This is a Robbery: why the biggest art heist of all time remains unsolved to this day

Empty frames: the Isabella Steward Gardner Museum - Boston Globe
Empty frames: the Isabella Steward Gardner Museum - Boston Globe
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It’s the most costly St Patrick’s Day in art history. Around 1am on Sunday 18 March 1990, as revellers stumbled home from a hard day’s boozing and Boston’s police forces mustered for the downtown parade later that day, two men dressed as cops showed up outside the quiet back entrance to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

One of the two night watchmen on duty, a 23-year-old music school dropout called Rick Abath, buzzed them in. The men ordered Abath to call his partner down to the security desk. They told him he matched a suspect description and to step out from behind the desk – away from his panic button, his only connection to the outside world. They shoved both guards up against the wall and, according to Abath, announced themselves: “Gentleman, this is a robbery.”

Over the next leisurely 81 minutes, while the guards were duct-taped in the basement, the thieves filched 13 pieces from the Gardner’s galleries. There were some hugely valuable items – two Rembrandts, including his only known seascape, Storm on the Sea of Galilee; Vermeer’s luminous domestic scene, The Concert, one of only 35 paintings by the artist in existence; and a Manet portrait, Chez Tortoni.

But there were also some odd inclusions: a small 3,000-year-old Chinese Shang dynasty beaker, the bronze finial eagle from a Napoleonic flag, and a series of sketches of jockeys by Degas. The thieves also bypassed more expensive art, tearing Rembrandt’s self-portrait off the wall, but leaving it intact. An estimated $500m of art was taken. In their wake, the robbers left heaps of gilded frames scattered over the Gardner’s polished wooden floors – and art’s greatest unsolved crime.

“Pragmatically, these pieces are worth $500m,” said the Museum’s director of security, Anthony Amore, on the 23rd anniversary of the robbery. “But the pieces stolen are the true definition of priceless because they can never be sold or replaced. Their spaces have to remain empty, their spots unfilled. It’s a fool’s errand to ascribe a dollar value to them – they’re much more important than money can express.”

Nonetheless, a $10m reward issued by the FBI for information on the missing art still stands. And the ghoulish appeal of the mystery remains: at least four books, countless articles and documentaries, and one Simpsons episode, have been dedicated to the crime. The Museum’s hauntingly empty frames are now almost as well-known as the art which used to fill them. Thirty years on from the heist, a new Netflix documentary – This is a Robbery: The World’s Greatest Art Heist – is the latest attempt to hack through the coils of theory, counter-theory and myth which have grown around the crime.

It is produced and directed by brothers Colin and Nick Barnicle, Bostonian natives who felt proproterial about this local tale of international notoriety. “We felt like we could figure it out,” Colin Barnicle told CNN. “A lot of people in Boston feel that way, too, because it’s like one degree of separation away from everybody. It became more like an obsessive thing after a while. “[With] a lot of documentaries, there’s usually a verdict in there where you can pull evidence from – but we couldn’t, there was none of that. We interviewed a lot of people just to try to get down to what happened that night.”

Despite nearly five years of research, the documentary largely follows the beats established by The Boston Globe’s Last Seen podcast, which conducted extensive interviews with most of the central players – including Abath, who stopped doing press a few years ago. The Barnicles’ production also fell foul of the Museum: they were allowed to film b-roll inside provided they didn’t use reenactments.

Baffling: the paintings may still be stashed in Boston - Netflix
Baffling: the paintings may still be stashed in Boston - Netflix

Nonetheless, the opening episode dramatises several scenes using a local acting troupe, The Berkshire Theatre Group. These include fabricated details, such as guns being used in the robbery. In addition, the filmmakers did not have access to the FBI’s case file which runs to several thousand pages. Barnicle admitted to struggling to condense the sprawling story down. “We had four hours to work with,” he reported to the local newspaper, The Berkshire Eagle. “We needed a beginning, middle and end for an unsolved, unadjudicated case with no paper trail. Everyone has a theory about what happened.”

The series’s main theory – corroborated by other investigations – is that Abath, the nightwatchman, was likely involved, although he has denied this, maintaining he simply buzzed the robbers in without knowledge of who they were. He told NPR in 2015: “Even if they get the paintings back they’ll never be the same, and I feel horrible about that,” he said. “I don’t want to be remembered for this alone… I’d like to be remembered for the good things I’ve done. I’m a husband, a father of two really cool kids. But they’re saying it’s half a billion worth of artwork. And ultimately I’m the one who made the decision to buzz them in. It’s the kind of thing most people don’t have to learn to cope with. It’s like doing penance. It’s always there.”

More than 90 per cent of art heists involve insider help, according to the FBI. And a source close to the case argues Abath’s behaviour was suspicious on the night. Around 10 minutes before the disguised thieves turned up, he had opened the usually-locked outside entrance to the Museum; and the motion-detecting security system noted only Abath's presence in the Blue Room where one of the paintings – a postage-stamp-sized Rembrandt self-portrait – was taken.

There are further discrepancies in his account. Why did he so readily abandon his post behind the desk, and its panic button? And why was he placed so far from the other guard in the basement? How, too, did the thieves know they had so long to steal the art: 10 minutes feels like a lifetime in a robbery, let alone more than an hour. Abath’s bindings were also odd: the thieves had swaddled his head in tape, but left his mouth free, as though to make a big show of his capture. Lastly, Abath was serving out his two week’s notice at the Museum when the robbers struck: unlucky coincidence, or a planned move? As for his fellow guard, he was filling in for a colleague and only knew he would be at the Museum around 9pm that night – a tight schedule in which to execute the greatest art heist in history.

Chez Tortoni, Manet - Alamy
Chez Tortoni, Manet - Alamy

The evidence against Abath is far from conclusive, though. As he admitted to the Boston Globe, his main hobbies were playing in a rock band and getting stoned with his buddies – he would often rock up to work buzzed. In fact, he claimed that he so readily followed the thieves’ orders because he had a Grateful Dead concert to get to after his shift and didn’t want to be late. His actions are not too surprising for someone out of their depth and slightly off their head. Yet in 2013, Abath reported he was told by an FBI investigator: “You know, we’ve never been able to eliminate you as a suspect.” The statute of limitations on the crime, though, has now expired – even if he admitted full culpability, Abath would not face prosecution.

So who took the paintings? The crime has inspired a lush tangle of wild theories. These range from Irish mobsters via the IRA to Saudi crime syndicates. And the list of criminals linked to it, most of whom have been whacked or jailed, reads like a blood-soaked first draft of Martin Scorcese’s The Departed. There has even been breathless whispering that a mysterious Dr No figure had the strange shopping list of art stolen to order.

This is bunkum, according to the source. Far more likely is that it was taken by local gangsters who, the day after the crime, realised the value of what they had, and when they found they couldn’t easily fence it, panicked and squirrelled away the stash. This would mean the paintings are still hidden locally in the Boston area. After all, crossing international borders with stolen paintings involves a lot of unnecessary work – and, besides, Europe has an embarrassment of stealable artwork already. Why go to the trouble of nicking it in Boston to ferry it abroad?

The eclecticism of the art taken supports this idea. The thieves went mostly for highly recognisable, and covetable, artists like Vermeer and Rembrandt – the world's most stolen artist. In fact, the Gardner Museum was the last in a string of Rembrandt heists in the 1980s and 1990s. These criminals, few of whom had PhDs in art history, were after works they were familiar with – and believed they could easily sell on. The other objects taken – the bronze finial, the Degas sketches – were likely pocketed once the main paintings were secured; they were trophies, proof the thieves felt confident they wouldn’t be disrupted.

There is one final piece of the puzzle: a key witness, Myles Connor Jr, has gone on record in recent years. Connor is a screen writer’s dream: he was a crooner at the scuzzy Beachcomber nightclub on Quincy docks, and now farms thoroughbred horses. He is also America’s most prolific living art thief. At the time of Gardner heist, he was serving a jail sentence for a previous bust. But he alleges that a criminal associate, Bobby Donati, had visited him in prison and claimed they would use artwork stolen from the Gardner as a bargaining chip to get him early release. Connor even says he asked Donati to nick the curious Chinese vase for him. Donati, however, is unable to corroborate this story: he was murdered a year after the theft, his body stashed in the trunk of his car.

Where, then, are the paintings? If, as many suspect, they are still in the Boston area, then it is possible they are hanging on someone’s wall, their owner unaware of their dubious heritage. “My hope is that the series ends up with one of the those works back in their frames,” Barnacle told the Guardian.

Strange bindings: Abath on the night of the robbery - Netflix
Strange bindings: Abath on the night of the robbery - Netflix

In a further twist, Abath, who now lives in Vermont as a teacher's aid with a wife and two children, self-published an online memoir in 2019 called Pandora's Laughter: The Eyewitness Account of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Robbery and Investigation. As the catchy title indicates, it's a curious document. Abath frames his autobiography as a conversation between himself and a therapist he has been visiting for treatment for undiagnosed ADHD. And while his account in it does not differ significantly from others, it nonetheless suggests how his whole adult life has been lived in the shadow of the heist – and its suspicions.

“A lot of people blame me for it,” he writes. Why, his therapist asks. “Because I let the robbers in.” He continues: “I've tried not to think how close to death I might have been. If one thing had gone sideways [it] could have sent the whole scene sideways. While I was tied up, all I could do was hope that they didn't burn the place down. I couldn't imagine a worse end than being burned alive, handcuffed to an electrical box. So how do I feel about it? I'm glad it hasn't ruined my life.”

As for the Gardner Museum, because of the “infamous will” of its benefactor, Isabella Stewart Gardner, no objects can be moved, bought or sold. Like Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, the 2,500-piece collection is a monument to one individual’s peculiar passions and collecting curiosity: a collective work of art. As such, the missing paintings' frames remain stripped, testament a crime committed half a lifetime ago whose protagonists may well be dead. Isabella Stewart Gardner's final bequest to the world is achingly incomplete.

This is a Robbery is on Netflix now