Gardner Museum Heist —Blog
Post-Truth Makes Camp in the Athens of America (Part Four)
The fact that Youngworth had made an early release for Connor as one of his conditions for returning the art, had renewed media interest in Connor, who had famously negotiated the return of a Rembrandt stolen from Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, in exchange for a reduced sentence twenty years earlier.
The Museum's interest in Youngworth went on for months, and off-and-on for years afterward, while the federal authorities, who exercised veto power over any such transaction, quickly lost interest, if they ever had any.
Even at the early stages, after speaking with the Feds, Youngworth was publicly skeptical. "The Feds don't want it to happen, Youngworth told the New York Times, in September of 1997," and he may have had a point. The U.S. Attorney's office went through the motions of working on a deal for another few months. But soon, it became not the first or the last example of where the Gardner heist saga "almost ended, but got fucked up.” as Robert Wittman, founder of the FBI Art Crime Team, described his own experience in trying to get the stolen Gardner art back, about ten years later.At one point "Federal prosecutors did send Mr. Youngworth and his lawyer, Martin K. Leppo, a draft immunity statement," but demanded from Mr. Youngworth that he prove he could produce the art they before would begin negotiations with him.
So Youngworth did offer proof. Through reporter Tom Mashberg of the Boston Herald, authorities were provided paint chips from one of the stolen Gardner masterpieces. Federal authorities, however, publicly dismissed the paint chips as not authentic, "not what they purport to be," they said.
The paint chips supplied by Youngworth, were compared with similar chips from two Rembrandts cut from their stretchers during the Garnder heist, and were deemed not a match. But Youngworth at no point ever claimed the chips were from one of the Rembrandts. And the Boston Herald reported that a source "close to the case" said that "the color and layering of the chips did match the Vermeer." Asked at that point, "whether the chips could have come from the Vermeer, Federal authorities, the museum and The Boston Herald all declined to comment," the New York Times reported.In a 2006 documentary, Electric Sky's the Art of the Heist, William Youngworth himself said that, "the paint chips they got, they immediately tested them against the wrong paintings. When they were pointed in the right direction all they would come back and say was, they are completely consistent with the Vermeer, that the color, the pigmentation and all of the characerstics to the chips were consistent with that. What they got was a genuine material, what they chose to do with it was not address it."
"I had absolutely nothing to gain by saying I could if I couldn't," get the stolen Gardner art back, Youngworth said in the same interview. Unlike Myles Connor, Youngworth has not tried to capitalize on his criminal notoriety and invovlement in the Gardner heist case by writing a book, or engaging with the media except to set the record straight, from his point of view, on his dealings with federal authorities. Twenty three years after the heist, the paint chips were publicly acknowledged by the Gardner Museum to be most very likely authentic."To have paint chips that are consistent not just with a Vermeer, but 'The Concert,' is beyond luck. It means that they should be considered as a very strong piece of possible physical evidence, Gardner Museum security Director Anthony Amore told the Boston Globe, deflecting away from the fact, that the museum had received the chips, not as any kind of "physical evidence," but as a way to authenticate possession of the art in order to make a return for the reward.
The chips were indeed not what the feds falsely claimed were purported to be. They were not chips from a Rembrandt. They were, however, what the feds had claimed they wanted. Strong physical evidence that Youngworth could return the art. Youngworth was not asking for anything in advance, anyway, except for immunity from prosecution for anything related to the stolen art and its return. The demand for Youngworth to prove he could get the art in theory, before he could get the art in fact, which he claimed he could do in thirty minutes, was nothing more than a stall tactic, a pretext to not negotiate with Youngworth, served up for public consumption through a reliably accommodating local media.Three years later, the British newspaper, The Guardian reported "many officials at the Gardner museum, and also some officers at the FBI, did favour some form of compromise," but... "the attorney general's office in Washington warned against pandering to "cultural terrorism."
Then in 2004, after anonymously receiving photos, which claimed to be of stolen Gardner paintings, ABC News, in a story by Brian Ross and Jill Rackmill reported that "Federal prosecutors did not want the thieves to get away with a deal." "You can't turn your back on a very serious criminal offense," Donald Stern," who had been the U.S. Attorney responsible for negotiating with Youngworth in 1997, told ABC seven years after the fact.Decades later, Tom Mashberg in the Netflix documentary This Is A Robbery, 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."
So in that put up or shut up moment, it was the Feds who refused to put up, but it was Youngworth who had to shut up. The press allowed the Feds to have their cake and eat it too. They were given the benefit of the doubt and the matter was dropped, by the media and as the years past Youngworth was dismissed as a con man.
It turned out that Youngworth had been right when he said "The Feds don't want it to happen." The negotiations were a charade by the U.S. Attorney, helpfully data-schlepped by reporters from the feds to the public, without any serious critical inquiry by the reporters covering the story.
The New York Times reported: "the Boston Herald, the tabloid that has become as much a player as an observer in the matter, reported that museum experts left open the possibility that the chips came from a stolen Vermeer painting, 'The Concert,' rather than the Rembrandts," after the feds dismissed them as not authentic. But the issue of whether the feds were in the right, whether what they were asking made any sense, in demanding proof before they would grant Youngworth immunity was never challenged. Nothing was invested by the news media in determining whether what the Feds were asking for made sense on its face, although Youngworth made a strong case that it did not. It was a little ironic that an amendment to a federal crime bill, put forth in 1994, by the U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, Edward M. Kennedy, and quickly passed, was touted as a way of helping to get the stolen Gardner Museum back, when in fact it would have the opposite effect. Three year earlier the New York Times reported that "Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, has been helpful, museum officials say, interceding with the Federal bureaucracy and adding a provision to the 1994 crime bill that made art theft a Federal felony." Why did the Museum have Senator Kennedy "interceding with the Federal bureaucracy"? The 1994 article does not say. It does report that Arnold Hiatt, the Gardner trustee, who negotiated with Youngworth along with Museum Director Anne Hawley had "said there were bouts of gloom about the prospects of recovery and moments of impatience with the FBI investigation." Ironically, the new law was what what gave the feds the legal auhtority to intervene in negotiations between the Museum and Youngworth to make a deal. The new federal law made art crimes like the Gardner heist, a federal crime, and not just the stealing of it, but also the possession or transport of it. Also in 1994, the Feds had manged to thrust themselves into the negotiations, in the case of another deal they opposed and obstructed, but with less legal standing for doing so, than the new federal statute had given them.A ransom note received by the Museum in April of 1994 was "extremely well written" and "referred to things in the case not known publicly," Museum Director Anned Hawley stated on American Greed, in 2008. "In 1994 we took it [the ransom not] very seriously and we continue to take it very seriously," Special Agent Geoff Kelly, who headed up the Gardner heist investigation, said in the same Season Two Episode Nine, of the long running true crime show.
But that particular invididual had wanted to negotiate in private. The ransom note writer told the Museum to have the Boston Globe include the numeral one in front of the decimal point for the value of the dollar against the Italian lira in the currency column it ran inside the Sunday business pages, and there was nothing to prevent the FBI from staking out a Times Square newstand, quite openly, as well as other venues around New York City, from where the ransom note was sent, which offered the Boston Globe for sale. “I am also fully aware of the massive alert that the federal, state and Boston authorities went on last Friday afternoon,” the ransom note writer sent in a follow up letter to the Gardner Museum, and was never heard from again. It was still considered a legitimate offer by the FBI over ten years later, as well as by the Museum, which continued to pursue the lead:In 2005, there was "an exclusive on camera appeal from the museum's director, an overture to an anonymous letter writer eleven years ago who seemed legitimate," Dan Lothian reported, in a CNN Special on the case.
"I'm particularly interested in hearing from that person," Hawley said, "who had, I think, a real concern about our getting the work back. "Hawley had impressed on Swensen and others at the FBI her hope that the letter writer was legitimate and that everyone needed to follow his instructions to the letter," which the FBI had not done, according to Stephen Kurkjian, in his book "Master Thieves."
It would be understandable if Hawley did not involve or inform the FBI, the next time someone tried to return the art. But the new federal law carved out new authority for the feds, and put anyone who tried to get the art back without involving them in legal jeopardy. They had already established that were not afraid of using whatever means were at their disposal, to keep Anne Hawley and the Museum from trying to negotiate a side deal for the return the Gardner art without their involvement. In March of 2016 Anne Hawley wrote: "I’ve had complex experiences with the FBI. 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." In order for Youngworth to return the stolen art for the reward, and other considerations, he had to seek immunity from prosecution from the Feds because of the jurisdictional terrain then occupied by the feds, which did not even exist when the Gardner heist occurred. The Feds exercised their prerogatives under the law passed three years earlier, seven years after the heist, and refused to give Youngworth the immunity for any charges related to the Gardner heist. In 2015, the Boston Globe reported that "Gardner Museum director Hawley, accompanied by museum board member Arnold Hiatt, agreed to a back-channel meeting, negotiating with Youngworth at a tony New York hotel in September 1997. The discussion lasted hours, after which Hiatt agreed to personally loan Youngworth $10,000 to aid the recovery. That meeting, like so many other efforts, would ultimately prove fruitless."What the story leaves out is that a key player, not present in the negotiations, was the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, or anyone from his office, who would have to approve an immunity deal for Youngworth in order for the him to return the art free of the the risk of prosecution.
In the news story the lack of a deal fell on Youngworth, who was willing to return the art for the reward, but not at the risk, of going against the advice of his attorney, he told me, to risk being prosecuted for doing so.In 2013, the Museum's security director Anthony Amore said that "every single person so far, one of them is Myles Connor, one of his associates was Billy Youngworth who's come forward and said it, they're all charlatans, and the nicest word I can use for them. hucksters. If they could they would. Every reason that any one of these guys has ever given for not telling us the information is an absolute lie. But we're not in the business of going on TV and arguing with criminals."
Former FBI supervisor Tom Cassano, who headed up the Gardner heist investigation at the time that Youngworth and the Museum were trying to strike a deal, said in 2016, that “we ran into a guy by the name of Billy Youngworth, He was an antiques dealer in Randolph, I believe. He had hooked up with a Boston Herald reporter and he convinced this reporter that he knew, that he could broker the return of all these paintings.” But none of Youngworth’s information panned out." "Thirteen years after the Youngworth attempt to return the Gardner art, in 2010, the government did offer Myles Connor an immunity deal. Myles did not provide any paint chips. He had nothing more than his own claims, as uncorroborated, and as ever changing as those of the Feds themselves, that he could return some of the stolen works. But he “the main lead we have has not come through," Connor explained, when he was unable to return the art. The person who had proven time and again, to be unreliable, who was relying on some unnamed third party to "come through," was granted immunity. While the guy who claimed he could have the art in half an hour was not. Why was immunity granted to Connor and not Youngworth? Because as FBI Special Agent Charles Prouty said of Connor, "he has come to us on a number of occasions with different theories. In every instance," he says, "it has not been what it has been purported." Offering Connor immunity solved a problem. It called the bluff of a man who had become at the very least, something of a nuisance, but who was also someone who was frequently quoted and on friendly terms with the Boston media. Youngworth was openly contemptuous of law enforcement and suspicious of the press, "Over coffee, he petulantly accused [Tom Mashberg] of being "the F.B.I.'s mole" at the Herald. They've got one at every newspaper!' he railed." In contrast, Connor was amiable in interviews and careful not to criticize law enforcement. By the time of his immunity deal, Connor was also an author, and potentially a film star. In April 6. 2003 the Boston Globe reported that Myles Connor's "life has been optioned as the basis of a feature film." To whom? It doesn't say. The Globe also reported in the same article that "Connor is believed to be involved in the planning of the biggest art theft in American history." By whom? The article doesn't say. "He is said to have masterminded the Gardner Museum heist with three cohorts." Again by whom? Who says this? The article doesn't say. Who wrote this story? The article doesn't even say that.Then in 2009, long before Kelly Anne Conway introduced America to "alternative facts," from the White House lawn in the opening days of the Trump presidency, the Boston Globe's Shelley Murphy wrote of Myles Connor's then newly released autobiography that "the book is clearly shaded by Connor's version of the truth."
So Connor had not only become someone that the Globe would routinely go to for a quote on matters related to art theft, and the Gardner heist, they had also established a very low bar for him in terms of requring corroboration and even truthfulness. But after Connor's immunity deal led to nothing, the Globe stopped quoting Connor about the Gardner heist or anything else."Boston, the city that had once embraced me as its prodigal son, that had seen in me its own restless image, no longer wanted anything to do with me," Connor wrote in his book, to explain his reason for moving to Kentucky in 1985. And it was deja vu all over again for Boston's repeat offending prodigal in 2010 when Connor again did not come through, even with an immunity deal.
After that Connor was only mentioned in the newspapers, when he was collared in a series of embarrassingly low rent capers. There was his 2011 arrest for shoplifting sunglasses in Mendon, MA, and that same year, another arrest for stealing hay from a barn, for the livestock he kept at his home in Blackstone, MA. Then in 2012, Connor was arrested again for armed robbery of a cell phone during a drug deal that went sour in Woonsocket, RI. Connor had brandished a 9mm Glock replica, which was actually just a pellet gun, at two women. But the self described prodigal would resurface — one more time — as a regular sideshow act, in what became the ever touring Gardner heist media circus, a few years later. While giving Connor immunity may have solved a problem or two, giving Youngworth immunity would have caused problems. He might potentially actually get the art back. The FBI was not buying the names floated by Connor and Youngworth, Donati and Houghton, who were both dead. Ensuring that the original thieves did not gain from the theft in any way, was clearly a much higher priority than getting the Gardner Museum getting its art back. There would be no immunity for William Youngworth.
By Kerry Joyce Copyright © 2025 All Rights Reserved