Gardner Museum Heist —Blog

At least with Trump, there is some pushback occasionally from other news outlets, but with Kelly, none. Whatever nonsense Kelly spouts, even if it contradicts what he stated 20 years earlier or two, is dutifully disseminated, and no explanation for the change is requested, by the access-compensated journalists who interview him, by the aggregators who spread the disinformation the journalists on the inside are reporting, or from the rest of the cowed media herd, who remain silent. This has been going on for decades, since 2013 at least.

Can the United States enjoy the fruits of a free society, of a democracy with a federal intelligence agency/police force that is unaccountable to the public, the press, the politicians? Not for long, it now appears.

One might think though, that if Kelly was so intent on challenging others about their adherence to the facts, that he would at least fact-check those parts of his so called nonfiction book, that pertain to those who fail to confirm to the FBI's ever shifting narrative, for example, on the question of whether or not the security guard Rick Abath was involved. But Kelly can’t even construct a halfway decent straw man without building it on layers of provably false claims.

In Thirteen Perfect [So Fuhgeddaboudit] Fugitives, Kelly brazenly forges ahead like some boozer who should have been shut off hours ago, but one with a literary agent, a publisher, and a squad of enabling media minions like Bob Ward, Tom Mashberg and Shelley Murphy, who at this point seem as invested in Kelly’s long running "local toughs" fairy tale about the Gardner heist, and the investigation as he is himself.

Before taking a job in law enforcement, Kelly was a producer for The Daily Show, the one starring Jon Stewart, and his career as a creature of the media, and a joker at that, continued on into his job with the FBI, as the Gardner heist lead investigator. The Gardner heist gig was not one sought after by his fellow agents, so he was able to take it on, shortly after joining the Bureau, he says.

In the way that he casually plays fast and loose with the facts, Kelly implicitly suggests that truth is not terribly important here. Although he was on the case since at least 2003, everything Geoff “Crypt Kicker” Kelly uses to support his false, every changing narrative is sourced from or about the dead, often about people, like Elene Guarente, Chicofsky, and Rick Abath who were still alive before he started saying the things he now says about them.

What is important is not the truth, but the authority of investigators. It is an attitude shared by his “former partner,” Anthony Amore:

"Don't believe the [Gardner heist] books," Amore said. "Don't believe what you read in them. Suspend disbelief [Time 28:00], and know that people are working really hard behind the scenes."

That sage advice to the public came about during an interview he did with WBUR pollster Steve Koczela on his podcast, The Horserace, in December of 2018. It was just a short time after the final episode of another podcast, Last Seen Podcast, about the Gardner heist case, was released. In that podcast Amore was a frequent figure at the center of all of the dramatic inaction, starting in Episode 1, where Amore’s authority is quickly established by Kelly Horan, and he then reveals what a burden it all is from the attic of the Gardner Museum.

Horan first presents Amore's strong leader credentials: "Besides the thieves, no one knows more about what happened the night of the robbery than Anthony Amore does. He took the job as security director at the Gardner Museum 15 years after the heist. He is the beating heart of the investigation. Organized, meticulous, dogged — you might even say haunted."

Then Amore says: "This case is like the perfect storm for someone like me — for it to like ruin your life. You know, to have 13 albatrosses around your neck forever because I know that if I go to my grave unsuccessful that I'll go to my grave an unhappy person."

The Horse Race podcast interview Amore did, was also right after his first resounding defeat in running for statewide office.

True to form, Amore set aside facts for more narrative-conforming bullshit. Koczela can’t say he wasn’t warned. [Time 20:00]

In his beggars belief reply, Amore told Koczela that "In 2015, the FBI and I came here to do a search of Suffolk Downs, and it's just really an example of how hard we are looking for these paintings."

“However we do know there are certain people of interest," Amore continued, "that we've looked at over the years, who we believe may have had some connection to the heist, whether at the time of the theft or afterwards, who frequented this place. And we also know that Suffolk downs was closed between January of 1990, so just before the heist for a about a two year period. [That’s pretty slick detective work finding out that a race track was closed for two years,“so it just seemed like an interesting thing.”

You would be surprised at the size of the operation. It’s a monstrous facility. There's so many places to look. And the FBI came with their evidence response team, which is dozens of agents, lots of technology and we spent the better part of a day here looking but of course we were unsuccessful.

Still, there are those that say that this was not really why the FBI was at Suffolk Downs searching for the stolen Gardner art in 2015.

So you can believe the news story that the FBI went through all of this trouble because they had a tip, or you can believe the “suspend disbelief, guy, Anthony Amore, that they searched Suffolk Downs, twenty five years after the fact because “it just seemed like an interesting thing.”

"In contrast to the promising leads, it was the specious ones that always lingered like an oblivious party guest," he complains, as if Kelly was the victim of some cruel fate, and not of his own and the FBI’s own whacked out communications strategy, that has been responsible for the failure to stomp out the narratives in competition with the ever changing one cooked up by FBI minions like Kelly, in a hollow tree somewhere, or maybe a regular tree by hollow men.

As I menionted earlier, Kelly worked in television.

Summing up, Horan’s admitted goal was to flood the zone with shit.

Writing here, Geoff Kelly also wants to conflate the term "theory" with "fact." The Kelly built theoretical question is, were the guards wearing authentic police uniforms or not? But the actual question is, did the Museum receive a ransom not that stated the thieves were not wearing authentic police uniforms, or not? Kelly wants to deflect from the ransom note to some alleged rumor, over insignificant minutia, concerning the attire of the thieves.

It is either true or not true that the thieves were wearing authentic police uniforms, not a theory. A theory would be that the thieves were helped, or not, in their effort to get inside by wearing authentic police uniforms.

The question of how authentic the police uniforms wore is not even one of any consequence, in any case, since Kelly now admits in his book that he and the FBI were convinced for years that Rick Abath, who acted alone in allowing the thieves into the museum, was an accomplice. And Kelly’s former partner Anthony Amore said that “Once they were in, it was a fait accompli. There were no further barriers between them and the paintings," Anthony Amore told WBUR in 2018.

Kelly wants to carry the day on something he mischaracterizes as a theory on a matter of zero significance. He writes that this "theory," came about at some point during the social media investigation into the heist, but never explains what that means, “social media investigation.” Presumably the part of the investigation that is unregulated by Kelly, Amore and the FBI. Kelly discredits NPR, and also "social media," as untrustworthy sources of information, although neither of those entities are the actual originating source of this information.

Kelly: "In the episode entitled “Anne Hawley’s Best Lead, the podcast discusses an anonymous letter received by the museum back in 1994: ‘It offered a piece of information that had never before been made public that attested the writer’s credibility: The uniforms the thieves had worn as disguises had not been those of police officers but rather of security guards.1’ That’s a very compelling statement, except it’s not accurate,” he concludes.

What is not accurate here is Geoff Kelly. There was no episode of Last Seen Podcast called "Anne Hawley's Best Lead," and this story about a 1994 ransom note received by the Gardner Museum is not discussed in any episode of Last Seen Podcast. Stephen Kurkjian did write a story for the WBUR website with that title. In fact Kelly copies a passage from it word-for-word (in italics above) but then does not even bother to put it in quotes, and misattributes it to the podcast.

Kelly: "Both the guards and the teenaged witnesses on Palace Road provided detailed descriptions of the subjects’ attire, and what they described were legitimate police uniforms, right down to the keystone-shaped Boston Police patches “outlined in gold piping” and dark blue pants with light blue stripes running up the seams."

But now that Abath is dead, we learn that "ostensibly" was the right descriptor after all, since Kelly now acknowledges that Abath was in on it, it doesn’t matter what the witnesses said about the uniforms. There are no witnesses to what the two crooks said to a third Gardner heist crook, security Rick Abath, except what Abath said they told him, in the course of claiming he was a patsy.

So on the day of the robbery the Boston Police had it right and twenty three years later, the FBI had it wrong. The thieves didn’t tell the “night guards they were investigating a disturbance," The guard solely responsible for letting the thieves in, Rick Abath, Geoff Kelly guard now says, was himself, one of the thieves.

Furthermore, the Boston Police reports said: The victim [Rick Abath] states that after gaining entry the suspect told the victim they were responding to a call for the kids outside the museum.

The kids outside had been gone for over seven hours by the time the Boston Police questioned Abath, they said. There is no way the Boston Police could have known about the kids outside the museum unless Abath told them that story, and this explanation was not offered until after they were already inside the Museum. Abath changed his story, and the FBI shared Abath's updated version with the public, at a national press conference.

Since the first mention of the guards possibly wearing security guard uniforms was on the day of the robbery by a Boston Police Department spokesperson at a press conference. Someone must have told the Boston Police Spokersperson Captain David Walsh to say that.

Furthermore the 2018 WBUR news story referenced by Kelly (which he mischaracterized as something in a nonexistent episode of Last Seen Podcast, did not claim that the police were wearing security guard uniforms, Kurkjian wrote that a ransom note writer claimed that the thieves were wearing security guard uniforms; a ransom note that Kelly himself called potentially legitimate 14 years later on an episode of American Greed Season 2 Episode 3, "Unsolved: $300 Million Art Heist."

It was "extremely well written" and "referred to things in the case not known publicly." Gardner Museum director Anne Hawley said on the program, which first aired on February 13, 2008. Hawley was followed by Geoff Kelly on the program saying: "In 1994 we took it [the ransom note] very seriously and we continue to take it very seriously."

Did the ransom note say what Kurkjian reported it said, that the thieves were wearing security guard uniforms, and if it did, then why did Kelly state on national television 14 years after the museum received the ransom note, that "we continue to take it seriously"?

Three years earlier, in 2005, in what CNN's Dan Lothian called "an exclusive on camera appeal from the museum's director, an overture to an anonymous letter writer 11 years ago who seemed legitimate, Anne Hawley said: “I'm particularly interested in hearing from that person who had, I think, a real concern about our getting the work back.”

Whether it was a legitimate offer or not became moot because the ransom note writer wanted assurances the FBI would not seek to arrest them during negotiations, a condition the FBI was unwilling to accept, in fact, even though they assured the Gardner Museum that they would.

“In an interview at the time, Richard Swensen, the special agent in charge of the office was adamant that he had ordered the investigators to stand down while the negotiations took place. One agent assigned to the case at the time confirmed he had been directed by superiors not to investigate dealings with the letter writer, but said other investigators had continued to pursue leads on the case,” Kurkjian reported in the article Kelly inaccurately referenced the source of in his book.

You might think that, moving forward, the best course for the Museum would be to not include the FBI in any future negotiations. But four months later, a new federal law, which retired FBI art crime specialist Robert Wittman stated was passed by Congress "because Congress wanted to make the Isabella Stewart Gardner theft a federal crime," made it illegal for the Museum, any museum to negotiate the return of their own art.

The Theft of Major Artwork Act, passed by Congress in September of 1994, and amended in 1996, made it a federal crime not only to steal items of value from a museum or objects of cultural heritage, but that a person “knowing that an object of cultural heritage has been stolen or obtained by fraud, receives, conceals, exhibits, or disposes of the object, shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 10 years, or both.” There is no exception in the law for being, like the Gardner Museum, the crime victim. The Museum is legally obliged to included the feds in any recovery effort. There can be no side deals by museums to get their art back under the law.

If you have the Gardner art and you call up Robert Fisher or Brian Kelly, or any of the other former DOJ attorneys who worked the Gardner heist case, now defending rich folks in federal court for a living, and you say you have the art, do you think they are going to tell you to call Anthony Amore at the Museum, or the FBI?

In 2020, Eric Trickey in Boston Magazine reported that “Once the museum gets the anonymous call or tip it’s been waiting for, there may not be time to wait for a Brinks armored truck to show up at the artworks’ location and shuttle them back home. ‘It’s just as likely I’d have to put them in the back of my Jeep Grand Cherokee and drive them myself,’ [Anthony] Amore says.”

This particular Walter Mitty fantasy, of Amore’s is, in real life, a federal crime. As much as Amore likes to talk about “our paintings,” which he has never set his eyes on in his life, the way the statute is written, which is supposed to protect Museums collecitvely from ransom demands, it is illegal for a museum to recover its own art without getting the feds involved.

Trickey continues: “If time allows, however, specialists will be brought on-site to package the art—which may be damaged—for transport to the Gardner’s conservation lab. ‘If any flecks of paint are precarious and might flake off,’ Amore says, ‘we’ve got to make sure none of it is lost.’”

Yet there were no conservation specialists brought in when the FBI searched for the art in Orlando, covered in Episode Nine of Last Seen Podcast. The FBI excavated a small plot of land, which turned out to be an old septic tank, as any qualified ground penetrating radar technician worth his salt could have told them without a dig. Neither was there anyone from the Gardner Museum present. “The owner reached out to the museum’s security director Anthony Amore to register the tip,” WBUR reported, then the FBI conducted the search, without any participation by the museum.

If you want to hear in his own words, the harrowing account of the return of a stolen $100 million dollar painting, "Woman-Ochre," a 1955 abstract expressionist oil work by Dutch/American artist Willem de Kooning, to the University of Arizona in August of 2017, from the person who personally returned it in 2018, FOR FREE, you can find it in Episode 1 of Season 2of the podcast Empty Frames Season Two Episode One, "Woman-Ochre Returns," and nowhere else.

by Kerry Joyce

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