, including a “criminal accomplice” by a noted Harvard law professor — but I felt certain I was feet from the real thing, that the Rembrandt, and perhaps all the stolen art, would soon be home. I wrote a front-page article about the furtive unveiling for The Herald — with a headline that bellowed “We’ve Seen It!” — and stood by for the happy ending.
It never came. Negotiations between investigators and the supposed art-nappers crumbled amid dislike and suspicion. Gardner officials did not dismiss my “viewing” out of hand, but the federal agents in charge back then portrayed me as a dupe. Eighteen years later, I still wonder whether what I saw that night was a masterpiece or a masterly effort to con an eager reporter.
Federal agents today continue to discount my warehouse viewing. (They say they have figured out the identity of my guide, but I promised him anonymity.) Still, the authorities are intrigued by some paint chips I also received in 1997 from people claiming to control the art. I wrote at the time that they were possibly from the Rembrandt, but the F.B.I. quickly announced that tests showed that they bore no relationship to the “Storm.”
In a recent interview, though, F.B.I. officials told me that the chips had been re-examined in 2003 by Hubert von Sonnenburg, a Vermeer expert who was chairman of painting conservation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Mr. von Sonnenburg died the next year.)
His tests determined the chips were an exact match for a pigment known as “red lake” that was commonly used by the 17th-century Dutch master and had been used in the stolen Vermeer (“The Concert”). The crackling pattern on the chips was similar to that found on other Vermeers, Mr. von Sonnenburg concluded, according to the authorities.
Perplexed? Me, too.
Such have been the vicissitudes in my coverage of the case for nearly two decades, during which I have gathered hundreds of investigative documents and photos, interviewed scores of criminals and crackpots, and met with dozens of federal and municipal law enforcement officials and museum executives.
In 2011, I wrote a book about art theft with the Gardner’s chief of security, Anthony M. Amore. We omitted the Gardner case because Mr. Amore said the hunt had reached a delicate phase.
Four years later, his quarry remains elusive. But it turns out that the assumptions that he and the F.B.I. special agent now overseeing the case, Geoff Kelly, were forming then became their active theory of the heist. The short version: It was the handiwork of a bumbling confederation of Boston gangsters and out-of-state Mafia middlemen, many now long dead.
Admittedly, that is far less startling than other theories floated over the years, which attributed the theft to Vatican operatives, Irish Republican Army militants, Middle Eastern emirs and greedy billionaires. And new deductions pop up all the time, like those in a book due out this month that combines elements of the F.B.I. theory with a few twists.
Before I get into the theories, though, some background: The Gardner museum was created by Isabella Stewart Gardner, a wealthy Boston arts patron who amassed a world-class collection of paintings, sculptures, Asian and European antiquities, and curiosities like letters from Napoleon and Beethoven’s death mask. In 1903 she arranged her 2,500 or so treasures inside a just-finished Venetian-style palazzo that became her home and as well as a museum open to the public. Her memorable fiat was that upon her death (in 1924), not one item could be moved from the spot she had chosen to display it.
But after midnight on March 18, 1990, as St. Patrick’s Day festivities from the day before were winding down, her edict was broken. Two thieves dressed as Boston police officers persuaded a guard to let them in to investigate a “disturbance.” They handcuffed him and another watchman in the basement, duct-taped their wrists and faces and, for 81 minutes, brazenly and clumsily cut two Rembrandts from their frames, smashed glass cases holding other works, and made off with a valuable yet oddball haul.
It included the Rembrandts, Vermeer’s “Concert,” Manet’s “Chez Tortoni,” Degas sketches, a bronze-plated eagle, and a Shang dynasty vase secured to a table by a bulky metal device that by itself probably took 10 minutes to pull apart. Left behind were prizes like a Titian, some Sargents, Raphaels and Whistlers, and, inches from the Degas works, a Pietà sketch by Michelangelo.
Anyone who expected the art to appear rapidly on the black market or to be used for some kind of ransom was disappointed. Instead, there was dead silence. Seven years later, the museum raised its reward to $5 million from $1 million. After a quarter-century, empty frames still mark where the missing “Storm” and other works once were on display.
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Early on, investigators focused on Myles J. Connor Jr., a career Massachusetts art thief who, in 1975, had stolen a Rembrandt from the Museum of Fine Arts here and used it to bargain himself out of prison time. Mr. Connor himself came forward in 1997 with an associate, William P. Youngworth III, to say he had planned the Gardner heist. Though he had been in jail when it took place, Mr. Connor insisted it mirrored a scheme he devised in the 1980s. He said he had cased the museum with a fellow thief, telling him he wanted to own the Chinese vase that was so laboriously stolen.
Information from Mr. Connor and Mr. Youngworth ultimately led to my dark trip through that Brooklyn warehouse, and later to the puzzling paint chips. But when Mr. Connor left federal prison in 2005, he failed to produce the paintings and investigators have long ruled him out.
Even easier to dismiss was the notion that the Boston crime boss James (Whitey) Bulger was involved. Mr. Bulger was a predictable target for suspicion because of his decades of involvement in murders, drug running and funneling arms to the I.R.A. But there was nothing to connect him, the authorities say.
In a book due out this month, “Master Thieves,” Stephen Kurkjian, a Boston Globe reporter who has tracked the case as long as I have, says that another lifelong Boston crook, Louis Royce, dreamed up the robbery. Mr. Kurkjian interviewed Mr. Royce and quotes him as saying his criminal associates stole his idea. The investigators say Mr. Royce’s tale is unsupported by the evidence. In his book, Mr. Kurkjian says he provided other information to the investigators including a possible motive for the theft — to exchange the masterpieces for the release from prison of a Boston mob leader.
Anticipating a wave of interest, and possible criticism, on the eve of the robbery’s 25th anniversary, the investigators, Mr. Amore and Mr. Kelly, recently showed me a PowerPoint presentation that detailed their best sense of what happened.
Though the efficacy of their efforts remains unclear, Mr. Amore, who was hired by the Gardner in 2005, and Mr. Kelly, who has his own museum identification badge, have spent a decade sharing tips and chasing leads. In one peculiar instance, they said, they approached the producers of the television show “Monk” in the mid-2000s because a tipster spotted a painting that looked like “The Concert” in the background of a scene. The painting turned out to be only a copy used as a prop.
Mr. Amore and Mr. Kelly’s current theory dates to 1997, when informants told the F.B.I. that they had heard a midlevel mob associate and garage supervisor from Quincy, Mass., Carmello Merlino, talk about trading the stolen art for the $5 million reward.
In 1998, the F.B.I., as part of a sting, arrested Mr. Merlino and some associates on their way to an armored car depot and carrying heavy weapons, including grenades. Investigators said that they promised him leniency if he helped them find the art but that he denied knowing of its whereabouts.
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Several years later, Mr. Kelly and Mr. Amore said, informants drew their attention to two associates of Mr. Merlino, George A. Reissfelder and Leonard V. DiMuzio.
Mr. DiMuzio, who was shot to death in 1991, was a skillful burglar who had long been involved with the Merlino gang. The investigators say that Mr. Reissfelder, who died of an apparent drug overdose the same year, owned a 1986 red Dodge Daytona, the same model of car that several witnesses have said they spotted idling outside the Gardner on the night of the break-in. The two passengers in the Daytona, the witnesses said, were dressed as Boston police officers.
In addition, the investigators said, two members of Mr. Reissfelder’s family have said they saw the Gardner’s stolen Manet on Mr. Reissfelder’s apartment wall three months after the robbery — a brazen act, to be sure. The investigators called it a “confirmed sighting.”
The investigators said they believed there had been a second sighting of one of the stolen items, though I’m sad to say it was not my encounter in the warehouse. A tipster, they said, told them in 2009 that he had seen a work resembling “Storm” in Philadelphia.
Two years ago, at a news conference in Boston aimed a drumming up leads in the case, Mr. Kelly and Mr. Amore outlined this theory but did not identify Mr. Reissfelder or Mr. DiMuzio as suspects. But on his PowerPoint, Mr. Kelly showed me that Mr. Reissfelder and Mr. DiMuzio closely resembled police sketches of the two men who had entered the museum.
Still, those men are now dead. So is Mr. Merlino, who died in prison in 2005, as is Robert Guarente, a reputed Maine mobster suspected of having once harbored some of the art.
Investigators say they are hopeful of locating the trove, even if many of their suspects are now in their graves. They were buoyed, for example, in 2009, when Mr. Guarente’s widow, Elene, told them her husband had turned over some of the stolen art to a reputed Mafia associate, Robert Gentile of Connecticut, in a parking lot in Portland, Me., in 2002.
Investigators searched Mr. Gentile’s home in 2012 and found pistols, ammunition and silencers — but no paintings. Mr. Gentile, who officials say had ties to organized crime figures in Philadelphia, has said he knows nothing about the art.
Mr. Kelly and Mr. Amore say they are convinced that, based on the 2009 sighting and other information, some of the art made its way from Maine to Philadelphia, where it was shopped around.
“The art was seen as too hot, and there were no takers,” Mr. Kelly said.
What happens now? The investigators keep looking.
“Mrs. Gardner would have expected us to battle every day to get back her art,” Mr. Amore said.
Mr. Kelly said he rejected the notion that the art was destroyed by the thieves as soon as they realized they had “unwittingly committed the crime of the century.”
“That rarely happens in art thefts,” Mr. Kelly continued. “Most criminals are savvy enough to know such valuable paintings are their ace in the hole.”
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