Gardner Museum Heist —Blog

False Fact 1. CONNOR: “Bobby was a typical, Italian crook.” Nobody is a typical Italian crook.

False Fact 2. “I wouldn't call him a mobster because mobsters are what you associate with organized crime. He wasn't that kind of a crook.”

Bobby Donati was that kind of crook: ““Revere police Detective Lt. William Gannon said that the body of Robert A. Donati, 50, of Revere, was found in his Cadillac on Savage Street in Revere by an officer on routine patrol about 1:25 a.m. Donati was a reputed associate of Vincent Ferrara, who is awaiting trial in Boston on federal racketeering charges. Donati, meanwhile, was said to be making collections from bookmakers and loansharks on Ferrara's behalf. Originally from East Boston, Donati had a lengthy criminal record involving arson, armed robberies and the theft of securities from the Boston Stock Exchange. Source Boston Globe September 25, 1991.

False Fact 3. RODOCLICO: “Myles Connor was a rock star. His band was called Myles Connor & The Wild Ones. He headlined clubs around Boston, and opened for big names, like Roy Orbison and Chuck Berry, or the Dave Clark 5”

Myles Connor was not a rock star. He played in clubs around Boston but never in Boston, or Cambridge. The only documentation of his music career that ever appeared in the Boston Globe was in advertisements by the Beachcomber for show-dates for Connor and his band on weeknights. There are no mentions of his opening for bigger acts, real rock stars, like Roy Orbison and Chuck Berry.
https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2013/03/18/investigators-say-they-identified-culprits-in-gardner-museum-theft-tracked-art-to-philadelphia-decade-ago

False Fact 4. HORAN: “Connor was a Renaissance criminal.

There has not been a “Renaissance criminal” in 400 years. What would a “Renaissance lawyer, or doctor, or Renaissance bus driver be? Calling Connor Renaissance criminal is a badly phrased euphemism for a hardened criminal:

“Myles Connor is one of these guys who committed every type of crime you can imagine. Make a list. Brainstorm on crimes. He can check off every box. Sold drugs, stole drugs, robbed grocery stores, banks, homes, armored cars, implicated in the murder of two teenage girls. You name it. he's done it, a real bad guy. Anthony Amore 11/12/14 Time 45:00
https://archive.org/details/BelmontHistoricalSocietyStealingRembrandts111214CL19

Also a con man and a Gardner heist huckster: “Every single person who said they could get the paintings back, one of them is Myles Connor, who's come forward and said it, they're all charlatans and that's nicest word I can use for them. Hucksters. —Anthony Amore Anthony Amore Weston Library 10/29/13 Time: 1:24
https://vimeo.com/78081473

False Fact 5. HORAN: “And he says the question of who he [Myles Connor] would and wouldn’t steal from was all down to a personal code. A kind of thief’s honor system."

There is no such thing as a thief’s honor system, and that certainly is not reflected in the violent criminal career of Myles Connor. He is a “Renaissance criminal,” but one with an “honor system”?

False Fact 6. HORAN: “It was a crime spree in the mid-1970s that solidified his reputation as someone who could outfox law enforcement.

HORAN: “ Myles Connor did four long stretches in prison totaling over 25 years in five decades. His internal organs were badly injured when he shot a state trooper and the police fired back hitting him “several times,” Connor wrote in his book, with his “shoulder taking the worst of the damage.” Connor was in prison for all but less than three years of the 70’s.

False Fact 7. HORAN: “Which, brings us back to that parking lot in Cape Cod, where Connor was nabbed with the five stolen Wyeth paintings.”

“Connor was caught with four stolen Wyeth paintings, not "the five." Three by N.C. Wyeth, one by Andrew Wyeth and a reproduction of another Andrew Wyeth painting.”
https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1928&dat=19740719&id=2HggAAAAIBAJ&sjid=iWcFAAAAIBAJ&pg=2308,2929182

False Fact 8. CONNOR: “And he said, ‘We've got you now, Connors. It'll take a Rembrandt to get you out of this.’ I said, ‘You know, you're right.’ And so then I set my heart on getting a Rembrandt.”

This is just one of at least three versions of the story Connor has told about what motivated him to steal the Rembrandt at the MFA.

In “Stealing Rembrandts,” by Amore and Mashberg, it was only well over a year later, when he was trying to figure out a way to avoid prison time, that he and a family friend in law enforcement came up with the idea of stealing a Rembrandt: “

"I said, 'for Chrissakes, John, what will it take to get me off? A Rembrandt? And Regan told me, 'That just might do it.'"

In his own book Connor swears John Regan said to him ’Face it Myles, nothing short of a Rembrandt could get you out of this.’ I swear these are the words he uttered.”

False Fact 9. HORAN: “On a sleepy Monday — April 14, 1975 — Connor launched what sounds like a paramilitary strike on Boston’s MFA. Connor says there were three vehicles with eight armed men, one with a machine gun.”

“Two unknown white males armed with 9 mm semi-automatics.” Boston Globe April 15, 1975. Also a Boston Globe review of Connor's book in 2009 by Shelley Murphy said of Connor's MFA Heist: "They pistol-whipped a guard who tried to stop them and escaped out a rear door," and nothing about a machine gun, and advises that: "The book is clearly shaded by Connor's version of the truth." The April 16, 1975 Boston Globe reported that shortly after 12:30 p.m. Monday, one of the robbers held an unarmed guard at gunpoint while another lifted the oil and wood panel off the wall." It is hard to know what was so sleepy about an early afternoon crime in the largest city in New England, four days before a two days visit by President Gerald R. Ford to kick off the country's Bicentennial celebration.

False Fact 10. CONNOR: “As the exit was made down the front steps there was a phalanx of guards that came rushing down.”

Boston Globe reported just two guards responding to the theft before the thieves left the building.

False Fact 11. CONNOR: “And there was a guy with a machine gun, brrrrr. Let the machine gun go off. They went right back.”

There was no machine gun. “As the thieves fled to a waiting car, the armed man fired three shots, hitting no one but adding a movie-scene flourish to what was then thought to be the most expensive art heist in American history.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/17/arts/design/17remb.html

False Fact 12. CONNOR: “The guy would not let go of the painting. The guy ran up to the back of the van and latched onto the painting.”

They left the scene “in a black and gold Oldsmobile or Buick” Boston Globe April 14, 1975 afternoon edition.

False Fact 13. HORAN: Don’t shoot the guard,” Connor said. One of them smashed him in the head with the butt of a gun.”

"The guard tried to stop the men as they ran toward the turnstyles inside the entrance and one of them clubbed him with a pistol butt." Boston Globe April 15, 1975t

The thief who removed the Rembrandt from the Boston MFA was described by witnesses as a white male, about 20 years of age, 5-foot-9, about 140 pounds, with long blond hair. Myles Connor, 5-foot-6, was 32 at the time of the theft, and claimed he was wearing a brown wig and leather chauffeur's cap to cover his red hair, during the MFA robbery, when he took credit for this violent crime decades later. Connor better fits the description of the other thief: "White male, 5-foot-6, about 135 pounds, about twnety years of age." This is the suspect police said "fired two shots at the museum guard." And if the taller man was the one who took the painting out of the museum then then it was the shorter crook, possibly Connor, that clubbed John J. Monkouski 66, of Dorchester, a retired Boston Police, with a pistol butt, who then required "a number of stitches" for a head wound at Peter Brent Brigham Hospital.

False Fact 14. HORAN: “There was just one problem, as Martin Leppo recalls. On March 18, 1990, Connor was serving a long federal sentence for drug trafficking.

Not true. He was in jail awaiting sentencing, and he was not only charged with drug trafficking. “After months of allegedly selling about $500,000 in stolen 17th Century paintings by ''old masters'' and other antique artifacts to an undercover federal agent, authorities said Myles Connor Jr. was arrested Wednesday night when he allegedly sold the agent a kilogram of cocaine. Connor was charged with transporting stolen property and possession of a controlled substance with intent to deliver.”

Leppo was not Connor’s lawyer for these charges in Illinois.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1989-03-10-8903250684-story.html

The recollections of an 87 year old confident of Myles Connor, concerning something that happened 30 years earlier, of which he had no direct involvement, is what the Boston Globe and WBUR consider being worthy of the term “deep dive” into this historic case?

False Fact 15. HORAN: “He [Myles Connor] was in prison in Lompoc, California.

He was not. According to newspaper accounts and his own book, Connor was in the Sangamon County Jail in Springfield, IL awaiting sentencing, not serving a long sentence, according news stories at the time and his own book. His sentencing was delayed twice after the Gardner heist. Connor and his cohorts had plenty of opportunity to try and initiate a deal.

False Fact 16. LEPPO: “When the Gardner was hit, Myles became the No. 1 suspect. Did he orchestrate it? And so forth and so on. So that was number one.

That was not "number one." Connor had been in jail in Illinois for over a year before the Gardner heist. The FBI didn't even try to talk to Connor: “We've made no attempts to speak with Myles Connor. FBI Supervisory Agent Edward Quinn. "He has not been requested to meet with the FBI Connor’s defense attorney Boston Globe 5/13/90. He was not the number one suspect.

False Fact 17.. CONNOR: “How I'm 100 percent sure that they [David Houghton and Bobby Donati] did it was because David Houghton, who was longtime friend of mine, flew all the way from Logan Airport to California just to tell me: “‘We've done with. We did it. And we got a bunch of paintings, and we're gonna use a couple of these paintings to bargain you into a reduced sentence.’"

The Mensa member, Myles Connor, doesn't even know what state he was in when Houghton supposedly told him he and Robert Donati robbed the Gardner Museum to get him out of prison.

From Connor's 2009 book, page 285, In the Fall of 1990 I was transferred to federal penitentiary in Lompoc, CA." Also in his book he says that "several weeks later [of March 1990] I received an unexpected visitor, David Houghton... "David's visit was the last time I heard from either man [David Houghton or Robert Donati]." So that means Connor's visit with Donati was in Illinois. It would have to have been several months later for him to have been in Lompoc, CA.

False Fact 18. HORAN: “He settled on one that was on loan to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Portrait of Elisabeth van Rijn,” Rembrandt’s sister.

It is not the artist’s sister.

The correct name of the painting is “Portrait of a Girl Wearing a Gold-Trimmed Cloak,”

A “proposed identification for the sitter is Rembrandt’s younger sister Elisabeth (Lysbeth). However, Rembrandt executed this painting in Amsterdam and Lysbeth apparently spent her whole life in Leiden.”

“The same model appears in two other paintings that Rembrandt executed in 1632: “A Young Woman in Profile with a Fan in Stockholm, and Bust of a Young Woman in a Cap in a private collection in Switzerland…The presence of these four paintings featuring the same model by Rembrandt, and his workshop makes it highly unlikely that Young Girl in a Gold-Trimmed Cloak was a commissioned portrait. Interestingly, the same model, in a nearly identical costume, appears in two of Rembrandt’s history paintings from the early 1630s: “as Europa in The Rape of Europa, in the J. Paul Getty Museum, and as the woman (Esther?) in the Old Testament scene in Ottawa.
https://www.theleidencollection.com/artwork/young-girl-in-a-gold-trimmed-cloak/

“Portrait of a Girl,” once believed to be a rendering of Rembrandt’s sister, inspired the facial types of many of Rembrandt’s heroines in the early 1630s.
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/17/arts/design/17remb.html

Kerry Joyce
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