Gardner Museum Heist —Blog

Reformatted information from the WatchDog New England Our Staff page,
saved by the Internet Archive on September 25, 2014.

In his prepared remarks, DesLauriers announced “We have identified the thieves, who are members of a criminal organization with a base in the mid-Atlantic states and New England."

He also said that “The FBI believes with a high degree of confidence that in the years after the theft the art was transported to Connecticut and the Philadelphia region and some of the art was taken to Philadelphia where it was offered for sale by those responsible for the theft." That statement implied the thieves were still alive. But then, when Tom Mashberg of the New York Times asked Agent Kelly that same day if the thieves were dead or alive, Kelly "would not say."

With little to no public activity by the FBI in 2014 to generate interest in the case, Gardner heist news coverage dried up, after a couple of embarrassing end-of-year interviews by Kelly in 2013.

The only breaking news story that year about the case in 2014 came on May 21st. After over a decade as the FBI's lead investigator on the case Kelly did what was billed by Fox 25 News (the lowest rated local TV news station in the Boston market) as Kelly's first ever television interview on the Gardner heist case, even though Kelly had sat to answer questions on television TWICE, less than six months earlier, with the BBC and with WGBH in December of 2013

Kelly made headlines in rival local media outlets, for telling Fox 25's Bob Ward that the FBI had confirmed sightings of some of the Gardner stolen paintings from informants. Several local news organizations, including the Boston Globe, and even CNN picked up the Fox 25 News story.

Kelly's claim that "there have been sightings of it, confirmed sightings," was perhaps a bit of narrative housekeeping. Four years earlier, in a front page 2010 Boston Globe story, Kurkjian quoted Kelly as saying that “In the last 20 years and the last eight that I’ve had the case, there hasn’t been a concrete sighting, or real proof of life.” Kurkjian repeated this statement by Kelly in his 2015 book, and in numerous subsequent interviews.

Bob Ward Fox 25 News: "But before any negotiations started [transcript], Merlino and members of his crew were busted in Boston on their way to rob the Loomis Fargo armored car depot in Easton. And that killed the deal for 'The Storm on the Sea of Galilee.'"

Geoff Kelly: "Well yeah, it certainly did, Kelly stated. and their defense was that this whole thing was entrapment set up by the FBI to get them to cooperate about the Gardner Museum [robbery]."

Only Matt Connolly, at the little old Patriot Ledger, a war veteran, former Marine Lieutenant, and career prosecutor stood up to Kelly and the FBI, in a column he wrote, which ran two days after his Fox 25 News interview.

Kelly would serve as the lead investigator on the case for another 10 years, twenty two years in all. It was a tenure, Kelly himself said, was unprecedented, to the best of his knowledge in the history of the FBI. If the Bureau wanted anything else from him and were not getting it, they could have replaced him with someone else with little fanfare. Not only had he kept the case for a long time, he also took the case with him when he changed FBI field offices, which is also highly unusual, Kelly said.

It was likely that Connolly earned little, as a columnist for the Patriot Ledger. He posted his columns on his own website too, originally named The Trial of White Bulger, and after the trial ended, he renamed it Trekking Toward The Truth. Not one given to hyperbole or extremism, Connolly had a long and successful professional life, with an independence journalists and columnists typically lack. Connolly's assertions about the FBI's Gardner investigation left little middle ground. On his website he described the FBI's claims in their press conference as "its silly story."

“The ultimate goal of this initiative was to make it possible for smaller community news organizations–which do not have substantial resources–to do serious watchdog and investigative reporting,” Robinson told the Columbia Journalism Review in 2011.

Robinson was one and done. He never replied to my email, or subsequent follow-up emails, or acknowledged receipt of it to me in any way. He had forwarded my email over to "the expert," a trusted (by him) former colleague.

In contacting me that same day, Kurkjian began: "Dear Kerry: Mr. Robinson (Robby) passed on your email that you'd sent to him." He included (forwarded) my email to Robinson; as proof, I guess. Why did Kurkjian assume that Robinson had not informed me of this himself? Was this standard operating procedure for how they take care of the little guy, as Kurkjian claimed to do? Or was this particular little guy (me) being treated differently because I was reaching out about the Gardner heist in a potentially problematic way?

I believe that what would have been the professional, and courteous, the decent way for Robinson to handle my correspondence, given my request for him "to treat me as a confidential source," would have been for him to include me in the decision to forward my email to Kurkjian, or at the very least to inform me of what he was doing it, or maybe to just reply to my email, or one of my subsequent emails, or something.

On the outside possibility that my email was in some sense authentic, given that it concerned what has been called the biggest property crime in the history of the world, the responsible thing to do would have been to treat the email with the kind of care that I had specifically requested in the first sentence, despite any reservations he might have about it, or to just delete it.

Portion of an email sent to me by Stephen Kurkjian

For example, on March 4, of 2026, I sent an email to a Boston Globe reporter, Amanda Milkovitz, about a new $2530 annual fee, not covered by insurance, that my primary care physician was about to begin charging all of his patients, if they wished to stay with his practice. He was affiliating with an outfit called MDVIP, which "supports affiliated physicians in delivering personalized, preventive care."

At that moment, Milkovits was the Globe reporter covering a closely watched and "contentious grandparents visitation rights trial in the Kent County [Rhode Island] family court." Milkovitz, who was in the courtroom, had a story in that day's newspaper based on her coverage of the courtroom testimony from the day before as well as another story about additional trial testimony in the Boston Globe the following day. I think it is fair to say Milkovits was as busy as any other Boston Globe reporter on the day and at the time I contacted her.

I had not asked to be a confidential source as I had done with Robinson, nor had I asked for any special treatment or consideration in any way. Yet, Milkovits managed to reply to me the same day:

"Hello Kerry, Thank you for your email. I'm unfortunately tied up, but I've forwarded your email to my editors, so they can look at your concerns."

Pretty standard stuff, except when the topic is the Gardner heist or maybe some other off-limits subject areas, apparently.

Kurkjian, one of the original members of the Boston Globe Spotlight Team, had been the Globe's Washington Bureau Chief from 1986-1991, at the time of the Gardner heist. His own reporting had most notably focused on a personal scandal involving Congressman Barney Frank, a leading liberal voice in the U.S. House of Representatives at that time. Frank survived the scandal, and went on to be one of the principal authors of the Wall Street reform legislation, Dodd-Frank, enacted in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

Pictures of Gardner heist eve video visitor March 17, 1990 (left)
and Rod Ramsay in Tampa, FL after his arrest on espionage charges on June 7, 1990 (right)

"We assess that

Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman approved an operation in Istanbul to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi," the report by the office of the US director of national intelligence says," the BBC reported, in February of 2021. So the United States government could accuse one of the richest and most powerful heads of state in the world of buthercing a Washington Post columnist, but could not reveal the names of the bumbling confederation of Boston gangsters and out-of-state Mafia middlemen, who robbed the Gardner Museum, and nobody challenges it. That's the free press America had before and after Trump. The levers of autocracy were already there. Trump was merely the first one to really take them for a test drive.

The FBI had gone from "we begin the final chapter," to saying ten years later, final chapters are harrrrrd, when they involve finding missing stolen art, (suckers).

When Kurkjian retired after almost 40 years with the Globe in 2007, he continued on as a freelance contributor, writing mostly about the Gardner heist.

Less than two hours after I had emailed Robinson, Kurkjian, who shared the emails referenced here with me, wrote back to Robinson: "Thanks pal. I think!"

Kurkjian’s response, it is fair to say, suggests some ambivalence about his having received the information I shared with Robinson.

Is this the spirit of inquiry that investigative journalists generally bring to their job? Apparently, when the inquiry has to do with the Gardner heist it is.

At least Kurkjian's pointed reply to Robinson could have offered me a little advance notice that his spirit of inquiry about the Gardner heist case would not necessarily include my efforts, but I did not notice his reply until days later, maybe longer.

There is little reason to think Walter Robinson, of WatchDog New England had achieved the kind of professional success he has earned, and the high esteem of his colleagues, by treating potential sources in the way I was treated by him. It does, however, represent one more example of the strangeness on the part of journalists, when the subject is the Gardner heist and its investigation.

Although not fully vetted at that time, my information represented a strong break, a challenge to the official narrative the FBI was promoting, and seemingly, that was not something Robinson was interested in being a part of in any way.

Surely Robinson was aware of some of the doubts news reporters covering the 2013 press conference were having privately, which Kurkjian who was associated at Watchdog New England at the time of the press conference wrote about in his book:

Before contacting Watchdog New England, I had already been through what would turn out to be a similar rigamarole with Anthony Amore, the security director at the Gardner Museum, the previous year. He had exchanged emails with me for ten weeks in 2013, as he worked to get as much information out of me while at the same time, not endorsing the conclusions I had drawn, it seemed, except through his continued willingness to engage with me by email.

At one point, he said that he was going to take a newspaper article write-up I had done about the case, about Rod Ramsay's possible involvement, and why that scenario would be problematic for the FBI. to one of the federal prosecutors working the case, Brian T. Kelly, whom Amore described as a friend. I never heard back about Kelly's thoughts about it or Amore’s.

Three years after leaving the DOJ, Brian T. Kelly told the Boston Globe “he remains hopeful the masterpieces will be recovered. ‘All it takes is a new lead that leads in a new direction and a lucky break or two,’ Kelly said.” A new direction was what was sorely lacking, a new direction was what I was offering. Robinson wanted no part of it or me.

In the absence of FBI backing, it would perhaps be difficult for a media outlet to report that convicted spy Rod Ramsay should be a suspect, based solely on the information I had collected up to that point. I accepted that. But it could have been an incentive for the media to investigate further, and follow up more closely with the claims made by an investigating network, like Watchdog New England. I provided specific steps for doing so in my correspondence.

Unless it was quickly disproven, my analysis could also be an opportunity for the media to reconsider the role it had assumed in their coverage, of taking whatever the FBI was saying at face value, and in the case of the Boston Globe and others, in the years since, going above and beyond to support the FBI's disinformation effort, by rewriting the history in a way that gave the FBI's narrative over time a consistency that it obviously and awkwardly lacks.

In the Fall of 2013, Kelly did an interview in the Boston Public Gardens, with Alastair Sooke of the BBC, which aired in December of that year: Sooke: To say things like we're closer than we've ever been and the case is solved sounds like madness if you don't know where the paintings are now and you don't know where they've been for twelve years. Kelly: Absolutely but it's the ultimate whodunit. Sooke: Not the least of which because it's the ultimate whodunit, but according to you, you know who did it, but it's still not solved. Kelly: Well whodunit sounds better than where-is-it [ba-dum bump].

Geoff Kelly laughing at his own joke in a BBC interview in the BBC documentary "The World's Most Expensive Stolen Paintings"

A month after my interview with Kurkjian, the filming of the movie, Spotlight, about The Boston Globe's Spotlight team of investigative journalists, who reported on the clergy sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic church, began at Fenway Park, in Boston, which is owned by the billionaire owners of the Boston Globe, who also own the Boston Red Sox.

The film starred Michael Keaton ("Batman" 1989) as Robinson and Gene Amoroso as Kurkjian. A year later, around the time when the movie premiered at the Venice Film festival, Robinson introduced Kurkjian, who was giving a lecture, and discussing his book about the Gardner heist case on October 7, 2015 at the public library in Plymouth, MA, Kurkjian’s hometown.

In one passage of his book Kurkjian writes that, "Hardly master thieves," the intruders pulled the majestic Rembrandt from where it hung on the far wall of the gallery and threw it to the marbled floor, shattering the glass in the huge frame," in his title-be-damned book, Master Thieves.

But Robinson was sure enough at least, and even endorsed the authenticity of Kurkjian's book "Master Thieves," which, according to its author, was not about master thieves. To the saying “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” should perhaps be added, or by its friendzy support by colleagues of the author, like Walter Robinson, in the media.

When "Master Thieves" first came out in February of 2015, Kurkjian said in an interview that “Over 25 years, so many names have been thrown into this. I had to come up with an overview that worked and conveyed – even if it wasn’t absolutely true – the latest and best idea of who was involved and how they did it.”

The Gardner heist case, with all of its sensationalist baggage, seems to have demanded a new genre of writing, one that is neither fiction nor nonfiction. Thanks to the Garnder heist, what with all of the "names thrown into it: by the investigators, there would in the future be written works that are nonfiction-ish, books, like "Master Thieves." Works that are categorized as nonfiction, but are acknowledged to not be conventionally true in the minds of their own authors.

The Dorchester Reporter article was headlined, "Veteran reporter stays on scent of the Gardner heist." Those "so many names," in Kurkjian's book, did not include convicted spy and admitted bank robber Rod Ramsay, a Boston native, whom my research suggested could be involved. Nor did it include the other individuals I had mentioned. If I was correct, Kurkian was staying on a scent, of something, but barking up the wrong tree, albeit one with bushels of government supplied low hanging fruit.

As one of the Gardner heist perpetrators Rick Abath observed in his uncompleted barely started book on the case: "It's easy for a reporter to get hooked on to one train of thought and ride it to its logical conclusion; even if it was a fantasy from the beginning."

Neither did Kurkjian's book include the name of Brian McDevitt, a Boston area native, from Swampscott, who resided just three miles from the Gardner Museum, at 69 Hancock Street, in Boston's Beacon Hill, when the Gardner heist occurred.

It was at a time when the FBI was seemingly looking everywhere, except locally, for the thieves. In the months following the heist, the FBI's official narrative about their hunt for the thieves could be summed up as, "They’re not around here:"

Two months after the Gardner heist, a May 14, 1990 front page story headlined: "FBI Said To Have Suspects Worldwide In Gardner Theft” in the Boston Globe began:

"The FBI's investigation into the $200 million art heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum has targeted about a dozen suspects scattered across the world, sources said yesterday."

"Investigators are keeping a close eye on the suspects' movements, particularly if they travel in and out of Boston. Sources were divided as to whether any of the suspects were currently in Massachusetts, noting that they frequently traveled from city to city."

A “close eye”? Why were they not questioning these suspects?

Two plus years later, in 1992, Brian McDevitt did a television interview on the top rated national news magazine program Sixty Minutes about his possible role in the heist. Denying any role, he acknowledged on camera that he had spent the night alone at his home, just a few miles from the museum, and that he had no alibi.

In 1993, McDevitt was brought before a grand jury about his possible knowledge of the Gardner heist case. But by that time the 1990 Boston resident was no longer local. He had moved to California. In McDevitt's attempt to rob the Hyde Collection in Glen Falls, NY in 1988, a female delivery van driver went to pick up a package but was "confronted by a man with a gun who forced her back into the van," forced to drive a short distance. She was then "handcuffed, her mouth and eyes were taped, and she was knocked out by an ether-soaked rag."

By the time the FBI began serving up their official narrative, about local toughs being the culprits, McDevitt had left the city, left the state, left the country, and was no longer alive. He died in Medellin, Colombia in 2004.

The man that Shelley Murphy at the Boston Globe has been calling a "California screen writer," for over 30 years was neither, nor had he ever been.

Less than two hours after Kurkjian's reply to Robinson, about my correspondence, Kurkjian emailed me: "Mr. Robinson (Robby) passed on your email that you'd sent to him. I worked for him at the Northeastern Initiative [Watchdog New England] and I am pursuing a book on the Gardner theft. I've read your message here, and had some questions. You able to talk about some of the details later today, maybe around 7:30 tonight or tomorrow night?"

That email was the most normal and professional thing about my engagements with Kurkjian and Robinson.

Kurkjian and I spoke at 8 o'clock that night, just nine hours after my email to Walter Robinson. What I had sent Robinson was a five thousand word document with 38 links to mainstream news sources, including the the New York Times, the Boston Globe, The Economist, and the Orlando Sentinel, as well as links to some primary source documents, which were available online, and in the public domain.

My emailed document included several pictures of two of the three individuals, who were mentioned in the document, alongside the Gardner heist police sketches for comparison.

My report also included two pages worth of specific suggestions on investigative areas that a reporter could look into to determine if the individuals I mentioned were indeed involved.

In my email, I made no claim to having any direct knowledge of the Gardner heist, or of ever having had any personal contact of any kind, with any of the three people I discussed in my document. I had no information about these individuals that was not taken from mainstream media news stories, and primary source documents I found online, with the exception of information about them, and their alleged involvement in criminal activity, that had been shared with me several years before the Gardner heist had occurred.

My germ of an idea, my hypothesis, originated with that information. And yet despite the modesty of my claims, Robinson was claiming to not be sure of the "authenticity," of my email as if I was purporting it to be the Shroud of Turin. Maybe Robinson was just speaking casually. If he had included me in the conversation, I could have explained to him why it was not, in my view, anything to be casual about, due to personal safety concerns.

My information was possibly authentic enough that he forwarded it to Kurkjian. It was authentic enough that it gained the attention of two Pulitzer Prize winning journalists, one of whom, had written dozens of stories about the Gardner heist going back 17 years at that point, and who wanted to interview me that very night, a person whom neither of them knew or had ever heard of before, an individual who had no affiliation with the government, the media, law enforcement, or criminal gangs, and an individual who claimed no direct knowledge of the case.

I was open to sharing this information in further detail with Kurkjian since he had the institutional backing from the Boston Globe to handle whatever challenges that investigating the story might entail.

I was not looking for a byline, payment, or credit of any kind. But I also had no intention of just dropping my efforts, if Kurkjian was not interested, unless there was a solid reason for doing so.

Writing 12 years later, I continue to have two problems with Kurkjian's initial emails to me, in setting up the interview. I have myself conducted a few interviews in my life, some with famous people, like "Weird Al" Yankovic and Bill Maher, for local entertainment 'zines, as well as with Mitt Romney briefly for the Worcester Telegram and Gazette, when he first ran for the U.S. Senate against Ted Kennedy in 1994.

My first problem with Kurkjian was his informing me that he no longer worked with Robinson. Although Michael Keaton, and Gene Amoroso would light up the screen, playing Robinson and Kurkjian, two years later, in the 2016 (Best Picture) Academy Award winning film Spotlight, as far as I was concerned Kurkjian was Robinson's former colleague, not a current one. He was a guy Robinson used to work with, whom he had forwarded my confidential information to, without informing me of doing so. If he respected the material enough to share it with Kurkjian, he should have respected my concerns enough to let me know he was sharing it with him.

My expectation was that if Robinson shared my information with anyone, someone not formally affiliated with Watchdog New England, such as a freelance writer for the Boston Globe he used to work with, like Kurkjian, that he would ask my permission. That was the kind of consideration I expected when I prefaced my email with a request to be treated as "a confidential source." But he didn’t even let me know he was doing it.

Did Robinson think I didn't know who Kurkjian was? The document I sent specifically referenced a "Special Report," about the Gardner heist case written solely by Kurkjian, and I quoted from it.

Why would I contact Watchdog New England if I thought I could get satisfaction from Kurkjian or the Boston Globe?

What if Kurkjian had decided not to follow up with me after Robinson forwarded my email, and I had then decided to start trying to contact Kurkjian, not knowing that he had already received the material I had sent to Watchdog New England and he had passed on it?

I never heard from Robinson. My subsequent follow-up emails to him were ignored. Had I not heard from Kurkjian either, I would not even have known that he had received my email.

Is this how one of the most famous investigative reporters in the world treats people who contact him, concerning what is possibly significant information about a historic news story? A story he thought may warrant further looking into by a fellow investigative reporter, a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner who had been covering the story for over a decade?

Perhaps this is how Robinson generally treats potential sources, but his long and storied career suggests otherwise. Given all of the other strangeness about the Gardner heist investigation, and the news coverage of it, I believe there is something different, something peculiar about the Gardner heist and its investigation that makes even storied journalists behave in disappointingly unexpected ways.

Most of the Boston Globe articles written by Kurkjian available online at that time included a Boston Globe email address for him, but it was a deactivated account. Still, he was a public person, I could probably find a way to get in contact with him. It likely would have taken an hour or two at that time, and I had considered doing just that after I tried to email him, at one point, and the email bounced back as undeliverable.

In the years that followed Kurkjian would write numerous editorials, including in the Boston Globe, claiming that there were people, who were holding back what they knew.

But Kurkjian, who claimed to be the Globe's "lead reporter" on the case at that time, could not even be bothered including an email on his stories that was not broken, so that people could share what they knew with him.

During a lecture Kurkjian gave on the case at the Foxboro public library in 2017, I pointed out that there was an open pocket knife behind Abath in the crime scene photo he had of him in his slideshow. Kurkjian looked, his shoulders jumped up toward his ears, and he then said it would have to wait for another time. But in none of the subsequent lectures that Kurkjian has done, or in any of the documentaries he has been involved with, has the knife ever been raised as an issue by Kurkjian or anyone.

In any case, the way Robinson treated me was not Kurkjian's fault, so I wasn't happy with the situation but it did not put me off about speaking with him. The other problem I would come to have with Kurkjian's emailed introduction and proposal to me was his statement: "I am pursuing a book on the Gardner theft." "Pursuing," to me suggested Kurkjian was in the early stages of writing a book, that he was at least still gathering information and that the book was still taking shape. But in fact, Kurkjian had already completed his book, by the time I spoke with him. It was available for sale just six months after his emails to me.

As the author of the already completed book "Master Thieves," The Boston Gangsters Who Pulled Off the World’s Greatest Art Heist Kurkjian was not in a position to introduce any major revelations about the case, of the kind I was potentially introducing, about perpetrators who were not the kind of Boston gangsters, the "hardly master thieves" Kurkjian and the FBI were holding up as the suspects.

In my own experience, I didn't "hear that," when Kurkjian interviewed me. I experienced something quite different. "Structural choices — and maybe bulldog competitiveness — further dull the storytelling" in "Master Thieves," Mason University English professor Art Taylor wrote in his review of Kurkjian's book in the Washington Post.

The investigation of Ramsay's espionage activities mostly covered his time in the Army from 1983-1985, when he was stationed in Germany, as well as some espionage activity he had been involved in, when he lived in Boston shortly after he got out of the Army in 1986.

The 13 pages of meticulously sourced information I had shared was not conjecture. I did not conclude that Ramsay was guilty, I suggested that there was information that justified Ramsay being considered a suspect. And I didn't suggest he had "some role." I said he could possibly be the man with the gold framed glasses who was one of the two men dressed as police officers who entered the museum that night, and did most of the talking, according to the security guard, Rick Abath, who let the thieves into the Museum.

Kurkjian seems to embrace the FBI's lack of enthusiasm for solving the whodunit aspect of the case. A couple of years later in October of 2016, for example, Kurkjian said on WERS that Abath's "involvement with the bad guys has never been proven."

In an interview with Forbes Magazine on March 10, 2026, Kelly said that Abath "took Manet's Chez Tortoni off the wall, one of the pieces that was ultimately stolen."

There are no question marks in Kurkjian's email because there are no questions in his email to Navarro. Kurkjian doesn't directly ask Navarro anything. Perhaps that's how the pros handle it when they're "in a very delicate, very tentative situation," as Kurkjian described at the Southborough library, just not with potential problem sources like me.

"The most important thing is to keep [your] eye on the narrative," Kurkjian told an interviewer in December of 2015, and my information was not going to be shoehorned into Kurkjian's and the government's publicly disseminated narratives of the case.

Also since the Gardner heist took place in the heat of a historic espionage investigation and trial, the details of which including any possible involvement in the Gardner heist could be classified.

After his arrest, Ramsay waived his right to a speedy indictment and trial and declined numerous requests for interviews. He was placed in solitary confinement in the Hillsborough County jail for 13 months, unsentenced, unindicted, and uncharged. Ramsay was indicted in July of 1991, but the indictment was not unsealed for an additional two months and there was no announcement of the indictment. signed a plea agreement in August, but that remained under seal until September as well. Authorities gave no explanation for the secrecy or the sudden unsealing of the case. He remained unsentenced and in solitary confinement for an additional 14 months.

"As part of a plea agreement, government censors must clear any of Ramsay's future writings about his espionage activity or the investigation of it." In addition, Ramsay agreed to give the government any future profits from the telling of his spy story." "As part of the agreement, Ramsay also said he would take periodic polygraph tests." What information did Ramsay have that they were worrying about him sharing? He had been out of the Army for nearly seven years? What profits did he stand to make from his "spy story?"

Before the Gardner heist Ramsay was permitted to drive a cab in Orlando, FL with its numerous military training and other military facilities at that time, but in prison, after the Gardner heist, he was asked to agree to take periodic lie detector tests, to make sure he was not passing along classified information.

Despite what Kurkjian says in his email, I did not urge him to do anything. He asked me questions and I answered them.

"Stephen, interesting story," Navarro begins. What story? The story, as told by Kurkjian in 200 words, is that someone, who is "conjecturing" that Rod Ramsay was involved, and that Ramsay and his roommate, who both look somewhat like the Gardner heist police sketches in Kurkjian's own view, is urging him to consider Ramsay as a Gardner heist suspect, and so he, Stephen Kurkjian, a three time Pulitzer Prize winner and the lead reporter for the Boston Globe on the Gardner heist case, is just casually emailing Navarro at three o'clock in the morning about whether he had ever run across any Gardner connection with Ramsay.

At no point in his reply does Navarro address the issue of whether he had "ever run across any Gardner connection with Ramsay." Instead Navarro answers the major question, not asked by Kurkjian, which is this:

Navarro knows exactly when he met with Ramsay in March of 1990, and in every other month and year, or has an easily accessible record of his exchanges. Six months after Kurkjian's email to him in August, it was reported Navarro had sold the film rights to a book, which had not yet been written, about his investigation of Rod Ramsay, to George Clooney's Smokehouse Pictures.

If Navarro had a meeting with Ramsay around the time of the Gardner heist he could have easily told Kurkjian. When his book came out, two and half years after Kurkjian contacted him, there was no mention in his book of a meeting, explicitly, or implied that took place between Navarro and Ramsay in March or April of 1990.

Orlando had a large military presence at that time. It included the Orlando Naval Training Center, the Orlando Recruit Training Command, as well as the Navy Nuclear Power Training Command. For the time Ramsay was working there Orlando also had the potential to be the home of the Ramsay espionage operation from out of his rented Yellow Cab.

Also more members per capita in the United States of the nomenklatura, the elite, communist party members in the crumbling Soviet Union and its Eastern bloc satellite countries, bringing their family on vacation there, per capita as well, south of Arlington, Virginia. With family vacations as a cover, Orlando was known to be a hot spot for espionage activity.

Since cab drivers who rent their taxis like Navarro says Ramsay did, are not employees. They are independent contractors. With "the hours upon hours he spends waiting in line at Orlando International every day in a cab he can pay the rent on only if he gets more fares than time permits."

If Ramsay's alibi was a certainty, or he was suggesting it was, he would not have asked this question.

And that was all she wrote for Kurkjian and Rod Ramsay's possible involvement in the Gardner heist. Based on the information I had shared and Navarro's email response, he considered Ramsay's possible involvement "far-fetched," he wrote in an email to me. He did ask me about the other participants, who went into the bank with him in the Vermont bank robbery he was involved in and "plotted." But I did not have that information at that time.

A month after my interview with Kurkjian, filming on location in Boston began on the Academy Award winning movie Spotlight,

Two months after that, the security guard Rick Abath, whom Kurkjian told me he intended to contact about the people mentioned in my information, posted a picture of himself standing between two guys who look like the Gardner heist police sketches, one wearing round gold frame glasses as was part of the description of the suspect and identical to a pair worn by Rod Ramsay in his mugshot photo taken 11 weeks later, and the other who looked like the police sketch of the other Gardner heist thief.

In 2017, when the Book Three Minutes to Doomsday came out I told Kurkjian about it, at the Boyden Library in Foxboro, on April 6, 2017. "Is there anything about the Gardner heist in it?" Kurkjian asked me.

"There is zero possibility these guys did it and they know it," I wrote to Kurkjian in an email, after seeing him in Foxboro. It is not their theory. And then the government does not even have the guts to come out and say that's who they think did it and accept the consequences of their lies. And yet they not only don't have the media challenging them or ignoring them, they have you putting it in the newspaper that that is who they think did it under your byline. I have said who I think did it and I have it as a pinned tweet on my Twitter page for over a year. And the people I'm talking about are alive."

Only 15 months earlier Kurkjian had asked me three times to meet with him in my home state of Rhode Island. He proposed having lunch at an Irish pub. Originally, I did agree to meet with him, but then I changed my mind after an email exchange with Anthony Amore about, which amounted to one more thing that made me decide he could not be trusted.

Subsequent emails from Amore stated, "Keep in mind that you owe him nothing; he's not anywhere close to getting to the bottom of this; and you have nothing to gain from it," and "Beware of 'off the record' promises, Kerry."

In the original information I had sent to Robinson that was forwarded to Kurkjian and was the basis of his interview with me, I had written about how the FBI might have been reluctant to prosecute Ramsay. And now here was Kurkjian, a year and a half later, supporting my contention that the FBI might have been reluctant to "solve" the Gardner heist case at the outset.

"Though it has been discounted by investigators," Kurkjian reported in the Boston Globe two months earlier, "four of the former guards had told Kurkjian they believe the person in the Gardner heist eve video, released on August 6, 2015. The article also reported that "Two former guards who knew O’Brien well told the Globe they do not believe the man in the video was O’Brien. His brother also disputes the ID."

I notified Kurkjian that I was no longer interested in meeting with him.

There is no discussion of any connection between Robert Guarente and Robert Donati in any way in Last Seen Podcast, as Kurkjian claims in his email to me. Donati's name and Guarente's names are not even mentioned in any of the same episodes. The only episodes of Last Seen Podcast where Guarente's name is mentioned are episodes 5 and 9. The only episode of Last Seen Podcast where Robert Donati's name arises is in episode 7.

In a 2012 Boston Globe article by Kurkjian wrote: "Guarente knew Robert Donati, one of the first potential suspects named," in 2012. That is the entire extent of the Boston Globe ever linking Robert Donati to Robert Guarente in any way.

The only exception is a diagram in the print version of the Boston Globe, a couple of days after the FBI's 2013 press conference, but without any reference to their connection in the accompanying article.

In one article Kurkjian supports his claim that Guarente might be involved, by asserting without any evidence that after he got out of prison Guarente invited old friends up to his new home in Maine. "Among those he hosted was Robert Donati of Revere, and David Turner of Braintree, whose names have been associated for years with the Gardner theft."

Kurkjian said that Donati and Guarente were great friends in the Netflix This Is A Robbery. He said Donati was great friends with Myles Connor in the same segment, episode 3, of the Netflix series.

"'We can trust this guy, right?" I asked." "Bobby nodded. 'Absolutely'"

Attorney Cardinale, in twitter DM's exchanged with me, dismissed the possibility of Donati having been one of the Gardner heist culprits, writing "Bobby Donati was a knock around guy who was essentially Vin Ferrara’s 'driver' (who I was then representing). When I met him [Donati], circa 1988-9, he was, in my humble opinion, not in any way involved [in the Gardner heist], just not what he would have been doing at the time."

Donati's son likely called Guarente because he was someone who might know what happened to his father, and not as a shoulder to cry on. Guarente is someone who could possibly know if Donati had been targeted by the rival Salemme gang.

Kurkjian suggested I look in his book to learn about the Donati / Guarente connection to the Gardner heist. I did not find a connection. All I found was two unsubstantiated claims by two unreliable sources that Guarente and Donati knew each other.

The other person who claimed Donati and Guarente were friends was Earl Berghman, who partnered with Jeanine Guarente, Guarente’s daughter from an earlier marriage," after she told him that she had seen Rembrandt's "Storm on the Sea of Galilee," in her father's home.

But "twice in a matter of months Jeanine produced what she claimed were chips she had collected from paintings her late father had at their home in Madison, Maine. "Twice, an attorney Berghman and Guarente had hired, Bernard Grossberg presented them to Arnold Hiatt, a trustee for the Gardner Museum. But on both occasions the chips turned out to be fakes. In fact, the second batch turned out to have come from the edges of a magazine that someone had snipped off."

The fact that one criminal knew another criminal, by itself, is not any kind of proof or evidence that were involved in any particular crime together.

Both Myles Connor and Vincent Ferrara claim that Donati told them that he took the art to bust them out of prison. The only connection between the two of them is that Donati may have informed on both of them, and may have either been trying to see if he could get more information out of them, or to gauge whether or not either of these two incarcerated past associates of his had any suspicions about him. It was potentially risky, unless someone had given Donati assurances that nobody would be coming forward to contradict his claim.

"On the same page Kurkjian writes that "Vinnie Ferrara was co-leader of the renegade Boston mob group that fought Frank Salemme for control of the region’s underworld in the 1980s and ‘90s," and then on the very next page he writes that Guarente was "a loyalist to Frank Salemme and his underworld gang."

Later he wrote how Guarente was personally involved, according to sources, in the execution of Richard “The Pig” DeVincent, for fraternizing with members of a rival gang, just like Kurkjian claims Donati and Guarente were doing, since he claims they were "great" friends:

Kurkjian: "I told him [his anonymous source about Donati's involvement in the Gardner heist] that as far as I could tell, the FBI was certain the heist had been arranged by David Turner, who had turned the stolen art over to Robert Guarente."

So while there is an overwhelming amount of poorly laid out information about a gallery of local toughs, who may or may not have been involved in the Gardner heist, there is barely anything about the actual investigation in Kurkjian''s book, or for that matter in Ulrich Boser's book or in Geoff Kelly's Gardner heist book.

It also points to a problem with the free exchange of information through the mainstream media, that is accurate, fair and thorough, and not just at Fox News, and MAGA media. This problem persisted prior to the election of Donald Trump in 2016, whose victory received a big and unprecedented boost by James Comey, director of an FBI that had somehow, somewhere along the line become above reproach, even in Boston of all places, where the FBI's corrupt relationship with organized crime leader Whitey Bulger's criminal exploits and corrupt reltationship with the FBI was a major news story a half dozen times for 25 years, from 1988 when the Boston Globe first reported he was an FBI informant until 2013 until he was convicted of multiple murders.

Even when acting publicly in questionable ways, as was the case with the Gardner heist anniversary press conference on March 18, 2013, a nationally covered event whose stated purpose was to advise the public about progress in the case, which they didn't do, and to "appeal to the public for help, that they didn't want." But the only help the FBI really wanted was from the media, was to help them dominate the narrative, to help them to to distract, to deflect, to dismiss and to defame, to threaten and intimidate, and to lie without consequence, to transform the Gardner heist "mystery" into a sensational destination, where your questions are the only answers you ever need. And the media, both MAGA and mainstream, have been only too happy to oblige. As Rick Abath wrote in the first chapter of his barely started book on the Gardner heist case:

by Kerry Joyce

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