Gardner Museum Heist
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Close encounters of the weird kind with former members of the Boston Globe Spotlight Team
Reformatted information
from the WatchDog New England Our Staff page,
saved by the Internet Archive on September 25, 2014. Sensationalized was more like it. Consistent with the ineffectual-by-design nature of the FBI's investigation from the outset, the billboards the FBI put up directed visitors to the home page of the Gardner Museum, not to any FBI site. And the Gardner Museum website at that time had nothing about the historic theft in any way, not even in the site navigation tabs. 
FBI billboards direct people to the Gardner Museum website not to an FBI information page with nothing about the Gardner heist readily available. Only a columnist for a small, south of Boston suburban daily newspaper, The Patriot Ledger, however, expressed any skepticism about the press conference in the news media. Matt Connolly, a retired career prosecutor and former Norfolk County assistant district attorney wrote, “I happen to think that the FBI is blowing a lot of smoke." DesLauriers also told the New York Times the FBI would be "starting a publicity campaign to focus attention on the paintings in the hopes of garnering leads from the public and possibly from acquaintances of the thieves, anyone who may have glimpsed one of the paintings over a mantel, say, or in an attic." But in the months that followed there was no sign, and barely even the show of a start to that effort. For all the big talk, there was little that was actually done. It was a much more modest effort, for example, than the publicity campaign, which led to the capture of gangland fugitive James "Whitey" Bulger in 2011 after 17 years on the run. Some FBI Gardner heist billboards were taken out of moth balls and put up in Pennsylvania.  
Gardner heist digital billoard alongside I-76 (The Pennsylvania Turnpike) in King of Prussia, PA, 15 miles outside Philadelphia (left) Same billboard used in Boston five years earlier in 2010, but with a different phone number (right). It was likely that Connolly earned little, as a columnist for the Patriot Ledger. He posted his columns on his own website Trekking Toward The Truth, as well. Not one given to hyperbole or extremism, Connolly had already enjoyed a long and successful professional life. In retirement, he had an independence as a news columnist that few in the media could match. On his website he referred to the FBI's claims in their press conference a "its silly story." Connolly's assertions about the FBI's Gardner investigation left little middle ground. The Gardner heist investigation was either in some sense "a hoax" as Connolly had asserted, or it was, what the FBI said it was: The pursuit of art stolen by "members of a criminal organization with a base in the Mid-Atlantic states and New England,” where over 20 percent of the U.S. population then resided. Three months later, owing to the actions of some of the people close to the investigation, or at least the public face of it, I began to suspect that Connolly was right. Kelly and the FBI were perpetuating a hoax on the public, and members of the news media were in some cases helping them do it. I contacted Watchdog New England, as just a concerned citizen with no direct personal knowledge of the Gardner heist case. I was someone without any government, law enforcement, media, or criminal underworld affiliations; a guy with a wife and children, one about to start the third grade, who perhaps saw something, said something and asked for nothing in return then or ever, except for one thing: to be treated as "a confidential source." I didn't get it. I sent my email around 11:30 in the morning of August 27th, 2014. It was addressed to Walter Robinson the former Boston Globe editor, and Globe Spotlight Team head, who at that time was a Distinguished Professor of Journalism at Northeastern University, and the head of Watchdog New England, (It's actual, formal name was: the "Initiative for Investigative Reporting at Northeastern University") “The ultimate goal of this initiative was to make it possible for smaller community news organizations–which do not have substantial resources–to do serious watchdog and investigative reporting,” Robinson told the Columbia Journalism Review in 2011. The accelerating pace of information technology likely rendered the Watchdog New England mission obsolete. It was no longer taking substantial resources to do "serious watchdog and investigative reporting." What it did take was the willingness, the gumption, and the determination to do it. Those human resources were lacking at WatchDog New England, and everywhere, seemingly. Robinson had led the Globe’s Spotlight Team during its coverage of the Roman Catholic clergy sexual abuse scandal. Kurkjian was also a Spotlight Team member during that time, and the two former colleagues, along with other Spotlight Team members won a 2003 Pulitzer Prize for public service, for their coverage of the scandal. The impact of the series was felt throughout the country and the world. I did associate Robinson's name with the Boston Globe but my interest in sharing information with him had to do with his current position with Watchdog New England, not his past associations with the Boston Globe. My email to Robinson began as follows: "Dear Mr. Robinson, 1. Please treat me as a confidential source. I'm entrusting you with this information in the hopes that you will respect my privacy and confidentiality." What followed was about 13 pages of information about three possible culprits in the Gardner heist case. Robinson quickly forwarded my email, 30 minutes later, to his former colleague at the Boston Globe as well at Watchdog New England, Stephen Kurkjian, who had left Watchdog New England the previous year. The body of Robinson's email to Kurkjian began and ended: "Not sure of authenticity." Robinson was one and done. He never replied to my email, or subsequent follow-up emails, or acknowledged receipt of it to me in any way. He had forwarded my email over to "the expert," a trusted (by him) former colleague. Butt covered. In contacting me that same day, Kurkjian began: "Dear Kerry: Mr. Robinson (Robby) passed on your email that you'd sent to him." Kurkjian included my email to Robinson; as proof, I guess. Why did Kurkjian assume that Robinson had not informed me that he was sending my information to him? Was this standard operating procedure for how they take care of “the little guy,” as Kurkjian claimed to do? Or was this particular “little guy” (me) being treated differently because I was reaching out about the Gardner heist in a potentially problematic way?
"Taking care of the little guy," if by little guy you mean the FBI, the Boston Globe, WBUR, and the Gardner Museum
Portion of an email sent to me by Stephen Kurkjian 
Pictures of Gardner heist eve video visitor March 17, 1990 (left) and Rod Ramsay in Tampa, FL after his arrest on espionage charges on June 7, 1990 (right) In February of 2021, a report by the office of the US director of national intelligence announced, "We assess that Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman approvedan operation in Istanbul to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi." So the United States government could publicly accuse one of the richest and most powerful heads of state in the world, of butchering a Washington Post columnist, less than three years after the fact, yet they would not reveal the names of the the Gardner heist thieves, the “burglars,” according to Kelly, who “would have just as easily stolen a car or somebody's TV, and “didn't know what they were doing.” And nobody challenges it. That was the free press America had before Trump’s second term. The levers of autocracy were already in place. Trump was merely the first one to really take them out for a test drive. The FBI was claiming to have information, the names of the thieves, that every reporter present was vitally interested in having, and not getting...yet. By 2023, the FBI was no longer making promises. Instead they were making excuses. Geoff Kelly was prepping for his post-retirement 2026 book on the case. "We're really looking for, what I call 13 perfect fugitives," (the exact title of his 2026 book) Kelly said in an official FBI podcast. Because they are the perfect fugitives. They don't get sick. They don't have to go to the dentist with a toothache. They don't have to get a driver's license." Right. Because like all inanimate stolen property, they’re not fugitives. In the prologue of his book Kelly wrote “I chose to take a more unorthodox approach to recovering the lost artwork, and instead of working it as a traditional stolen property case, I worked it as a fugitive investigation. He never explains how this helps with the investigation except for giving him a way to personify the stolen works, and giving himself and his cohorts an alibi for not finding any of the missing art or accomplishing anything, in the FBI’s thoroughly unsuccessful investigation. The FBI went from "we begin the final chapter," in 2013, to saying ten years later, final chapters are harrrrrd, when they involve finding missing stolen art, suckers. When Kurkjian retired after almost 40 years with the Globe in 2007, he continued on as a freelance contributor, writing mostly about the Gardner heist. Less than two hours after I had emailed Robinson, Kurkjian, who shared the emails referenced here with me, wrote back to Robinson: "Thanks pal. I think!" Kurkjian’s response, it is fair to say, suggests some ambivalence about his having received the information I shared with Robinson. Is this the spirit of inquiry that investigative journalists generally bring to their job? Apparently, when the inquiry has to do with the Gardner heist it is. Here you have one Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, who can't forward my email along fast enough, over to another Pulitzer prize winning journalist who seems a bit put out at having received it at all, but then still wanted to interview me that very night. At least Kurkjian's pointed reply to Robinson could have offered me a little advance notice that his spirit of inquiry about the Gardner heist case would not necessarily include my efforts, but I did not notice his reply until days later, maybe longer. The Gardner heist is a historic story with a significant level of public interest. When the media-watch program, "Beat The Press" celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2018, it ended the program with a review of a half dozen "Media Triumphs," the top news stories during the time of the show's first twenty years. The review included a short segment on the Gardner heist. Unlike the other five stories mentioned, the Gardner robbery took place eight years before the first episode of "Beat The Press" even aired. It seemed like a gratuitous plug. Brief as it was, it still seemed out of place, alongside the other big stories: the Whitey Bulger capture, the clergy abuse scandal, the 911 Terrorist attack, the Boston Marathon Bombing, and the Red Sox first World Series win in 86 years. Nonetheless it illustrated that the Gardner heist remained a big story, how the story Brief as it was, it still seemed out of place, alongside the other big stories: the Whitey Bulger capture, the clergy abuse scandal, the 911 Terrorist attack, the Boston Marathon Bombing, and the Red Sox first World Series win in 86 years. Nonetheless attention given to it on this occasion illustrated that the Gardner heist remained a big story, "the great white whale of art crime," and how the story persists in news coverage. There is little reason to think Walter Robinson, of WatchDog New England had achieved the kind of professional success he has earned, and the high esteem of his colleagues, by treating potential sources in the way I was treated by him. It does, however, represent one more example of the strangeness on the part of journalists, when the subject is the Gardner heist and its investigation. If Robinson's response to me was an outlier, for him personally and for his profession, then perhaps it was because the Gardner heist investigation itself is an outlier. As Geoff Kelly wrote in his 2026 book on the robbery, "The Gardner case followed none of the conventions and protocols of a typical investigation." The length of time he had been assigned the case was "bizarre, he said. “I don't know of anybody that's had a case that's even close for that length of time.” The same could be said of the protocols followed by news organizations in their Gardner heist investigation coverage. They too were and remain bizarre. In 2019, at a Brown University ACLU panel discussion, What Press? Whose Truth?, long time New York Times journalist C. J. Chivers said that 30 years ago (1989), the Times would limit reporters to a maximum term of seven years on any particular "beat," to help ensure the independence and objectivity of the newspaper’s coverage. He criticized the end of this practice. That rule has certainly never been in force with Gardner heist news coverage. Formerly at the Boston Herald and now with the New York Times, Tom Mashberg has been covering the Gardner heist for 30 years. Mashberg co-authored a book with Gardner Museum chief investigator Anthony Amore, and this year, made a personal appearance with Geoff Kelly on his book tour in Boston, on the same day he had an article about Kelly book published in the New York Times. Shelley Murphy has been covering the Gardner heist for 33 years, at the Boston Globe, Bob Ward, now at Fox 25 News has been covering the Gardner heist since the it occurred 36 years ago, and Stephen Kurkjian's byline appeared in Boston Globe news stories about the case for 24 years from 1997, until his retirement in 2021. News organizations are no longer willing to sacrifice a congenial relationship with a valuable source, authority or institution on the altar of objectivity. Although not fully vetted at that time, my information was a strong break, that would represent a challenge to the official narrative the FBI was promoting, and seemingly, that was not something Robinson was interested in being a part of in any way. Surely Robinson was aware of some of the doubts news reporters covering the 2013 press conference were having privately, which Kurkjian who was associated with Watchdog New England at the time of the press conference, wrote about in his book: “At the press conference the FBI had "sketched out a scenario in the vaguest of terms," Kurkjian wrote, adding their theory of crime had "a number of holes in it."
In the absence of FBI backing, it would perhaps be difficult for a media outlet to report that convicted spy Rod Ramsay should be a suspect, based solely on the information I had collected up to that point. I accepted that. But it could have been an incentive for the media to investigate further, and follow up more closely with the claims made by an investigating network, like Watchdog New England. I provided specific steps for doing so in my correspondence. Unless it was disproven outright, my analysis could also be an opportunity for the media to at least reconsider the role it had assumed in their coverage, of taking whatever the FBI was saying at face value, and in the case of the Boston Globe and others, in the years since, going above and beyond to support the FBI's disinformation effort, by rewriting the history in a way that gave the FBI's narrative an authoritarian flex, and a consistency that it continues to lack to this day. The Boston Globe could have openly expressed some skepticism about the FBI's ever shifting claims, or at least point out the lack of consistency in what the FBI was telling the public. They could question FBI investigators and their surrogates more stringently and begin to ask for some kind of corroboration of some of the FBI’s more dubious unsupported assertions. Instead the opposite has occurred. If the FBI was a friend in need, there were numerous journalists, and media outlets who were willing to serve in the capacity of friend indeed: Bob Ward, (Fox 25 News), Shelley Murphy (Boston Globe), Jared Bowen (WGBH) Kelly Horan (Globe and WBUR) Howie Carr (Boston Herald and WRKO), Stephen Kurkjian (Boston Globe), and Tom Mashberg (New York Times), while there were very few, in fact none locally, except the Patriot Ledger columnist, Matt Connolly, who were willing to push back against the FBI’s tide of questionable claims. Nationally, the only exception was The Daily Beast. In the Fall of 2013, Kelly did an interview in the Boston Public Gardens, with Alastair Sooke of the BBC, which aired in December of that year: Sooke: To say things like we're closer than we've ever been and the case is solved sounds like madness if you don't know where the paintings are now and you don't know where they've been for twelve years. Kelly: Absolutely but it's the ultimate whodunit. Sooke: Not the least of which because it's the ultimate whodunit, but according to you, you know who did it, but it's still not solved. Kelly: Well whodunit sounds better than where-is-it [ba-dum bump].
Geoff Kelly laughing at his own joke in a BBC interview in the BBC documentary "The World's Most Expensive Stolen Paintings" 
The journalists and actors during the shooting of “Spotlight.” Front row: Ben Bradlee Jr., John Slattery, Steve Kurkjian, Gene Amoroso. Back row: Walter Robinson, Brian d’Arcy James, Michael Rezendes, Mark Ruffalo, Sacha Pfeiffer, Rachel McAdams. The film starred Michael Keaton ("Batman" 1989) as Robinson and Gene Amoroso as Kurkjian. A year later, around the time when the movie premiered at the Venice Film festival, Robinson introduced Kurkjian, who was giving a lecture, and discussing his book about the Gardner heist case at the public library in Plymouth, MA on October 7, 2015. In one passage of his title in his title-be-damned book, "Master Thieves", Kurkjian wrote that, "Hardly "Master Thieves", the intruders pulled the majestic Rembrandt from where it hung on the far wall of the gallery and threw it to the marbled floor, shattering the glass in the huge frame," Robinson was sure enough at least, and even publicly endorsed the authenticity of Kurkjian's "Master Thieves", which, according to its author, on page 49, was not actually about ""Master Thieves"." To the saying “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” should perhaps be added, or from the support it receives from ex-colleagues of the author, like Walter Robinson. When Kurkjian's book "Master Thieves" first came out in February of 2015, Kurkjian said in an interview with the Dorchester Reporter, that “Over 25 years, so many names have been thrown into this, I had to come up with an overview that worked and conveyed – even if it wasn’t absolutely true – the latest and best idea of who was involved and how they did it.” The Gardner heist case, with all of its sensationalist baggage, seems to have demanded, according to Kurkjian, a new genre of writing, one that is neither fiction nor nonfiction. Thanks to the Gardner heist, what with all of the "names thrown into it," by the investigators, and then pushed out through a media-supplied firehose of falsehood, there would now be written works that are nonfiction-ish. Books, like ""Master Thieves"," that are categorized as nonfiction, but are acknowledged to be not "absolutely true," even by their own authors. The article's headline was "Veteran reporter stays on scent of the Gardner heist." Those "so many names," in Kurkjian's book, did not include convicted spy and admitted bank robber Rod Ramsay, a Boston native, whom my research suggested could be involved. Nor did it include the other individuals I had mentioned. If I was correct, Kurkian was staying on a scent, of something, but barking up the wrong tree, albeit one with bushels of government supplied low hanging (wax) fruit for him to feast upon. All aboard the Fed train! As one of the Gardner heist perpetrators, Rick Abath, observed twenty five years later in his uncompleted, barely started book on the case: "It's easy for a reporter to get hooked on to one train of thought and ride it to its logical conclusion; even if it was a fantasy from the beginning."Neither did Kurkjian's book include the name of Brian McDevitt, a Boston area native, from Swampscott, who resided just three miles from the Gardner Museum, at 69 Hancock Street, in Boston's Beacon Hill, when the Gardner heist occurred. 
"60 Minutes'" Morley Safer interviews a former neighbor of Brian McDevitt in the entrance to the apartment building where McDevitt lived at 69 Hancock St. in Boston's Beacon Hill Instead,in the Boston Globe for over three decades, McDevitt has been a California screenwriter usually not even mentioned by name in news stories. In fact, McDevitt was never any more a screen writer, than he was Paul Stirling Vanderbilt, a scion of one of America's most famous Gilded Age families, who McDevitt made up and pretended to be, as part of his plan to rob The Hyde Collection, in 1980. Morley Safer on 60 Minutes November 29, 1992: (Voiceover) "McDevitt is now 32, living in Hollywood, where he says he went to reinvent himself, a new, clean McDevitt who would launch himself in a literary career or at least become a screenwriter." So he was going to reinvent himself perhaps as "a screenwriter. From the way Safer put it, the “screenwriter” job sounds like more of a backplan, in case the whole being the next Ernest Hemingway didn’t pan out. And at the time of the Gardner heist McDevitt was even less of a screenwriter, if that’s even possible.Morley Safer: Have you ever published anything anywhere? Brian McDevitt: Nope, haven't. The man that Shelley Murphy at the Boston Globe has been calling a "California screen writer," for over 30 years was not, nor had he ever been.
Gardner heist basement crime scene photo of Rick Abath with an open pocket knife behind him So who was holding back what they know? Based on my impression of Kurkjian at that time, prior to his contacting me, I did not feel particularly motivated to find a way to contact him. I had been researching the Gardner heist for a little over a year. I appreciated some of the information that had come to light thanks to his efforts. But my impression was that there was a distinct lack of openness about the Gardner heist case in the public sphere. There seemed to be little breathing room for fresh perspectives, and Kurkjian seemed to me to be one of those operating comfortably from within this Gardner heist bubble.I found the FBI's widely disseminated official narrative about possible suspects, for example, flimsy, contradictory, and suspect. If Kurkjian shared that view, he had not expressed it in his writing on the case that I had seen. The way Robinson treated me, however, was not Kurkjian's fault, so while I wasn't happy with the situation, it did not put me off about speaking with him. The other problem I would come to have with Kurkjian's emailed introduction and proposal to me was his statement: "I am pursuing a book on the Gardner theft." "Pursuing," to me suggested Kurkjian was in the early stages of writing a book, that he was at least still gathering information and that the book was still taking shape. But in fact, Kurkjian had already completed his book, by the time I spoke with him. It was available for sale just six months after his emails to me. Typically a nonfiction book from an established publisher, like Public Affairs, which published "Master Thieves", is not available for purchase until 12-18 months after the final manuscript is completed. A work can be fast-tracked, as was the case with "Master Thieves", which was timed to come out for the 25th anniversary of the Gardner heist. In one anecdote during a lecture Kurkjian was giving on the case at Southborough Library two years later, Kurkjian mentioned in passing that he had been completing the last chapter of his book in May of 2014. That was three months prior to his interviewing me. As the author of the already completed book "Master Thieves", The Boston Gangsters Who Pulled Off the World’s Greatest Art Heist, Kurkjian was not in a position to introduce any major revelations about the case, of the kind I was potentially introducing, about perpetrators who were not the kind of Boston gangsters, the "hardly "Master Thieves"" Kurkjian and the FBI were holding up as the suspects at that time. My work fundamentally contradicted, and directly competed with the narratives in Kurjian's completed book on the case. And since his book so neatly complemented the main tenets of the narrative put forth by the FBI's investigative team, (that the Gardner heist "was the handiwork of a bumbling confederation of Boston gangsters and out-of-state Mafia middlemen, many now long dead,") there was little reason, practically speaking, to make such an abrupt course correction. If my information and analysis were correct, Kurkjian's book was obsolete before it was even released, and, if true, it debunked the FBI's latest revised claims about who the perpetrators were. That's likely why, one could surmise, Kurkjian replied to Robinson’s email about my email: "Thanks pal I think," If my information and analysis were correct, Kurkjian's book was obsolete before it was even released, and, if true, it debunked the FBI's latest revised claims about who the perpetrators were. That's likely why, one could surmise, Kurkjian replied to Robinson’s email about my email: "Thanks pal I think," A short time later in that same Southborough Library presentation, Kurkjian said that when talking to sources: "The way we work when you're in a very delicate, very tentative situation is, you build confidence, whatever they ask unless it involves a source. You chit chat, you show them your expertise, your seriousness and sobriety. You're not a wise guy, and they hear that."In my own experience with Kurkjian, I didn't "hear that." I experienced something quite different in Kurkjian's interview with me. Mason University English professor Art Taylor wrote in his review of Kurkjian's book, in the Washington Post, that "Structural choices — and maybe bulldog competitiveness — further dull the storytelling in "Master Thieves"." The "bulldog competitiveness" certainly came through in his interview with me. The experience felt more like being questioned as a hostile witness at a deposition, by Kurkjian, who is a law school graduate, in addition to being a journalist. At one point early on in the interview, for example, I was going to tell Kurkjian something about why I had suspicions about Abath, something not in the public domain, not in the document I sent, and that he couldn't possibly have known. But before I could do so, Kurjian interrupted me and said with a really sarcastic tone: "Oh, you're going to tell me about Rick Abath." The reporter who spent close to two decades as Abath's defense attorney in the court of public opinion, despite direct evidence of his possible involvement, Kurkjian was not interested in hearing anything about why Abath might be involved. At that point I replied, "Listen, I didn't ask you for anything for doing this. If you can't at least be polite I'm going to hang up on you." We talked for about another half hour, about an hour in total with Kurkjian interrupting me occasionally to complain that I was straying from his questions. I was giving him too much information. My replies were venturing beyond the scope of his questions, and he let me know it was a problem. This is the opposite of what an investigative reporter, or any investigator would do if their primary objective was to uncover as much information as possible. Kurkjian put me on speaker phone too, shortly after I called, which took a minute to set up with his tape recorder, but he did nothing to put my mind at ease, or to feel safe about sharing information about very much alive suspects. I wondered if there was anyone else in the room, and who they might be. We ended the call on friendly terms and Kurkjian told me he was going to try to follow up with the security guard Rick Abath about the individuals I mentioned. About six hours later, in the early morning hours of August 28, 2014 at 2:44 a.m., on Kurkjian's own BIRTHDAY, the three time Pulitzer Prize winner, Stephen Kurkjian emailed a former FBI agent, Joe Navarro, who in retirement had himself become a successful author and had established himself as a leading expert on kinesics, (body language). It had been former agent Navarro, who headed up the investigation of Roderick Ramsay's espionage activities in Tampa, FL where Ramsay then lived. In over forty interviews prior to Ramsay's detainment, Navarro had been the agent in charge, and was present for nearly all of them. The investigation of Ramsay's espionage activities mostly covered his time in the Army from 1983-1985, when he was stationed in Germany, as well as at least some espionage activity he had been involved in, when he lived in Boston shortly after he got out of the Army in January of 1986. In the interviews Navarro conducted of Ramsay, the former Boston resident, confessed to passing highly classified documents to Hungarian Intelligence services, which resulted in his spending over 12 years in federal prison for espionage. Ramsay, who prosecutors said had cooperated fully with investigators, was detained without being charged, twelve weeks after the Gardner heist. The admitted spy was then held in solitary confinement, while remaining uncharged with any crime for over a year, at the Hillsborough County jail, in Florida until his conviction and sentencing in 1992. Kurkjian's email to Joe Navarro began: "Hi Joe," I am a retired reporter for The Boston Globe who has been the paper's lead reporter for more than a decade on the Gardner Museum art heist. I received some information - well, more conjecturing [he's writing a retired FBI agent at 3 a.m. on his birthday about some "conjecturing."] - from a local individual who urges me to consider the possibility that Roderick Ramsay might have played some role in the Gardner heist. The 13 pages of meticulously sourced information I had shared was not conjecture. I did not conclude that Ramsay was guilty, I suggested that there was information that justified Ramsay being considered a suspect. And I didn't suggest he had "some role." I said he could possibly be the man with the gold framed glasses who was one of the two men dressed as police officers who entered the museum that night, and did most of the talking, according to the security guard, Rick Abath, who let the thieves into the Museum. Kurkjian continued: "The heist took place on March 18, 1990, 12 weeks before Ramsay was arrested. There is no specific evidence that I know of him that ties him to it yet but as the individual says Ramsay and a roommate at Northeastern lived in the area in the early 1980s, went to high school with a fellow named [Name deleted], whose father was a local Boston bookie who might have rubbed elbows with those whose names have been tied to the case." Attorney Kurkjian says there is no specific evidence that he knows of that ties Ramsay to it. But, at that time, there was no specific evidence, in the public domain at least, linking anyone to the Gardner heist, except for Rick Abath, the guard who was the only person recorded by the security system entering the Blue Room on the night of the Gardner heist, where Manet's Chez Tortoni was stolen. And even that fact had not been released unequivocally to the public until 16 months after my email in December of 2015. Kurkjian seems to embrace the FBI's lack of enthusiasm for solving the whodunit aspect of the case. A couple of years later in October of 2016, for example, Kurkjian said on WERS that Abath's "involvement with the bad guys has never been proven." While it has never been proven Abath was involved, there is evidence pointing to his involvement. As Geoff Kelly said in 2015 on CBS Good Morning: "Someone went into the Blue Room that night, and the only one that went in that room that night was the security guard, according to the motion sensor printouts." While it has never been proven Abath was involved, there was evidence pointing to his involvement. As Geoff Kelly said in 2015 on CBS Good Morning: "Someone went into the Blue Room that night, and the only one that went in that room that night was the security guard, according to the motion sensor printouts." Eleven years later, in an interview with Forbes Magazine on March 10, 2026, Kelly said that Abath "took Manet's 'Chez Tortoni' off the wall, one of the pieces that was ultimately stolen." Isn’t taking a painting off the wall stealing it? This is the kind of equivocating language you might expect from a politician, not someone who was involved with a criminal investigation. “If nothing else were stolen the night of the heist, we’d still be talking about one of the biggest art heists in history,” Amore said in 2016 of the theft of Chez Tortoni. Clearly, there was evidence of Abath’s involvement, just as there was evidence of Rod Ramsay's involvement, which is not the same as proof of their involvement. The number of people who make plans with others, days or more in advance, to enter a building and engage in violence or threats of violence, as part of their plan, against complete strangers is extremely small. The number of burglaries in 1990 was more than ten times that of the number of indoor robberies in commercial and business properties. Rod Ramsay had admitted to having engaged in this kind of criminal behavior when he was just 19 years old. Brian McDevitt when he was only 20. While evidence can be weak, contradictory, and open to interpretation, it is data, information, or clues that can be used to support a scenario of what happened and who was responsible. Proof represents a sufficient amount of compelling evidence that establishes a fact or truth beyond any doubt. Not all evidence is legally admissible, but it can lead to evidence that is. If there was no evidence of Ramsay's involvement, why did Kurkjian interview me? Why was he emailing a retired FBI agent in the middle of the night on his birthday after he interviewed me? Kurkjian continued: "And the two roommates [Name deleted] is the second man look somewhat like the sketches of the two thieves." "I realized [sic] it's a very long shot but no stone unturned in my business like yours as an agent." So Kurkjian acknowledges they BOTH look at least somewhat like the police sketches. What are the odds? And one of the "two roommates, is an admitted bank robber, and at the time of the Gardner heist, was the subject of an FBI investigation that led to his receiving a 36 year sentence, for espionage. In addition, the man who recruited him into espionage admitted to being involved in art crime. Ramsay was potentially looking at life in prison for his crimes, as was his fellow spy Clyde Lee Conrad, who did in fact receive a life sentence, ten weeks after the Gardner heist. In a 2026 interview in Forbes Magazine, Kelly said that the Gardner heist was "yet another example of Massachusetts thieves stealing Rembrandts because they figured they could use them at some point for leverage on pending criminal charges." So who had pending criminal charges in 1990? Rod Ramsay, a Boston native and robber, who had moved to Florida a couple of years earlier, was also someone who at that time might potentially be looking for a get-out-of-jail-free card for himself and or his fellow spy Clyde Lee Conrad. That had been the case the last time a Rembrandt was stolen in 1975, from Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. Ramsay, a Boston native, had a close friend from Milton, the hometown of Myles Connor, who negotiated a return of that stolen Rembrandt in exchange for a sentence reduction. Ramsay was likely to have known about that robbery and the deal made by Connor. With the release of the Gardner heist eve video less than a year after my interview with Kurkjian, it would turn out that Ramsay also closely resembled the visitor who entered the Museum 24 hours before the heist as well. 
Pictures of Gardner heist eve video visitor March 17, 1990 (left) and Rod Ramsay in Tampa, FL after his arrest on espionage charges on June 7, 1990 (right) Best, Steve Kurkjian There are no question marks in Kurkjian's email to Navarro. because there are no questions. He doesn't directly ask Navarro anything. Perhaps that's how the pros handle it when they're "in a very delicate, very tentative situation," as Kurkjian described dealing with potential sources at the Southborough library, just not with potential problem sources like me. "The most important thing is to keep [your] eye on the narrative," Kurkjian told an interviewer in December of 2015. My information could not be shoehorned into Kurkjian's and the government's publicly disseminated narratives of the case. It was a narrative breaker. If Navarro had ever run across any Gardner connection with Ramsay, the whole world would have known about it or the whole world was being kept in the dark about it. And if the whole world was being kept in the dark, Kurkjian provides no reason for Navarro to change course after 24 years, at least in the email he shared with me. Also since the Gardner heist took place in the heat of a historic espionage investigation and trial, the details, including any possible involvement in the Gardner heist by Ramsay could be classified. After his arrest, Ramsay waived his right to a speedy indictment and trial and declined numerous requests for interviews. He was placed in solitary confinement in the Hillsborough County jail for 13 months, unsentenced, unindicted, and uncharged. Ramsay was indicted in July of 1991, but the indictment was not unsealed for an additional two months and there was no announcement of the indictment. signed a plea agreement in August, but that remained under seal until September as well. Authorities gave no explanation for the secrecy or the sudden unsealing of the case. He remained unsentenced and in solitary confinement for an additional 14 months, over two years in total "As part of a plea agreement, government censors must clear any of Ramsay's future writings about his espionage activity or the investigation of it." In addition, Ramsay agreed to give the government any future profits from the telling of his spy story." "As part of the agreement, Ramsay also said he would take periodic polygraph tests." What information did Ramsay have that they were worrying about him sharing? He had been out of the Army for nearly seven years? What profits did he stand to make from his "spy story?" As part of his plea deal, if Ramsay were to share information with another person, related to his espionage or the investigation of his spying, and that person then turned that information into a book or movie, any money Ramsay received would belong to the government. Making these unusual details of his plea deal public in the mass media, would serve to ward off any journalists or others who hoped to capitalize on the life and times of the "career criminal," and spy Rod Ramsay. Before the Gardner heist Ramsay was permitted to drive a cab in Orlando, FL with its numerous military training and other military facilities situated there at that time. But in his plea bargain he agreed to periodic lie detector tests, to make sure he was not passing along classified information, years later. Kurkjian does acknowledge that Ramsay and the other roommate look somewhat like the sketches of the two thieves." But besides that he just has some conjecturing from a local individual (me), whom he falsely claims "urges him to consider that Roderick Ramsay might have played some role in the Gardner heist." Despite what Kurkjian says in his email, I did not urge him to do anything. He asked me questions and I answered them. He implied that his emailing Navarro has as much, or more to do with my urging him, as with his having seen one or more details in the information I sent, or something that I had said, that had him looking into Ramsay's possible involvement. The information I presented in my email to Robinson began: "Could a couple of former military boarding school classmates, Roderick Ramsay and [name deleted] be the culprits in the Gardner Museum Theft?" There was no urging, no call to action. I was just presenting the information for Robinson's consideration. Kurkjian did not share the information I sent with Navarro, to my knowledge, which could have caused him to think harder about the possibility that Ramsay was involved. Not only does Kurkjian not ask Navarro a direct question, he does not even explicitly suggest that Navarro consider the possibility that Ramsay was involved. He just suggests that Navarro share it with him if he had "run across any Gardner connection with Ramsay." Navarro replied to Kurkjian's 3 a.m. email at 7 p.m. that night. Subject: Re: from Steve Kurkjian, Re: Roderick Ramsay To: Stephen Kurkjian "Stephen, interesting story," Navarro begins. What story? The story, as told by Kurkjian in 200 words, is that someone, who is "conjecturing" that Rod Ramsay was involved, and that Ramsay and his roommate, who both look somewhat like the Gardner heist police sketches in Kurkjian's own view, is urging him to consider Ramsay as a Gardner heist suspect, and so he, Stephen Kurkjian, a three time Pulitzer Prize winner and the lead reporter for the Boston Globe on the Gardner heist case, is just casually emailing Navarro at three o'clock in the morning, about whether he had ever run across any Gardner connection with Ramsay. That is not a very interesting story, unless it is quite possibly true. At no point in his reply does Navarro address the issue of whether he had "ever run across any Gardner connection with Ramsay." Instead Navarro answers the major question, not asked by Kurkjian, which is this: Would it have been possible for Ramsay, seemingly scraping by as a cab driver, at Orlando International Airport, and possibly unemployed, to have robbed the Gardner Museum? To that question Navarro offers nothing close to an iron-clad alibi: "For nearly 6 months, including the period you indicate, [What period exactly is that?] Ramsay was under surveillance and or meeting with me almost twice a week but at least once a week and at the time; also, sources close to his employer (cab company) showed him going to work every day. His phones were being monitored so I don't know how it would be possible. Do you have pictures of the bad guys?” Navarro knows exactly when he met with Ramsay in March of 1990, and in every other month and year, or has an easily accessible record of his exchanges. Seven months after Kurkjian's email to him on April 15, 2015 it was announced that Navarro had sold the film rights to a book, which had not yet been written, about his investigation of Rod Ramsay, to George Clooney's Smokehouse Pictures.
Announcement by author and ghost writer Howard Means that Joe Navarro had sold the film rights to his Rod Ramsay story to George Clooney's Smokehouse Pictures If Ramsay's alibi was a certainty, or he was suggesting it was, he would not have asked this question. So not exactly an iron clad alibi. Furthermore, Navarro left the door open to further discussion on the question of Ramsay's possible involvement by ending his email to Kurkjian: "Do you have pictures of the bad guys?" If Ramsay's alibi was a certainty, or he was suggesting it was, he would not have asked this question. And that was all she wrote for Kurkjian and Rod Ramsay's possible involvement in the Gardner heist. Based on the information I had shared and Navarro's email response, he considered Ramsay's possible involvement "far-fetched," he wrote in an email to me. He did ask me about the other participants, who went into the bank with him in the Vermont bank robbery he was involved in and "plotted." But I did not have that information at that time. A month after Kurkjian interviewed me, filming on location in Boston began on the Academy Award winning movie Spotlight, Two months after that, the security guard Rick Abath, whom Kurkjian told me he intended to contact about the people mentioned in my information, posted a picture of himself standing between two guys who look like the Gardner heist police sketches, one wearing round gold frame glasses as was part of the description of the suspect and identical to a pair worn by Rod Ramsay in his mugshot photo taken eleven weeks later, and the other who looked like the police sketch of the other Gardner heist thief.
Comparing associates of Rick Abath (in black Stetson) with police sketches, FBI suspects, Rod Ramsay (mustache and glasses) and Ramsay's Boston roommate In 2017, when the book "Three Minutes to Doomsday" came out I told Kurkjian about it, at the Boyden Library in Foxboro, on April 6, 2017. "Is there anything about the Gardner heist in it?" Kurkjian asked me. It did not. But if Kurkjian was asking, maybe the possibility did warrant further investigation, but Kurkjian and the Boston Globe were not the people to do it, and seemed to be doing quite well for themselves, pumping out the FBI's disinformation talking points. I followed up the following day with an email to Kurkjian about the problem I had with the government blaming the heist on, Leonard DiMuzio, an honorably discharged Viet Nam era Marine Corps NCO, and the victim of an unsolved homicide, and also George Reissfelder, a white collar criminal, who "spent half of his short adult life in prison for a crime he didn't commit." Reissfelder died of an overdose, but now Geoffrey Kelly suggests that Reissfelder was actually murdered, which would make him, like DiMuzio, a victim of an unsolved homicide. "There is zero possibility these guys did it and they know it," I wrote to Kurkjian in an email, after seeing him in Foxboro. It is not their theory. And then the government does not even have the guts to come out and say that's who they think did it and accept the consequences of their lies. And yet they not only don't have the media challenging them or ignoring them, they have you putting it in the newspaper that that is who they think did it under your byline. I have said who I think did it and I have it as a pinned tweet on my Twitter page for over a year. And the people I'm talking about are alive." "Kerry, let's not get too driven here," the same Kurkjian who reportedly "dives deep into the underbelly of Boston’s crime syndicates of the 1980s and 1990s," according to the Dorchester Reporter. "Let's remain friends," Kurkjian continued, "but I'm not going to go down these rat holes [not rabbit holes, rat holes] with you as it doesn't do your mental health any good. Have your wife say it's ok and then I'll consider it. But let's talk of more interesting stuff like the Red Sox and the Pats until then.Only 15 months earlier Kurkjian had asked me three times to meet with him in my home state of Rhode Island. He proposed having lunch at an Irish pub. Originally, I did agree to meet with him, but then I changed my mind after an email exchange with Anthony Amore about, which amounted to one more thing that made me decide he could not be trusted. Kurkjian's proposal came after I had sent him an email after attending a lecture of the Gardner heist case he gave at the Weston Public library on January 20, 2016. We exchanged small talk briefly, but nothing about the Gardner heist, and he was not aware that I was someone he had conducted a telephone interview with about the case a year and a half earlier. I was leery of meeting with him after the past experience of our phone interview. I contacted Anthony Amore at the Gardner Museum, about the idea of meeting with Kurkjian. We had exchanged dozens of emails from August to October of 2013 about my thinking on the case and my belief that Ramsay was involved. By that time too, I had a Twitter account with dozens of tweets examining the possibility that Ramsay should be a suspect. The information I shared with Amore the previous year was pretty much the same information which Kurkjian had seen. Amore gave me reason to be mistrustful of Kurkjian. Amore: "Kurkjian throws whatever he can against the wall in hopes that it will stick. Just look at the book!!!" Amore wrote. As well as: "I think you have a good sense of how Kurkjian operates. For instance: that story about the shed is inaccurate. But then again, so are pages 1-300. Another example: I never, ever, gave anyone including Elene Guarente $1, never mind $1000. It's a complete falsehood. You seem like an extremely bright and savvy individual. You should follow your instincts on meeting with him. I'm a believer that our gut reactions occur for a reason." Subsequent emails from Amore stated, "Keep in mind that you owe him nothing; he's not anywhere close to getting to the bottom of this; and you have nothing to gain from it," and "Beware of 'off the record' promises, Kerry." During the time that Kurkjian was trying to set up the interview with me, he sent me a couple of out-of-the-blue emails about matters related to the Gardner heist case, but which we had never discussed. In one email, sent to me on January 21, 2016, Kurkjian wrote: "I heard they were battling - [Robert] Fisher, the new prosecutor in the case, was frustrated by how little spadework had been done by the FBI. But there's a major disconnect between what the US attorneys office wants to get done and the approach that the feds take in an investigation." In the original information I had sent to Robinson that was forwarded to Kurkjian and was the basis of his interview with me, I had written about how the FBI might have been reluctant to prosecute Ramsay. And now here was Kurkjian, a year and a half later, supporting my contention that the FBI might have been reluctant to "solve" the Gardner heist case at the outset. My 2014 document to Robinson at Watchdog New England stated that "It would be embarrassing for law enforcement if Ramsay had done this crime since questions would arise as to why he had not been arrested earlier, as well as how did he get into the position of stealing classified documents in the first place." "Ramsay is an embarrassment to the government," I wrote. "How did this boarding school bank bandit, daily pot smoker from the age of 15 ever get a top secret security clearance, [ever] get entrusted with our nation’s most vital secrets?" "How is [it] that this most odious of enlistees wound up working directly under the head guy in the longest running espionage conspiracy known in the history of the United States?" To my knowledge, Kurkjian has never shared this information about the federal prosecutor's frustration with the FBI's "spadework," in any of his public writing about the case. In fact, Kurkjian stated quite the opposite, the following year in a radio interview on WNPR he said that "It's known as the largest art heist in world history and for 28 years the FBI has labored diligently...and they have chased down every lead but come up with nothing." Stranger still was an email I received hours earlier from Kurkjian that same day, with the subject line: "Obrien(sic) license." The email included no text, nor additional information, only an attached image-file. It was a photocopy of retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Lawrence O'Brien's driver's license.
Drivers License of Retired Army Lt. Colonel and Gardner Museum Supervisor Lawrence O'Brien who died in 2015 sent to me by Stephen Kurkjian "Though it has been discounted by investigators," Kurkjian reported in the Boston Globe two months earlier, "four of the former guards had told Kurkjian they believe the person in the Gardner heist eve video, released on August 6, 2015. The article also reported that "Two former guards who knew O’Brien well told the Globe they do not believe the man in the video was O’Brien. His brother also disputes the ID." “Though it has been discounted by investigators,” Kurkjian reported in the Boston Globe, one of the more promising possibilities put forward is that the man in the footage was Lawrence P. O’Brien, then the museum’s deputy security supervisor, who died in 2014 at age 77. Four former guards told the Globe they are convinced it is he, including one who has a “vague memory” of O’Brien returning once after museum hours to retrieve a wallet he had left at work. The article also reported that "Two former guards who knew O’Brien well told the Globe they do not believe the man in the video was O’Brien. His brother also disputes the ID." I actually knew Larry O'Brien. He was my next door neighbor for about a year, as I told Kurkjian. Although I don't recall discussing the Gardner heist with him, we had spoken at length several times, and I remember he told me that he worked at the Museum in security. 
Comparing Gardner Museum Security Supervisor Larry O'Brien with video still-shots of heist eve videos from Gardner security camera 
The thin gray unsubstantiated line linking Robert Guarente and Robert Donati in the Boston March 20, 2013 print edition 
Mugshot photo taken of Robert Donati 29 years before the Gardner heist used on Wikipedia, "Last Seen Podcast" and Netflix' "This Is A Robbery" (right). Much more recent photo of Donati in Kurkjian's book "Master Thieves" (left) Kurkjian claimed that Guarente is a suspect because he was friends with Donati and then claimed that Donati is a suspect because he was friends with Guarente. Everything else Kurkjian reports about the connection between the two is unsupported. All of the other claims are anonymously sourced without corroborating information. Kurkjian said that Donati and Guarente were great friends in the Netflix This Is A Robbery. He said Donati was great friends with Myles Connor in the same segment, episode 3, of the Netflix series. Connor moved to Kentucky three and a half years before the Gardner heist, and was in jail awaiting sentencing for over a year before the robbery. It seems Bobby Donati was very popular. But he was also potentially very unpopular. Every time Myles Connor hooked up with his pal Donati, trouble followed: "When he [Donati] told me he found a buyer for the Wyeths, [from the 1974 Woolworth estate burglary] I made certain assumptions," Connor wrote in his memoir. "'We can trust this guy, right?" I asked.""Bobby nodded. 'Absolutely'" “You’re Bobby’s friend, right?” Connor wrote that the FBI undercover agent asked Connor, as he approached him in a rented U-Haul truck full of stolen art, from the Woolworth estate burglary. The deal was supposed to take place at a Cape Cod shopping plaza in Mashpee, MA. But Connor was quickly arrested and charged with "receiving merchandise which was stolen and transported in interstate commerce.” On the run, a year later after skipping out on his trial, for trying to sell the "Wyeths" to an FBI undercover agent, and after cautiously hiding out in Cohasset, MA for months, Connor grew more and more restless as well as reckless, he wrote. He began heading up to Boston to see friends, including Bobby Donati. A short time later Connor was arrested a hundred miles away from both Boston and Cohasset in Northampton, MA where his girlfriend was attending college, a team of FBI agents, at least a dozen of them confronted Connor in the parking lot in his favorite restaurant in the area, wrote. It would appear that someone had tipped off the feds about where Connor was going to be. Was Donati an informant? Donati was sentenced to 4-6 years in prison only days before the Woolworth estate burglary, in May of 1974 and to ten years in prison (to be served concurrently) on federal charges involving stolen securities, two weeks after Connor’s arrest with some of the stolen art in the Woolworth estate thefts, in July of 1974. Since Donati was on parole for armed robbery at the time of the arson, the Globe reported that Donati's sentence would only begin after he served a portion of his sentence for the robbery he was on parole for. But the federal judge dropped that requirement. If Donati had been an informant, it could explain the special treatment he was getting within the criminal justice system, despite his crimes, which became a front page Boston Globe news story in 1977.
Boston Globe 11/10/77 Donati's continued participation in the work release program was called an “outrage and a disgrace” by Suffolk District Attorney Garrett H. Byrne, "incredible," by the head of the DOJ's Organized Crime Task Force, and "a joke" by another DOJ lawyer assigned to the strike force. Then six years after he died, the question of whether or not Donati had been an informant became an issue in the high profile trial of Mafia boss Frank Salemme, in federal court. On June 13, 1997 the Boston Globe reported that acting Assistant Attorney General Seth Waxman was threatened with contempt by US District Judge Mark L. Wolf, for refusing to disclose whether or not Donati and three other men were informants. The following week it was reported that Waxman, who had been threatened with jail time, submitted an affidavit that Donati had not been a federal informant. Three days later, however, the Boston Globe reported that "Anthony M. Cardinale, the lawyer for indicted New England Mafia boss Francis P. "Cadillac Frank Salemme and codefendant Robert DeLuca said the defense had just learned that Donati "may have been the unnamed informant who wore a hidden device to record conversations of convicted Mafia captain [his boss] Vincent Ferrara," the Mafioso gang leader, who according to Kurkjian, claimed Donati stole the Gardner art to get him out of prison. "Lawyers for five alleged organized crime figures argued yesterday that Donati was actually an informant for the State Police." That is a distinction that would be a good deal less important to Mafia bosses, like Vincent Ferrara, Donati was said to have informed on, than it was for the federal judge deciding the fate of the accused organized crime figures. Donati's body was found bludgeoned and stabbed twenty-one times, in the trunk of his Cadillac, a short distance from his home. In appearance, it was a mob hit more in line with that of a snitch, than that of an opposing soldier in a gang war. But in his book, while Kurkjian's offers a few theories about the reason for Donati's murder: It was because he owed money, or he was "possibly a victim of the Boston gang war raging at the time," (a gang war that in 1990 existed only on the pages of copy written by Stephen Kurkjian) or something to do with the Gardner heist." The heavily reported question of whether or not Donati was an informant, which arose in a federal courtroom six years after Donat's death, and was consistent with the manner of his execution, is never raised as a possibility, by Kurkjian. Nor is it mentioned in Geoff Kelly’s 2026 book about the case, which suggests that Donati’s murder may have been related to the Gardner heist. Attorney Cardinale, in twitter DM's exchanged with me, dismissed the possibility of Donati having been one of the Gardner heist culprits, writing: "Bobby Donati was a knock around guy who was essentially Vin Ferrara’s 'driver' (who I was then representing). When I met him [Donati], circa 1988-9, he was, in my humble opinion, not in any way involved [in the Gardner heist], just not what he would have been doing at the time." In Netflix “This Is A Robbery,” Kurkjian states that "the day after Bobby Donati went missing, his son picked up the phone. Whom did he call looking for his father? He called Bobby Guarente. Donati…and Bobby Guarente were great friends. These guys grew up together in the East Boston neighborhood. They knew each other.” Donati's son likely called Guarente because he was someone who might know what happened to his father, and not as a shoulder to cry on, or the name of a good grief counselor. Martin Leppo, who once represented Robert Guarente, said in the same episode of This Is A Robbery, "Bobby Guarente was somebody who was very personable, and was not ashamed to have his name be associated with a lot of tough people." As a member of the Salemme gang, Guarente was someone who would possibly know if Donati, who worked for Ferrara, had been targeted by this rival gang, who were Ferrara’s sworn enemies. In the CNN Gardner heist documentary "The Gardner Heist Stealing Beauty" on How It Really Happened with Jesse L. Martin (“Season Eight Episode 5”) in May of 2024, Kurkjian went so far as to say that "Bobby Donati gave the art to his great friend, Bobby Guarente." Kurkjian suggested I look in his book to learn about the “the connection between Donati and Robert Guarente.” I did not find a "connection," except for two unsubstantiated claims by two unreliable sources that Guarente and Donati were in some ways associates. One was, Elene Guarente, who also "told the Globe that her recollection of the painting [she saw her husband give to Gentile] did not match any of the paintings and sketches authorities showed her," Kurkjian reported in the Boston Globe. If Guarente is credible, then whether or not her claim that Donati and Guarente knew each other is moot since she says she did not see her husband with any stolen Gardner art anyway. Minus Elene Guarente there is nothing connecting Robert Guarente to the stolen Gardner art. The other person who claimed Donati and Guarente were friends, according to Kurkjian in “"Master Thieves"” was Earl Berghman, who had teamed up with Jeanine Guarente, Guarente’s daughter from an earlier marriage," after she told him that she had seen Rembrandt's "Storm on the Sea of Galilee," in her father's home. "Twice in a matter of months Jeanine produced what she claimed were chips she had collected from paintings her late father had at their home in Madison, Maine. Twice, an attorney Berghman and Guarente had hired, Bernard Grossberg, presented them to Arnold Hiatt, a trustee for the Gardner Museum. “But on both occasions the chips turned out to be fakes. In fact, the second batch turned out to have come from the edges of a magazine that someone had snipped off," Kurkjian wrote in “"Master Thieves".” The fact that one criminal knew another criminal, by itself, is not any kind of proof or evidence that they were involved together in any particular crime. In total, as far as the evidence presented by Kurkjian, you have weakly established information linking Donati to the theft, weakly established information linking Guarente to the stolen art, and weakly established information linking Guarente and Donati to each other in any criminal enterprise, or even as associates. Both Myles Connor and Vincent Ferrara claim that Donati told them that he took the art to bust them out of prison. The only connection between the two of them is that there is strong reason to believe he informed on both of them. What I did find in Kurkjian's “"Master Thieves"” was not a connection, but the opposite of a connection. I found a disconnection, and a potentially fatal one if not respected. What I discovered was the impossibility of Donati and Guarente working together on the Gardner heist. In his book, Kurkjian writes that Donati was a "confidante of and driver for Boston mob leader Vincent Ferrara who reportedly told Ferrara that he had pulled off the Gardner robbery to try to gain Ferrara’s release from prison." "On the same page Kurkjian writes that "Vinnie Ferrara was co-leader of the renegade Boston mob group that fought Frank Salemme for control of the region’s underworld in the 1980s and ‘90s," and then on the very next page he writes that Guarente was "a loyalist to Frank Salemme and his underworld gang." Later Kurkjian wrote how Guarente was personally involved, according to sources, in the execution of Richard “The Pig” DeVincent, for fraternizing with members of a rival gang, just like Kurkjian claims Donati and Guarente were doing, since he claims they were "great" friends: “An FBI report attested to Guarente’s involvement with organized crime figures,” Kurkjian wrote. "During the battle for control of Boston’s underworld in the 1980s and ’90s, he [Guarente] was aligned with Frank “Cadillac Frank” Salemme. Guarente was designated by his bosses to make it clear to Richard “The Pig” DeVincent, whom he knew from prison in the early 1980s, that he needed to stop associating with a rival gang seeking the same power." Like DeVincent, Donati, a Ferrara loyalist, was in a rival gang seeking the same power. DeVincent did not heed Guarente’s advice and was shot to death in 1996, an execution witnessed by Guarente and a member of the Rossetti crime gang, according to the FBI. Guarente was quoted by an informant as saying that another witness’s gun had jammed in shooting DeVincent and that “it was a good thing my gun was working properly,” Kurjian wrote. In addition, Kurkjian's own source in claiming Donati robbed the Gardner to get Ferrara out of prison, insists that Gaurente, and David Turner, whom Kurkjian claims was a Guarente "thug" protege, were not involved. From "Master Thieves": "I told him that as far as I [Kurkjian] could tell, the FBI was certain the heist had been arranged by David Turner, who had turned the stolen art over to Robert Guarente, who before he died in 2004 had given at least several of the paintings to Robert Gentile." “They don’t know what they’re talking about,” the caller said. “David Turner didn’t have anything to do with this. If he did, he wouldn’t be spending the best years of his life behind bars. “Bobby Donati robbed the Gardner Museum,” the caller said flatly, to get Vinnie Ferrara out of jail.” There was no way Guarente could associate with, nevermind plot, or be involved in a massive caper like the Gardner heist, with a Ferrara soldier and confidant like Bobby Donati, most especially so if Vinny Ferrara would stand to benefit, as Kurkjian's source claimed, since Ferrara was one of Salemme's chief rivals for power in the Boston underworld. In the Washington Post review of "Master Thieves" the reviewer stated, "Kurkjian has gathered so much information that explaining the smallest bit of it leads to a spate of cross-references, qualifications and digressions, adding "as the section on “The Heist” transitions to “The Search,” readers might expect to plunge into the investigation, but Kurkjian leaps instead to 1997, when Tom Mashberg, then at the Boston Herald, reported that he’d seen one of the stolen paintings." So while there is an overwhelming amount of poorly laid out information about a gallery of local toughs, who may or may not have been involved in the Gardner heist, there is barely anything about the actual investigation in Kurkjian''s book, or for that matter in Ulrich Boser's book or in Geoff Kelly's Gardner heist book. The investigation from the outset was five hundred miles wide and an inch deep, and the books on the case reflect that, but without addressing that glaring absence of a tangible robbery investigation. There never was anything like the kind of comprehensive investigation people were led to believe there had been, ever, which should be reflected in the literature but it is not. What happened between the time of the heist and when Youngworth popped up seven years later looking to make a deal with the museum to return the art? Kurkjian claimed on Netflix This Is A Robbery, “Episode 3,” that "Between 1990 when the theft took place and around 1997 there was nothing." 
by Kerry Joyce Copyright © 2026 All Rights Reserved
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