The Gardner Heist Investigation In The Media (Part IV)
The crowdsourcing campaign to identify the unauthorized mystery visitor which began on August 6, 2015 might be thought of as the third of three crowd sourcing campaigns related to the Gardner Heist.
The first crowdsourcing or “publicity campaign” began on March 18, 2013 and included a press
release, a press conference as well as a dedicated FBI webpage on the Gardner
Museum theft, video postings on FBI social media sites, publicity on digital
billboards in Philadelphia region, and a podcast.
That campaign was focused exclusively on the possible whereabouts
of the paintings. Federal investigators refused to identify and would “not provide details about the thieves,” although both the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, Carmen
Ortiz, and the Special Agent in charge of the FBI’s Boston office, Richard
DesLauriers, were pressed hard by Emily
Rooney on the WGBH News program Greater Boston on this
question. Investigators went so far as
to suggest and continue to assert to this day that identifying the thieves,
unlike every other case in history is somehow incompatible with getting the
public’s help in locating the paintings.
DesLauriers: We're not in a position to identify those responsible Emily.
Emily Rooney: Why not?
Richard
Deslauriers: Because it would hinder our
ongoing investigation and it would hinder our ability to vet new information
and to analyze new information as it is coming in. So this is an ongoing
investigation, it is an active investigation, particularly in the last two, two
and half years since 2010 and a variety of factors investigatively led us to
decide that this was a good time to do the public awareness campaign…”
How identifying the thieves would serve as a hindrance is never made clear, while the potential for getting more information in identifying the thieves was obvious at least to Rooney, who held her guns during the interview March 19,2013 interview.
"OK so you're not going to name the people, although I think that would be helpful but okay," she said, pointing a finger for emphasis.
DesLauriers
retired three months later after a 26 year career with the FBI,” but even before that, within just a few weeks of this crowd sourcing campaign, there began a lull in the public life of the Gardner Heist investigation. The FBI’s Geoff Kelly said the agency continued to work leads from the 2013 social media effort when the quarter century anniversary of the case came around two years later.
There were indications, however, that the FBI was not fully on board with the 2013 social media campaign even before it began. In an article published in June of 2012 nine months prior to the social media campaign kickoff on March 18, 2013, in an article called 'Public’s aid sought in ’90 Gardner Museum heist', the Globe wrote: "Federal officials investigating the 1990 Gardner Museum heist plan to launch a public awareness campaign similar to the one that led to last year’s arrest of James “Whitey’’ Bulger, in the latest sign that officials have sharpened their probe into the notorious theft, according to the US attorney’s office."
Interestingly, further on in the article, reporters Milton Valencia and Stephen Kurkjian wrote:
"Museum officials would not comment for this article. But [Gardner Museum Security Director Anthony] Amore sounded optimistic recently [six weeks earlier] at a lecture at the Plymouth Public Library when he said he believed the works will be found."
Why would the Gardner Museum refuse to comment on what on the face of it, would seem to be fantastic news for the Museum. Why was the Boston Globe grasping at straws to normalize this strange non-response by the Gardner Museum, in reporting on the tenor of the Museum security director's feelings on a related but different subject.
Perhaps the reporters were needling the Museum a little, suggesting they must be pretty confident the paintings are coming back if they cannot even publicly welcome additional resources and manpower to be deployed getting their half a billion dollars' worth of stolen artwork back.
The article too mentioned the FBI three times as in: "Ortiz has said that the Gardner theft has become a priority of the FBI and her two-year-old administration."
As with Gardner Museum officials, however there is no statement or quote by the FBI about the planned social media campaign in the article. Neither is there a statement, about an FBI refusal to comment for the story.
Just as "man proposes and god disposes," the U.S. attorney's office may propose, but it is ultimately in the hands of the FBI to carry out these proposals. And, according to Stephen Kurkjian, "there's a major disconnect between what the US attorney's office wants to get done and the approach that the feds take in an investigation." he said in January of 2016..
There seems to be less of a disconnect, though, between what the FBI wants to get done, and the approach the Gardner Museum, the Boston Globe and other news outlets take with respect to publicity, news coverage, and discussion of the investigation. But there is, after all, no investigation story without an investigation, and not much hope of the artworks' return either.
Based on what was said, and more to the point, not said, in this article, the FBI's view of bringing the public into the investigation via crowd sourcing, the Gardner Heist investigation was possibly no more welcome than was Boston Police "sourcing" or the Massachusetts state police "sourcing" had been back in 1990. Was there even a crowd sourcing campaign? "What the case needs is help from the public" a Boston Globe editorial stated just two years later.
Still, with the FBI strongly hinting at a possible break in the case during their first-and-goal press conference in March of 2013, the Boston Globe’s Stephen Kurkjian embarked behind the scenes working on a book, looking at the entire history of the investigation, which came out two years later in time for the 25th anniversary.
There were indications, however, that the FBI was not fully on board with the 2013 social media campaign even before it began. In an article published in June of 2012 nine months prior to the social media campaign kickoff on March 18, 2013, in an article called 'Public’s aid sought in ’90 Gardner Museum heist', the Globe wrote: "Federal officials investigating the 1990 Gardner Museum heist plan to launch a public awareness campaign similar to the one that led to last year’s arrest of James “Whitey’’ Bulger, in the latest sign that officials have sharpened their probe into the notorious theft, according to the US attorney’s office."
Interestingly, further on in the article, reporters Milton Valencia and Stephen Kurkjian wrote:
"Museum officials would not comment for this article. But [Gardner Museum Security Director Anthony] Amore sounded optimistic recently [six weeks earlier] at a lecture at the Plymouth Public Library when he said he believed the works will be found."
Why would the Gardner Museum refuse to comment on what on the face of it, would seem to be fantastic news for the Museum. Why was the Boston Globe grasping at straws to normalize this strange non-response by the Gardner Museum, in reporting on the tenor of the Museum security director's feelings on a related but different subject.
Perhaps the reporters were needling the Museum a little, suggesting they must be pretty confident the paintings are coming back if they cannot even publicly welcome additional resources and manpower to be deployed getting their half a billion dollars' worth of stolen artwork back.
The article too mentioned the FBI three times as in: "Ortiz has said that the Gardner theft has become a priority of the FBI and her two-year-old administration."
As with Gardner Museum officials, however there is no statement or quote by the FBI about the planned social media campaign in the article. Neither is there a statement, about an FBI refusal to comment for the story.
Just as "man proposes and god disposes," the U.S. attorney's office may propose, but it is ultimately in the hands of the FBI to carry out these proposals. And, according to Stephen Kurkjian, "there's a major disconnect between what the US attorney's office wants to get done and the approach that the feds take in an investigation." he said in January of 2016..
There seems to be less of a disconnect, though, between what the FBI wants to get done, and the approach the Gardner Museum, the Boston Globe and other news outlets take with respect to publicity, news coverage, and discussion of the investigation. But there is, after all, no investigation story without an investigation, and not much hope of the artworks' return either.
Based on what was said, and more to the point, not said, in this article, the FBI's view of bringing the public into the investigation via crowd sourcing, the Gardner Heist investigation was possibly no more welcome than was Boston Police "sourcing" or the Massachusetts state police "sourcing" had been back in 1990. Was there even a crowd sourcing campaign? "What the case needs is help from the public" a Boston Globe editorial stated just two years later.
Still, with the FBI strongly hinting at a possible break in the case during their first-and-goal press conference in March of 2013, the Boston Globe’s Stephen Kurkjian embarked behind the scenes working on a book, looking at the entire history of the investigation, which came out two years later in time for the 25th anniversary.
Meanwhile, Ulrich
Boser, author of the still popular The Gardner Heist abruptly stopped doing personal appearances or writing articles about the Heist
in the first half of 2013, even sitting out the huge coverage of the twenty fifth anniversary except for a quote or two in other writer's stories.
Boston's other daily newspaper, the
Boston Herald, which competed formidably with the Boston Globe on press
coverage of the story for two decades, then pretty much dropped out of Gardner robbery coverage after their lead journalist on the story, Tom Mashberg, left the Herald in 2010.
By 2013, after writing a book, Stealing Rembrandts, with Gardner Museum Security Chief Anthony Amore, Mashberg had moved on to the New York Times. He was still covering the Gardner robbery with the Times but he was not doing the kind of news-breaking primary source coverage that added to his strong reputation as one of Boston's elite new reporters. .
Meanwhile
Edmund Mahony of the Hartford Courant did incredible work covering the five year saga (2012-2017) that was the investigation of Connecticut mobster Robert Gentile, who was
suspected of having the paintings, or knowing where they were. But there was a little write about him after he was sentenced to prison in May of 2013 on unrelated gun and weapons charges.
Gentile's activities after he was released in April 2014, as the target of an FBI sting, made for a great read in the Hartford Courant, though was not published until January of 2016.
Gentile's activities after he was released in April 2014, as the target of an FBI sting, made for a great read in the Hartford Courant, though was not published until January of 2016.
At that point, the Boston Globe had something of a monopoly on this decades long mystery story with the exception of stories related to Gentile in Connecticut. Other New England media following the Globes lead. But the Globe did not have lawyers and suspects and informants to cover, the way Edmund Mahony did in Connecticut, where Robert Gentile resided either.
For the most part the Globe settled in to passing along the talking points of investigators without question or challenge, standard practice for ongoing criminal investigations. These are not politicians after all, these are law enforcement professionals going about the people’s business. It is not the job of the press, most people feel, to look over the shoulders of investigators while they are doing their job. They don’t have to speak with the press at all.
A
case could be made however, for a different approach, when the investigation
stretches on for decades, the trail includes clear errors, lost evidence,
ignored evidence, missteps and missed opportunities and when the investigators begin
to sound more like politicians than public safety professionals. Emily Rooney and Jim Braude of WGBH had certainly taken a different tack at the time.
Details occasionally trickle into Gardner robbery news stories from time to time in the Globe if they are ever to be known to the public at all. There have been some interesting revelations in nonfiction works, and social media about the case that seem to take years to make it into the mass media and are not always ever raised with investigators for the public.
Details occasionally trickle into Gardner robbery news stories from time to time in the Globe if they are ever to be known to the public at all. There have been some interesting revelations in nonfiction works, and social media about the case that seem to take years to make it into the mass media and are not always ever raised with investigators for the public.
Ulrich Boser book mostly focuses on the efforts of private investigators and his own efforts in trying to determine who committed the crime and the locations of the paintings. But it opens with a solid description of how the crime was executed and later explores some aspects of the investigation.
Boser's The Gardner Heist does reveal at least one significant detail that was never picked up in newspapers or brought up for discussion by investigators, a key fact that would add suspicion to the possible involvement of Abath in the robbery. A review of the motion detector readout included no record of the thieves entering the building, only Abath's footsteps making the final completed round of the museum before the robbery were picked up by the museum's security system in the Blue Room where Manet's Chez Tortoni was taken.
In addition, in his discussions with director Anne Hawley, the former museum director revealed that there had been bomb threats made to the museum. Hawley also shared with Boser her frustration at what she saw as a lack of commitment by the FBI to solve the case.
Boser's The Gardner Heist does reveal at least one significant detail that was never picked up in newspapers or brought up for discussion by investigators, a key fact that would add suspicion to the possible involvement of Abath in the robbery. A review of the motion detector readout included no record of the thieves entering the building, only Abath's footsteps making the final completed round of the museum before the robbery were picked up by the museum's security system in the Blue Room where Manet's Chez Tortoni was taken.
In addition, in his discussions with director Anne Hawley, the former museum director revealed that there had been bomb threats made to the museum. Hawley also shared with Boser her frustration at what she saw as a lack of commitment by the FBI to solve the case.
A year after Boser’s book, in Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World's Stolen Treasures, retired FBI art crime investigator Robert
Wittman to write his memoir of this and other cases, also revealed this “clue,” which had made
it into the Boser work:
“Most befuddling, the thieves took a thirteen-inch tall Manet, Chez Tortoni, from the Blue Room. This was the only work stolen from the first floor, and most curiously, the motion detectors did not pick up any movement in the gallery during the robbery. Absent a malfunction, this meant the Manet was moved before the thieves confronted the guards, raising the specter that the Gardner Heist was an inside job.”
This "clue" again was not picked up in book reviews which instead focused on the charge leveled by Wittman that his attempt to recover the art in 2007 was undone by bureaucratic infighting.
Wittman himself downplayed the significance of what he was revealing: "The mystery of the Manet is like most Gardner clues -- intriguing but useful only to the countless armchair detectives in the bars of Boston and the art community.”
It
would be four years after Boser's book before any newspaper reported that the
thieves footsteps were not recorded in the Blue Room that night and six years
before anyone directly involved in the investigation went on record to discuss it publicly. Yet it may be the most
significant information to come to light about the Gardner Heist since the first week of the investigation.
To an even greater extent Kurkjian's book, "Master Thieves" includes much second guessing, outright criticism of the investigation and in some cases skepticism of what the investigators are telling the public by Boston Police officers, by then-Mayor Boston Ray Flynn, by then-Museum Director Anne Hawley, by then-Governor of Massachusetts Michael Dukakis, by a former State Police Chief, Colonel Thomas J. Foley, who was a state police officer at that time, by retired FBI agent Robert Wittman, who had gone undercover in an attempt to retrieve the Gardner Paintings, and by Francis W. Hatch, a former Republican nominee for Governor of Massachusetts, who served on the Gardner Museum's Trustee for over 30 years.
Considering the substantial bad press, for the federal investigation, found in Kurkjian's book, Master Thieves, combined with their own lack of an arrest, the lack of a recovered painting, the lack of even a claim of a confirmed sighting of a painting until 2014, as well as the lack of a convincing theory of the crime over 100 words in length that did not quickly collapse in on itself, it might well be expected that this component of Master Thieves might be the focus of interest and concern, news stories and publicity.
But despite the missteps, the miscues, the misquotes, the missed opportunities; and despite all the long and winding replies to questions that should perhaps be described as responses rather than answers. despite all of that, this aspect of Kurkjian's book was never brought up in reviews, in interviews, or even in Kurkjian's own presentations about the book. Clearly there was enough to satisfy the demands of readers and the public in Kurkjian's take on the Garnder Heist itself, the possible culprits, his descriptions of the city, and the museum, and most importantly the crooks and characters, without looking closely into this fundamental aspect of the history and the book.
I have personally seen Stephen Kurkjian's presentation about his book on two separate occasion, and I have at least two other versions of it online and he does not in any instance delve into this facet of what can be found his book. Like most people, I came away satisfied and did not occur to me until later that this part of the story was not included.
Kurkjian seems to delights in telling the story of his big interview with Robert Gentile. "I think it's the best chapter in the book," he says smiling with enthusiasm, while adding later that he does not believe Gentile ever had the paintings.
So while the chapter about Robert "The Cook" Gentile may be the best chapter in an entertainment sense, it is not the best chapter in a historical sense. That chapter would have to be Chapter Four, which offers a very near complete cross section of community and state leaders, on the record, expressing their frustration with the investigation.
To an even greater extent Kurkjian's book, "Master Thieves" includes much second guessing, outright criticism of the investigation and in some cases skepticism of what the investigators are telling the public by Boston Police officers, by then-Mayor Boston Ray Flynn, by then-Museum Director Anne Hawley, by then-Governor of Massachusetts Michael Dukakis, by a former State Police Chief, Colonel Thomas J. Foley, who was a state police officer at that time, by retired FBI agent Robert Wittman, who had gone undercover in an attempt to retrieve the Gardner Paintings, and by Francis W. Hatch, a former Republican nominee for Governor of Massachusetts, who served on the Gardner Museum's Trustee for over 30 years.
Considering the substantial bad press, for the federal investigation, found in Kurkjian's book, Master Thieves, combined with their own lack of an arrest, the lack of a recovered painting, the lack of even a claim of a confirmed sighting of a painting until 2014, as well as the lack of a convincing theory of the crime over 100 words in length that did not quickly collapse in on itself, it might well be expected that this component of Master Thieves might be the focus of interest and concern, news stories and publicity.
But despite the missteps, the miscues, the misquotes, the missed opportunities; and despite all the long and winding replies to questions that should perhaps be described as responses rather than answers. despite all of that, this aspect of Kurkjian's book was never brought up in reviews, in interviews, or even in Kurkjian's own presentations about the book. Clearly there was enough to satisfy the demands of readers and the public in Kurkjian's take on the Garnder Heist itself, the possible culprits, his descriptions of the city, and the museum, and most importantly the crooks and characters, without looking closely into this fundamental aspect of the history and the book.
I have personally seen Stephen Kurkjian's presentation about his book on two separate occasion, and I have at least two other versions of it online and he does not in any instance delve into this facet of what can be found his book. Like most people, I came away satisfied and did not occur to me until later that this part of the story was not included.
Kurkjian seems to delights in telling the story of his big interview with Robert Gentile. "I think it's the best chapter in the book," he says smiling with enthusiasm, while adding later that he does not believe Gentile ever had the paintings.
So while the chapter about Robert "The Cook" Gentile may be the best chapter in an entertainment sense, it is not the best chapter in a historical sense. That chapter would have to be Chapter Four, which offers a very near complete cross section of community and state leaders, on the record, expressing their frustration with the investigation.
