Gardner Museum Heist Reports
 The two robbers paid their entrance fee and proceeded up the long winding marble stairs to the Museum's second floor. They then took a right and passed through the 17th and 18th Century European gallery before arriving at the Dutch and Flemish room. In a gallery full of masterpieces, the two men paused nervously facing the Rembrandt painting they intended to steal. Around 12:30 p.m. an unarmed MFA security guard named Vito Magaletta, age 53 of Medford, enountered the two men as they were removing the Rembrandt from the wall. "It was on two hooks and something underneath and they were just lifting it up," Magaletta said. "What are you try to do with that painting?" He asked them. The man with the blond hair aimed a gun at him and said "Shut up, or I'll kill you." Keeping the guard at bay with a loaded 9mm pistol, they quickly completed the task of removing the painting from the wall, then made a dash for the stairway. But as the robbers headed down to the first floor toward the Museum's Fenway side-exit, Magaletta ducked behind a wall and blew his whistle. The shriek alerted another Museum guard, John J. Monkouski, 66, of Dorchester, a retired Boston police officer, who was already at the the doorway. As they approached the turnstyles, Monkouski confronted the man with the painting. But the other thief clubbed the guard on the head with a pistol butt, opening a gash that required numerous stiches. Magaletta, who was coming up from behind said: "I saw them hit John. I saw blood."It was an ordeal for the guards to be sure, but unlike the Gardner heist guards fifteen years later, the identities of the guards who engaged the MFA Rembrandt robbers were not hidden from the public. On the way out, the painting had become jammed in the turnstyle as the thief rushed through it. Four splintered pieces torn from the portrait's frame were later found near the exit. Fleeing the scene, one of the armed thieves fired three shots, but no one was struck by the bullets.The men ran with the painting to a black and gold Oldsmobile with Massachusetts plates, driven by a third man, waiting in the Museum parking lot with the engine running. The car was recovered about a mile away near Roxbury Crossing at 4:00 a.m. the following morning. Registered in New Hampshire, the vehicle had been reported stolen prior to the robbery by the Norwood Police. The guard, Monkouski, was taken to Peter Bent Brigham Hospital for treatment of his head wound. Boston Police and the FBI were on the scene in minutes. The thieves were described as "rank amateurs" by the Boston Police. Four detectives and seven other Boston police officers plus 12 FBI agents were assigned to the case.A photograph of Boston MFA Director Merrill Rueppel, adjusting a self-portriat by another 17th century Dutch painter Barent Fabritius, which filled the spot where the Rembrandt had hung, appeared alongside a news story about the robbery the following day. "No one in their right mind would steal that painting," Rueppel said. Rollin Hadley, director of the neighboring Gardner Museum in Boston, concurred. Neither man could fathom why anyone would steal a Rembrandt. “There's no market for this painting,” Mr. Hadley said. “You can't sell a Rembrandt. Nobody's going to buy the thing,” the New York Time reported.Asked of the possibility the painting had been stolen for ransom, Rueppel said: "I suppose if that's what they have in mind they'll let us know." The robber who removed and carried the painting out of the Museum was described by witnesses as a white male about 20 years of age, 5-foot-9-inches tall and around 140 pounds with long blond hair, and wearing a black leather cap. The other robber was said to be 5-foot-6-inches tall and weighed about 135 pounds. He also appeared to be about 20 years old. The driver of the getaway car was described as a white male, but there was no further description. One spent bullet was quickly recovered outisde the museum. Both men had been armed with 9mm automatic pistols, according to witnesses. James O. Newpher, SAIC of the FBI's Boston office said that the descriptions of the thieves were "fairly good," The FBI was also working on composite sketches of the two men, he said. The getaway car was checked for fingerprints, as was a rubber glove that was dropped by one of the thieves inside the museum."It went off like clockwork,” said Myles Connor who famously negotiated the return of the Rembrandt and decades later, would make the dubious claim that he have personally removed the painting from the wall, and of carrying it out of the Museum that day. Connor's penchant for claiming credit for crimes long past their statute of limitations, claims that may have been nothing more than big talk, earned him the nickname "Myles Away," from his former friend William Youngworth. In the version of Connor's MFA robbery story, which appeared in the book Stealing Rembrandts by Anthony Amore, and Tom Mashberg, one of several accomplices in the museum with him that day, a tall professional looking man, had thrown security guard Vito Magaletta to the floor, then threatened him with a gun, and gave him a kick to the solar plexis, "winding him instantly and painfully for a good three minutes," The robber's confrontation with the security guard, Magaletta in newspaper accounts and in Connnor's own book, The Art of the Heist however,was limited to threats of violence. But Amore and Mashberg explain in the NOTES section of their book, that "Connor has writeen a longer, slightly different account of the robbery in his memoirs," and that "the small variations in the versions do not in any case alter the basic sequence of events.""The basic sequence of events," however, has Myles Connor, entering the Museum at 10:15 a.m. in Stealing Rembrandts, but not leaving the city of Brockton, over 20 miles away, on the day of the MFA robbery, in Connor's memoir, The Art of the Heist, until "just before noon." Back in 1998, nearly two decades after the statute of limitations had expired on the case, Connor was still only taking credit for "engineering" the MFA Rembrandt snatch and grab. Another decade would pass before Connor started laying claim to having personally robbed the MFA of the Rembrandt, as well as taking "credit" for numerous other unsolved art heists from decades earlier. Myles Connor's tall tales have earned him the title: "The greatest art thief who ever lived, by his good friend Gardner Museum security director and chief investigator Anthony Amore, and the nickname "Myles Away," by his former good friend William Youngworth, who had tried to quite publicly negotiate a return of the stolen Gardner Museum art in 1997, and but is skeptical of Myles Connor's claims about his criminal career.In his dubious claim of having stolen a Rembrandt from Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, there are numerous versions of what he claims inspired him to do it. In Last Seen podcast, Connor said that the FBI agent who arrested him with some of the stolen Woolworth art said: “We’ve got you now, Connor. It’ll take a Rembrandt to get you out of this.” And Connor replied: “You know, you’re right.” And so then I set my heart on getting a Rembrandt." In “Stealing Rembrandts,” by Anthony Amore and Tom Mashberg, it was well over a year later, when he was trying to figure out a way to avoid prison time, that he and a family friend in law enforcement, State Police Major John Regan came up with the idea of stealing a Rembrandt. "I said, 'for Chrissakes, John, what will it take to get me off? A Rembrandt? And Regan told me, 'That just might do it.'" In his own book Connor swears John Regan said to him "Face it Myles, nothing short of a Rembrandt could get you out of this." I swear these are the words he uttered.” In"The Rembrandt Heist: The Story of Criminal Genius, a Stolen Masterpiece, and an Enigmatic Friendship Anthony M. Amore," Amore goes with a version more like the one in Connor's book than his own past effort in Stealing Rembrandts. When he offered to return other stolen works in exchange for a lighter sentence, an officer told him 'Nothing short of a Rembrandt could get you out of this.' Connor was scheduled to face trial just five weeks after the MFA robbery in the old federal courthouse, in Boston's Post Office Square. Charged with interstate transport of stolen goods, Connor had tried to sell the lion's share of the art stolen in the 1974 Memorial Day weekend burglary of the Woolworth estate in Monmouth, Maine, to an FBI undercover agent in July that same year. The stolen items included a painting by Andrew Wyeth, and had a total estimated value at that time of about $165,000. It would seem logical that Connor would be a prime suspect for the MFA heist. But he simply did not fit the description of the two thieves, and was not considered a suspect. He was too short 5'6" too old 32, and at 180 pounds, too heavy, though with a muscular build. If Connor actually controlled the art when his trial was scheduled, why did he become a fugitive instead of striking a deal at that time?In his autobiography Connor maintained that despite already having control of the Rembrandt when his trial was scheduled to begin, he was realstic enough to understand that whateever deal he struck with the U.S. Attorney, would involve weeks of negotiation and in the end, some prison time. "Summer was coming and the thought of spending it in Walpole or the sweltering top tier of the Charles Street jail did not appeal to me," he wrote. Although he risked additional prison time for skipping his trial and remaining at large, and for whatever crimes he might have to commit to continue staying out of jail as a fugitive, he decided the potential consequences were worth it, he wrote. That might seem difficult to believe, but it would have been impossible for Connor to secure control of the stolen Rembrandt after the fact, when he was already behind bars. Perhaps he spent his time as a fugtive securing the painting from the people who did steal it, and maybe he did have a hand in the not exactly elaborate planning of the theft. In any case, it seems unlikely Connor was one of the actual robbers that day, as he now claims, given that Connor has a new version of the story of how he robbed the MFA every time he tells it, all of which are widely different from what appeared in the newspaper accounts at the time, as well as from each other, combined with the fact that no one considered him a suspect at the time despite his lengthy and growing rap sheet, which included two art thefts. As formally agreed upon, though his attorney Martin Leppo, Connor arranged for the return of the stolen MFA Rembrandt on January 2, 1976 in the parking lot of a Boston area restaurant. In exchange, a federal judge imposed a four year federal sentence on Connor, to be served concurrently with additional time Connor would have to serve, for the Back Bay rooftop shooting and wounding of state troper John R. O'Donovan. Connor had already served six years for that crime, but when he was arrested with the stolen Woolworth estate paintnigs, Connor's parole for the 1966 trooper shooting had been revoked.With his release four years later, Connor had spent over a decade of his life behind bars, and would spend 15 of the next 20 years behind bars as well. The greatest art thief who ever lived, as Anthony Amore, and only Anthony Amore calls him, was arrested and convicted a second time in 1989, for trying to sell, among other things, items from the very same Woolworth Estate burglary he had been convicted of selling items from back in 1974. This time too, Connor was taken in by an FBI undercover agent, one who was posing as a "connected" gangster named Big Tony Graziano, who was also an art collector with a weakness for antique grandfather clocks. "I'd been set up," Connor wrote. That much was true.Gunmen Flee Museum with stolen Rembrandt 15, 1975 Boston Police Expect Break in Rembrandt portrait heist Boston Globe April 16, 1975 Rembrandt Stolen in Boston Recovered New York Times Januray 4, 1976 "Deal for stolen Rembrandt made in jail cell." Boston Globe January 9, 1976 "76 art theft informer [Myles Connor] held on parole violation"" Boston Globe August 30, 1979 Storied Rembrandt to Be Shown at the Getty New York Times November 17, 2007
FBI nabs trio, "recovers stolen Wyeth paintings" Berkshire Eagle July 19, 1974
By Kerry Joyce Copyright © 2025 All Rights Reserved kerry@gardnerheist.com
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