Gardner Museum Heist —Blog
|
Only three weeks ago a 1984 murder on Long Island may have been solved after authorities recovered DNA from a suspect's discarded smoothie cup, which matched DNA found at the crime scene. DNA was first introduced as evidence in the United States criminal court system in 1986, four years before the Gardner heist. A big, historic investigation, like the Gardner heist is where the FBI would normally make use of their most state of the art technology, if not for the fact that the Gardner heist is not a normal investigation. It's especially hard to extract DNA when the "critical evidence in the case up and vanished as long as a decade ago," Boston Magazine reported. How convenient! Both duct tape and handcuffs used during the infamous 1990 robbery have long been missing," so the government lackeys in the media pretend like it wasn't an option anyway. The original scoop came from the Boston Globe, but that story was wrapped up in so many provably false facts, on the history of the case, that I hesitate to source it directly. "You would think that evidence would be preserved," Murphy then said. Right. But if it wasn't presereved, and if you combine that knowledge with the fact that eyewitnesses to this day have not been questioned by the FBI, which took exclusive control of the case on day one, you might question whether amplifying the FBI's constantly changing statements on the case is in the public interest. "They've said the chances of finding anything on duct tape from twenty-nine years ago, what are the chances? Murphy continued, adding: "But you don't know if you don't have it, if you don't look. There's never been forensic evidence, DNA, fingerprints, hair, anything like that, that says, 'These are the thieves.'" Murphy's reference to 29 years ago had nothing to do with the Gardner heist investigation. It had to do with the amount of time that had passed from when she was speaking, in 2019, and the Gardner Heist occurred in 1990. In 2017, Murphy reported that "it’s unclear when the items vanished — although two people said they have been missing for more than a decade." The Boston Police turned over the duct tape and handcuffs on the day of the robbery to the FBI. The evidence could have been tested, preserved, and safeguarded from that time forward. But focusing on what could theoretically be accomplished in any given year, if the evidence had not been lost, does not take away from what could have been accomplished in 1990, by testing, or at least preserving DNA samples at that time. For the investigaton of the 1950 Brinks robbery in Boston "more than 3,000 local, state and federal agents worked around the clock. More than 400 docks, houses, warehouses and other sites were searched for clues," the Boston Globe reported March 20, In contrast, Ray Flynn, the Mayor of Boston at the time of the Gardner heist, recalled: "'Boston police were pretty much taken off the scene of the investigation by the feds, and we never could quite understand why that was the policy. Our robbery squad knew every wise guy in the city and had some reliable informants. They grew up and lived in Boston. Why wouldn't they hear things during an investigation,' Flynn said," according to Stephen Kurkjian in Master Thieves. Kurkjian then proceeded in his book to explain away the FBI's solo act this way: "Traditionally the FBI has resisted seeking assistance from local law enforcement in investigating federal crimes," but he offers no examples or evidence to support the existence of this claimed FBI "tradition." It is not true that the FBI has spurned assistance from other agencies with any other robbery investigation, except the Gardner heist. No one, who was directly involved or was in a position of authority at the time of the Gardner heist has anything positive to say about the Gardner heist investigation with the exception of a small, long-in-the-tooth pack of access hounds, who have been bought off with exclusives, tips, scoops and interviews, as well as promises to be in the million dollar winner's circle if the stolen Gardner art is ever found.As Anthony Amore said to Boston 25's Bob Ward earlier in the year. "You and Shelley Murphy both say the same thing to me all the time, 'Hey I'm going to be your first call, right?' And you would be because you're both the best crime reporters in the city without a doubt." In the Louvre heist, the "more than 100 investigators assigned to the case are combing through 150 DNA samples, surveillance footage and evidence left behind in the thieves’ wake. Those assigned include the Brigade for the Repression of Banditry, the special police unit in charge of armed robberies, serious burglaries and art thefts." But Gardner heist had at most 40 agents working the case, across the country, and many like Thomas McShane were focused exclusively on the art's recovery, sort of. McShane wrote about his experience on the Gardner heist investigation that, "suffice it to say, the informant tips coming into the Boston field office regarding the Gardner theft were no doubt being finely screened," Thomas McShane wrote in his 2007 book, Loot about his experience of being an FBI agent investigating the Gardner heist, in 1990. "It was one similar frustration after another, a quagmire I was happy to leave to the uncooperative and compromised Boston field office," he wrote. Finely screened? From where? By whom? "Within three months, the number of agents assigned to [the Gardner heist case] had been drastically reduced to just one, a 26-year-old agent from San Francisco, Daniel J. Falzon," Kurkjian wrote. Not even keystone cop(s)! Just the one agent. The FBI asserted for themselves a completely exclusive law enforcement role. Every other law enforcement agency was shut out from the investigation, and with the investigation closed off in this way, they proceeded to assign a single, inexperienced agent from out of town on the case. Then when the Gardner Museum went ahead and hired their own investigators, the US Attorney, for the District of Massachusetts threatened the Gardner Museum with legal action, for investigating the case themselves. That led to US Attorney Wayne Budd sending "a memo to the museum warning the museum that it faced prosecution if it withheld information relevant to the investigation." Trustee Francis Hatch responded, Stephen Kurkjian responded in Master Thieves, saying in his letter to Budd that he was 'shocked and saddened' by Budd’s attempt to 'intimidate' the museum and that it cast 'a pall over future cooperative efforts.'” The following year, in March of 1992, President George Bush gave Budd a promotion, appointing him to serve as Associate Attorney General of the United States. Budd oversaw the Civil Rights division, as well as the Environmental, Tax, Civil and Antitrust divisions at the Department of Justice, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Now a senior counsel at Goodwin Procter in Boston, Budd's daughter is the chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. That's what intimidating crime victims, who encroach on an FBI slow walked / no walked investigation gets you, even before Trump. That and crickets from the local media. Former Museum Director Anne Hawley also recalled how: "Early in the investigation, I was threatened with the charge of obstruction of justice when pursuing privately a lead that promised to crack open the investigation." An outside security systems contractor for the Gardner Museum named Steven Keller, was openly critical of his experience of being interviewed by the FBI about the Gardner heist case in 1990: "I was called in to talk to the FBI briefly (in spite of the fact that they were not at all interested in talking to me)…. "I feel that if the FBI interviewed everyone as poorly as they interviewed me, it's no wonder this remains unsolved… I felt that they were not interested in what I might be able to tell them because they knew it all already," Steve Keller wrote in the comments section of a Boston Phoenix interview with Gardner heist author Ulrich Boser. But the Globe persists in consulting with the now retired Geoff Kelly, who was the FBI's lead "investigator" for twenty years and never even got around to interviewing two eyewitnesses who came forward right after the heist. The two young friends, who saw the thieves outside the museum sitting in a hatchback in uniforms with BPD insignia. For 18 years Kelly said publicly the guard Rick Abath was not a suspect, until after he retired and Abath had died. Kelly now says he is convinced that Abath was involved, based on the motion sensor data from the security system Steve Keller had installed. While it was established in the first week of the investigation that Abath had been the only person who had entered the Blue Room, on the morning of the robbery, Kelly spent his two decade suggesting and stating that Abath was not involved in the crime, and bases that conclusion on evidence the FBI had in 1990, and that was made public in the Boston Herald in 2009. The recent article about the Louvre heist, which sought out Kelly's opinion, includes a convenient link, for buying Kelly's crummy, duplicitious book, Thirteen Perfect Fugitives: The True Story of the Mob, Murder, and the World’s Largest Art Heist. The excuse making starts right in the title. The FBI has not only not found the "thirteen perfect fugitives," which refers to the missing artworks stolen from the Gardner Museum. They haven't found anything ever: "Not a fingerprint, footprint, hair, DNA sample, clothing fiber, nothing. The robbers operated completely off the CSI radar — a neat trick considering that the security guards said they weren't wearing gloves," ex-FBI Gardner Heist Investigator Thomas McShane, and author of Loot wrote. "A neat trick indeed," maybe not so much by the thieves, as by the FBI's investigators. So is it perfect fugitives? Two perfect thieves? Or is it a government agency perfectly unwilling to be straight with the public about the Gardner robbery? The article, Former FBI agent who investigated Gardner heist [Kelly] weighs in on Louvre break-in and museum theft, is written by Mark Shanahan, who just might be in line to be among the next generation of Gardner heist dissemblers for the Boston Globe. If you're going to be a Gardner heist dissembler, you first have to establish you've got game, and Mark Shanahan is nothing, if not gamey. In 2016, Shanahan incorrectly described Stealing Rembrandts, by Anthony Amore and Tom Mashberg as "the book about heists of works by the Dutch master at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and elsewhere, even though Amore's co-author, Tom Mashberg, wrote in the New York Times, the year before that in writing Stealing Rembrandts, we omitted the Gardner case because Mr. Amore said the hunt had reached a delicate phase." The book's forward, by Amore, includes a disclaimer stating that "this book is not a detailed look at the theft of three Rembrandts, and ten other items (including a rare Vermeer)." But to be a Boston Globe Gardner heist, mouseketeer, means being reliably unreliable. So two years later Shanahan reported the Gardner Museum has published Stolen, a slender volume that's the first book authorized by the museum about the theft. The first book authorized? Since when is the museum in the business of authorizing and not authorizing books about the case. It's a coffee table picture book, with photographs of the stolen Gardner art. There are fewer words about the Gardner heist in it, than the article Shanahan wrote about the "slender volume." In addition Shanahan wrote once again that the art has never been recovered despite countless turn-of-the-screw news stories about the investigation, and at least four books, including...Stealing Rembrandts by Tom Mashberg, and Gardner Museum security director Anthony Amore." Promoting books by the Gardner Museum, and their security director, Anthony Amore, under false pretenses, are apparently the kind of "clips" Globe editors like to see in showing that a given journalist can be trusted to be untrustworthy in their coverage of the Gardner heist in the tradition of Shelley Murphy, Tom Mashberg, Stephen Kurkjian, and Kelly Horan. Because who does the Boston Globe get to speak with Geoff Kelly so he can "weigh in," on the Louvre heist, Mark Shanahan. It was quite predictable that the Boston Globe tapped the misinforming Shanahan the article that came with it the opportunity to speak with the double-talking Geoff Kelly.Kelly's book Shanahan writes, includes the author’s theory of who stole the 13 masterpieces from the Gardner. The author's "theory"? The FBI has been saying for twelve years that the identity of the thieves was an established fact. The Boston Globe has reported over a dozen times in the past ten years, and as recently as March 18, 2025, that: "In 2013 the head of the FBI’s Boston office [Richard DesLauriers] said at a press conference, often referred to as a "bombshell press conference by Kurkjian, that the agency knew who had pulled off the robbery. Now twelve years later, Geoff Kelly has a "theory" about it? Never has it been referred to as a "theory," until this year. So in 2013 Geoff Kelly said he knew who the thieves were. Then in 2023 he had a really had a good idea. And now in 2025, he knows who did it... in... "theory"? To speak with Geoff Kelly on the record, as an American journalist about the Gardner heist investigation, is to embrace his mutually contradictory statements about the Gardner heist investigation, without a followup quesiton or request for clarificaiton. In 2013, the BBC's Alatair Sooke, however told Kelly that his claims about the state of the Gardner heist investigation "sounds like madness, to say things like 'we're closer than we've ever been' and 'the case is solved,' if you don't know where the paintings are now and you don't know where they've been for 12 years." To which Kelly replied: "Absolutely, but it's the ultimate whodunnit." In this same article by Shanahan Kelly says “We know who did it." So is it a theory or is it a fact? In 2013 Kelly said: "We know who did it," which does not sound like a theory. But ten years later Kelly said: "We really have a good idea of how we think the heist went down back in 1990 and where the art work moved over the years, and individuals, who were responsible for the theft and may have had some involvement." This wasn't in response by some gotcha journalists. This is Geoff Kelly speaking on a pre-recorded FBI podcast, and the best he can come up with is "We really have a good idea of how we think the heist went down..." But again I always temper that by saying that we could be wrong." And we, as Americans, are supposed to play along with this Fox News MAGA style manure because local media at the Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, GBH, WBUR, and Fox 25 News are the ones dishing it out, or staying silent. This why you only see members of this same cadre of dissemblers writing these stories and appearing on the documentaries, and you don't see them on documentaries about anything else. The Boston Globe called on Tom Mashberg, who has been covering the Gardner heist for 28 years, to write about the recent Louvre heist case. Mashberg did some important work on the Gardner Museum case last century concerning William Youngworth's offer to return some stolen Gardner art, but he has had to go along to get along as they say, and is no longer a credible journalist when it comes to the Gardner heist.On Netlfix This Is A Robbery Mashberg said: "At that time, I think the museum people really wanted Youngworth and Connor to get a full immunity package and a guarantee of reward money, and then let's see the art returned. It kind of became a put up or shut-up moment. But at the time, the FBI and law enforcement rejected that idea. They still felt that it was caving in to extortion." In other words, Mashberg is stating that is what the feds who stepped away from the negotiating table, not Youngworth, that they did not want to cave in to extrotion. That contradicts the official explanation given to the public however. For example, Mahsberg's co-author, Anthony Amore, who serves as kind of an unofficial spokesperson, for the investigation said in 2013 that “Every single person who said they could get the paintings back, one of them is Myles Connor, one of his associates is Billy Youngworth who's come forward and said it, they're all charlatans and that's nicest word I can use for them. Hucksters." Time: 1:24 In his latest article for the Globe about the Louvre case, Mashberg put in a gratuitous plug for Anthony Amore and the book the journalist (Mashberg) and his source (Amore) wrote together."Anthony Amore, a museum security expert and the head of security at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Mashber wrote, "has been counseling France to swallow its pride and offer a reward. (Disclosure: Amore and I coauthored “Stealing Rembrandts: The Untold Stories of Notorious Art Heists.”)" It should have been called the Made Up Stories of Notorious Art Heists, at least in the part about Myles Connor. In the Notes, section of Stealing Rembrandts, it states that "Connor has written a longer, slightly different account in his memoirs. This account is drawn from multiple one on one interviews. The small variations in the versions do not in any case alter the sequence of events. But in their book, when Connor 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, however, Connor writes "Surely I though there was at least one piece out of the many I'd stolen, that would be worth my freedom. But when I broached the subject with Regan, speaking theoretically of course he was less than encouraging. "But a family friend who was a state law enforcement official, John Regan said that the U.S. Attorney was not in the mood to negotiate and even if he was his hands were tied." "Face it Myles, nothing short of a Rembrandt could get you out of this," adding "I swear these are the words he uttered.” Stealing Rembrandts contradicts newpaper accounts from the time of the robbery in numerous ways.In Stealing Rembrandts, the MFA Boston was robbed at 10:15 a.m. Newspaper accounts said it was at 12:30 p.m. In Stealing Rembrandts, the robbers were armed with a machine gun. In newspaper accounts the robbers had pistols. In Stealing Rembrandts, the security guard John Monkowski was struck on the head with machine guns inside a getaway van, in an attempt to retrieve the stolen Rembrandt. Newspaper accounts reported: "Mounkouski tried to stop the men as they ran toward the turnstiles inside the entrance, and one them clubbed him with a pistol butt." [Another guard Vito] Magaletta, who was coming from behind the armed men said: "I saw them hit John. I saw blood.'" There was no machine gun and there was no van. "Police also have the car used for the get-away. A gold-colored Ford Torino, bore the same rear license plate numbe that witnesses furnished," and "both carried 9mm pistols." Myles Connor did not fit the description of the robber who removed and carried the painting out of the Museum. The robber was described by witnesses as a white male about 20 years of age, 5-foot-9-inches tall and around 140 pounds with long blond hair, and wearing a black leather cap. The other robber was said to be 5-foot-6-inches tall and weighed about 135 pounds. He also appeared to be about 20 years old. The driver of the getaway car was described as a white male, but there was no further description."Connor is 5-foot-6, and was a good deal heavier than 135 pounds. Balding and in his early 30's, Connor would not have been mistaken for a 20 year old, even in 1967, when he was 24, as the mug shot on the cover of his book shows.  Amore has been counseling France, Mashberg reported in this story. Alo, Monsieur Amore? Zeese is France on zee phone calling you now. We are at zee ends of our wits. Zee crowns jewels are meesing. What are we to do? Like there aren't a thousand other people saying they should offer a reward in France. Here's a "disclosure" for Mashberg: New York Times "staff members may not enter financial arrangements with or accept employment or compensation of any sort from individuals or organizations who figure or are likely to figure in coverage they provide, edit, package or supervise. No staff member may serve as a ghostwriter or co-author of a book with someone who figures or is likely to figure in Times coverage. But Amore did figure into Mashberg's coverage of the Gardner heist for the New York Times after their book came out. The reason the New York Times prohibits these kind of relationships with their staff is to ensure the kind of impartiality the public is NOT getting about the Gardner heist, which is exactly the way the New York Times seems to want it, which may explain why they look the other way with Mashberg's relationship with Amore. A relative newcomer, but hands down the most prolific Gardner heist investigation dissembler, in recent years, is the fabulicious Kelly Horan. Until recently, Horan was the Assistant Ideas editor of the Boston Globe, and was brought back to do that voodoo that she do about the Louvre heist, Why France’s stolen crown jewels matter. In Horan's new role as a "Boston Globe team member," she is making a personal appearances, with one of her Gardner heist sources, Anthony Amore.
Apparently they didn't like my comment about how completely full of it Horan is about the Gardner heist,
so they may have shut down the comments on the article over it for everyone. Anyway, that's what happened, if you can
believe Anthony Amore. Spoiler: You can't. Anyway I turned my comment
into a blog post. People can decided for themselves to what extend it is or is not a "manifesto."
As she has done in her Gardner heist coverage, once again in this Globe Opinions column, Horan puts style ahead of facts, and subordinates the actual history to other considerations. Ironically, and yet not surprisingly, Horan is a WBUR (public radio) veteran, married to a WBUR (public radio veteran,) who nonetheless seems to want to establish what a quadrille-stepping monarchist she is: "But Empress Eugénie’s tasseled diamond bow was not plundered by revolutionaries in 1887. It was sold by the French state to jeweler Emile Schlessinger, who in turn sold it to American heiress Caroline Astor. What a shockingly banal outcome in a country habituated to lurching from one dramatic denouement to another." The subhead of Horan's column is that "The story of the Louvre heist is sensational. It’s got nothing on the stories behind the loot itself." In much of the new journalism, when events are "sensational," like the Gardner heist and the Louvre heist, history, reason, fact, and professional codes of conduct become inoperative, obsolete. Sensation is all. In that unclean spirit, it is not surprising that Horan's account of the fate of Empress Eugénie’s diamond brooch bears little resemblence to how it really happened. The 1887 auction, which the New York Times over a hundred years later called "the Grand Auction," of the French Crown Jewels came about after the rise of the French Third Republic, and was partly an effort to undermine a potential coup d’etat by royalists. Those in favor of the sale, including one National Assembly member who famously said, “Without a crown, no need for a king,” hoped the dispersal of the jewels would discourage restoration of the monarchy, in addition to raising money.The auction took place in the Pavillon de Flore, a tower that stands at the southwest end of the Louvre [itself] near the Pont Royal, in May 1887. More than 77,000 gems were sold, with few pieces remaining intact. Horan, however, makes it seem like the French government sold the diamond brooch to Schlessinger to pay the light bill at the Palace of Versailles or something. And that he then sold it to Caroline Astor when she stopped by his little shop one day with her Papa. In fact, Emile Schlesinger was acting for Caroline Astor of New York. The auction was attended by diamond merchants, importers and jewelers from many countries, including the United States, Britain, Spain, Italy, Russia, Turkey, Tunisia and Egypt, who descended on Paris for the 11-day event in May 1887. Schlessinger, an American was one of them, acting as "a jewelry representative for the self-proclaimed Queen of New York society, Mrs. William B. Astor." Caroline Astor was not simply an "heiress," but one of the most influential women in the United States. She was from a wealthy family but married into the far wealthier Astor family. A prominent American socialite of the Gilded Age, she was often called "the Mrs. Astor," and held immense power over New York City's high society. As the gatekeeper of the exclusive "Four Hundred," she and her social arbiter, Ward McAllister, dictated who was and was not part of the city's elite, making an invitation to her balls the ultimate social prize. The Boston Globe just can't lay off that sweet Gardner heist clickbait, and the wacky clickbaiteers who serve it up; real characters, like from out of a novel by Alexandre Dumas. But if the Boston Globe stops now, they might get left behind, after all the time and money and effort that they have put into being co-deceivers of the public on the Gardner heist narrative. So they trot out Geoff Kelly, (Geoff Kelly!), who kept the public as in the dark and excluded from the Gardner heist investigation, as they did the Gardner Museum, before their commissar Anthony Amore was installed in there, the Boston Police, and even other FBI agents working the case, to weigh in on the Louvre heist. Their reporters will go on blaming the city and the public: "My feeling, as far as what this is unique about Boston," Stephen Kurkian said in 2015, on the "public" radio WBUR, "is the tribalism and that is intense. And I think that that has factored into a code of silence. You know, you don't help out, those aren't us, you know, we're, whatever your high school is. We're old school. And that stopped an easy flow of — a sense of, if I haven't lost something, I'm not going to get involved in the recovery. I'm not going to try to clean it up. Unless it hurts me and my family, I'm not going to raise my hand, because it's going to get me in trouble."Kurkjian wrote in the Tampas Tribune that year how Bostonians were too ignorant to understand what is at stake: "One approach that has not been fully utilized was underscored in the successful recovery of nine Impressionist paintings five years after they had been stolen from the Marmottan Museum Monet in Paris in 1985. "A French detective who worked on the case said a major difference between that investigation and the Gardner heist was the overwhelming assistance French police received from the public." "'The loss of the paintings had evoked a sense of personal loss for the Parisian public,' said detective Pierre Tabel. 'It was like a pall of gloom had fallen over the city,' Tabel said. 'Every Parisian felt it.' And that deep collective sense of loss motivated so many — from legislators to common folk — to maintain a commitment to solving the crime." "Tabel stressed that the investigators in the Gardner theft need to gain that sense of the collective loss among the Boston public to advance the case. While federal investigators believe that the two thieves who pulled off the heist are dead, there are others, including family members or other criminal associates, who might know essential pieces of the puzzle."In the Albany Times Union Kurkjian credited the FBI with doing their best in the investigation: "Despite the FBI's best investigative efforts including issuing a public offer that no one who voluntarily returns the artwork would be prosecuted and instead would be given access to the museum's $5 million reward for recovery." But waving a white flag, and paying the thieves a ransom is not any kind of "investigative effort." And second, what Kurkjian is saying is completely false, and it does not become more true by the number of times he says it, which is quite frequently. The FBI has no authority to make good on such a promise, even if they had made, which they haven't. It would be up to the U.S. Attorney to decide, and the only thing any U.S. Attorney has ever said is that they would consider immunity. The reward, is not from the government, it is from the Gardner Museum, and the Museum has stated that the thieves are not eligible for the reward. Kurkjian further stated that "secrets that could lead to the whereabouts of the artwork remain hidden among associates, family members and friends of the thieves, and it's these individuals who must be convinced to break their traditional code of silence." Kurkjian says this without a shred of evidence, that the Gardner heist was committed by local thieves, only that it is what "the FBI believes." Kurkjian wrote a similar editorial around the same time, in the Boston Globe, minus the offensive remarks that appeared in the versions published by the Albany Times Union and the Tampa Tribune.“The place is so wonderful now that we tend to forget what a horrendous thing it was to have happened,” [the then Governor Michael] Dukakis recalled. Dukakis lived less than two miles from the Gardner Museum, when it was robbed. “The wearing of police uniforms always bothered me, and then the seeming difficulty of being able to identify them [the Gardner heist thieves].” For the FBI it has been a difficulty, but for Governor Dukakis it was a "seeming difficulty." Hawley too, he said, has shared with him and his wife, Kitty, a very close friend, her frustration that the FBI has been unable to recover any of the stolen pieces. “She’s frustrated, HIGHLY SKEPTICAL about a lot of the stuff,” he said. “She’s gotten tired with everything. Enough already."Boston is only as pathetic as these Gardner heist dissemblers, like Geoff Kelly, if they refuse to stand up for themselves and say we have had it with this phony Gardner heist investigation and the phony news coverage of it. As Michael Dukakis said in 2014: "Enough Already." by Kerry Joyce Copyright © 2025 All Rights Reserved
|