Gardner Museum Heist —Blog
Abath: I was panicking. I didn't realize I was panicking. But I was completely panicking. I was afraid that they were going to set the place on fire after they were done. That was my -- maybe because I was right across from the boiler. But that was -- my predominant fear was, God, I hope they don't burn the place down.
Jesse L. Martin, Host of the CNN original series, How It Really Happened with Jesse L. Martin: Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is known for its vibrant art depicting picturesque Dutch and Resnaissance scenes. But on one dark night in 1990 the museum became the scene of a horrifying crime. Robbers swept in, terrorizing the guards and taking 13 works of art now worth half a billion dollars The sinister smash and grab left the FBI with a mind boggling mystery on their hands. Where are the missing masterpieces? And who were the masterminds behind this audacious heist. This is how it really happened.Boston Globe Ideas Editor Kelly Horan: March 17, 1990 is St. Patricks Day, which is practically a national holiday here in Boston.
Boston Globe reporter Shelley Murphy: There are a lot of celebrations, a lot of parties.
Retired Boston Globe investigative reporter StephenKurkjian: The police are out en masse. Every police officer who wears a uniform is on duty.
CNN Reporter Randi Kaye: But it was really what should have been a typical night at the Gardner Museum.
Kurkjian: There are two night watchman the museum had in place.
Kaye: At 1:24 a.m. Rick Abath, one of the security guards, was at the security desk and the buzzer went off. This is on Palace Road, which is sort of the service entrance to the side of the museum.
Retired FBI Agent David Nadolski: He answered it and he saw two uniformed police officers standing outside.
Abath: And I could see them on the outside camera. I thought they were just clearing drunks off the street. And I just kind of leaned over to the intercom and said, "yeah"? And they said, Boston police, we got a report of disturbance on the premises. So I buzzed them in.
Nadolski: So he buzzed them in.Kaye: According to Rick Abath the two men at the door were both white. One was tall about six foot one the other one he said was shorter and wider. Both had mustaches. He seemed to think that they were fake mustaches.
Abath: They just looked like Boston cops.
Fisher: Right when they walk in, they walk up to the security desk. They say is anybody else here, and Rick says "yes, there's another guard."
Kurkjian: The second guard. Randy was on the third floor.
Fisher: They said well can you call him down? So Rick gets on the radio and asks Randy to come down.
Abath: And as soon as he was there the cop that was dealing with me turned to me and said, "Don't I know you? Don't I recognize you? I think there's a warrant out for your arrest. Can you step out from behind the desk?" And he said up against the wall, and so I put my hands against the wall and he handcuffed me. There was one alarm called the panic button that you had to press if something went wrong. It was up on the underside of the desk. And that was the only alarm that went outside the museum.
Horan: So by getting Rick away from the panic button. there's no way for either security guard to send a signal of distress. Randy, the other guard had never spoken to the press before and chasing him down was quite a feat. But we went on the record.
Hestand: He told Rick to stand against the wall and put his arms up. He does the pat down. He puts the cuffs on, and I'm just standing there with my jaw open.
Horan: Randy is really worried, then the cops say "you too." And then he said "what did I do?" Hestand: I kept asking them over and over: "Why are we being arrested? Why are we being arrested?" And he wouldn't answer.
Abath: And then very dramatically said gentleman this is a robbery.
Horan: And then all of a sudden Randy and Rick are being led by these two men, who they now realize are not real police officers to the basement of the museum.
Nadolski: They were both tied up.Horan: Rick was duct taped around his head.
Murphy: It's very peculiar they way they were subdued. If you look at photos from the time, the duct tape is just wrapped right around the face, which is kind of strange.
Horan: Randy thought he was going to die.
Hestand: It was scary and I remember feeling like I needed to prepare myself for death.Martin:The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum stands as it has for more than a century. Within these walls is a remarkable private collection, some of the finest artwork ever created. much of it displayed here still, according to the will of Isabella Stewart Gardner.
Horan: Isabella Stewart Gardner was dubbed by one of the Boston newspapers of her time as one of the seven wonders of Boston.Patricia Vigderman: It was the Gilded Age. Isabella was a Boston socialite.
Horan: She had thought as a young woman that what Boston really needed was art and she began collecting voraciously.
Vigderman: Titian's Rape of Europa, Rembrandts, in particular Storm On The Sea of Galiliea. She had a Vermeer.Horan: Gardner herself prized The Concert by Vermeer possibly more than any other painting in her museum. This was a painting that she bought at auction in Paris she beat out the Louvre Museum. The Letters of Bernard Berenson and Isabella Stewart Gardner, 1887-1924: With Correspondence by Mary Berenson Hardcover – January 1, 1987
Wittman: It's a masterpiece
Horan: At some time with this growing collection she decided well this all belongs in a museum. Vigderman: When she came to build it she modelled it on a Venetian palazzo and all of the artwork goes up and down the walls.
Kurkjian:: when she opened the museum in 1903 she mandated that it be free of charge. to gain the appreciation and the attendance of all of Boston. Her museum at that point in time was the largest collection of art by a private individual in America.
Horan: August 21, 1911, the Mona lisa is found to be missing from the Louvre Museum in Paris. Immediately, Isabella Stewart Gardner gives her guards a shoot to kill order. Anytime someone tries to take anything from this museum, you shoot them dead. I think she would have been horrified to hear eighty something years later that neither security guard on duty that night wanted to risk their lives for her art.
Abath: We talked about it a lot how easy it would be to rob the museum. It seemed like a foregone conclusion. [Laughing] It was not at all inconceivable that the place could get robbed.
Horan: Once Randy and Rick were secured in the basement. The thieves made a bee line for the Dutch Room.
Kurkjian: Up there the scheming, cunning thieves turn into werewolves. The frames are broken, the glass is shattered.
Horan: They took down Storm On The Sea of Galiea enormous Rembrandt's only seascape. Despite the title, it is not a seascape. "His only seascape," is a sensationalist element added in later years. A seascape painting is simply a work of art in which the ocean or major body of water is one of the central elements of the work.If Storm On The Sea of Galiea is a seascape so is Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze. they took down lady and gentlmen in black also by rembrandt. they took down a tiny postage stamp sized rembrandt etching.
Randi Kaye: They took Vermeer's The Concert. They took a piece of art by Flinck called Landscape with an Obelisk, and then they take what's really called a Chinese ku but it's sort of a vase or urn. Kurkjian: Then they move to the Short Gallery. After three minutes in the Dutch one thief goes into the Short Gallery, while the other remained in the Dutch Room.Kaye: they took five Degas sketches. And they also took a bronze eagle finial, which was part of a Napoleonic flag. Apparently it seemed to investigators that they had tried to get the flag itself, but they weren't able to, so they took the finial off the flag.
Horan: Also that night, Manet's Chez Tortoni was taken.
Kaye: The thieves didn't protect the paintings in any way. They cut some of the artwork out of the frames. The cut the artwork from the stretchers.
Horan: To me leaving remnants of the paintings behind was savage. In my mind it's sort of like slashing someone's throat.
Murphy:Today the value of what was stolen 13 pieces of art is placed at over $500 million dollars, probably well above that.
Kaye: The thieves didn't leave until sometime after 2;00 a.m. and they exited through the very same door that they came in.
Text on screen: About 4 hours later around 7am the next security shift arrives.
Kaye: They try to get buzzed in from that same employee entrance and nobody answered.
Murphy: They immediately see that things aren't right. There are no guards at the desk. They called the police.
Kaye: The police came, security came.
Murphy: The FBI was called in immediately. They find the guards luckily alive and well in the basement.
Kaye: And they saw what turned out to be the biggest art heist in history on their hands.
Unknown Reporter: Where the artwork once hung is now just empty space inside this Boston Museum.
Unknown Reporter: Paintings by Vermeer, Rembrandt and others stolen, but so far publicly at least authorities have only these composite sketches to go on.
Kaye: The thieves took the security camera tapes. and they took the printouts of the motion detectors, which would have tracked where they were and all of their movements througout the museum.
Horan: Not knowing however, that there is back up.
Murphy: So investigators were able to track their steps.
Fisher: There were fingerprints recovered in various points in the museum. Whether on frames or on broken glass.
Murphy: But nothing that allowed investigators to link any of these fingerpints to a particular suspect.
Nadolski: DNA wasn't out at the time and a lot of the forensic capability that exists, not even a fraction of it existed at the time.Wittman: The security in museums at the time it was almosgt primvative. So the investigators did what they could with what they had.
Fisher: I think initially there was a lot of speculation or belieft that organized crime was involved.
Murphy: And there's talk of you know Whitey Bulger who was one of Boston's most notorious gangsters, could he have been involved.
Horan: But if you're in Bosonn on the morning of March 18th 1990, and you hear that not one not two but three Rembrandts have been stolen you think of only one person. You think of Myles Connor.
Connor: I collected art and antiques. Later on I learned that it was not the hardest thing in the world to rob museums.
Kaye: Myles Connor: He was a career criminal known for stealing art. He'd stolen a Rembrandt, at one point.Horan: It was a Rembrandt from the Museum of Fine Arts. It was a brazen daylight robber. Myles had a specially made oversized trench coat into which he could put a painting, that caught the attention of the guard, who gave chase and Myles goes to the waiting van and they take off so Myles was the first person that we know the FBI looked at in the Gardner Heist. He would have been the number one suspect if not for the fact that he was in federal prison at the time.
Kaye: So he couldn't have actually been in the museum that night, but there were still a lot of questions about whether or not he orchestrated it.
Uknown Reporter: The feeling is if they don't explore all options to get the paintings back they might be painting themselves into a corner.
Kurkjian: William Youngworth had a antique shop. His importance in this case begins in 1997.
Uknown Reporter: William Youngworth says he knows where the paintings are, and will reveal them for a share of the $5 million dollar reward.
Youngworth: If i can produce with what they are asking for then I deserve the reward like any other citiezn would.
Kaye: He claimed that he had information about the missing art works and that he could provide more information about them and even maybe acess to them. Youngworth somehow connected with a reporter from the Boston Herald and they asked for proof. Let's see the art.
Mashberg: And the scheme that was arrived at was showing me a painting, in its hidden location.
Kurkjian: Tom Mashberg was picked up at the Herald around 11;00 o'clock at night and they drove to Brooklyn. They went up to a warehouse and there is a container with several large, rolled up cylinderical tubes and Youngworth takes a canvas out of the bin and holds it up over his head and let's the canvas roll down.
Kaye: This reporter thought what he saw was Storm On The Sea of Galilea, one of the missing Rembrandts, and the Herald was thrilled, ran with the story. The big headline: "We've Seen It." But had they really?
CNN's Dan Lothian:Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is an intimate showcase of some of the finest works of art. But it's perhaps best known for what was stolen. William Youngworth, who has a rap sheet of some sixty convictions claims to know where the Gardner art is.
Kaye: William Youngworth got in touch with a reporter from the Boston Herald. Youngworth took this reporter to a warehouse of sorts and this reporter was shown a Storm on the Sea of Galilea.
Kurkjian: He only saw it for a flash of a second.
Mashberg: Shortly therafter I was also given photogrpahs and paint chips, which was purported to be indicative of the real art.Murphy: As soon as the FBI sent the paint chips to its lab for analysis, they concluded these were not from the Storm on the Sea of Galilea, and they just stopped all negotiations with youngworth.
Horan: It alll comes to nothing for the museum.
Kaye: The FBI was getting so many tips but then it went silent. Even though there were these thirteen works of art that were missing the informaiton just sort of dried up, until 2005 when the fbi got a big tip.
CNN reporter Dan Lothian, 2005: Recently you took a trip to France in tracking down potential evidence in this case. you can confirm that you did go.
FBI Gardner heist lead investigator Geoff Kelly: Yes we did go. We did go to France. I can't get specific on what we were doing over there, but in broad terms I can tell you that we were covering yet another lead that's come up.
Kaye: Around 2005-2006 the FBI gets a big tip that two Frenchmen living in Miami are trying to broker a deal regarding two paintings a rembrandt and a vermeer.
Wittman: What was reallly interesting about that statement the Vermeer was that there's only 34 verifiable Vermeers in the world and the only one that was missing at that time is The Concert that was stolen from the Gardner Museum.
Kaye: Bob Wittman is an undercover agent with an art heist unit formed by the FBI. It was formed after the theft at the Gardner museum. So Bob Wittman goes undercover as an art buyer.
Wittman: I was acting as a shady dealer so to speak, who was representing clients around the United States, who had a lot of money. And they would be very interested in buying stolen artworks. We were able to make an arrangement to go meet with these poeple in Miami.
Horan: Bob Wittman really gets in close undercover with two criminals Sunny and Laurenz
Wittman: So Sunny was working with groups that stole paintings. He had information about two paintings that had been stolen from the United States back in the early Mineties late Eighties.
Kaye: Bob Wittman is told that the two paintings are in the hands of Corsican mobsters. Corsica is an island in the Mediterranean, and it's a French territory. What's interesting is that this finial was stolen from a Napoleonic flag the night of the robbery. It was sort of an odd choice for the thieves to take. But it turns out that Corsica is essentially the homeland of Napoleon.
Horan: It's a very compelling notion that a Corsican band of gangsters might have tried to steal back their flag and pull off the enitre rest of the heist in the process.
Wittman: So Sunny said me that he had access to these paintings, they're in the South of France. And he told me they wanted $30 million dollars for the two paintings so we started the investigation. At that point we called it Operation Mastgerpiece. And this was an undercover operation to try and do a buy-bust, to get thsee two paintings back to the United States. We contacted the OCDC which is the French art crime team in Paris. They became our partners in the investigation and they set up wiretaps. And listening in, and they heard Sunny using a code. And they were talking about the Rembrandt and the Vermeer being streets. So the idea was my person in the United States wants to buy something from Rembrandt Street or Vermeer Street. And that was the code they were using, thinking that no one could fgure out what they were saying.
TEXT ON SCREEN: Before Wittman can set up a sting to buy the alleged Gardner Museum paintings, his connection tells him there other artwok they want to sell off first.
Wittman: Sunny said that they had four paintings. These paintings had all been stolen in an armed robbery from the Museum of Fine Arts in Nice, France. So Sonny said we need to buy those first. So we set up a meeting in Marseilles, they brought the paintings and they were arrested. Those four paintings were recovered but my cover was shot. They knew not to sell any more paintings from Bob the dealer from the United States.
Horan: The whole operation falls apart.
Wittman: And as a result of my cover being blown the leads vanished.Fisher: There was a lot of time and energy spent on investigating whether the paintings were in or could be in Southern France. Could that have br a viable theory. I think it would have been difficutl to get these paintings out of the country and over there. if you had a professional crew that was going to get to a foreign country in Europe, they probably would have got more than 13 pieces and got them over to Europe right away. But I could be totally wrong.
Martin: Welcome back to how it really happened. Art selling for millions of dollars used to be unheard of, but then in the seventies and eighties for more people, art became an asset and prices skyrocketed. Van Gogh's Irises shattered auction records in 1987 going for $53.9 million. Suddenly everyone, including criminals wanted to get their hands on big name pieces. All of that set the stage for what happened in Boston's Gardner Museum in 1990, In the Gardner case, it's really interesting because three of the pieces that were stolen were Rembrandts. One of the Rembrandt's that was taken was an etching. Not worth a whole lot of money. The other two were very, very valuable the Storm on the Sea of Galilee, the only seascape Rembrandt ever did. So in some respects you could almost think that they were targeted.
Murphy: What is so intriguing about this is if in fact someone went in there to steal Rembrandts, why are they stealing a ku, like a Chinese beaker, right? Why are they stealing sketches of jockeys on horses.
Amore: In the majortiy of major art heists, thieves go to a museum looking for big name, well known artists because of the value ascribed to such art.
Fisher: The Gardner Heist didn't really fit the profile of you typical art robbery. If you had the means to pull this robbery off, you would hired a professional crew. Somebody who understood how to handle this art. I think from all the evidence, we've seen, this crew did not know how to handle this art. I can't imagine some rich collector of fine art would be happy if they were cut out of the frames and damaged.
Wittman: At the FBI we found about 89 percent of museum institutional heists are inside jobs. That's how these things get stolen.
Kaye: When you look at the Gardner Heist you can't help but wonder if this was some sort of inside job.
Nadolski: First and foremost was the fact that the robbers knew they had to pull the guard out of the booth because that's where there were panic buttons.Horan: And we know that thieves were in the museum for 81 minutes.
Nadolski: People were inside an awful long time. A robbery like this seemingly without a care, suggests to me that they wer very very comfortable that they had a good understanding of how the secuirty system works how the police could be notified, and that no one had been notified.Murphy: Another thing is that where the Storm on the Sea of Galilee was hanging there's a secret door, it was ajar. The thieves knew about that door.
Fisher: The robbers also before they left they did have access to the guard supervisor's office and that's where there was a VHS system, that was recording what was happening on the security cameras. The way that system worked was there was a 24 hour loop tape for every day of the week and they must have known that because they took the VHS tape from the night of the robbery.
Amore: I will tell you that to find it. Does speak to some, maybe some inside information not necessarily complicity, but just information.
Abath: I knew they obviously had to be looking at me as a suspect. I'm the guy who opened the door. I assumed that i was a suspect.
Kurkjian: The repsonsibility of the two night watchman was one was to stay at the security desk and one was to do touring the galleries. So that night, Rick had done the first tour and Randy had been at the desk.
Abath: There were motion detectors and so while one person was walking throught the museum, they would be setting off the motion detector alarms and stuff like that.Horan: Edward Manet's painting Chez Tortoni was in a room called the Blue Room in the museum on the first floor.
Amore: It was about 8x10 and it was in a gold gilded frames and it was here [pointing to the wall in the Blue Room].
Kaye: And they didn't take the frame, they left the frame behind.
Amore: They left the frame behind and it was curious, because all of the frames were left behind in a room from which the paintings were taken, except this one. This frame was left on the security director's chair. This part of the theft is different from the rest of it.
Horan: When you look at the motion sensor readouts from the night of the theft.
Murphy: The motion sensors do not show the thieves steps on the first floor of the museum.
Horan: There's no activity in that room. The only person we know who had stepped into that room is Rick Abath.
Kurkjian: Rick went through the room in his tour of the gallery at midnight, an hour before the bad guys show up.
Kaye: So how is that Manet removed from the Blue Room. did it happen earlier in the night when only the guards were in the museum?
Horan: This casts a lot of suspicion on one person.
Abath: Once I sat down with the FBI, I think the first thing I said was, what do you want to know?
Horan: And there's one more thing we know, which we learned many years after the heist.
Kaye: The night of the heist at the gardner museum, Rick Abath was coming down to take over at the secuiryt guard desk, and the let his partner do his rounds in the museum. But before he did that, he went over to that door that the thieves came through, and he opened and closed the door before taking his seat at the desk.
Kurkjian: And I questioned rick about it and he said he did it because he wanted to make sure the door was locked.
Horan: Why would he have done that? That was not part of his rounds, that was not part of the typical security protocol.
Fisher: I thought it was unusual.
Horan: The supposition has been that he was signaling the thieves who were waiting outside.
Fisher: Rick said well I did that every night i was trained to do it that way. I'm not sure why you would open an outside locked door a little past one o'clock in the morning, shortly before coincidently two robbers show up.
Horan: Rober Fisher wants to know, okay if you say that this is what you did as a matter of course, show me the tape from the night before. If what I see there is Rick Abath opening and closing the door, I will believe him, and that will be good enough for me.
Fisher: There was a 24 hour loop system there were seven tapes. It didn't appear anyone had focused on those.
TEXT ON SCREEN: In 2103, Rob Fisher uncovers the tape from the night before the robbery. The video reveals Rick Abath was also working that night. It shows that Abath did not open and close the door to reset the alarm like he said he "always did." and the tape reveals 24 hours before the museum heist Abath actually let someone else in.
UNKNOWN FILE FOOTAGE: On this never before seen video, a man who may have pulled off the greatest art heist in history. Take a good look. The grainy video is from March 17, 1990, the night before two men broke into Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
TEXT ON SCREEN: In 2013, surveillance video from the night before the Gardner Museum robbery was discovered by Rob Fisher. It revealed Rick Abath letting an unknown person into the buidling. But a subsequent investigation determined the invidiual had nothing to do with the museum heist.
Horan:What we now know is the person Rick Abath let in the night before was the deputy direct of security at the Gardner museum, who reportedly had left his wallet at the museum.
Lothian 2005 CNN Interview: Was it ruled out that the guards didn't have anything to do with this.
Geoff Kelly: I can't really say I can tell you that the guards are no longer suspects at this point.Kaye: Rick Abath has always said that he had nothing to do with this heist.
Fisher: Rick has never been charged.
Horan: If you look at how he lived his life subsequent to the heist, he led a quiet life, he led a simple life, he certainly didn't lead the kind of life that you would attribute to someone who could have been involved in the greatest art heist of all time.
Horan: About four miles from the Gardner Museum is TRC Auto Electric. You would just think it's a place where you go to have your car repaired. Well it turns out to be the nucleus for a criminal organization.
Murphy: The FBI in looking at this group, that hung out at TRC Auto, one of the guys who ran the shop, his name was Carmello Merlino. Carmello Merlino doesn't know anything about fixing cars. But he was very skilled and planning heists and selling drugs, and he's got a whole network of criminals under him.
Nadolski: He stood out as a real person of interest, as did his two underlings, David Turner and Stephen Rossetti. Robert Siklellis: This was an extraordinalrily dangerous group. They'd been involved in armed robberies, so they were under investigation wholly unrelated and preceding the Gardner heist of this group. Nadolski: I had an informant who confided his suspicions of who might have been involvved in this particular robbery. And his suspicions were Carmello Merlino, David Turner and Stephen Rossetti. Rossetti and Turner supposedly they were home invaders. They would crash into a house of a person who was rich. They would tie 'em up, get the money and leave. That's kind of what happened There at the museum. It wouldn't surprise me at all if they had been involved. Sikellis: In one surveillance we saw David Turner taking a vase a Chinese like Ming vase, out of his car and brought into his lawyer's office. and we started to kind of suspect he had possibly had something to do with the museum. If you look at one of the sketches of the guards it has a resemblence to David Turner.Nadolski: Carmello Merlino, David Turner and Stephen Rossetti were all arrested by me and my squad, when they were coming together to rob the Vault facility. We took them all in to the office after the arrest and I interviewed them individually, and the first thing I asked them about was the gardner and whether they were involved in it. And all three of them competely denied any knowledge of that crime.
Murphy: Some of these people went to prison for a long time. Are you really going to die in prison and spend years in prison if you know. where the Rembrandt is? I don't think so.
Sikellis: One of the other things that led us to think that maybe there is a connectio here, if you look at one of the sketches by the guards, one of them has a resemblance to David Turner. And the other one has a resemblance to George Reissfelder. He was one of the other indviduals who was part of this TRC gang.Horan: Not only is he a dead ringer, but curiously close to the first anniversary of the heist in 1991, he turns up dead. And it's a cocaine overdose. But it was injected, and various people close to George said he didn't inject, he was afraid of needles. that raises the question was Reissfelder murdered? His name is floated as a suspect in the Gardner heist and his brother after George's death really wants to clear his name. His brother comes to Anthony Amore head of security at the Gardner, and Anthony says: "have a look at some of the paintings that were stolen have you seen any of these?" He goes down throught the line of the eleven pieces, when he gets to Chez Tortoni, George Reissfelder's brother jumps in his seat. And he says I've seen that. My brother had that painting. They go to reissfelder's apartment. There's no Manet in that apartment.
Murphy: Merlino had been at the house right around when Reissfelder died. Did Merlino take the painting off the wall, after he died? There's just so many questions, but unresolved.
Kaye: The FBI said that they were going to make a big announcment.
Kurkjian: Something's here something's breaking.
FBI Boston SAIC Richard DesLauriers: With today's annoucment we begin the final chapter.UNKNOWN File footage The FBI tells us they now know who the thieves are.
SCREEN TEXT: March 18, 2013. DesLauriers; ok Good afternoon everybody. It's great to have each of ou here today. My name is Rick Deslauriers and I'm the special agent in charge of the FBi's bosotn division.
Horan: It's the first break in years.
Murphy: They were confident they knew the identities of the thieves.
Kurkjian: Two thieves, but they're both dead.
Horan: And they say we can tell you with a resaonable degree of certainty that these paintings these stolen artworks traveled from Boston through Connecticut to Philadelphia.
Geoff Kelly: About a dozen years ago at least a number of thee paintings were offered for sale. down in the philadelphia area. But we don't know whther these paintings. were, whether the deal was consumated, if they left the philadelphia area where they are now. We had a signficant break in the case a few years ago when we developed some information about who was actually responsible for the heist
Murphy: David Turner from TRC Auto ended getting years shave off his sentence fueling the belief that he had provided some information about the Gardner heist. Please get away from me.
Sikellis: The reduction took place in 2013. What I think happened there was that Turner gave them the details of how, what happened the steps. up unti what he knew. Murphy: The prime theory is that it was local sort of petty criminals that committed the heist.Kurkjian: My reporting on it was said that the thief is Bobby Donati.No proof no explanation just a mug shot with the date cropped off the bottom of it
Murphy: Bobby Donati was sort of like this what I would characterize as this mob associate. Notorious art thief Myles Connor has said Bobby Donati did it.
Connor: We went there on several occassions and went through the place, sat outside the place, to get an idea of the comings and goings and the security within the placeHoran: Bobby Donati and Myles, Myles told me. to the Gardner museum and kind of cased the place.
UNKNOWN: You found the security was farily lax.
Career Criminal Myles Connor: Yes. and felt that it was a target that could be taken down.Horan: Myles claimed that as they walked through myles said what would you take if yo could, and donati really like the finial
Connor: we felt that they would come up with a substantial amount of money to get them back. then i went away to federal prison. initially the plan as it happened was my plan. it was my friends that did it.Kurkjian: Bobby Donati gave the art to his great friend, Bobby Guerente.
Horan: Bobby Guarente claims to be a made man with the Philadelphia Mafia.
Murphy: Guerente was very well known and had lots of ties to different people. Had ties to David Turner and was very good friends with Carmello Merlino.
Sikellis: Guarente in my view was behind a lot of this. I think he was the one who was going to be the middle man. The painting were going to go to him.Kurkjian: For selling. That Donati hid all of them, I'm not sure. But some of them.
Murphy: After Bobby Guarente died his wife told the FBI oh yes he had at least two of the gardner museum stolen paintings and that he gave them to a man named Bobby Gentile. So now the focus shifts to Bobby Gentile.
Unknown: A dramatic search in Connecticut linked to one of the greatest unsolved art heists ever. The FBI raided 75 year old Robert Gentile's home. in Connecticut.
Kaye: Bobb Gentile is a Connecticut criminal with connnections to mob groups and other criminal enterprises.
Robert Gentile's Attorney Ryan McGuigan: They have ground penetrating radar. They have a few bloodhounds. They have a ferret back there. They have everything you could possibly use to try to fine what they're looking for.
Kurkjian: They search Gentile's house and came up with a couple of pieces of evidence that are suspicious. they find police caps. they aslo find a boston herald from the day after the heist inside is a hand written list of all pieces of art that were stolen with prices.
Kurkjian: They did get a tip. that it's maybe in the shed in the backyard.
Kaye: Under the shed there was some type of secret compartment and they thought maybe this was it.
Sikellis: there was a huge kind of plastic oversized you know tupperware that was, could have been an ideal place to hide the paintings.Kaye: But when they opened it. there was nothing there.
Kurkjian: After my interviewing Gentile, I said. 'Artwork?' And he said 'No I had nothing to do with it. Why? Who knows?
Unknown: They say the turned up four guns, ammo, homemade dynamite, a stun gun, $20,000 dollars stuffed into a grandfather clock with a set of brass knuckles. They did not find any stolen art.
Kaye: The artworks were not there. It doesn't mean they were never there. That's the key but they weren't there when the FBI finally searched that house.
Amore: Looking for stolen art is sort of like trying to find in this case 13 needles in a haystack.
Kaye: I don't know if we're ever going to find out where these paintings are.
Person on the street: I can't believe in Boston we haven't figured it out already.
Wittman: It might take 30-40 years to recover these pieces. The oldest case I ever had involved an original copy of the Bill of Rigths. That was stolen in 1865 by a union trooper and we only recovered that for the state of north carolina in 2003. That was 138 years that it ws missing.
Horan: Every single person you talk to has their own theory. there in the basement, they're in the attic, they're under a bed. everybody will tell you something different because nobody knows.
Wittman: As an investigator who has been doing these cases for 30 years. I think the art is in different places. i don't think all 13 pieces are still in one spot. but then again i could be wrong because you know, we don't know. They might all be sitting in an attic two block from the museum. It's certainly something that haunts everybody who attaches themself in som eway. This became so much more than an assigment for me. this became a complete obssession.
Sikellis: To this day my 17 year old son uses it agains me to say why should i listen to you, you couldn't even find the paintings.
Martin: The Statute of Limitaions on the Gardner Museum robbery has expired. Prosecutors have said they would be wiling to make a deal with anyone who steps forward in possesion of the stolen art. Look in your atticks search the flea markets and if you know anyting about the whereabouts of the 13 pieces call the FBI at 800-Call-FBI. The current reward for information that leads to the recovery of the paintings is ten million dollars. Lili Gurry