At 1:24 a.m. on March 18, 1990, two men dressed as police officers walked into Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. I pointed out that if he really did have the paintings, the museum’s $10 million reward would be more than enough to pay off his debt. Abath made the first rounds while Hestand hung out at the security desk. Wives have become ex-wives. They overpowered two unsuspecting night security guards, then duct-taped their victims to a pipe and a workbench in the museum basement. Leppo doesn’t know if the woman was telling the truth. There’s no Agatha Christie detective to show up at the end of this story, lock all the suspects in a room, and calmly unravel the clues one by one for a comforting and satisfying conclusion. “I understand it, it’s an unbelievable mystery,” he says. According to Boston, it was a later reexamination of the case by The Boston Globe that turned up an intriguing fact: one of the missing pieces of art, Rembrandt's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," (pictured) had been stolen once before. Now they can’t. Then an analysis of some paint chips indicated it was probably a fake. It’s the tragedy that something irreplaceable has been lost”. Gardner died in 1924, and in the absence of heirs (her only child had died young), she left everything to the public. “The deeper and deeper you dig, the more questions are raised.”. Even someone involved in the theft itself can come forward; per the Times, the statute of limitations on the crime has expired. So the museum left the empty frames where the stolen paintings used to hang. That’s when things got weird. The theft has been the subject of books, documentaries, and podcasts. Barnicle says he hopes the new series will bring the plight of the paintings to an even wider audience—with the lingering hope that someone watching might know something new about the art’s whereabouts. So it just rehung the empty frames, a visual testament to what had been lost. The Russborough House, for example, has been robbed four times: by an IRA-affiliated gang in 1974, then by an Irish criminal named Martin Cahill in 1986; then in 2001 by Cahill’s protégé, Martin Foley; and finally in 2002, by a group (possibly involving Foley again) who stole some of the same paintings Cahill took in 1986. Among the thirteen priceless works stolen was Vermeer's "The Concert" one of only 35 of the masters surviving works. Abath, for his part, has long denied any role in the heist, and authorities have generally cleared him as a person of interest, reported Tom Mashberg for the New York Times in 2015. At one point last year, Hill wrote to a Massachusetts congressman asking the U.S. government to step in—but he did so around the time that Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election was publicly released. Late on the night of March 18, the two thieves tricked the young guards on duty, 23-year-old Rick Abath and 25-year-old Randy Hestand, into buzzing them inside. He remains the only living person who likely has firsthand knowledge of the 1990 heist. It was a re-creation of a Venetian palace, complete with columns, stone arches, and an open courtyard filled with lush greenery. He tells me this casually, confidently, as if there couldn’t possibly be another explanation. For the price of a museum ticket, anyone could study the actual brushstrokes Rembrandt put to canvas. The statute of limitations ran out on the actual robbery years ago, and the museum has publicly promised not to prosecute anyone who admits to having the paintings, as long as they’re returned. Give a Gift. But he’s undeterred. “He always says, ‘Charley, you’re wrong.’ ”, Amore is more measured in his response. One name that has always been associated with the heist is James “Whitey” Bulger. 25 Years After Art Heist, Empty Frames Still Hang In Boston's Gardner Museum On March 18, 1990, robbers stole $500 million in art from the Isabella … They assume that, given his client roster, he either knows where the missing works are or knows someone who knows someone who does. “One, the crime happened the night of St. Patrick’s Day,” which, he points out, is an important Irish holiday. 18th Annual Photo Contest Winners and Finalists Announced! A couple of years ago, for instance, a woman walked into his office and told him her father had been involved in the theft. It was a case that also garnered national attention for its haul and the fact that the museum offered a whopping $10 million for information leading to the arrests of the thieves responsible and for the recovery of the art itself. These days the FBI’s current theory, and the one to which Amore gives the most weight, is that the paintings were stolen by low-level associates of one of Boston’s organized crime rings. Over the years the pictureless frames have become one of the most famous features of the museum. The grainy footage shows Abath, who was on guard during the day of March 17, opening the same side doors used by the thieves and admitting an unidentified man in a waist-length coat and an upturned collar, as the Times reported. “This is a robbery,” one of the men said. As the Guardian reports, dozens of theories ranging from conspiratorial to credible have cropped up over the years. “I was just this hippie guy who wasn't hurting anything, wasn’t on anybody’s radar and the next day I was on everybody’s radar for the largest art heist in history,” he told NPR that same year. My emails to Viper Debt Recovery went unanswered. “I haven’t spoken to Martin since February,” Hill says. Empty frames representing stolen artworks in the Dutch Room at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. In 2013, the FBI announced that it had identified the two thieves with a “high degree of confidence.” In 2015, the organization revealed the names of its primary suspects: George Reissfelder and Leonard DiMuzio, two associates of the late mobster Carmello Merlino. Leppo, the defense attorney, isn’t searching for the paintings, but even he can’t seem to leave the case behind. “We haven’t released the names of the people we believe were involved, but I’ll say we’ve gotten a good amount of credible information on them,” he says. “This whole thing has been utter insanity,” Leppo says. At one point they tried to grab a silk flag that had once belonged to Napoleon’s Imperial Guard, but it was screwed into the wall, so instead they took the 10-inch bronze eagle finial at the end of the flagpole. On March 18, 1990, two unknown thieves orchestrated an art heist estimated at around $500 million -- the largest in history -- at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. It, too, had been cut from its frame, which was left on a chair in the security director’s office. The museum is offering a $10 million reward to anyone who provides information leading directly to the safe return of the stolen works. After those attempted sales, however, the artworks’ trail goes cold. He hasn’t heard from her since. They traveled frequently to Europe, returning with sculptures, ancient Roman vases, and sometimes a Rembrandt or two. “Martin is worried,” Hill told me last summer, when I visited him in London to see how his plan was progressing. Updated September 16, 2018, 1:01 a.m. B y now, you probably know the story: Early on the morning of … “Two, one of the robbers used the word ‘mate’ when he tied up the security guards. Wittman, the retired FBI agent, is convinced that the 2006 sting he worked in France—he posed as a shady collector willing to buy the paintings from Corsican gang members—was the real deal. On the 27th anniversary of the $500 million Gardner Museum heist, we take a look at six theories behind the stolen paintings. If these conditions were ever violated, the entire collection, along with the house and the land, would be turned over to Harvard. Both resembled police sketches of the criminals and died within one year of the heist. The Manet, though, particularly irks him. Just over an hour later, the thieves made off with a staggering collection of art that’s valued today at $500 million. The following year, Edvard Munch’s The Scream was stolen from the National Gallery in Oslo; to get it back, Hill posed as a representative of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles who was willing to buy the work. While the rest of the city drank and partied and drank some more, he and another guard, Randy Hestand, took turns patrolling the empty rooms of what had once been the ostentatious home of a Victorian-era socialite who was really into art. A copy of one painting used on the show Monk looked so real, the FBI called the producers to double-check that it was a prop. Now, a new Netflix docuseries, “This Is a Robbery: The World’s Biggest Art Heist,” takes a deep dive into the thorny mysteries surrounding the crime. Statements were given, damage was assessed, missing works were tallied: 12 pieces from the upstairs galleries and then, what’s this? They also felt "with that same confidence" that the artwork was transported to Connecticut and Philadelphia in the years following the theft, with an attempted sale in Philadelphia in 2002. Today, museumgoers can visit the Gardner in person or take a virtual tour showing what the thieves left behind: empty frames that hang eerily on the walls as a reminder of the loss. The police—the real police—were called and, because hundreds of millions of dollars in artwork had been stolen, the FBI. They checked on the security guards—yep, still duct-taped. “Yes,” Hill says. “He’s just a regular guy,” says Brand, the Amsterdam art historian. On the night of St. Patrick’s Day in 1990, Rick Abath was working the overnight shift as a security guard at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Overall, the museum’s security director, Anthony M. Amore, told the Times, the video “raises more questions than it answers.”. Sure, Abath could have stolen it. They took three of the four Rembrandts that hung on the wall, including his only seascape; a landscape by Govaert Flinck; and one of the only 36 Vermeer paintings known to still exist. The investigators also said that they suspected the art was transported via organized crime networks to Connecticut and the Philadelphia region, where the thieves attempted to sell the works on the black market. In fact, one of the most intriguing aspects of the Gardner heist is that even the people who are trying to solve it can’t agree on what happened. Their shift started at 11:30. The walls of what soon became known as the Gardner Museum have remained unchanged ever since. For more than a year, Hill has been traveling back and forth to Dublin to meet with Foley and devise a plan for the return of the artwork. There was one catch: According to her will, the works couldn’t be rearranged, sold, or donated, and new art couldn’t be added. The Globe and WBUR’s investigative podcast “Last Seen” helped publicize the theft upon its debut in 2018. “I’d say I’m working on it on a weekly basis,” says Arthur Brand, an art historian-cum-detective who lives in Amsterdam. Because art crimes of this nature typically require an inside source, he was high on the list of possible conspirators. In 1990, two men dressed as cops con their way into a Boston museum and steal a fortune in art. He works closely with Geoff Kelly, the FBI agent who leads the bureau’s investigation on the case. “I said, ‘Call me when you find them.’ ” Read next: How Thieves Hacked $3 Million From a London Art Gallery Sale, Photographer: Philip Keith for Bloomberg Businessweek. The cops asked Abath for his ID. The last person to visit that room was Abath, when he was making his rounds. In 2017, Brand told Bloomberg he’d have the Gardner’s paintings returned to the museum within months. From start to finish, the biggest art heist in modern history lasted just 81 minutes. “Somewhere in there has to be the answer.”. Anyone who helps return the Napoleonic eagle finial will receive a separate $100,000 reward. Brand offers himself as a go-between, someone criminals can come to when they want to anonymously surrender stolen art—last year he facilitated the return of a $28 million Picasso that had been snatched off a yacht on the French Riviera 20 years earlier. Hill plans to meet with him in August. If they targeted the Rembrandts and the Vermeer because they were worth a lot of money, why did they leave the museum’s most valuable painting, Titian’s Rape of Europa, which art historians have called one of the most important examples of Renaissance art? “Anthony Amore knows my thoughts,” Hill says. 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