Convicted spy Rod Ramsay as a potential Gardner heist suspect (Part Two)

Rod Ramsay, an admitted bank robber from Boston, prior to his enlisting in the Army, and for two of the four years he was in the Army, was a member of the Szabo/Conrad spy ring. By the time of his involvement, the operation was headed up by Clyde Lee Conrad, shown in the photo above at his trial. Both men were stationed at the Army’s Eighth Infantry Division Headquarters in Bad Kreuznach, West Germany, as document custodians in the G-3 Plans section.

The spy ring made millions of dollars, nearly all of it for Conrad, by selling top-secret NATO and U.S. documents to Hungary and to a lesser extent, Czechoslovakia.

Ramsay had been perhaps its most prolific member, in terms of the sheer number of documents he managed to steal. After ten plus years in of the spy ring’s operation, however, a defector from Hungarian Intelligence alerted NATO and the Americans about a huge number of classified documents, being passed to Hungary, from somewhere in West Germany. Eventually, the Army was able to identify the culprits, after a massive investigation, and to work through German authorities to arrest the spy ringleader. Clyde Lee Conrad The United States had no extradition treaty with West Germany for the crime of espionage.

The FBI first interviewed Ramsay about the security breach at the Eighth Infantry headquarters on August 23, 1988. It had been almost three years since he left the Army. Ramsay was house sitting at the time, and although this visit from the FBI was unexpected, Ramsay was not unprepared.

While speaking with the feds in the place where he was staying, the former army sergeant took from his wallet a mysterious slip of paper, which had been given to him by Conrad. Ramsay turned it over to the FBI agent interviewing him, Joe Navarro. The paper had a hand-written telephone number written on it, which Conrad told Ramsay he could use if he never needed to contact him.

Navarro took the slip of paper with him, when the meeting with Ramsay was over. An FBI lab determined that the note given to Ramasay was written on a water soluble paper, favored by Eastern European intelligence services, which dissolved instantly, when exposed to any liquid or saliva,” which made for easy disposal and destruction of sensitive information, in an emergency.

The phone number was quickly identified as one belonging to the Hungarian Intelligence Service, by one of the other members of Conrad’s espionage gang, Imre Kercsik, who was arrested soon after Conrad, but unlike Conrad was cooperating with investigators.

That slip of paper represented hard evidence of Ramsay’s personal involvement in espionage. But while bringing Ramsay to justice was a priority, finding out as much as possible about what Ramsay knew about the Conrad/Szabo spy ring was paramount, and so the FBI was careful in their treatment of the former spy, in hopes of getting him to tell them everything he knew about the espionage he and Conrad, as well as others had been involved in.

The Army had first learned there was a spy somewhere in their ranks when Lt. Col. István Belovai, of the Hungarian Strategic Military Intelligence Service contacted the CIA, to warn them that Hungary was receiving a substantial number of top secret NATO documents from somewhere inside West Germany. The classified documents included NATO battle plans, detailed descriptions of nuclear weapon locations and troop movements. Belovai also provided a list of specific items, which allowed the Army to narrow their focus on possible suspects to those who would have had access to those specific documents.

But before the investigation was complete, Belovai, who had been under suspicion for about a year, was arrested by Hungarian counterintelligence agents, in 1985, while making a pickup at a CIA drop in Hungary.

Perhaps Conrad was tipped off by his Hungarian contacts of Belovai’s arrest, or maybe it was a coincidence, but Conrad retired from the U.S. Army that same year, and Ramsay left the Army as well, at the end of his enlistment in November. Ramsay later claimed later that he intentionally failed a urinalysis test and used that to get out of the Army without being pressured by Sergeant Conrad to reenlist.”

For that first interview with Ramsay, Navarro was accompanied by Al Eways of the U.S. Army Intelligence Security Command (INSCOM). It was Eways who had done much of the dogged investigative work, combing through Army personnel files and the backgrounds of individual soldiers, who fit the profile by virtue of having access to some of the classified documents known to be taken, in their search for whoever it was that had been leaking vast amounts of classified information to the Hungarians.

The effort led to the identification of Conrad as a suspect, and perhaps Ramsay as well. If it was not already a well established conclusion that Ramsay was involved, it seems doubtful that Eways would have been riding along with Navarro’s in Tampa, Florida that day on the same day as Conrad’s arrest thousands of miles away in West Germany. The Army had no jurisdiction over Ramsay, a civilian.

Three decades later, in a book called Three Minutes To Doomsday, Navarro detailed his experience investigating and interviewing Ramsay. There would be another forty plus interviews of Ramsay by the FBI, nearly all led by Navarro, from that first one in August of 1988, until his arrest on June 7, 1990.

But it would be nearly two years before Ramsay was arrested, three years before he was charged with anything, and over four years before he was finally convicted of espionage, even though he had confessed and was pleading guilty.

For twenty months, after having implicated himself in espionage, Ramsay was free to come and go as he pleased. There was not even any surveillance on him of any kind for over a year, or so Navarro suggested in his book.

Ramsay was seemingly left to his own devices to try to figure out something he could do to extricate himself from his seemingly hopeless predicament. Perhaps counter intelligence operatives were interested in what Ramsay would do in such a desperate situation, and sought to find out who he would contact by keeping him under surveillance.

In a scene in the fictional TV Series The Americans, a Russian spy character named Nina Krilova, remarked to one of the FBI spy-catchers in one episode:

“What do you want with us? With Arkady and the others at the Rezidentura? Do you want to put them in jail? That's how policeman thinks, not how spies think. We want everyone to stay right where they are, and bleed everything they know out of them forever.”

So it might well have been with Ramsay, the FBI’s desire to gather information from him, including information he would not give up voluntarily was a higher priority than prosecuting him for espionage, especially at the outset.

Less than a week after their first interview with Ramsay, he told them that in January of 1986, he had met with Conrad in Boston where he was residing at that time. Perhaps his espionage activities had ended with the end of his enlistment and return to the United States, but it was incumbent upon federal investigators to ensure that was the case, and if not then find out what new projects he had taken on in the espionage realm, that might threaten national security.

Conrad’s recruits continued to work for Conrad back in the United States, illegally exporting hundreds of thousands of advanced computer chips through a dummy company in Canada to the Eastern Bloc,” ABC News reported.

Ramsay would admit to Navarro that he was the source of that ABC News story but said that he and Conrad had only discussed the possibility of doing that project, and had never followed through on it. Ramsay, however, was admitting that he and Conrad had at least considered engaging in criminal acts inside the United States

Facing the possibility of decades in prison, or even life, Ramsay, to escape this fate, would have had to come up with a plan, something big, given the kind of manhunt that he, as one of the most prolific spies in American history, would be up against, if he simply successfully robbed a place and fled.

Ramsay would need a caper big enough to make such a manhunt something that could be either withstood, or unnecessary, something where he could make some kind of a deal. At the very least it would have to be able to help make his life more comfortable while he was inside prison, and perhaps after he got out, as well..

Meanwhile Clyde Lee Conrad was not cooperating in any way and never did. The master spy who recruited Ramsay and others, earning for himself millions of dollars from America’s enemies, died in prison, less than ten years later, having never admitted to any wrongdoing. He denied all of the charges against him, and never implicated Ramsay or anyone else.

Ramsay may have had buyer’s remorse, he might have been disappointed with the deal he was getting for all of his cooperation with investigators, he might have felt bad that he had given up his friend Conrad, when Conrad had not admitted anything about his or Ramsay’s or anyone else’s involvement in espionage.

An arrest of Ramsay for the Gardner heist, or any serious crime would have made international headlines and would potentially jeopardize the prosecution of Conrad, whose trial was ongoing at the time, and featured Ramsay as the star witness in absentia, which is permitted under German law. Navarro was allowed to testify under oath in a West German court, about what Ramsay had told him about the espionage activity he had witnessed by Conrad, and others as well as his own, at Conrad’s trial.

But other criminals, who like Ramsay, had entered into a cooperative relationship with the FBI, had used their status as witnesses and informants to commit other crimes with impunity.

In 1975, a career criminal named Robert “Deuce” Dussault, along with seven other armed men. pulled off Rhode Island’s Bonded Vault heist. The Bonded Vault was a secret mob bank, inside an old fur storage building in Providence, RI. One of the largest robberies in US history, the thieves stole an estimated $30 million in cash, gold, and jewelry from safety deposit boxes. The heist is considered the biggest in the criminal history of the Northeast.

Well into the eighties, Dussault, who had turned on his fellow gang members and became a star witness against them to save himself, was being flown back to Providence, RI to testify at the trial of his fellow robbers, from Colorado, where he was in the witness protection program.

During that time, Dussault proceeded to engage in a crime spree, including armed robberies, right when federal prosecutors were still depending on his testimony against the people involved in the Bonded Vault robbery.

In a book on the Bonded Vault case, called “The Last Good Heist,” the authors wrote that “even after all these years, it’s still unclear just how far federal investigators went to protect Dussault [from arrest and prosecution].” WPRI-TV investigative reporter Tim White one of the co-authors of the book, said in an interview on Rhode Island’s NPR affiliate, WNPN, that "Robert Dussault "robbed banks and businesses absolutely blind while under the thumb of the federal government."

“Deuce’s now unclassified FBI file shows him escaping from a state prison in Colorado on October 28, 1985; twenty one days later he was robbing a bank there. How many other robberies he may have committed that year state and federal authorities are either unable or unwilling to say.”

Another famous example from that same era as the Gardner heist was James "Whitey" Bulger, who “rose to power as a secret informant to the FBI and relied on FBI agents to help him get away with murder and extortion.” At the same time “Bulger was credited inside the Justice Department with helping take out the top and middle tier of the local Mafia.”

Even after providing in depth information about Conrad’s espionage, as well as his own and others, Ramsay was a free man, although he was likely under surveillance. The criminal profile of the typical spy is more that of a white collar criminal, while Ramsay was certainly a capable white collar type criminal acts, he was also someone who as a teenager robbed a bank in Vermont, armed with a loaded shotgun. Ramsay was a multifaceted criminal threat.

As William Youngworth, who famously tried to negotiate the return of some of the Gardner art said in the 2005 Gardner heist documentary, Stolen: "The FBI takes this public posture that 'listen we just want the stuff back and we don't really care how it comes back.' That's not true. I mean I have sat there behind closed doors and they only have one agenda the only thing they want is names," and "they want an informant, more than they want the art back." adding, "They give people passes for 19 murders, you know, we're only talking about some pictures here."

In the same documentary, U.S. Attorney Michael Sullivan ask: What’s more important, the artwork or a criminal prosecution?” If there was any criminal prosecution that was more important to the U.S. Government, at the time of the Gardner heist, than “some pictures here,” it was that of the retired U.S. Army Sergeant Clyde Lee Conrad, on trial for espionage taking place right then in a West German courtroom.

Convicted spy Rod Ramsay as a potential Gardner heist suspect (Part One)

Though his name has never been raised with the public as a Gardner heist suspect by either investigators or the news media, Roderick James Ramsay, a former Boston resident, arrested on espionage charges in Tampa, FL, on June 7, 1990, just ten weeks after the robbery, is certainly someone who remains worthy of consideration. Ramsay was convicted of espionage two years after his 1990 arrest and spent over a decade in prison after his conviction in 1992.

The Boston Globe, New York Times and other news media long ago abandoned hard reporting on the Gardner heist case in favor of “conjecture based on a theory,” mutely disseminated by government officials and their surrogates, like former FBI Gardner heist lead investigator Geoff Kelly, who in retirement has updated his narrative (changed his story). Kelly now claims that the security guard Rick Abath was indeed involved, after publicly suggesting otherwise on numerous occasions for over twenty years. Kelly has a book on the Gardner heist investigation coming out in 2026. Kelly bases his conclusion that Abath was involved on information known to investigators the first week; that the Museum security system did not record anyone going into the Blue Room gallery, where Manet’s Chez Tortoni was taken except Abath (twice).

As Kelly himself said on CBS Good Morning ten years earlier, in 2015: "Someone went into the Blue Room that night, and the only one that went in that room that night was the security guard [Rick Abath], according to the motion sensor." printouts."

But when Abath refused to speak with CBS Good Morning, and said publicly he was not doing anymore interviews, the FBI and its surrogates reverted to their false narrative that Abath was tricked into letting the thieves in.

By April of the following year, the Museum’s Anthony Amore, the FBI’s chief public relations surrogate, with more side gigs than a Las Vegas parking lot attendant said: “We have nothing to point at to say that he [Abath] was involved.”

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An FBI podcast on the case starring Geoff Kelly in June of 2023 begins: “In March 1990, art thieves conned their way into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.” Less than two years later, Kelly told the Boston Globe he was convinced Abath was involved. Abath was the guard, the person solely responsible for letting the thieves into the Museum. If he was involved then they didn’t con their way into the museum.

Meanwhile, real facts, which would lead to the kind of real answers the public is surely entitled to after close to four decades, remain unreported. Among those facts are the evidence supporting the possible involvement of Ramsay, along with the Gardner security guard Rick Abath, and others, such as Brian McDevitt. McDevitt lived just three miles from the museum, and had been convicted in an attempt to rob the Hyde Collection, an art museum in Glens Falls, NY, of a Rembrandt and other works ten years earlier.

In a Sixty Minutes interview, McDevitt said that he had no alibi for the robbery and a girlfriend of his at that time, Stephanie Rabinowitz said that McDevitt had asked her to lie, to say he was with her that night. In addition, McDevitt told Rabinowitz he was involved in the heist, she now says.

McDevitt was interviewed on Sixty Minutes about his possible role in the Gardner heist, and was brought before a grand jury in 1994, regarding the robbery. But in Last Seen podcast, Tom Mashberg said: “Very remarkable that between 1990 and 1997 there were very few stories about the crime. There was never, say, an arrest or a suspect being questioned. Bobby Donati, nobody ever had a chance to ask him any questions obviously.”

“Obviously”? Donati did not die until 18 months after the Gardner heist and was under FBI surveillance during at least some of that time, as he made collections from bookies and loan sharks. Kurkjian too, in the same Episode 3 of Last Seen podcast falsely stated that: “Between 1990 when the theft took place and around 1997 there was nothing.”

Real facts have gone unreported, or papered over with false false facts by an iniquitous guild of access-driven journalists and news media gatekeepers, who instead disseminate false narratives and suspect theories, originating from within the investigation itself.

Another example is the highly promoted, highly reported on and reviewed, Last Seen Podcast by The Boston Globe and a local NPR affiliate, WBUR. The Last Seen senior producer claims Kelly “Red Herring” Horan, on her Boston Globe bio page claims that “Last Seen was named a top 10 podcast of 2018 by The Atlantic, the Financial Times, Stitcher, and other outlets.” None of that is true, although it did garner quite a lot of attention, with dozens of local journalists endorsing it on social media at the time of its release in September of 2018. In 2021 and in 2025 the New York Times put it on a list of preferred podcasts. One called "6 Podcasts About Making and Appreciating Art," and the other was "7 Podcasts About the Art of the Scam." Last Seen podcast fits neither category, of the New York Times stories, but such is the clickbait power of the keywords [Gardner heist] that articles referencing Last Seen Podcast and its Gardner heist subject matter, are page-view powerhouses, real winners, though not necessarily for podcast listeners. Last Seen podcast does not even fit the category of “true crime,” as Horan acknowledged in an interview two years later:

"As someone who also has enjoyed a fair amount of pot boilers I knew that red herrings would work and so my goal in structuring the entire [Last Seen Podcast] ten episode series, the kind of narrative arc that I wanted to put in place was one where each episode would take you in deep inside a theory, you would meet the central characters of that theory and then you would leave that episode saying 'Aha! that's the one.' only to have the next episode come along and make you doubt that because that was my experience, the experience of reporting this was like whiplash. You know, 'This must be it.' 'No this must be it.' 'He must have done it. No he must have done it.'" —Kelly Horan

Horan’s “narrative arc,” however, was sold to the public as a serious work of investigative journalism: “Iris Adler, Executive Director for Programming, Podcasts and Special Projects at WBUR said that “the producers of Last Seen have obtained unprecedented access to case files, first-ever interviews and this podcast is the result of a year of investigative reporting to unravel the crime’s many mysteries.’”

It seems the Boston Globe and WBUR were given unprecedented access to case files, just so they could present an assortment of junk theories, “red herrings,” in the words of the person who headed up the project, to present the public with disinfotainment, and they did not “unravel” any of “the crime’s many mysteries.”

A short before its release one of the staff members on the project, Eve Zuckoff, now a city reporter for WBUR, tweeted out: "If you've spoken to me any time in the last 15 months, THIS is the secret @WBUR and @BostonGlobe podcast I've been working on! Please SUBSCRIBE and get ready for SO. MUCH. MORE."

If WBUR and the Boston Globe were serious about unraveling mysteries they would not have made the podcast in secret.

In episode 4 of Last Seen Podcast, called “Two Bad Men,” Boston Globe reporter Shelley Murphy, one of the leading disseminators of Gardner heist disinformation for over 30 years, acknowledged in Last Seen Podcast that: “All these theories are frustrating. For everything that points toward these particular suspects,” she said, “there’s something that points away.”

Frustrating indeed when a journalist spends decades of their career sourcing stories about the Gardner heist from people inside the investigation, who persist in casting aspersions on “suspects” for whom “there’s something that points away,” something exculpatory, something that excludes them from having actually been the actual Gardner heist robbers, effectively deflecting attention from other actual suspects like Ramsay, Abath, and McDevitt, despite strong evidence, and for whom there is little, if anything, “that points away."

It has not been so frustrating, however, that Murphy and The Boston Globe have ever done anything except assist in this disinformation operation, to cooperate fully with it, disseminating the FBI’s dubious, ever-changing narrative, supported with false facts, while profitably propping it up with sensationalist news stories, a ten-part podcast, and a four-part Netflix series.

As full of inaccuracies and outright deceit as the Globe’s Last Seen Podcast, and The Boston Globe’s Gardner heist news stories generally have been, their four-part Netflix series This Is a Robbery was produced and directed by Colin Barnicle and his brother Nick. The brothers are the sons of former Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnacle, who resigned from the Boston Globe after Reader's Digest was set to reprint a Mike Barnacle Boston Globe column, one he wrote in 1995 about a friendship between two young cancer victims, but discovered that the story wasn’t true.

Barnacle’s sons have done numerous projects for the Red Sox, which is owned by the same people as The Boston Globe, John and Linda Henry. Colin Barnicle was an intern for the Red Sox front office when he was a teenager in 2005. Linda Henry, The Boston Globe’s chief executive officer” was also an executive producer of the Netflix Gardner heist documentary. The Barnacle Brothers continue to prosper through their relationship with the Henry’s, winning a Sports Emmy for Outstanding Documentary Series in 2025 for their Netflix series, about the 2004 Boston Red Sox.

In addition, four past and current Boston Globe reporters appear prominently in the series: Stephen Kurkjian, Shelley Murphy, Kevin Cullen, and Tom Mashberg. All four reporters at the time of the documentary had written about the Gardner heist, starting over twenty years earlier. All of the journalists involved in the making of the documentary were current or former Boston Globe reporters.

This Is a Robbery was released in 2021. At that point Murphy and Cullen had worked at The Boston Globe for over thirty years. Kurkjian reported for the Globe over fifty years. He retired in 2007, but stayed on as a freelancer, covering the Gardner heist for the Globe for another 14 years, until 2021.

Mashberg had done freelance assignments for the Globe as recently as October 2025, on the Louvre jewels heist, and was employed by The Boston Globe as their New York Bureau chief and then as a reporter for about three years in total, in the early nineties.

Along with Boston 25’s Bob Ward, these three Globe reporters (Mashberg, Kurkjian and Murphy) account for over ninety percent of the original reporting on the Gardner heist the past ten years, a good deal of it insincere, false and misleading. Cullen covered the case for the Boston Globe in the days following the robbery, but has written little on the case in the last decade.

In 2015 Cullen, wrote skeptically about the Garnder heist investigation: “On Thursday, federal authorities released a surveillance video showing a security guard letting a man into the Gardner Museum the night before it was robbed of 13 priceless paintings in 1990. US Attorney Carmen Ortiz said officials hoped someone in the public might recognize the mystery man.”

“How could this crucial piece of evidence just be coming out, 25 years after the city’s most infamous unsolved crime? It seemed like either a breathtaking bit of incompetence by the FBI, or more evidence of the bureau’s reluctance to share information with law enforcement partners and the public.”

But by the time of the Netflix This Is A Robbery, Cullen had been won over. Since his 2015 column about the heist, expressing skepticism about the investigation, Cullen had undergone his own Mike Barnacle, Blarneycle type troubles. The Boston Globe conducted two reviews of Cullen’s past work in 2018, after WEEI had questioned the truth of some of his past work He was given a three month suspension, but managed to keep his job.

The Boston Globe issued a statement on their findings in June of 2018:

“The reviewers found Mr. Cullen’s writing to be ‘among the most appealing that appears in the Globe -- precise, well observed and often standing up for the forgotten man and woman with profound effect.’

However, the review did find some problems. The kind of problems that have been a consistent feature of the Boston Globe’s news reporting, its podcast, and its documentary about the Gardner heist

The reviewers found that “his columns at times employed ‘journalistic tactics that unnecessarily raise questions about his accuracy’ that ‘may open the door to providing seriously misleading information to the public.’”

The Gardner Museum's Disinforming Ad Campaign (Part Two)
False Facts In The Gardner Museum Audio Walk
Link to (Part One)

Text taken directly from the Gardner Museum Audio Walk appears in blue.

Amore: Thank you for joining me [Gardner Museum Security Direct Anthony Amore] as we retrace the thieves’ steps—and find out what really happened—on March 18th, 1990.


Gardner Museum "Heist" Ad August 20, 2025

This museum audio description of the Gardner heist does not describe "what really happened." There are numerous false facts, and unsubstantiated claims presented as facts, which showcase the museum's willingness to support the FBI's disinforming false narrative about the Gardner heist, which seeks to explain the Gardner heist case as "the handiwork of a bumbling confederation of Boston gangsters and out-of-state Mafia middlemen, many now long dead," while protecting Abath so long as he kept his mouth shut. Silencing Abath had formerly been a top priority for the FBI, until he died in 2024. Now after twenty years of claiming that Abath was not a suspect, the Boston Globe is reporting that the former Gardner heist lead investigator, Geoff Kelly is convinced that Abath was involved.

The museum audio also glosses over the utter lack of any tangible basis for concluding there had ever been any actual investigation of the Gardner heist, as the term is generally understood, or anything other than the blocking of an investigation into what actually happened, by the FBI.

Let's begin. There was no equipment in the Gardner Museum in 1990 that could retrace the thieves' steps. There were electric eyes in the door jambs of the galleries, which recorded when someone entered or exited some of the galleries and other spaces in the museum.

This could be chalked up to a metaphorical description, but it has been repeated so many times over 15 years that it gives an added measure of knowledge, and authority to what is known and being shared with the public. Most people who have spent time learning about the case are surprised to learn that there was no equipment literally tracking the steps of the thieves. At no time has anyone involved in the investigation made any reference to the electric eyes in the door jambs, in speaking publicly about the case.

In 2009 the Boston Herald reported, "The thieves shut off a printer that spit out line-by-line data on any alarms that would be triggered by movements in the museum. But the computer hard drive still recorded their footsteps in the galleries."

No equipment "recorded their footsteps."
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Amore: Two security guards were on overnight duty, as was typical. They’re stationed at a security area downstairs.
In this case where the security guards were "stationed," and where they were in fact located were two distinctly different things, when the thieves entered the building. One of the guards was indeed located in the security station. He alone made the decision to let the thieves into the building.

At some point later, that guard called the other guard on a walkie talkie, and asked him to return to the security station, he says, as he had been instructed to do by one of the thieves.

"Inside the Venetian-palace-style building, two young watchmen were on duty. One of the security men was seated at a guard’s desk in an office next to a door facing the Palace Road side entry. The second guard was doing lengthy rounds within the compound," the Boston Herald reported in 2009. The guard was only ten seconds away on the stairs near the security station, when he was called by the guard inside the security station, Rick Abath.

The Gardner Museum's Disinforming Ad Campaign (Part One)

For over two months now, at least, the Gardner Museum has been running Google paid search ads with keywords regarding the Gardner heist, covering an area at least 50 miles from the museum and out of state. Last month, for example, I entered: [gardner rick abath] into Google, and my search results included an ad for the Gardner Museum. The landing page for the ad was a page on the Gardner Museum website with the header "Gardner Museum Theft: An Active and Ongoing Investigation."

Frequently there are large, what are called half-page ads, and two ads on the same page in the Google search results. The ads are probably very inexpensive, since Google ad prices are based on an auction system, and no one else is buying ads for the keywords [gardner heist], it seems.

But the Gardner Museum is spending some money to bring people to a particular page on their website about the robbery. What is the point, exactly? The Gardner Museum's "theft" page is consistently at or near the top of Google search results for "Gardner heist," for free as part of the natural search results delivered by the Google algorithm. So if you were to put [gardner heist] into Google, you stand a chance of Google returning results with three of the top ten results being the Gardner Museum.


Gardner Museum "Heist" Ad June 22, 2025

Without scrolling, the only thing displayed on the ad's landing page, which you arrive at if you click on the ad, is a large photograph of the Gardner Museum Dutch Room. Then, further down is some dodgy history about the theft, and finally, some pictures of the stolen art at the bottom of the page.

The ad itself has some false information in it, too. The headline includes: "See The 13 Stolen Works."

Apparently, the Gardner Museum assumes that everyone knows that none of the art has been recovered, and that you can't see any of it. All you can see are photographs of the stolen items on this webpage, which is not the same thing. There is nothing special about the photographs. These same images can be found in a lot of places.

The ad also invites visitors to retrace the steps of the thieves. This, too, is false. There was no equipment in the Gardner Museum at that time that recorded the steps of the thieves, or movement of any kind, most importantly within any gallery.

Further down on the webpage, the Museum asserts that "the facts are these: In the early hours of March 18, 1990, two men in police uniforms rang the Museum intercom and stated they were responding to a disturbance.

This is not a fact. This is an uncorroborated and updated account of what happened, taken from Rick Abath, the security guard who let the two thieves in. There are no witnesses to what Abath claims were the words exchanged between him and the thieves he allowed in, except for the thieves themselves, and The Boston Globe reported in March of 2025 that the Gardner heist's own lead investigator for the previous 22 years, Geoff Kelly, is "convinced" that Abath was one of the Gardner heist thieves. Abath is hardly someone whose statements can be accepted as "the facts."

In addition, Abath was initially interviewed by the Boston Police, and in their official report, it states that Abath told them that the two fake cops said they were responding to the kids in the street after they were permitted inside the building. He did not claim that the cops said they were responding to a disturbance until years later.

Next, the Museum says that "the guard on duty broke protocol and allowed them through the employee entrance." Saying that he broke protocol suggests that breaking protocol was all Abath had done. If he was one of the thieves, which Kelly now says he is convinced is the case, then he didn't just break protocol; he broke the law, and all this discussion of whether he was trained not to let anyone in, even cops, is moot.

"At the thieves’ direction, he stepped away from the security desk," the Gardner reports, but again, this is the uncorroborated account of someone who is considered one of the perpetrators. There is no electronic footprint of Abath's and the other thieves' actions and interactions.

"He and a second security guard were led to the basement of the Museum where they were restrained." More specifically, he and the other guard were led to the basement after Abath called the other guard on a radio and asked him to return to the security station, without telling him the reason. This second guard was handcuffed and blindfolded with duct tape before being brought down to the basement, but we have only Abath's questionable word that he too was led to the basement and restrained, since the other guard was unable to see.

They cut Rembrandt’s Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee and A Lady and Gentleman in Black from their frames. These two Rembrandt works were not cut from their frames. They were cut from their stretchers, which preserves more of the painting intact and explains why they broke the frames.

Thomas Cassano, when he was the FBI's Supervisory Special Agent for the Gardner case, said that "the first two paintings stolen were damaged. Rembrandt’s “The Storm on the Sea of Galilee” and “A Lady and Gentleman in Black” were both taken from the wall, their frames smashed, and the canvases cut from their stretchers," Antiques and the Arts reported in November of 2000.

Ten years later, Anthony Amore, security director for the Gardner Museum, said that "they took a very sharp instrument we can tell by the grooves left in the stretchers," Amore in an interview in 2010. If the paintings were cut from their frames, there would be deep grooves left by the thieves in the frames, not in the stretchers.

The fact that the thieves took the extra step, in the heat of a robbery, to cut the paintings from their stretchers instead of the frames suggests, "How they went about removing the paintings – slicing them from their frames – that's indicative of a rank amateur when it comes to art theft," Kelly said in 2013. But that fits the profile of the kind of individual the FBI was interested in pinning the robbery on, while not what actually happened in fact.
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Double Speak
Double Think
Double Plus Ungood For You

The time the FBI ran two condtradictory Gardner heist narratives on the same day in the same place, in front of the entire national media and nobody said jack about it.
By Kerry Joyce July 2, 2025

On the anniversary of the Gardner Museum heist in 2013, the FBI held a press conference, where the head of bureau's Boston office famously announced that the FBI had identified the Gardner heist thieves. "FBI agents had developed crucial pieces of evidence that confirmed the identify of those who entered the museum and others associated with theft, but that "because the [23-year-old] investigation is continuing it would be 'imprudent' to disclose their names or the name of the criminal organization,"

With Soviet era servility the Boston Globe began their front-page coverage of the story by reporting that:

"Federal investigators, in an unprecedented display of confidence that the most infamous art theft in history will soon be solved, said Monday that they know who is behind the Gardner Museum heist 23 years ago and that some of the priceless artwork was offered for sale on Philadelphia’s black market as recently as a decade ago."

Eight days later, however, the Boston Globe, in an unsigned editorial, contradicted the Boston Globe's own characterization of the press conference in their reporting. "Whether this is an expression of confidence or desperation is anyone's guess," they wrote.

Twelve years and over a hundred Boston Globe newspaper articles later, in addition to a ten-episode Boston Globe podcast, Last Seen and a four-episode Boston Globe Netflix documentary (This Is A Robbery), and absolutely nothing to show for it in terms of progress in the FBI's investigation, what can we conclude? Was this FBI announcement, an act of desperation or of confidence?

There were definite signs of desperation by the FBI at the press conference. Their progress report's most recent and definitive date concerned the possibly sighting of some stolen Gardner art "about ten years ago." Why the ten-year wait? Subsequent stories said the information had been brought to the FBI's attention three years earlier. OK then, why the three-year wait? And anyway, the Boston Globe had already done a front-page story about how the "federal officials investigating the 1990 Gardner Museum heist plan to launch a public awareness campaign similar to the one that led to last year’s arrest of James 'Whitey' Bulger," while the FBI and the Gardner Museum could not even be bothered to say anything about it.

"Museum officials would not comment for this article. But Amore sounded optimistic recently at a lecture at the Plymouth Public Library when he said he believed the works will be found," the Globe reported.

Desperate too was the bureau's claim of knowing the identity of the thieves, but refusing to name them. DesLauriers said that knowing the identity of thieves was "opening other doors" Wouldn't sharing that information with the public open even more additional doors?

The utter lack of any tangible progress in the twelve years since the 2013 press conference, would seem to indicate that the event had not been a prelude to an anticipated dramatic break in the case, at least one from the government or investigative side of things. DesLauriers did say that "with today's announcement we begin the final chapter..." But that was twelve years ago in a case that is 35 years old. As of today, the final chapter spans over one third of the time that the FBI has been investigating it, and with little promise of it being resolved any time soon.

In terms of recovering the art, far from being something the FBI was desperate about, the FBI has shown time and again, that it is not something they are desperate about all.

Consistently, the FBI had demonstrated they had other priorities concerning the case than apprehending the criminals certainly, or even recovering the art.

In the 2005 Gardner heist documentary, Stolen, William Youngworth complained: "The FBI takes this public posture that 'listen we just want the stuff back and we don't really care how it comes back.' That's not true. I mean I have sat there behind closed doors and they only have one agenda the only thing they want is names," and "they want an informant, more than they want the art back." adding, "They give people passes for 19 murders, you know, we're only talking about some pictures here."

Youngworth may have a point. There have been at least three known attempts by individuals to strike a deal for the major pieces of the Gardner art, and in all three cases, the FBI has been credibly accused of interfering with a return. One involved a ransom note the museum received in 1994. Another was the case of the French criminals who offered to broker a deal for some of the stolen Gardner art, which they claimed was held by Corsican gangsters, and a third was when William Youngworth offered to return the art but on advice of counsel, demanded that he be given immunity from prosecution for anything related to the Gardner heist, a condition the feds refused to accept, for Youngworth, while then extending a similar offer to Myles Connor twelve years later:

"For years convicted art thief Myles J. Connor Jr. boasted that he knew who committed the brazen art heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990 and could help recover the masterpieces," the Boston Globe reported March 15, 2010. "Last summer, federal prosecutors decided to find out if he actually knew anything."

"They gave Connor and a longtime friend, Edward J. Libby, letters of immunity that promised to shield them from criminal charges if they helped recover the 13 stolen paintings and artwork, according to Connor, Libby, and Robert A. George, a Boston criminal defense lawyer who engineered the agreement."

"But once again Connor came up empty-handed."

The immunity was extended to Connor in 2009, the same year Connor signed a deal with Harper Perennial (A division of Harper Collins) to write a book about his lifetime of criminal exploits. Called The Art Of The Heist, it was published in 2010.

It seems that the feds were desperate, but not for anything related recovering the stolen Gardner Museum, but as always for control of their false Gardner heist narrative.

What about confident? Was the FBI's press conference "an unprecedented display of confidence," the case would soon be solved?

The FBI did show a tremendous amount of confidence. Not that "a recovery was imminent," however, but that DesLauriers, the SAIC of the FBI's Boston office, could safely step outside of the FBI's official and false Gardner heist narrative, like an astronaut leaving his spaceship to make needed repairs to the outside of his craft, and deliver a real world message to the Gardner heist thieves, and the public, and then go right back to business as usual that very same day with their old pre-press conference narrative, confident in their power to switch narratives as effortlessly as shifting gears in a Maserati, without any grinding push back from the news media.

While DesLauriers was making his announcement, that day, the Gardner heist lead investigator, Geoff Kelly, mingled with favored reporters gathered there that same day and continued to promote and perpetuate the official story the FBI had been developing, revising and perfecting over the previous dozen or so years.

At the time of the 25th anniversary in 2015, Anthony Amore Stealing Rembrandts co-author Tom Mashberg wrote that "Two years ago, at a news conference in Boston aimed at drumming up leads in the case, Mr. Kelly and Mr. Amore outlined this theory, that it was the handiwork of a bumbling confederation of Boston gangsters and out-of-state Mafia middlemen, many now long dead."

So, while FBI Boston's SAIC said one thing at from the podium, while at the same press conference, the Gardner heist lead investigator, Geoff Kelly was working the room, and disseminating a "theory" that contradicted what DesLauriers had just said.

"From my reading of this [Fox News] article, retired Norfolk County prosecutor Matt Connolly wrote in the Patriot Ledger," "the FBI is still wandering around in the dark looking for a candle. [More like keeping people in the dark with something they're calling a candle.] FBI Agent Geoffrey Kelly said that because the paintings were sliced out of the frames 'that’s indicative of a rank amateur when it comes to art theft.' How does that square with knowing the identity of the thieves?" Connolly wrote. [The Fox News article quoted DesLauriers as saying that "we have identified the thieves who are members of a criminal organization with a base in the mid-Atlantic states and New England." "If you know who the thieves are, you know whether they are amateurs or not," he continued.

"Kelly also said about two of the thieves. 'They were clever in how they got into the museum, but the working profile points to inexperienced art thieves.' It seems to me if you know who they are you don’t have a 'working profile.' You know what their experience is."

"I’m cynical not so much because the FBI, like the gangsters, treats truth like an overcoat to be used only when necessary," Connolly added. "It’s because as Joe Friday would say, 'the facts don’t add up.'"

What was the precipitating event, which caused DesLauriers to step outside of the FBI's own alternate reality, and make this announcement, one that was significantly at odds with had been the official narrative of the case in recent years, continued to be the official narrative for Geoff Kelly in speaking with Fox News and with Tom Mashberg of the New York Times that day, and remains the official narrative to this day?

Continue

History's Worst Draft

By Kerry Joyce June 23, 2025

The Big Lie The Boston Globe won't stop telling about a key historical fact of the FBI's Gardner heist investigation.
"Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia" —George Orwell "1984"
                                    "Public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy. Ethical journalism strives to ensure the free exchange of information that is accurate, fair and thorough. An ethical journalist acts with integrity." — Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics

"Sensationalism can override the truth of a news story." —Rick Abath 2015

"We’re really looking for what we describe as 13 perfect fugitives." —Geoff Kelly, FBI Gardner heist lead investigator (now retired) and now author, and a partner at Argus Cultural Property Consultants, from the podcast Inside the FBI June 23, 2023

Gardner Heist Aftermath
Post-Truth Makes Camp in the Athens of America (Part One)

It Doesn't Add Up

1. "We have identified the thieves, who are members of a criminal organization with a base in the Mid-Atlantic states and New England." Richard DesLauriers FBI Boston SAIC March 18, 2013

+2."I can't tell you specifics about the [Gardner Heist] thieves and what I know from them. All I can say about them is that they cannot lead us to the paintings today." Anthony Amore Gardner Museum Security Director November 12, 2014

+3. The two individuals that took them and committed this crime are currently dead." Peter Kowenhoven FBI Boston Assistant SAIC March 18, 2015

+4. "In 2013 the head of the FBI’s Boston office said at a press conference that the agency knew who had pulled off the robbery, and that both men were dead." —Stephen Kurkjian, Boston Globe December 27, 2015
Gardner Heist FBI
Quote of the Day

"Wow. It's easy to look back and say, well, the guard shouldn't have let them in. But it is a believable way to get into a museum, by having two guys dressed up as Boston cops responding to an alarm... I can tell you that the guards are no longer considered suspects at this point." —Geoff Kelly, FBI Gardner heist lead investigator (now retired) March 18, 2005

Gardner Heist / Art Recovery
Can anyone tell me the name of one suspect, interviewed by the FBI in the year following the Gardner heist, besides William Youngworth. Asking for a city. Seven years later, Youngworth made the most public and tanglible offer to return the Gardner art, and was pursued by the Gardner Museum, for years afterward in the hope of facilitating a return.

"While it may not point to a conspiracy, I remain intrigued as to how the FBI could have muffed the investigation at several key points. Why not focus on [museum guard] Abath more widely and intensively at the probe’s outset?"
Stephen Kurkjian Research Gate March 2019

"We know who did it." —Geoff Kelly, FBI Gardner heist lead investigator (now retired) December 4, 2023

"We really have a good idea of how we think the heist went down back in 1990 and where the art work moved over the years, and individuals, who were responsible for the theft and may have had some involvement... But again, I always temper that by saying that we could be wrong." —Geoff Kelly, FBI Gardner heist lead investigator (now retired) June 23, 2023

"We know who did it." —Geoff Kelly, FBI Gardner heist lead investigator (now retired) October 21, 2025

French police arrest 2 Louvre jewel heist suspects amid manhunt Both suspects are French nationals who live in a suburb of Paris. One of the suspects has dual citizenship in France and Mali, and the other is a dual citizen of France and Algeria. Both were already known to police from past burglary cases. —GMA October 26, 2025

Arrests made over jewel heist at the Louvre, French prosecutors sayA huge police operation has been underway to locate the four thieves who were captured on camera making off with eight pieces from the museum in a daylight robbery early last Sunday. —NBC October 26, 2025


‘It’s Got to Be an Inside Job’: Jewelry Thieves Weigh In on Louvre Heist

"The heist was far from a flawless operation. The thieves ditched gloves, a helmet, vest and other items that the authorities have said contained traces of DNA." 'They’re not experts,' he said. 'They’re opportunists.'
New York Times October 25, 2025


Louvre’s Director Says Key Camera Was Pointing Away From Jewelry Thieves The museum’s director acknowledged on Wednesday that much of its security system was badly outdated and that the only exterior camera near the thieves’ entry point was facing away from them.

The security system kicked in only once the thieves had breached a window with power tools, shaving off crucial several minutes from the authorities’ response time.
New York Times October 22, 2025

Police probe new video showing Louvre jewel thieves escaping "Investigators hunting the gang behind the heist have also found traces of DNA samples in a helmet and gloves, prosecutors confirmed.
NBC October 22, 2025

W. Thomas Cassano, Supervisory Special Agent for the Gardner Museum heist case said that "a tape inside the museum showed the thieves making four forays through the galleries. After taking the two Rembrandt oil paintings in their first trip, they removed Jan Vermeer’s oil painting “The Concert,” Rembrandt’s etching “Self Portrait,” and Govaert Flinck’s painting “Landscape with an Obelisk” during their second." Antiques and the Arts November 21, 2000