This Is A Robbery Episode One Transcript
Martin Leppo: The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum was a [sic] art thief's delight.
Everybody talks about the Gardner.
This is this is it.
The biggest art theft in the history of the world.
Millions of dollars' worth of artwork.
They disappeared.
Somebody had to know something.
Kevin Cullen: Every reporter in this town eventually did something on that heist.
We were all hitting our sources saying, "What's up " "What's up "
People didn't seem to know.
Unknown: The crime occurred in 1990 on St. Patty's Day.
Whatever drunken revelry was occurring across the city, who knows?
But it was a good time to commit a crime.
Shelley Murphy: With this case, it is really Boston's biggest unsolved mystery,
in addition to being the largest art heist in the world.
Everybody has a theory.
The people that did it, maybe they're dead.
Maybe some of them, who were involved are still alive.
Eye Witness Nancy Clougherty: [Witness] When I start to think about the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum · ·
and the drama and the obsession with getting the paintings back,
and the whole obsession around everything,
I keep talking about it, because it's fascinating to me,
because I was there.
I was a witness.
That night, I had plans to meet up with friends.
It was quiet on Palace Road.
The street's very dark
just lit by this really faint amber glow from the streetlights.
We were outside the building and I asked my friend Justin, I was like "
Hey, can you give me a piggyback ride?"
I Jumped on his back, and we started walking down the street.
Eye Witness Justin Stratman: We're goofing around, we'd had a couple of beers,
and I noticed that this car has its running lights on.
We're coming from behind it.
When I sort of get up close to it, I see that there are people in it.
Clougherty: Two men in the front seats.
Stratman: There's a glare from a streetlamp,
but I can see the shoulder of a policeman's uniform.
Boston police uniform, it's got a sort of distinctive keystone shape.
Clougherty: When we saw the officer,
thinking at that time that they had come to end the party,
our feeling was, "Let's just go."
I do remember that the car was parked right next to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
I probably wouldn't have remembered this night if it hadn't been for what happened later.
Hawley: With works of art, they're only works of art because you're interacting with them.
I mean, they can't exist without, you.
I was the director of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
from 1989 to 2016, and the first woman to be a director.
The museum had become inward-looking.
It hadn't connected deeply to the community.
So, I was brought in to bring the museum back to life, was sort of my charge.
Murphy: I grew up in Dorchester.
I went to South Boston High School.
And the first time I went, I fell in love with the place.
I had been through all the galleries
and I can remember so vividly The Storm on the Sea of Galilee.
Loving that one in particular.
Kevin Cullen: This is gonna make me sound like a wicked snob, and I'm not.
It's sort of like the MFA in Boston was like the Louvre,
and the Gardner Museum was like the d'Orsay.
That sounds so pretentious, I can't believe I just said it.
It has more character. Put it that way.
Hawley: It's such a beautiful environment that you go to another place.
I like to call it the "a-ha" moment or the epiphanic moment, which is a little too heady to say.
It's built to echo a Renaissance Venetian palace.
It's very plain on the outside.
You're just shocked when you come inside to this verdant, luscious courtyard
that is at the center of the museum,
and all the galleries on every floor surround it.
And then every gallery has its own theme.
It's probably one of the most
extraordinary creations by an individual anywhere.
When Isabella Stewart Gardner built the museum,
she broke ground in 1899.
There was nothing here. It was a swamp.
And when she died, she left her infamous will.
She said that if anything were permanently changed,
the collection should be crated, shipped to Paris for auction,
and the money should go to Harvard University.
The Memory Palace of Isabella Stewart Gardner author Patricia Vigderman
She [Isabella Stewart Gardner] was an eccentric in a world where being eccentric
was a way of getting out of the house for women.
I believe she was flirtatious.
She didn't mind being a little sexy.
And she dressed to show it off.
Which, you know, wasn't part of the time.
Before the museum was open, she wanted to test the acoustics,
but you have to have people in the room listening to the music.
But she didn't want anybody to see the place.
She was connected to the Perkins School for the Blind
and she had the blind children come in
and be the bodies listening to the music to test the acoustics.
You know, it's not a museum.
It was her work of art. It's an architectural spectacle.
Guard/First Responder Karen Sangregory: To this day, I still have dreams about the Gardner Museum.
All of that stuff really seeped in.
As a gallery guard, we had all this time to spend,
intimate time with the collection.
Charles Heidorn / Security Foreman: There's no downside to working in a Venetian palace.
It was just beautiful.
We had the Titian Rape of Europa.
We had the Raphael, Matisse, Rembrandt.
And it was just that whole environment.
To feel like you could reach out
and touch something from that long ago.
Here I am, staring at the actual marks
made by the actual hand
of this guy when he was, like, my age.
You just can't get any better than that.
Aaron Fannin: If you got the call
to work overnight shift, you were happy to do it.
It was kind of a treat.
You were like, "Cool. I get to go stay all night." "
All the lights in the museum were off,
and you just had your flashlight and a walkie-talkie.
You'd do your round, then you'd walk through the museum.
It was pretty spooky.
And then you'd sit at the desk
and wait for something to happen.
And nothing ever happened.
Heidorn: That's the problem of the night watch.
Day after day, week after week,
year after year of nothing happening.
Just absolute benign nothing happening,
and then March 18th, 1990.
Reporter: Today is Sunday, March 18th, 1990.
A beautiful day in South Boston.
Now, as the parade gets underway, it's 48 degrees.
We'll see a high of 52 and clear skies.
Cullen: St. Patrick's Day in Boston,
the day itself,
I'd call it just a drinking day.
People would be drinking all day,
rolling into Saturday, then right into the Sunday.
And Boston has its parade on Sunday.
It's not on the 17th. The parade in Boston is confined to South Boston.
It draws in hundreds of thousands of people from outlying areas.
The other thing it would do, it would attract an enormous police presence.
But in the area where the museum is,
it's generally quiet.
Karen Sangregory: It was a total normal day. Just coming in to work on Sunday morning in my role to replace the two guys that would've been there all night at the alarm control center desk. Normally, one or both of them would be in there and they would buzz us in. Nothing like that was happening. There was no response, and this was completely unprecedented and very odd.
Too much time is passing. So, I called the chief of security and told him we couldn't get into the building. He said, "Allright I'm coming in." He took us around some kind of a back door. As soon as we got in there, you just knew something is really, really wrong. The security cameras had been turned, the office door had been busted. There was a frame in there. It was like, "Oh." And there was a crowbar leaning against the wall. The chief hands me the crowbar. He's like, "Here, hold this!" And so I'm holding this crowbar and my mind is thinking, "This is part of the scene of the crime, right? This is evidence. My hand prints are on this crowbar!" And then my next thought was, "He gave me this so that I can pummel someone with it." It's like I went in with this open vision and curiosity, like, And then it just, like shrunk down really fast. And then it was like, "Where's the guys? Where's the guys?" And then the next thought was, "Are the bad guys still here?"
He picks up the phone and called the Boston police. It seemed like all he could say was, "I'm calling from the Gardner Murder. We've got big trouble. We've got big trouble."
Hawley: Must have been about eight o'clock. We had some friends come over for breakfast, when I got the phone call from the security director.
And he [Head of Security Lyle Grindle] said,
"There's been a theft and you need to come right now."
Sangregory: "To me, it felt instantaneous. Like, the street was lined with cars.
I ended up sitting at the alarm control center.
And the police come in, and it was like the first order of business
to plop down this big box of donuts on the counter.
Right in front of me. Like, "Whoa!"
They went up and worked their way down.
No one knows what's going on. We don't know where the guards are yet.
I had never done the rounds like the night guards had,
but I had heard there were tunnels, under this building.
And I'll never forget this astonished look on the cop's face, and he says,
"Oh my God. If there's a body to be found, it'll be in a tunnel."
As it turned out, the guards were located down in the basement.
Tied up in the duct tape and everything.
John Green: The day of the robbery was the first and last time
I was ever at the Gardner Museum.
I was a forensic photographer,
and I was also an image analyst for the FBI.
I may have gotten there about 9:15 or so.
Those shots there were taken by BPD.
They photographed Rick.
Randy was in the other shot.
But they seemed to concentrate on Rick
and how he was taped up.
He was duct taped.
His head and his hair in a roundabout fashion.
And then his hands were bound.
Which I thought was kind of odd. They had a little pad.
Why would you tape around the head
Why not just put tape on his eyes
I've seen people who were killed. They were taped.
But Rick's taping, Yeah, I never saw anything like that.
I thought that was kind of odd, you know that
he was taped in that fashion.
We were thinking, "Jeez, if these were any real serious hoods,
why not just kill these people?
Dead men tell no tales.
Boston Police exiting building: Wait a minute. Go ahead.
Hawley: I think I got there around
8:30, maybe, or quarter to 9:00. I can't remember exactly.
The FBI was there,
and they wouldn't let me in to any of the galleries,
so I had no idea what I was going into.
And when I got into the galleries, it was just horrifying.
Green: When I first entered,
I saw the golden frames
overlapping one another.
And you could see that someone had used a knife.
The paintings weren't unscrewed from the back, they were cut out.
I found that pretty interesting.
You know, Why did they cut them
It wasn't like cutting a piece of paper.
As the conservators explained,
The paintings are not just one canvas.
You can't cut them out and then roll them up like a set of blueprints.
They said it'd be time-consuming and difficult, cutting these things.
SanGregory We were starting to hear things, like,
"What They just cut this stuff out of the frames
Oh my gosh."
It was, and it still is, completely unbelievable.
Hawley: It was incomprehensible to me
that even if you were wanting to steal art that you would treat it that way.
There were 13 works that were taken altogether.
In terms of art historical works, the most important work lost is the Rembrandt seascape, Storm on the Sea of Galilee."
It's Rembrandt's only seascape, and that was brutally cut out of the frame.
As was the Rembrandt portrait of The Lady and Gentleman in Black.
That was also cut out of the frame,
and that picture had been altered at some time in the past.
There was a man and a woman, and there was a space between them.
Well when they X-rayed it,
there was a child between the man and the woman.
Apparently, the child died, and it was too painful,
and it was painted out by Rembrandt.
The Vermeer picture is called "The Concert."
And you have a woman just about to burst into song.
Vermeer's paintings, there aren't that many.
Some say 33, some say 35.
Sangregory: For me, that Vermeer was the toughest one to realize,
"Boy, that thing is gone." As a guard, that was one of my favorite pieces to just study.
You could just be there and you could just almost like talk to it."
Hawley: And then, of course, there was the Flinck,
"Obelisk in the Landscape."
The Chinese beaker, that actually was the oldest work taken.
Those were the works that were in the Dutch Room,
along with an etching of Rembrandt.
The Rembrandt self-portrait was also off the wall.
And I thought, "Oh my God, that too?" And I pulled the frame out and the picture was still there.
Then, from the Short Gallery,
there were five works on paper.
Degas' depicting jockeys riding horses,
beautifully drawn and executed.
And then, in that same gallery,
the Napoleonic finial, from the Napoleonic flag.
Green: They kinda theorized that that's where probably they were out of time.
Where they tried to unscrew the finial.
The, uh, screws were in the cigarette receptacle.
They hadn't gotten through taking all the screws out,
so they figured it was time to go,
that these particular items
may have just been an afterthought.
Hawley: And then finally, from the first floor, the Blue Room,
a Manet called "Chez Tortoni."
Boston Police Spokesman: There are significant paintings missing.
Ballpark figure on the cost is about $200 million dollars.
Hawley: The FBI didn't have an art squad. Nobody did.
It was just devastating.
Uh, in terms of the rooms
So, they were struggling to get up to speed on it.
And, of course, we were shattered.
It was like a death in the family.
That's precisely why people.
I was just totally numb.
Trustee Arnold Hiatt: We were told by the FBI
we needed to get a reward going before the trail gets cold.
That was considered to be the most important move we could make.
So, I called someone I knew who was in the Philippines at the time.
He was also the chairman of Sotheby's.
"What do you want from me?" he said.
And I told him we needed a million dollars.
Hawley: Sotheby's and Christies stepped in, offering this million-dollar reward.
We were just overcome with calls coming in.
In fact, the whole phone system broke down.
A group of us were just really around the clock
working to get the reward out.
Hawley [1990 Footage]: I have to operate under the assumption that we are going to return,
get these returned, because we are a world-class museum.
Hawley: The press was brutal for a while.
Just brutal.
[Reporter 1990]: How long have you been director?
Hawley: For six months.
Reporter: The guards, how old were they?
Hawley: I don't know.
Reporter: How long have they worked for you, do you know?
Hawley: I don't know that.
Reporter: What happened to them?
Hawley: [No reply]
Reporter: Would you say that the guards screwed up in this thing, is that your opinion? Or were they just taken advantage of?
Hawley: The FBI's handling all of that. We will, I don't have more to say now, but we will continually update you if there is any new information.
FBI first responder Tron Brekke: I was there that morning.
And I think I was maybe the first FBI agent on the scene.
Boston PD was already there.
This was designated as a major theft, and I had responsibility
for the violent crimes program, which included
kidnappings, bank robberies, fugitives, that type of thing.
As I recall, they showed me the security area
that had been breached.
I mean, these guys obviously had some idea of what they were doing.
I had to sit down with the supervisor of the squad
that would handle violent crime like this.
We tried to figure out,
What do we do? Who do we look at?
Where could these things have gone?
Green: I only saw the guards briefly upstairs.
There were other people that were interviewing them
and they were in this conference room.
Guard Rick Abath: I could see on the security camera that there what looked like two cops standing out there.
They come to the door, they rang the bell,
and they said,
"Boston Police. We got a report of a disturbance on the premises."
I buzzed them in.
They asked me if I was alone,
and I said that no, my partner was off doing a round.
They said, "Get him down here."
The cop turned to me and said, "Don't I know you Don't I recognize you"
I think there's a warrant out for your arrest.
Can you step out from behind the desk?"
And he said, "Up against the wall."
The guy who was dealing with me was taller and skinny and
was wearing his gold frame like round glasses, if I remember correctly, and
he had a mustache.
It looked really greasy.
It was probably a fake mustache.
And he handcuffed me.
Cuffed my partner,
very dramatically said,
"Gentlemen, this is a robbery."
Reporter: The FBI released these pictures after conversations with guards at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum."
Reporter Suspect number one is described as a white male in his early 30s,
approximately 5'10" tall, 160 pounds,
dark hair, and wearing gold wire-rim glasses.
Suspect number two is described as a white male in his early 30s also.
Approximately 6" tall with dark hair.
Murphy: I don't think the sketches was [sic] that reliable.
How long did they see them? Did they get a good look?
Were they wearing fake mustaches?
Ted Koppel: Take a look at these composite drawings.
They may, in a manner of speaking, be worth several hundred million dollars.
If, that is, they bear a striking resemblance
to the two men who inspired them.
Brekke: With something like this, we try to take a minute,
step back and say,
"Okay, where do we go from here."
This is not a crime of opportunity.
These guys were not dressing up for Halloween in policeman's uniforms saying,
"Gee, a good idea, let's go rob the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum." You know, this was planned out.
Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Fisher: A lot of planning. They had duct tape, they had handcuffs, they had the uniforms on.
They were ready to get in that museum. I've done organized crime cases for years. I've done a lot of wiretaps. I think I know how criminals think and act.
I don't think it was a cold call.
Brekke: You analyze the 13 pieces that were stolen.
It just seemed like they had either cased the place
or given specific information about what to look for, you know,
what's on our shopping list.
A finial off the Napoleonic flag?
Fisher: It's confounding. It's hard to figure out why you would, in a museum, with priceless pieces of art,
waste precious time with this finial that is essentially worthless.
Brekke: They had taken a Chinese artifact.
Fisher: It's a Chinese ku [bronze beaker].
It's old, it's somewhat valuable,
but not even close to some of the other items of art just in that room.
Brekke: Was the Chinese artifact a diversion?
Murphy: There was one, the self-portrait of Rembrandt where his eyes follow you around the room. They tried to steal that and they took it down off the wall,
and for some reason, it was left behind. And they don't know if it was just too big or they forgot it.
Fisher: One thing that stuck out was the Rembrandt etching. It's the size of a postage stamp. The frame isn't much bigger.
And yet somebody wasted time unscrewing that
and then taking apart the whole frame
and taking only the etching.
Right, if you're carrying out the biggest heist in history and you don't know if the police are coming,
and you have limited time to get valuable artwork,
are you gonna waste time with an etching that isn't that expensive,
waste precious moments taking it out of a frame
that you could stick in your pocket regardless
I would say no.
Brekke: The paintings themselves,
everybody knows about it so you can't sell 'em on the market.
At least not on the open market.
Auctioneer: Sold, 43 million.
Ted Koppel: Even at a time when prices are setting records,
dealers and curators say these paintings would be difficult to fence.
Many believe they were hired to steal what they took.
But unless they had a buyer already lined up,
it may have been one of the dumber robberies in recent history.
Repoter 1990: Given that these pieces are well-known,
who could possibly keep them?
Hawley 1990: That's a very good question.
Only probably a person who is determined
to keep them private for the rest of their life.
Tom Brokaw: Some masterpieces are so valuable,
they may be too hot to sell.
Which raises the question:
were these thieves working for a collector
Brekke: The Storm on the Sea of Galilee is the only seascape that Rembrandt ever painted. Who is gonna have that in their living room?
We started speculating.
"Well, maybe it's a oligarch in Russia, and he's got it in his basement "
and he goes down there and he looks at it."
You know, the only Rembrandt seascape in existence.
Fisher: A lot of people have speculated that it was a Dr. No theory.
You know, some rich oil baron or billionaire wanted these particular items,
and they paid a crew to carry out the robbery.
Cullen: It's somebody probably looks like a villain from one of the Bond movies.
He's sitting there with his cognac
and his trophy wife or girlfriend next to him
admiring the art that was stolen from the Gardner Museum.
Bond movie villain: I was the unwanted child of a German missionary
and a Chinese girl of good family.
Hill: Any thought that these paintings
are hung on the walls of the Mr. Big
who has them stolen to order
is utter rubbish.
The problem with your Dr. No theory
is that as soon as he's commissioned it,
and the thieves see that there's, in the case of the Gardner Museum,
a reward for information leading to the recovery,
what are they gonna do? They're gonna cash in.
They're gonna set the guy up and get their reward.
No. Dr. Nos and so on don't exist.
I mean, you get some very professional criminals.
But they don't know how to handle art, they don't know what to do with art.
And that's usually their undoing.
Where you've got a professional art thief,
the theft is professional, it's skilled.
The artwork has been taken
because they know how they're gonna dispose of it.
And that's when you've got a problem.
Steven George Xiarhos: My name is Steven George Xiarhos.
I'm the deputy chief of police here in Yarmouth.
Yarmouth is historic, quaint, quiet.
And, looking back, a good place to commit a crime.
So, in '88, I get called out to this scene.
Pulling up to this beautiful museum, the Bangs Hallet House,
and seeing the immediate aftermath of a really serious crime.
They went in the back door, they overpowered the caretaker,
tied her up, taped her mouth shut, her eyes,
then stole all of
these items.
They knew what they were looking for,
they had been inside,
and they were very successful.
And then disappeared.
So you start putting pieces together. You work with local police,
and then state police, and then federal.
And through all that, that name came up, you know, this man named Myles Connor.
Reporter: Myles Connor, a legendary outlaw from Massachusetts.
In 1975, he stole a Rembrandt from the Museum of Fine Arts.
Leppo: I first met him, I believe it was in Mattapan Square,
when he had either a cougar or a mountain lion on a leash.
I said, "That's Myles Connor." And I introduced myself.
And I followed his career.
And then got to represent him.
Myles was the man.
He could play the guitar and sing.
And he put on a great show.
He might've been really a big star,
but everything always was interrupted by his other activities.
Green: Myles Connor. Yeah. He did a show at
The Beachcomber
Yeah, exactly that.
My wife in her younger days would go there
with her sisters and a few friends and see his shows.
He was a robber, a thief
a killer.
Connor: Depends upon whom you ask,
but in general, I'm known as an art thief.
And some people
consider me the biggest art thief in this country
because I've robbed a number of museums.
But then again, I was a rock and roll guy.
Myles Joseph Connor Jr.
His father was a police officer,
his step-brother was a state police officer,
his other brother is a priest.
His favorite line was, "Where did they go wrong."
He was a criminal.
He was this 5'7 ", 5'8" guy with this booming voice.
He was a member of Mensa, he was like, brilliant.
He has a doctor's knowledge of human anatomy,
and is a student of Eastern philosophy.
He was always pulling off crazy capers and getting into trouble.
Anybody in law enforcement that hears my name,
I'm sure must think that I'm running second neck-to-neck to Attila the Hun.
He had robbed museums up in Maine, he had shootouts with police.
Myles was shot three, four, five times at once.
And went through surgery without anesthesia.
He was the definition, the quintessential art thief.
When this crime happened in Yarmouth,
we tried to find him.
One day, I'm in my office and I get a phone call.
"Detective, I heard you were looking for me."
My name is Myles Connor."
He said, "Yes, that's my thing, but I want you to know I had nothing to do with this."
No one really saw anything,
but the cop in me wants to lock him up.
Connor: Take a peek in here if you want to.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.
No, I think that's wrong. Actually 11 to 12.
Hah. You lose count.
Xiarhos: When the Gardner Museum happened, yeah, we thought back to this.
It wasn't too long after, you know.
Whoever did this, that's their world.
Art theft.
It's not like breaking into a house and stealing a TV.
This is different.
Whoever did this, and Gardner,
in my opinion, may be connected.
They absolutely have done it before, they probably did it again,
and that's professional thieves.
Interviewer: How many art heists have you done
Connor: Probably 30. Thirty-plus.
Interviewer: How many did the authorities know about?
Very little.
Leppo: He was so well-prepared to do something.
You just don't go into a museum
and decide to take a painting.
It's the getaway that's the big thing here.
And Myles was a great escape artist.
He had always said, not necessarily to me,
that the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum,
that that was on his bucket list.
Interviewer: Any reasonable person on the planet would assume
that you masterminded it from the beginning.
Murphy: Myles Connor, the biggest art thief in the city. ·
He would be suspect number one.
If he wasn't in jail at the time that this happened.
Connor: On the day of the robbery of the Gardner Museum,
I was in federal custody.
Reporter: The FBI nailed him in a sting involving art he'd stolen years before.
The judge gave him 11 years.
Which means that when the Gardner was hit in 1990, the master thief Myles Connor was behind bars.
Connor: But there's a saying that the guards came
and knocked on my cell door to make sure I was there.
But I think that's more legend than it is fact.
Murphy: I think there was sort of a feeling
that somehow this would shake out fairly quickly.
And then as time dragged on,
they realized this stuff was just way too hot to handle,
that it was gonna take some time.
Fisher: I started in Public Corruption in March of 2010.
My first week was the 20th anniversary.
It was a cold case, it was 20 years old,
so I took time going back through the file, and looking at other angles.
I wanna take this through step by step how it happened.
Not only minute by minute, but like second by second.
How did this thing play out
And how many things had to go right
for these two robbers to still not be caught.
Murphy: What we know is that 23-year-old Richard Abath,
sort of a uh music school dropout,
is on duty that night.
Maybe around midnight or so,
Rick Abath takes the first shift to do the rounds upstairs.
He says there was fire alarms going off,
and that he ends up shutting off the fire alarm.
He comes down and relieves the other guard at the desk.
But what he does is, he opens the outside door
and shuts it about 10 minutes before the thieves show up.
Fisher: The very first thing we know
is, that outside door that they entered through
was open 15, 20 minutes before they enter it.
Why?
Murphy: So, now at 1:24 a.m.,
two men dressed as police officers show up at the door.
They say they're there to investigate a disturbance.
Rick Abath says he buzzed the door and let them in.
They say, "I think I might have a warrant for your arrest. Step away from the desk."
Now he's removed himself from the only place
where he can get help from the outside.
There's a button that will alert Boston Police
that there's a problem at the museum.
And now the thieves spend
81 minutes in the museum, helping themselves."
Fisher "Ten minutes in a robbery seems like an eternity.
That's what has always stood out for me,
the fact they were comfortable enough
to be in there for 81 minutes.
That's an incredibly long time to spend
when you have people tied up in a basement and you don't know if police are coming.
Murphy: And another peculiar thing is in the Dutch Room, there was a secret panel.
There's actually door that leads downstairs, and it was slightly ajar
when the investigators arrived that morning.
Which also raised the question,
who would know there was a door there?
Fisher: There were security cameras,
but the thieves knew where the VHS system was,
so they took tape from that evening.
We know that at least one of the proximity detectors went off.
I think the Rembrandt.
If an alarm like that goes off,
typically they get out of there, in case that alerted somebody.
But these thieves didn't.
I don't see how this was pulled off without inside information.
Fisher: My understanding is at the guard desk,
there was an old printer there
that prints out the motion detector alarms.
Somebody took that. They took the printout, the paper.
But it was 1990, so what they probably didn't realize
1990
that there was a hard drive somewhere that had the data.
Murphy: The most peculiar thing about what happened during those 81 minutes
is that most of the stolen artwork was taken from the Dutch Room.
There were also some items taken from the Short Gallery.
The Chez Tortoni is the only piece that was stolen on the first floor,
from the Blue Room.
And the only person that the hard drive can show
whose steps went into that room
were those of Richard Abath,
when he was doing his rounds in the museum.
Fisher: Best we can tell in the data, they never entered that room.
So, that means somebody either took it off the wall before
or after the police got there.
Fisher: I think it happened before the robbery.
Brekke: Number one, you've gotta look at the inner circle.
Murphy: Looking at it through today's lens,
you know, the question is,
"Whoa, why wasn't there immediately a lot of focus on Richard Abath,
Abath: Once I sat down with the FBI, I, I knew.
I was like,
"Well, I'm the guy who opened up the door.
They're obviously gonna be looking at me."
END
