Gardner Museum Heist —Research Perspective

“It remains the most tantalizing art heist mystery in the world, the Associated Press reported on the Gardner Robbery’s twentieth anniversary

The leads too “have been tantalizing and plentiful, but have unswervingly led to a dead end,” according to The Boston Globe. Ulrich Boser authored a “"tantalizing whodunit" about the crime and if all that was not tantalizing enough, in 2013, the FBI’s Geoff Kelly acknowledged that it is “kind of a little tantalizing” for the FBI to say they know who did it without sharing that information with the public.

How long can the public and the journalists covering the story remain tantalized? Last November Shelly Murphy wrote a story called "More than 30 years later, a tantalizing clue in the Gardner Museum art heist surfaces"

The dictionary defines “tantalizing” as having or exhibiting something that provokes or arouses expectation, interest, or desire, especially that which remains unobtainable or beyond one's reach, which is what all of these stories do. They promise something while delivering nothing. It is for thi sreason that the production of Gardner heist news coverage,(cover[up]age) clearly outstrips demand.

What makes the Gardner Heist mystery “tantalizing” is not just that the FBI lists the heist as the largest property crime in US history, or that the stolen items are works of incredible, priceless beauty, it is that the Gardner Heist arouses an expectation, of the crime being solved, yet it does not fulfill that expectation.

While the challenge of getting the paintings back may seem impossibly daunting, figuring out who the robbers were seems eminently doable, especially now in the era of the I.T. revolution:

There were four eyewitnesses and the robbers wore no masks. One guard spoke to one of the robbers at length and the other guard was spoken to by both robbers. There is even a videotape with someone who aroused the suspicion of Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office sufficient to release it to the public.

These robbers were people of a certain gender, of a certain race, of a certain age, who spoke a certain way. They were people who were experienced enough, bold enough, or desperate enough, to coolly execute a well-planned premeditated act of violence in the commission of a property crime. “Unlike other art thefts, they tied up the guards; it was a violent crime.“ Boston Globe May 13, 1990.

Everyone agrees the robbers had inside information. That means someone who worked at the museum, unless they died, knows who did it. It also means the robbers have regional ties of some kind to the Boston area. Is it possible that people could do this without being detected for decades? Yes it is possible, it seems to be what happened, but it is a highly unexpected and unlikely outcome. After close to three decades of failure and dead ends, it may be time to consider other unlikely possibilities as well.

Was there a credible attempt to negotiate a deal for a return of the paintings in the days following the Gardner Heist?

There is good reason to believe that at least a couple of the people involved have been known to the FBI within the first few days as the thieves tried to make a deal, but their offer was refused.

As the FBI has frequently pointed out, there is hardly anywhere or perhaps nowhere, to turn a profit on such one of a kind, high profile masterpieces. The authorities may have calculated there would be another offer at some point down the road. The decision was possibly made by a different jurisdiction or agency, by higher ups. If the FBI had received an offer for the paintings and turned it down, or were compelled to turn it down, it is unlikely they would send out a press release or otherwise share that information with the public.

Since 2009, the FBI has quite openly made the pivot from the Gardner Heist investigation being one of finding the culprits and getting the artworks back, to one solely dedicated to getting the paintings back.

The FBI, mostly through surrogates have put forth a muddling narrative about who was responsible for the theft, "the crewish" as Ulrich Boser referred to them. Nothing so definite as individuals or a crew, but something one stepped removed from a crew, and from reality, not so neatly termed a crewish. The public might have an expectation that investigators would share in their burning interest in the whodunit aspect of the case and want to announce their findings proudly to the world. Instead, it was reported in the Boston Globe back in 2010 that:

“Authorities who ordinarily vow to catch and punish wrongdoers have adopted the unusual position of trying to woo anyone who knows where the artwork is stashed, with promises of immunity and riches.”

What are some reasons to think that the robbers did in fact contact authorities to make a deal for the safe return of the paintings very shortly after the robbery?

1. They said they would.

“Tell them they'll be hearing from us,” was the last thing the robbers said to the guards on their way out as they left the guards in the basement.

It was “a possible allusion to a ransom demand, which never arrived,” the New York Times reported. There is no motive to say this unless that was there serious intention. As the thousands of people who the FBI says have contacted them and the museum about the Heist over the years, contacting the FBI is a good deal easier than robbing the Gardner Museum.

2. Somebody was desperately trying to contact the FBI, possibly directly but at the very through the Museum.

Former Gardner Museum Director Anne Hawley: "We also were being threatened from the outside by criminals, who wanted attention from the FBI, and so they were threatening us, and threatening putting bombs in the museum, we were evacuating the museum, staff members were under threat, no one knew really what kind of a cauldron we were in," Gardner Museum Director Anne Hawley told Emily Rooney in a WGBH Television Interview broadcast in December of 2013.

Later in the same program Emily Rooney asked the FBI’s Geoff Kelly about this, about what happened in the aftermath of the robbery at the museum, which Hawley on another occasion, referred to as “that horror.”

Rooney: Anne Hawley told us, we never heard that before, that right after the heist that there were all kinds of bomb threats and the museum was threatened. I didn’t know anything about that. Explain that. What happened?

Kelly: Certainly when you have a case of this magnitude, people are going to come out of the woodwork. That’s what happened. shortly after the case. It happened over the years, where people came forward either claiming to have information about the theft, or coming forward to try and extort some money out of the museum, so this has been such an unusual investigation,

I have been working it for 11 years, but obviously it has been almost 24 years since it happened. And it has run the gamut from everything from an art investigation to drug investigation to extortion investigation. I mean, it has really encompassed every type of federal statute that you could think of.

This is Agent Kelly’s complete response to the question although only the first two sentences actual address what was asked:

One possible explanation is that offered by Agent Kelly, who became involved with the case 13 years after the fact: People did indeed came “out of the woodwork” to the extent that the Director of the Musuem Anne Hawley endured death threats in the months immediately following the robbery. If these threats were unrelated to the robbery itself, or most especially if they did, why did it take until 2009 for any mention of these crimes to be made public?

Still another possible explanation is that someone was desperate to make a deal for the paintings and the FBI was either putting them off for some reason, was not interested in negotiating with this person or did not have the authority to negotiate a deal, and for that reason, they did not follow up with this person who was so anxious to speak with them.

3. The receipt of a ransom note, deemed credible, received four years after the heist was made public.

In April of 1994, the Gardner Museum received a ransom note for the safe return of the paintings.

Though unsigned, the two-page letter was written with a command of legal terms, as if it had come from a lawyer, and conveyed a knowledge of the Gardner theft that only museum insiders and the FBI knew at the time.

Over ten years after its arrival at the Museum, then-Gardner Director Anne Hawley still considered the ransom not the most important lead in the case, Stephen Kurkjian said in a March 30, 2016 WATD radio interview.

“In 1994 we took it very seriously and we continue to take it seriously the FBI’s Geoff Kelly said of the ransom note, in the third episode of Season 2 of American Greed, "Preying on Faith," which first aired February 13, 2008, 14 years after the note was received.

"Eleven years later, Hawley, who has described the note as “extremely well written,” made a cryptic appeal to the ransom note writer in a CNN news segment which aired March 18, 2005:

Dan Lothian: And in an exclusive on camera appeal from the museum's director, an overture to an anonymous letter writer 11 years ago who seemed legitimate.

Anne Hawley: I am particularly interested in hearing from that person, who had, I think a real concern about our getting the work back.”

The Boston Globe managed to get many of the details of the ransom note and its contents to press before the CNN segment aired, but this ransom demand was unknown to the public until that time.

Stephen Kurkjian to whom Anne Hawley dictated the entire ransom note over the phone, wrote in his book Master Thieves:

“The letter writer stated that the paintings had been stolen to gain someone a reduction in a prison sentence, but as that opportunity had dwindled dramatically there was no longer a primary motive for keeping the artwork.”

The letter writer, therefore, was suggesting that the person, on whose behalf the paintings were stolen, has committed a crime or crimes so serious, that even the Gardner Heist paintings would not get them out or a reduction in sentence.

That certainly represents an infinitesimally small subset of incarcerated, (profoundly unsympathetic) American inmates and those a long prison term. (You wouldn’t steal paintings in the USA to get someone out of prison in France.) If the letter were a hoax, it might potentially be quickly judged so, based on these strange, highly specific details. There would not be any reason to go into this backstory about a quickly discreditable explanation, unless it were known to be true by the writer as well as by the authorities, who were among the recipients. "There are people who have done more heinous crimes [than the Gardner Heist] that have negotiated down prison terms" Ulrich Boser observed. As William Youngworth who negotiated with the Gardner Museum over the return of the paintings said: "They're just pictures." This ransom note continues to be considered credible decades later.

So there is evidence of the robbers intention to make a deal before the robbers left the museum, there is evidence of someone desperately and despicably, though unsuccessfully, trying to make a deal shortly after the robbery, trying to jump-start negotiations with threats, a fact which was not made public until 20 years later, and there is a suggestion in the ransom note sent to the Museum Director Anne Hawley, someone in the know, that a sentence reduction was the original motive, a detail that would not seem to serve any function except as a way to authenticate the ransom demand by including inside knowledge of the Heist and its aftermath.

by Kerry Joyce