Gardner Museum Heist —Blog

Gardner Heist Aftermath Post-Truth Makes Camp in the Athens of America (Part One) Gardner Heist Aftermath Post-Truth Makes Camp in the Athens of America (Part Two)

Gardner Heist Aftermath Post-Truth Makes Camp in the Athens of America (Part Three) Gardner Heist Aftermath Post-Truth Makes Camp in the Athens of America (Part Four)

Gardner Heist Aftermath
Post-Truth Makes Camp in the Athens of America (Part One)

The Gardner Museum heist 34th anniversary news coverage was certainly, shall we say, robust this year, given how utterly trivial, and lacking in any substance it was. It was as vapid and devoid of any meaningful content as the "Inside The FBI" podcast about the Gardner heist case, which was released last June. The podcast should have changed its name to "Outside the FBI," for this particular episode since, there was nothing "inside" about it. Am I wrong? [transcript and audio link].

Nonetheless the FBI's Gardner heist disinformation house organ, The Boston Globe, posted this nothing burger of a news story on their website home page, for March 18, 2024, the 34th anniversary of the Gardner heist.

They placed the story at the top of the front page of the Boston Globe print edition too, with a huge photo of Gardner Director of Security Anthony Amore, his head surrounded by an empty picture frame in the Gardner Museum’s Dutch Room, like a rectangular halo. Subtle.

The empty frame, minus the frame part, had more accurate content than this story.

It served as a nice, big splashy distraction from the news concerning Rick Abath, the Museum security guard and eyewitness, who assisted the thieves in carrying out the Gardner Museum robbery on March 17-18, 1990. Several times over the years, Abath had contributed information about some of the particulars of the case; particulars which did not conform to the official narrative, and so they typically did not make into any news stories. The ancient order of Gardner heist dissemblers, take the word of people who did not get involved with the case until a decade after the fact over the word of an eye witness, who saw the thieves for an extended period, and will not even give their reader an opportunity to decide for themselves, where the truth lies.

For example, Abath wrote: "I can tell you that George Reissfelder wasn’t one of the guys in the museum that night."

Abath personally told this to "Gardner Heist," author Ulrich Boser, several times, Boser told the producers of the podcast Empty Frames.

If the "art thieves conned their way into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum as as the FBI podcast, Inside The FBI asserted last June, in the very first sentence, then the person who was "conned" was the security guard, who is said to have let them in, Rick Abath. And as the New York Times reported in 2024, in an article by Anthony Amore's Stealing Rembrandt's co-author, Tom Mashberg: "In 2015 the F.B.I. named two long-dead, Boston-area criminals, George Reissfelder and Lenny DiMuzio, as the likely.bandits,", which only makes sense if Abath is covering up for Reissfelder. And that only makes sense if Abath was involved. And if Abath was involved then the thieves did not con their into the Museum, so they just leave out the eyewitness account.

The Rick Abath news this time was that the former Gardner security guard, had died after a long illness, just three weeks before the Garner heist anniversary. The news was first made public on February 27, 2024.

Nowhere to be found this year was Gardner heist anniversary fixture, Stephen Kurkjian, author of the 2015 Gardner heist book, Master Thieves,who until this year, had been like the Dick Clark, of the Gardner heist anniversary.

Apparently nobody wanted to speak with Kurkjian, the reporter who had interviewed Abath not once, but twice, the first time in 2005 and again in 2013, and who had spun that content into numerous newspaper articles, numerous pages, of his book, as well as podcast and documentary segments.

Abath shared a lot with Kurkjian, although only a small portion about what Abath knew about the case has come to light at this point.

For over 15 years Kurkjian has been unstinting in explaining away Abath's suspicious, and disconcerting actions on the night of the robbery and the night before the robbery, ("Nothing's been proven.") perhaps in hopes of getting another interview with Abath, while staying on the good side of The Investigation, and is still professionally active, though retired from the Boston Globe.

He was at a public event to discuss the case on November 16, 2023 at at the Westport [CT] Library. And he was at on March 7, 2024. at theCohasset Elder Affairs in Cohasset, MA, shortly before the anniversary and well after the public announcement of Abath's death, on February 27th.

But there were no TV appearances, interviews or even a current quote from Kurkjian in any of the articles about the anniversary this year, or when Abath's death was announced weeks earlier, with the person, the journalist, most closely identified publicly with the Gardner heist side of Rick Abath.

Or for that matter, anyone else who knew the former Gardner security guard, except for his lawyer. Interestingly, Abath, who hasn't lived in Massachusett for over thirty years has a Boston area attorney, not a family spokesperson, a lawyer.

Rest assured, even after Abath's death, Kurkjian is still promoting the official narrative, about hapless Rick Abath's innocence, the certainty of which would go up and down like the tide, depending on what Abath was or wasn't doing about sharing information about the case, during his life, and should achieve some kind of stasis in the next few years, depending on what Abath left behind, and what his family members decide to do and say.

Maybe Kurkjian will score that my-Rick-didn't-do-it interview, with Abath's widow. But for now, nobody wants any part of the Abath reporter, Stephen Kurkjian.

MeanwhileThe Investigation keeps serving up their empty, ever changing and conflicting narratives about the empty frames, with the Boston Globe serving as head caterers, and the rest of the aggregating news media serving as the wait staff.

For their next distracting, deflecting, follow the shiny object gimmick, the Boston Globe should probably put out empty quarter-pounder-with-cheese boxes, wrapped in a grease resistant reproduction of this 34th anniversary Boston Globe story, with that big picture of Amore, and distribute them from drive-thru windows at McDonald's free with every purchase. It won't help find the paintings, but it might help find the Gardner Museum's security director, Anthony Amore.

At least Amore might be the Gardner Museum's security director. It can sometimes be hard to know. Two long-time fixtures in Boston media suggested otherwise right before the anniversary this year. Carly Carioli, former editor-in-chief of Boston Magazine reported in that publication on March 13, 2024 how "on Sunday, March 17, Myles Connor will once again take center stage when he appears at the Regent Theater in Arlington, in conversation with former Gardner Museum security director Anthony Amore.

Two days later Boston Herald columnist and best-selling author Casey Sherman tweeted: "4 years after this podcast and zero accomplished by the so-called "Investigators" of the Gardner Museum Heist. The Director of Security has stepped down after nearly 20 years with nothing to show for it. Such an embarrassment."

In this never ending help us find "our paintings," effort, it is hard to understand how such a misunderstanding could arise about Amore who is "constantly thinking about those paintings."

Maybe because for several months until the anniversary, he had omitted his affiliation with the Gardner Museum in some public places online, such as on his "X" page profile, where he regularly posts invective filled tweets, perhaps to goad fringe political actors, into targeting the Gardner Museum in some way, so he can have some face time with the media about something that does not involve lying about the Gardner heist.

Maybe that, combined with the fact that some people might logically assume that since it is not really fitting or appropriate for someone, who is the head of security for the museum that bills itself as having been the victim of the largest art theft in the world, to appear on a stage, and in a documentary with a man, Myles Connor, whom Amore calls "the greatest art thief who ever lived," and who has also misled investigators about having inside information about the Gardner heist, in times past, according to Amore himself. Some might well conclude that therefore, Amore must have left his job at the Gardner museum.

But I guess when it comes to someone who is serving on the front lines of a cheesy, domestic disinformation warfare operation, like Amore is, you cannot depend on anything being quite as it appears.

So, this year's Gardner heist investigation update was about how "20 tips were reported to the museum over the past year from people who thought they saw one or the other of the two most recognizable stolen paintings, 'The Storm' or Vermeer's 'The Concert,' in homes across the country that were staged for sale and featured in real estate listings."

"It sure looked like The Storm on the Sea of Galilee." And as they said in the Boston Globe/WBUR podcast, "Last Seen," "Amore responds to every single tip. Even the patently cuckoo ones, 'cause you never know."

Actually, most everything in the public domain disseminated about the Gardner Heist robbery is "patently cuckoo" so that you will never know.

But it gets crazier. They want even more busy work: "With the majority of tips related to the two most famous paintings, officials say they’re trying to draw attention to some of the lesser known works, which might hold key clues to solving the crime." Even though, Special Agent Geoff Kelly, who heads up the Gardner heist investigation, for the FBI has said that "the people that took these paintings don't have them hidden in some private art gallery, sitting back and just reveling in their beauty. These paintings are most likely up in an attic somewhere, or in a basement, not being viewed by anyone."

The odds of any stolen Gardner art coming back because of this kind of engagement with the public is infinitesimal. In 2016, when Juliette Kayyem asked Anthony Amore, "so what's the best recovery story given that you've studied decades-- or centuries of art heist-- what's you favorite recover story where actually something was found?" Amore replied with two examples, neither of which involved any investigators, or investigation locating stolen art. He offered up two where art was returned when people who controlled it, decided to return it.

These stolen Gardner Museum art "recovery" news stories are always seeded with some disinformation about who the perpetrators were, as in this most recent Globe story, which reports that "in 2013, Richard DesLauriers, then special agent in charge of the FBI’s Boston office, announced the bureau was confident it had identified the thieves — local criminals who have since died," a snippet of deceit, cut and pasted into a half dozen of these Gardner heist stories in the past seven years."

In 2013, the FBI said:

“The FBI believes with a high degree of confidence that in the years after the theft, the art was transported to Connecticut and the Philadelphia region, and some of the art was taken to Philadelphia, where it was offered for sale by those responsible for the theft.” DesLauriers added, “With that same confidence, we have identified the thieves, who are members of a criminal organization with a base in the Mid-Atlantic states and New England.”

It was not until 2015 that the FBI announced that the thieves were "currently dead," and the Boston Globe did not even bother to pick up the story. Nine years later, it is one of the most historically significant points, a big lie that bears repeating in every "recovery" story.

The story makes lavish use of the term local in their disinforming "buy local" campaign, while only making passing reference to someone who was actually probably involved, Brian McDevitt, not by name, just as "a Hollywood screenwriter."

And there was no suspect more local at the time of the heist than McDevitt, who said on 60 Minutes, that was at his home at the time of the Gardner heist, which was three miles away from the Gardner Museum, at 69 Hancock St. in Boston, and that he had no one who could corroborate his story.

McDevitt had an extensive criminal background, which included trying to rob the Hyde Museum in Glen Falls, NY around Christmas in 1981. It was a failed caper that included knocking out a 26 years old female FedEx driver with ether, handcuffing her, and covering her eyes and mouth with duct tape in the back of her truck.

Two months after the heist, the Boston Globe reported that: the FBI's investigation into the $200 million art heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum has targeted about a dozen suspects scattered across the world."

Only after it became too late and the actual thieves, like McDevitt, had shed any local ties, did the official narrative became all about local thieves. Even in 1993, when he was brought before a grand jury to answer questions about the Gardner heist, in a story written by Brian McGory, the Boston Globe described McDevitt as "a Swampscott native who now lives in Los Angeles." Yes. But where was his legal residence when the Gardner heist occurred? On Boston's Beacon Hill.

This publicity campaign is not an effort to generate interest in a Gardner heist recovery effort, it is an effort to redirect interest from the original crime under the guise of stolen art recovery.

But in redirecting, effort, more interest in the original crime is generated too, and so it becomes more nonsensical, corrupting and desperate with each passing year.

One example of the de- moralizing, poison fruit of this bizarre crowd saucing of the public, concerning the facts and details of the Gardner heist case, is how the reputation of Myles Connor has been rehabilitated in the news media, from the cop shooting "real bad guy" since forever, and "huckster," in 2013, to that of the impish folk legend of today, with the assistance of the Gardner heist investigator, investigation spokesperson, and over-cover brother Anthony Amore.

Saturday Night Live turns 50 this year, a well deserved highly successful run. But the sketch comedy of the Gardner heist investigation in the new media, going on for 34 years now, is no joke. It should be canceled.

by Kerry Joyce

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