As the St. Patrick’s Day celebrations wound down in Boston in the early morning hours of March 18, 1990, a theft of unprecedented proportion was about to captivate the city. Two thieves posing as policemen gained entry into The Isabella Stewart Gardner Art Museum. Over the following hour-and-a-half, they stole thirteen artworks valued at approximately $200 million at the time and now estimated to be worth $500 million.

The Gardner heist is considered the largest-value theft of private property in history. Thirty-four years later, despite efforts involving the FBI, Scotland Yard, and multiple global probes, no arrests have been made and none of the artwork has been recovered.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Boston, Massachusetts

Two men dressed in dark uniforms were seen leaving a St. Patrick’s Day party near the museum at around 12:30 a.m. Revelers took them to be policemen.

After parking a hatchback roughly one hundred feet from a side entrance to the museum, the men rang the buzzer on the side door connected to an intercom inside. The buzzer was answered by twenty-three-year-old security guard Rick Abath. The men said they were police officers responding to a disturbance call. No such incident had been reported to Abah, but he surmised a St. Patrick’s Day reveler may have climbed over the fence and been reported to the police.  He admitted the men into the museum at 1:24 a.m.

Dressed in what appeared to be legitimate police uniforms, the men approached Abath and asked him his name. After he responded, they told him they had a warrant for his arrest and ordered him from the desk that contained the museum’s only button to alert the police. Abath was then handcuffed.

Shortly thereafter, the second of the two security guards on duty, twenty-five-year old Randy Hestand, arrived from patrol and was also placed in handcuffs. The incapacitated guards were then taken to the museum’s basement where they were further handcuffed to pipes. The men masquerading as policemen then wrapped duct tape around the guards’ heads, hands, and feet. The time was approximately 1:35 a.m.

When Abath and Hestand’s relief arrived approximately seven hours later, they found their bound colleagues and called the real authorities.

Security Guard Rick Abath

As Found By Other Guards

Museum officials and the (real) police determined that after suppressing the guards, the men masquerading as policemen went to the museum’s security director’s office, where they took the video cassettes showing their entrance to the museum from the closed-circuit cameras and the data printouts from the motion-detecting equipment. The movement data was also captured on a hard drive, which remained untouched.

The thieves then began removing the artwork. The museum’s side entrance doors were opened at 2:40 a.m. and again for the last time at 2:45 a.m. The robbery lasted eighty-one minutes.

Thirteen works of art with an estimated value of $200 million at the time had been taken from the museum.

Boston Globe Headline

The most valuable stolen artwork was The Concert, one of only thirty-four known works by seventeenth century Dutch painter Jan Vermeer. Valued at $140 million at the time, it now has an estimated value of $250 million, and is believed the most valuable unrecovered painting in the world.

Also stolen were two works of Rembrandt, another seventeenth century Dutch painter: A Lady and Gentleman in Black and his only known seascape, The Storm of the Sea of Galilee. A small postage-stamp-sized self-portrait etching of Rembrandt was also taken; it had been stolen from and later returned to the museum in 1970.

The thieves also removed a large Rembrandt self-portrait oil painting from the wall but left it leaning against a cabinet. Investigators believe it was deemed too large to transport, potentially because it was painted on wood rather than canvas like the others.

Chez Tortoni by nineteenth century French painter Édouard Manet was the only item taken from the first floor.

Art experts were puzzled by the other pilfered pieces, as more valuable works were left untouched. Five sketches by nineteenth century French artist Edgar Degas drawn on paper less than a square foot in size and made with pencils, inks, washes and charcoal, had a combined value of under $100,000.

The thieves may have taken Landscape with Obelisk believing it another Rembrandt; it was long attributed to him until credited to his pupil Govert Flinck a few years before the heist.

A ten-inch-tall French Imperial Eagle finial from the corner of a framed flag for Napoleon’s Imperial Guard, was only worth roughly $100,000. The robbers may have thought it was more valuable because of its gold-like coloring.

The stolen ten-inch tall bronze gu was traditionally used for serving wine in ancient China. It was one of the oldest works in the museum, dating to the Shang Dynasty in the twelfth century BC, but it has a monetary value of only several thousand dollars. 

The thieves passed other more valuable works by Raphael, Botticelli, and Michelangelo. Perhaps most strangely, they did not enter the Museum’s third floor containing the Italian painter Titian’s The Rape of Europa, among the most valuable paintings in Boston.

The selection of works and the thieves’ rough treatment of the artwork leads investigators to believe they were not experts commissioned to steal particular works.

The Pilfered Artwork

The paintings had been removed from the wall and thrown on the marble floor, shattering their glass frames. The thieves then used a blade to cut the canvases out of their stretchers. The frame for the Chez Tortoni was left at the security director’s desk.

Multiple fingerprints and footprints could not be determined to have been those of the perpetrators or museum employees.

Frames Discarded

Composites of the robbers were distributed nationally and globally, but failed to produce their identities.

Composites Of The Robbers

The first significant lead in “The Theft of the Century” came in April 1994, over four years after the heist. Gardner Museum Director Anne Hawley received a letter saying the artwork was stored in a “non-common law country” in a climate-controlled environment. It could be returned— for a price and under certain conditions.

The anonymous writer claimed to be a third-party negotiator who did not know the thieves’ identities. The artwork was said to have been stolen to reduce a prison sentence but that the opportunity had passed. In return for the artwork, the culprits wanted immunity for themselves and all others involved and $2.6 million which would be wired to an offshore bank account at the time of the exchange. The writer provided a coded message to be printed in The Boston Globe if the museum wished to negotiate.

The FBI deemed the letter credible, saying the writer conveyed information known to only them and museum officials at the time. The coded message was printed in the May 1, 1994, edition of The Boston Globe.

Several days later, Hawley received a second letter in which the writer claimed to have told the perpetrators of the museum’s interest in negotiating a return, but that they were fearful of the publicity the case was receiving. No subsequent communication was made.

Anne Hawley

Isabella Stewart Art Museum Director

Three years after the anonymous letter claiming the artwork was stored overseas, Boston Herald reporter Tom Mashberg believes he saw one of the pilfered works only a couple of hundred miles from Boston.

Mashberg reported he was, at his consent, blindfolded and driven to a warehouse by an “informant.” Once there, he saw what he believes to be the stolen Rembrandt’s Storm on the Sea of Galilee. Tests of paint chips he was allowed to take, however, could not confirm it was the original painting; they were only able to demonstrate the work dated from the seventeenth century.

The FBI believes the warehouse to which Mashberg was taken is in Brooklyn. The locale was searched, but none of the artwork was there, nor was anything found indicating it had ever been housed there.

Tom Mashberg

Boston Herald Reporter

Mashberg’s informant was determined to be Billy Youngworth, an antiques dealer who had served as a fence for stolen property. He claimed the Gardner robbery was carried out by five men; he identified two of them as Bobby Donati and David Hougton, both deceased.

Youngworth told Mashberg that Donati was one of the two robbers who gained entry into the museum while posing as a policeman and that Houghton, an associate based in California, had masterminded the theft and had driven the getaway van.

The FBI dismisses Youngworth’s claims, saying he is uncredible.

Donati was murdered in September 1991, sixteen months after the heist. Hougthon died of a heart attack the following year.

                                                       

Billy Youngworth 

David Houghton 

Bobby Donati was a career criminal associated with the New England-based Patriarca crime family. A family associate also fingers Donati in the theft and says he told him he had buried the stolen loot underground.

At the time of the heist, family crime boss Vincent Ferrara had recently been indicted on racketeering charges. The unidentified family associate claims Donati stole the artwork in an effort to get Ferrara released from jail because he needed protection from a rival faction gaining control of the Patriarca family.

If that was Donati’s desire, it failed. Ferrara remained behind bars and, in September 1991, two-and-a-half years after the Gardner heist, Donati was found bound, beaten, and stabbed to death in the trunk of his car in Revere, a suburb of Boston named after the Revolutionary War patriot. His murder is unsolved.

The FBI has not named Donati a suspect in the heist.

                                                     

Bobby Donati 

Vincent Ferrara

A friend of mob associate Bobby Guarente also implicates Bobby Donati in the robbery, but claims that Donati gave the paintings to Guarente when he became concerned for his own safety. He claims Guarente and mob partner Robert Gentile attempted to use two of the stolen artworks to reduce a prison sentence for an associate.

In 2015, Guarente’s widow, Elene, told investigators her husband once had possession of some of the stolen art and that shortly before his death in 2004 he gave two paintings to Gentile.

Bobby Guarente

In May 2012, FBI agents searched the Manchester, Connecticut, home of Robert ‘Bobby the Cook’ Gentile. They found an empty hidden ditch beneath a false floor in a backyard shed.  Gentile said it had flooded a few years prior. He claimed he could not recall what was in the ditch but thought it had been small motors.

In his basement, Gentile had a March 1990 Boston Herald article of the Gardner Heist and a listing of what each stolen piece could draw on the black market. None of the artwork, however, was found.

Gentile served thirty months in federal prison on drug charges. While he was incarcerated, three other inmates said he told them he had knowledge of the stolen art. Gentile was offered a reduced sentence if he cooperated with the FBI, but he instead refuted the other inmates’ claims, saying he did not know who ordered the heist, that he had never possessed any of the stolen artwork, and that he had no knowledge of the pieces’ whereabouts.

Although Gentile failed a lie detector test, authorities did not have enough evidence to charge him in connection with the theft as nothing was found indicating he had ever possessed the artworks.

Gentile was released from prison in March 2019, after serving eleven months for a weapons violation. He died in September 2021, still denying any knowledge of the whereabouts of the stolen art.

Bobby Gentile

In 2013, the FBI stated they believe they know the identity of the two robbers and that they were members of a New England-based criminal organization. It was announced two years later that the unnamed suspects are deceased.

Authorities believe these men were associated with a gang from Dorchester, the largest neighborhood of Boston, loyal to Patriarca family mobster ‘Cadillac” Frank Salemme. The gang’s operations are believed to have been run from an automobile repair shop run by mob-associated criminal Carmello Merlino.

In their investigation of an unrelated art theft in 1982, undercover FBI agents learned of several Merlino associates discussing robbing the Gardner Museum.

Imprisoned Dorchester gang associates were offered reduced or canceled prison sentences if they disclosed information leading to recovery of the artworks. Most denied any knowledge of the theft; the few leads supplied all resulted in dead ends.

Merlino died in prison in 2005; Salemme died in 2022.

Carmello Merlino

Frank Salemme

After being arrested for cocaine trafficking in 1992, Merlino told authorities he could arrange the artworks’ return in exchange for a reduced prison sentence. The proposed deal never came to fruition after his associate, David Turner, was unable to locate the works. Merlino said Turner heard they were stored in a church in south Boston, but authorities found no evidence to support the claim.

In 1999, Merlino, Turner, and another associate, Stephen Rossetti, were sentenced to thirty-eight years in prison after being convicted of an attempted robbery of the Loomis-Fargo vault in Easton, Massachusetts, thirty miles south of Boston.

Turner was paroled in 2019 after serving twenty years. Federal prosecutors say his sentence was shaved because he had been a model prisoner and participated in several educational programs. They will not confirm or deny that his cooperation in the Gardner Art Theft investigation was a factor in his release.

FBI agents say they have several secret recordings of Turner discussing the missing art, but he has, from behind bars and since his release, repeatedly denied any involvement in or knowledge of the robbery.

David Turner

The Gardner Art Heist occurred over St. Patrick’s Day, and, coincidence or not, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) has also been mentioned as possibly orchestrating the heist to raise money or bargain for the release of IRA prisoners.

The act of tripping the fire alarm before the heist has been dubbed a “calling card” of the IRA and of its rival Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). Both organizations had agents in Boston at the time, and both had previously demonstrated the capability to organize art heists.

Beantown crime boss and longtime fugitive James “Whitey” Bulger supplied arms to the IRA, but the FBI investigation found nothing tying him to the caper.

Here is the link to my write-up on Bulger, written shortly after his capture in 2011. He was murdered in prison in 2018.

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1389670047957317&type=3

Whitey Bulger

Another person of interest is Brian McDevitt, a Boston conman who attempted to carry out another caper nine years before the Gardner heist. He fit the description of the larger thief.

In 1981, McDevitt dressed up as a FedEx driver, and, as in the Gardner robbery, used handcuffs and duct tape in his attempt to steal a Rembrandt from The Hyde Art Museum in Glens Falls, New York.

When interviewed by the FBI in late 1990, several months after the Gardner theft, McDevitt denied any involvement and refused to take a polygraph test. He died in 2004.

Brian McDevitt

Speculation of involvement in the Gardner Heist surrounds  many nefarious people with underworld connections. Some, however, wonder if the theft of half-a-billion dollars-worth of art could have been an inside job perpetrated by a man making little more than minimum wage.

Many view the actions of security guard Rick Abath as suspicious. While on patrol shortly before the robbery, he briefly opened and closed the museum’s side door, a move that some believe could have been a signal to the thieves parked outside. He told authorities that he opened and closed the door routinely to ensure that it was locked, but a coworker says supervisors would have noticed him doing so from their computer printouts and ordered him to stop.

Abath also broke protocol by coming out from behind his desk, which contained the museum’s only alert button.

Does The Security Guard Have Something To Hide?

 

Furthermore, the museum’s motion detectors on the morning of the robbery did not detect any movement in the Blue Room, from which the Chez Tortoni was taken. The only footsteps detected in the room that night were Abath’s during his security patrol.

A security consultant, however, reviewed the motion-detector equipment several weeks after the theft and determined it was, at that time, operating correctly.

The Gardner Museum Blue Room

After the FBI uncovered the plot to rob the Gardner Museum in 1982, museum officials allocated funds to improve security. Among these improvements were sixty infrared motion detectors and a closed-circuit television system consisting of four cameras placed around the building’s perimeter. No cameras, however, had been installed inside the museum, as its board of trustees considered them cost prohibitive.

In 2015, the FBI released a security video from the museum several hours before the theft showing Abath admitting an unidentified man into the building to converse at the security desk. Abath told investigators that he could not recall the incident or recognize the man, but several former museum guards identified him as the museum’s deputy security chief.

Security Camera Image Of The Man

Rick Abath died on February 23, 2024.

The FBI agent overseeing the case in its early years concluded that Abath and fellow guard Randy Hestand were not competent enough to have committed the gargantuan crime.

Rick Abath

No specific motive for the theft has been established. Authorities believe the thieves were members of a criminal organization based in the mid-Atlantic or New England, and that the stolen paintings were moved through Connecticut and the Philadelphia area in the years following the theft.

Some of the art may have been offered for sale in Philadelphia in the early 2000s. Investigators do not know what became of the artwork afterwards or where it could now be held.

The Artworks Have Not Surfaced

The guards and witnesses in the street who saw the robbers before the theft generally described them as appearing to be in their thirties, meaning they would likley be in their sixties to early seventies today.

One of the men was approximately five-feet-nine to five-feet-ten inches tall with a medium build, while the other man was taller, appearing to be six feet to six-feet-one-inch inch tall, and had a heavier build.

Renderings of The Thieves

The statute of limitations on the theft expired in 1996, meaning no one can be prosecuted for stealing the artwork. Federal authorities say they will not charge anyone who voluntarily turns in the artwork, but anyone caught knowingly in possession of the stolen items could face charges.

The estimated value of the pilfered works is now $500 million, though some art dealers believe it could be upwards of $600 million.

The FBI and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum are each offering up to a $10 million dollar reward for the return of the artwork. It is the largest bounty ever offered by a private institution.

If you believe you have any information relating to any of the stolen artwork, please contact the FBI at 1-800-CALL-FBI.

The Largest Reward Ever Offered

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is located in Boston’s Fenway–Kenmore neighborhood near the Back Bay Fens parkland, a half-mile from Northeastern University and less than one-and-a-half miles south of Fenway Park.

Designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano, the museum is a Venetian-style palazzo displaying one of the world’s most impressive collections of European, Asian, and American art, ranging from paintings and sculptures to tapestries and decorative arts.

A World-Renowned Museum

The museum was found by and named for art collector, patron, and philanthropist Isabella Stewart Gardner in 1903. She was an eccentric woman known for her love of culture and travel. Her stylish tastes and unconventional behavior provided much fodder for the early twentieth-century gossip columnists.

When Gardner died in 1924, her will created an endowment of $3.6 million, outlined stipulations for the continued support of her museum, and mandated that her collection of artwork be exhibited “for the education and enjoyment of the public forever.” Her will also stipulated that the arrangement of the artwork should not be altered and that no items be sold from or purchased into the collection.

Isabella Stewart Gardner

The empty frames of the pilfered portraits remain displayed in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

As Gardner’s will decreed that nothing in her collection should be moved, the empty frames for the stolen paintings remain hanging in their respective locations in the museum as placeholders for their potential return.

The Frames Are Still Bare

Here is the link a write-up I did a few years ago about the Gardner theft and other stolen artwork.

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1389678121289843&type=3

Sources:

• America’s Most Wanted
• Artnet News
• Boston Globe
• Boston Herald
• FBI
• The Guardian
• Isabella Stewart Gardner Art Museum
• New York Times
• Reuters
• Town and Country Magazine