Gardner Museum Heist Investigation

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This Is A Robbery Episode Two Transcript

Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Fisher: If we could go back to the scene of the crime now, with DNA and forensic investigations, it'd be a much different crime scene. It's 1990.

You had Boston Police first on the scene. By the time the FBI gets there, the scene's been disturbed. So, I was very interested in where's the evidence? What is the evidence? And I'd like to review it to understand what happened. We knew that the thieves took the VHS tape the night of the robbery, but I wanted to know if we had the prior VHS tapes. That's what I went to. I got the tape, went to the night before. I wanted to see, "OK How does opening the outside door work>" You can see a car pull up. You can't really tell what kind of car it is. You can see an individual get out. I couldn't tell what they were wearing. They could've been dressed in a police uniform. There should be no way they're getting in. That's a locked door. There's a security guard there. And the protocol is, nobody gets in. Rick was working that night. The person was just buzzed right in. Right through both doors. The night of the robbery, it seems like it happened the same way. That always struck me as odd. Was it organized crime? Was it a crime of opportunity? Was it an inside job?

Security Guard Aaron Fannin:After the robbery, I think it was a couple of weeks. I'm sure I heard through the grapevine that Rick was the guy. And then he just showed up one day in Harvard Square. I could tell that it was, you know, it was rough for him. He just seemed defeated. He told me about what happened. I think I asked him, I said, "Did you get fired?" "And he said, "No, I quit, but the FBI wants me to hang around."

Boston Globe Reporter Shelley Murphy: 16 Farrington was the house where Rick Abath lived. · It was a sort of a frat house kind of atmosphere in Allston. Sort of a college section of the city. And he was in a band. And a number of the band members lived there and other friends lived there. And it was a bit of a party house. They used to put on shows.

Fannin: They're just like cool guys. You know, all long hair, hippie guys. They're the type of hippies that like, were good at chess. They hung out and they went in the basement and, you know smoke weed, drink beer, and they'd rock out.

The band was called Ukiah. "People found good roommates and friends and it was just good. I was like 19 years old. Good times.

At one point, we were over there, it was like 11:30 or whatever, and he was like, "I gotta get a car to go to work." And I'm like, "You're kidding, you gotta go to work now?"

Murphy: Rick Abath acknowledged that he would show up high to work. He says he was sober that night, but we know he's not someone that always plays by the rules. Rick Abath: Come in, uh clock in. There would be two guards. Sit around, walk around, basically.

Murphy: Rick Abath's on duty that night. The second guard, we know he calls in sick. ·

Fisher: When you hear that, you're like, uh, a guy called in sick that night It was St. Patrick's Day. Mulvey was an older guy. I had heard that he would frequently call in sick.

Fannin: Joe Mulvey liked the job, but he didn't need the job. · If it had rained a lot and it was treacherous to get out to his car, he would call off. But I don't know if Joe would've opened the door. Joe was that type of guy that would have just been like, "Mmm, no." "You can wait there." If he had come in, maybe the museum wouldn't have been robbed.

Fisher: Fisher And then you could say, "Okay, what about the guy who covered for him Right

Murphy: The second guard on duty had never worked that shift before.

Fannin: Randy, I think, took that shift. I think he went there that night thinking he was gonna practice trombone, and just do a shift and hang out in the museum.

Fisher: The guy who covered had what, a couple hours' notice that he was working that night? So, yeah, again, but that was investigated. What is unusual is the fact they actually got in. That's where I get back to the man-trap. There's two doors, they're both locked. You get buzzed in the first door. The second door cannot open. The problem is you could be stuck there impersonating Boston Police.

Abath: I could see 'em on the outside camera, walking down the street. They stopped, and they buzzed the buzzer, and I just leaned over to the intercom and said, "Yeah?" And I buzzed them into the museum.

Fisher: The fact that this worked as planned by those two individuals is really hard for me to believe if they didn't have some knowledge that they were getting in.

Stephen Kurkjian: Jesus Christ. Look at this. Bastards. My name is Steve Kurkjian. · I am a retired newspaper reporter with the Boston Globe. I was a founding member of the Spotlight Team, 1972 started in 1972. We find out stuff, we reveal stuff, and we do it for the public good. There's our boy.

Two or three months before the theft, he had let people into the museum at midnight, January One. It's a New Year's Eve party. He is stoned and drugged out of his mind. He was in a psychedelic fog. What? It's mind-blowing. That the security of this palace with all the majesties of art, was left in the hands of a guy who was that negligent. Uh, it's it's shocking.

Reporter: Down to Magic. Celtics 5 and 0 this season, when Bird scores 40 or more.

Fisher: Maybe it was just two random thieves decided to hit the Gardner that night, and, by a stroke of luck, they were let in. I have a hard time believing that. It's then hard for me to believe they would have known about the conservator's room, know where the VHS tape is, spend 81 minutes in the museum. It seemed to me they knew the police were not coming.

Murphy: Richard Abath had also opened the door, minutes prior to letting them in. · He says that was his practice. That's what he always did.

Fisher: To date, I've never seen what a guard opening the outside door looked like on video. I was never able to find it on the previous six days. If there's two guards inside and you have security cameras and everything's alarmed, why are you opening that outside door even for a couple of seconds?

Kurkjian: No one else I talked to who did the night shift ever opened those back doors. Rick said he did it all the time. I haven't been able to confirm he did it all the time. If he's an accomplice, he's telling bad guys who are waiting outside, "I'm taking over the desk." Now this would make Rick a true accomplice.

Murphy: Another peculiar thing is the Chez Tortoni was taken from the first floor, and also its frame was left on the chair of the head of security, and that was viewed as a little bit of a to the head of security. A little bit of a snub, you know? There was some question about whether that was personal.

Kurjian: Rick did not have a great relationship with the security director. And people did say Rick was a pain in the ass. He acknowledges. He said, "I was talking all the time about the security system sucks." We're in danger here." " The theft was Sunday morning. Rick had put in his papers to move on, just a few days before. Could Rick have snatched the painting and hid it when he went back to the desk? In 2013, I went to his house. Knocked on the door, announced myself saying, "I want to talk about the museum." And he agreed.

We drove downtown to one of the two places in the town that allowed smoking still. Rick was a heavy smoker. I had an interview with him.

Abath: New technology.

Kurkjian: I know. Hahha Let's hope it works. All right, so Here we are, Rick

Abath: Yes, we are. Here we are. - -

Kurkjian: We talked, I think probably by 7:30, eight o'clock at night, until closing time, until midnight. And he told me as much as he could tell me.

Kurkjian: Okay, so the thing goes down. You had already given your notice

Abath: Yes.

Kurkjian: Why did give your notice?

Abath: It was getting in the way of playing with the band.

Kurkjian: How long do you stay in town? What happens afterwards

Abath: After the robbery, I was planning on calling in sick that next night, because I had tickets to the Grateful Dead shows in Hartford. So I left town and went down to Hartford to see the shows. And I had a great time, drinking and smoking reefer. I did a bunch of acid the first night, I think I did mushrooms the second night. Then I came back to Boston.

Kurkjian: Do you have any idea how the people who broke in knew about the museum security

Abath: No.

Kurkjian: You've been recently questioned by the authorities about the Blue Room and your... Let's go through all that.

Fisher: According to the motion sensors, the guard that let the robbers in had been the last person in that room. The system had been reviewed by security experts right after the robbery, experts that are still around today in the industry and are very well-respected, and claimed it was working as it should have, the night of the robbery.

Security Guard Training Film:

Security Consultant Steven Keller: Freeze! It could happen like this, capturing a thief, saving an irreplaceable treasure, but it probably won't. Incidents like these can happen any time or any place in a museum. Your job is to spot 'em and to know what to do. This film deals with security, museum security. Museum security is different.

End of training film.:

Keller: I'm Steve Keller, and I'm president of a company called Steve Keller Associates. · And we're museum security consultants. I did a risk assessment at the Gardner Museum in the year prior to the theft. After the Gardner Museum theft, the museum asked if I would be able to come to Boston to test the alarms. I had done some walk-tests of the system, while I was at that visit. I tried everything, and all of those detectors detected me each time. How did that happen?

Interviewer: How long after the theft were you there doing a walk-through

Keller: Uh, it was a... it was a couple of weeks. This is a printout of the alarm activity that occurred on that night. When it comes to the alarm information, and that's the main stuff right here. This is the important thing, this printout.

Interviewer: Have you seen this before

Keller: No, I haven't. I haven't seen the printout at all. I wish I had. I wish they would have shared things with me, but, uh you know, I understand how it is with the FBI.

It appears that the investigators made notes along the columns.

At 12:27 a.m. an alarm went off for a motion detector at the exit corridor, and then, within the minute, an alarm went off on the entrance corridor, on the other side of the Blue Room. There's no motion detectors in the Blue Room itself. So it appears Rick passed through the Blue Room and exited within the same minute. At 1:24 a.m., the outside door to the museum on Palace Road opened. And that appears to be when the thieves entered the museum., and then the next alarms occur at 1:48 a.m., which was 24 minutes later. Which is an awful long time to linger in one location.

So at 1:48, we start to get a series of alarms on the second floor. The alarms occurred in the Dutch Room until 1:51 and then you start to see other alarms occurring. There was an alarm in the Italian Room, then it went to the Little Salon. And then there were a long series of alarms. There's an alarm in the Dutch Room again, and then an alarm in the second floor hallway, and then there were no further alarms for four minutes. But then there's an alarm in the Little Salon again. That just was curious to me. There seems to be a gap in the alarms from 2:15 to 2:23. It's a period of eight minutes. At 2:28 a.m., there's another 12 minute gap until 2:40 a.m. It appears that there were no alarms triggered on the first floor while the thieves were inside the museum. According to this printout, the thieves are inside the museum for 81 minutes, and they didn't trigger any alarms for 48 of those minutes. In those days, you didn't saturate the museum, so there might have been hallways that didn't have motion detection. I know they had difficulties running wires in that building. They also had a fire alarm that occurred that night. So it's very possible that they had a power glitch. I wish that I would have been asked about this early on, because it does change your understanding of what actually happened. Fannin: You know, some days you'd go into a room just to see if the motion sensor would catch you. You know, they worked, but they weren't 100% reliable. Abath: Well, apparently, me on my round is the last time there's any alarm in the Blue Room. They wanted to know how it would be possible for the thieves to get that painting out of that room. How they stole the Manet

Kurkjian: Right. -

Abath: Which is a perfectly reasonable question. And my answer is, I have no idea. Kurkjian: Okay, But the likelihood of your sitting down, having a few beers, smoking a little dope and saying something, is that about That's pretty likely. We were all bitching about the security in that place.

Fannin: For Rick to take that painting No way. What's he gonna do with it Those guys cut the other ones out of the frames and Rick gets to get away with that one Please.

Fisher: I don't wanna put anything on Rick's shoulders. I know Rick, he knows me. If we could've charged somebody, we would've. So, I think that speaks for itself. We never made it to the point where we could charge somebody.

Abath: I was completely panicking. And then I started singing, "I Shall Be Released."

Bob Dylan: I see my light Come shining grom the west down to the east

Abath: What happened, happened. For some reason, I seem to be the only person involved in this thing who's not trying to figure it out. And that mainly comes down to, I'm glad to be alive.

Dylan: I shall be released

Kurkjian: I think if there is a secret within him, he said the wrong thing unintentionally to the wrong person. Did the bad guys know that there was only one alarm to the outside world? It was known by every guard and every night watchman. So it didn't have to be Rick, who gave them that secret.

Charles Heidorn: It was mid-September 1981. I was acting chief of security at the time. I forget what day it was, but it was during the day. Well-dressed fellow with a briefcase came in. It was Detective Clark from the FBI. He showed his credentials. And when I saw the badge and the FBI thing, it gets your attention. He said, "I just thought you would like to know that somebody is casing you." He told me the whole story about this guy by the name of Royce. How this guy was an area lowlife. Royce is gonna throw a smoke bomb in the courtyard, and in the ensuing confusion, pull the Whistler and the Matisse and, I think, the Sargent out. And they arrested him. The FBI guy, Mr. Clark, he said this fellow had way too much information. You either have someone who's willingly giving out information or you have a tapped resource.

Fisher: You could've had an insider friendly with organized crime, or owed a debt to organized crime, or a debt to a gambler or a drug dealer. And this was sort of payment. We'll let you in the museum or give you information. It could've been that.

Murphy: Boston's a small town. Everybody's related, didn't you know that Of course there were people in the museum that had mob ties. Who didn't, right? I think that a lot of people had access to that place.

Kurkjian: Louis Royce was an active member of the Rossetti Gang. · And they were always looking for scores. Banks, armored cars. That tells me that the Rossetti Gang knew through Louis that this museum was vulnerable to a theft. In '81, the museum's made aware that vipers are in the grass and they're moving towards you. So, that would seem to me to have been clear indications that it's time to get up to speed. Heidorn It was a real eye opener as to how vulnerable we really were. We sat down and talked with the director, who was Rollin Hadley at the time, · and a couple of other people, and sat down and saying, "Here's the reality. What we gonna do " " " I was a little taken aback that Mr. Hadley didn't take it as serious. His attitude was more or less, "They caught the guy, right I go, "Well, it didn't happen, but something very similar can happen."

Kurkjian: It's inattention. One museum trustee, Arnold Hiatt, · had been recently elevated to a trustee in the museum, and he said, "We have to get a new director " who really cares about Who's on his or her toes." " That's what they hired in Anne Hawley. ·

Hawley: I took over in September of 1989, but it was practically 1990. It's such a beautiful environment that you almost pinch yourself to be there every day. This was being in nature and art. The collection, at the time, was insured for everything but theft. But there were lots of initiatives that I was trying to push forward. The museum had yet to install a climate control system. That was the priority that I think we all saw. I'll never forget, it was raining and there was actually a cloud that formed in the Spanish Cloister in front of the El Jaleo, because the moisture outside was as high as the moisture inside.

Heidorn: There was a sewer pipe that broke in one of the galleries. The cast iron gave way and sewage started coming down in the middle of a gallery with paintings and things like this, and it's... And that's not good for a museum.

Hawley: And of course this just blindsided us completely.

Hiatt: Anne Hawley, she was so despondent. · She called me, she said tearfully, "You never told me this would happen." And I said, "I never knew it would happen."

Interviewer: Were you ever warned, "Hey, watch out, you could get robbed," or anything like that?

Hawley:Yeah. No. When an organization or a person becomes a victim, there's just a pile-on that happens. Calls would come in from people in prisons around the country, that wouldn't talk to the FBI, they wanted to talk to me or the security director, because they said they had information that they wanted to trade. But I certainly didn't have the skill set to be strategizing the investigation. I want to refer all security questions to the FBI. And then, on top of that, the museum got several bomb threats and threats on people's lives. So, there was a whole dark side going on.

Reporter: Crime is suddenly the dark obsession of the opulent world of art. The black tie business of champagne and culture and price tags big as the Ritz has made art burglary a booming industry. A shadow enterprise stripped of romance that experts claim is increasingly tied to the drug trade.

Auctioneer: 2,950,000. We've come this far.

file footage Harold Smith, art detective: It doesn't take a person with a bad mind long to start feeling maybe there's an opportunity here to make money.

File footage, Gilber Edelson Art Association of America: In the old days, a cat burglar pried open the skylight, came down on the rope and took the pictures out and so on. Now people walk into museums and say, "Stick 'em up!" " "

File Footage Constance Lowenthal, Art Hisotrian: The clandestine activity in the traffic of stolen art, worldwide, is probably about three quarters of a billion dollars. Billion Yes.

Kurkjian: In the 1980s, the crime of art theft increased, but it made sense, because the value of art was rising.

Ellis: If we're talking iconic works of art from museums and galleries here, the sort of things that can't be resold through the legal art market, then this is used by the criminals as collateral. That's how it works.

Ellis: If you are the owner of a house and you decide that you need some investment money, you go to the bank and they will advance you money against your house. That's exactly how the black market works.

Connor [Drug Mule]: Back then, cocaine was a pretty big business. There was a number of people involved in that business making a buck from it.

Cullen: I lived in South Boston in the 1980s and the 1990s. 20 80 90 There was more cocaine in South Boston than maybe any neighborhood in the city. It was everywhere. I mean, I literally saw people do it on bar tops. These were not nice establishments. I did not bring my wife to these establishments. But it happened.

Connor: Say, for instance, you have a large cocaine shipment, say, 20 kilos of cocaine, but you don't have anything more than 20,000 bucks cash to put down. But you have several million dollars' worth of stolen art. So you give that art as security. And they hold the art until they're reimbursed for whatever the value of the cocaine is. That's how that goes.

Ellis: They take that recorded legitimate value and they run with anywhere between three and ten percent of that as being what it's worth on the black market to the criminals.

Leppo: Why do people steal artwork Well, there's a number of reasons. You get it because you wanna continue to look at it. You want the reward. You want the insurance money. You wanna save yourself from going to jail, you wanna to get somebody out of jail. So it's a good bartering piece.

Ellis: You know, there's a good example of Myles Connor in Boston · stealing the Rembrandt from the Museum of Fine Art. Uh, his intention was, all along, to use that as a bargaining chip over his next sentence. So you gotta look at the motive behind the theft.

Leppo: That's all Myles. Myles did a lot of jail time. State prison time, federal time. It's the mid-'70s, and Myles had a parole violation with the Feds. Then he was picked up in Mashpee with some stolen paintings. I made a deal that they would reduce his million-dollar bail down to $100. Believe it or not, Myles, he's on the street now.

Connor: I got the idea from an FBI agent that said, "it'll take a Rembrandt to get you out of this, Connor. " I said, "Okay." And so, I knew there was a Rembrandt on loan, and it was uninsured. And I knew that it could be taken.

Leppo:Myles went in, joined a tour that was going on. Had somebody with him, removed the painting from the wall, went to walk out. The guards, These guards were not musicians like at the Isabella Stewart Gardner. · · These guys were all retired cops. There was a phalanx of guards. A friend of mine was down there with a machine gun. Not to shoot anybody, but to shoot at the feet of anybody. And sure enough, they came down. He let go of the machine gun. When that thing goes off, it was like a vacuum. Took 'em all back. Except for one that was a retired Polish cop. And he was convinced that "I am not letting this kid take this fucking painting on my watch." So, he ran down, he latched onto the painting. And in the back of the van, I've got another friend, with another machine gun. He aims the machine gun at the guy. I said, "Do not shoot the guy." And he hits the guy in the head with with his gun. And finally the guy lets go.

Leppo: It later surfaced under a lady's bed to be returned to Massachusetts State Police. So the Rembrandt was not used for any monetary value.

Kurkjian: He got two four-year sentences combined into one four-year sentence. Out of that comes this myth within the bad-guy world, that having a stolen painting, a masterpiece, is a get-out-of-jail-free card. "The Feds will deal with you. They'll let you out of jail. Look what they did to Myles."

Leppo: Anybody who was a thief. an art thief, knew about the Gardner. You had to. I've talked with guys and said, "I've scoped that place out." " " I'm not gonna tell you who, but I've scoped that place out. It was an easy, easy score, as they say on the street.

Muprhy: We now know that a lot of local wise guys were scoping out the museum. They were casing it. But at that time, the focus was on all these other events.

Cullen: Put it this way, back in 1990, 1990 if you're an FBI agent, the way you get a promotion, the way you get a raise, do a big Mafia case. The culture hadn't changed. That was how you got your name in the paper, how you got your people on the news. Solving an art theft 1990 versus a Mafia prosecution in 1990, what do you think is gonna get more attention?

File footage Musuem Employee: There was a theft here last night. Two Rembrandts and a Vermeer.

Visitor: Is that why it's closed Yes, that's why. - -

Reporter: The gates at the Gardner Museum will stay locked · · while authorities search for clues in the daring weekend heist.

Cullen: When the FBI gets in, they kinda shut stuff down. They assert complete dominance or control of an investigation. Not only not telling us what's going on, they're not telling the locals, they're not telling the Staties.

Brekke: Much like a kidnapping case, we wanted to be in it from the vert outset. When you're at the FBI academy, you learn about collecting evidence. It's somewhat rudimentary. Dusting for fingerprints, doing tire impressions, those type of things.

John Green: We had low-level training back then. If the Gardner was robbed today, it would be a different story. There were a lot of things that weren't taken that we would have taken today. In 1990, that wasn't part of the protocol.

And I remember going into the conservator's room. That particular door was ajar. So I don't know who opened that. I didn't know if the police officers opened it. Did the robbers open that door? I'm not sure. That's another thing with crime scenes now. We know everybody that entered the crime scene, where they came from, when they left. There's a person at the door that does all of that. Back then, yeah, there wasn't. We figured if we had any luck at all of obtaining any type of fingerprint, ridge detail, it would've been off the duct tape. The way we had the tape at the time, it was removed by BPD. It was all balled up. That tape then would've been taken Liquid nitrogen would be applied to it. It would release the bonding properties. You'd be able to stretch the duct tape out so that it's straight. So we were hoping to do that, but then the tape went missing.

Murphy: It's gone. It's vanished. They don't have it. They can't test it.

Green: To the best of my knowledge, the tape was never examined for fingerprints. Back then you would sign it out. And I wouldd say, "I'm giving this to the State Police to test." And off it would go. So I don't think there was any of that exchange of paper and whatnot. It went missing. I think to this day, they probably don't have any idea where it's at.

You know, to this day, that sticks in my craw. Because of all the things we probably would have found from that.

Murphy: They weren't thinking about DNA in 1990, DNA but you would think that evidence would be preserved. They've said, Chances of finding anything on duct tape from 29 years ago, what are the chances? But you don't know you don't have it, if you don't look. There's never been forensic evidence, DNA, fingerprints, hair, anything like that, that says, "These are the thieves."

Clougherty: So I remember I was sitting in the kitchen, I'm reading the Boston Globe, " " and seeing something about the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. · And reading what happened, that it was two men dressed as police officers that robbed the museum, it was just like the coin drop. Like, "Oh my God!"

Stratman: For uniformed policemen to be in what I recalled as a Dodge Daytona, it's like this little hatchback. That seems odd. When we went to make a statement to the police at the station in Dudley Square, I pointed out the patch that was on a uniform jacket hanging in the room. Said, "It was just like that. It was exactly that." And then he took it away, 'cause he didn't want me to presumably have my memory be informed by the things in the room while taking a statement.

Clougherty: It looks like these are the notes that detectives would have taken when we were interviewed at the police station. That's interesting. I didn't recall giving such an explicit description of the person. White male, dark hair. Black hair, and a mustache. Medium to dark complexion.

Stratman: Early 30s, wide eyes, 30 hair below the ears.

Clougherty: Average height or a little taller. And I also remember seeing the sketches. And I thought, "Wow! neither of these look like the guys that I got a really good look at." " To my knowledge, the folks that I spoke with at the station were members of the Boston police force.

Stratman: I have no recollection of ever talking to the FBI. None of the FBI folks reached out to me later on. If it was the Boston Police, was that information shared with the FBI? I don't know. But someone, who was responsible for the investigation never followed through and contacted me again, and I was an eye witness.

Kurkjian: There were 45 agents working the case right at the outset. Well, that ended soon after, you know within a month, and those agents went on to other things. It then evolved down to one agent, that was 26 years old.

Cullen: Is that how old the FBI agent was? He was 26 Well, that tells you something right there. You would think, if this was the movies, they'd make a call. "Hello, Mr. Desmond." " " Some guy picks up the phone on a beach somewhere. "Your services are needed." They'd bring in some real high-powered guy who had done something like this somewhere before. It doesn't sound like that happened.

Fisher: By the time I get involved, it's 20 years later. I spent a lot of time focused on, "What evidence do we still have?"

Interviewer: Was there any identification you guys could have made from who had entered the museum the night previous?

Fisher: Um, well, we tried to figure out who that was. We eventually made the determination, that it would be best to release the video to the public, and the Globe, New York Times, and many other outlets picked it up."

Peter Kowenhoven: That's the car, drives up, and you see some light in it.

Reporter: I sat down with FBI assistant special agent in charge Peter Kowenhoven, · who took me through the 25-year-old video released publicly for the very first time. He shows me the guy he wants your help in identifying.

Kowenhoven: And that's the individual of interest, that bounced in. He just came in, and you'll see the corner of his head as it bounces back and forth.

Interviewer: Begs the question, had nobody seen that tape?

Fisher: I don't know. I had never seen it. I don't — I have never spoken to anybody that has seen the tape. A cold case, you don't really think of that. The stuff's been in storage for 25 years. You don't really think of getting it out, and showing it to the public. Because you think everyone's seen it like you have, and they haven't.

Interviewer: What did you think when that police tape comes out in 2015 2015

Leppo: I laughed. You mean to say it took all that time to see it The FBI has concluded they know who it is, and it was potentially one of the employees.

Kurkjian: The FBI, they get a call from a couple of ex-guards, one of whom says, "That's nothing suspicious. That's not a mystery." She says, "That's Larry O'Brien, the deputy director." Why are we learning about this in 2015 Why 25 years after the theft?

Hiatt: We didn't have much confidence in the FBI. It didn't seem to be the high priority. We didn't think we were getting, really, their full attention. They seemed distracted. I didn't know why at the time.

Murphy: After the heist, the largest art heist in the world, that same week there were these blockbuster indictments where 21 members of the New England Mafia 21 were charged with racketeering and loan sharking and murders. I can tell you, the conversation wasn't about the museum.

Government Official: It should lay to rest once and for all any doubts that La Cosa Nostra is a figment of law enforcement's imagination.

Accused in Federal Court to press: Hey, how you doin'

Reporter: Good. How's it going?

Accused: Good, good. - - {Murphy: But it does seem like within the criminal world here, these paintings were a get-out-of-jail-free card. This had been done before. This isn't just conjecture.

Kurkjian: Who did it? Why did they do it, and whom were they connected with that it would allow them to get away with this art?

END