The Sword AND The Stone (Part Two)

The Sword AND The Stone (Part Two)

Was there actually a serious and sustained, yet unsuccessful effort to determine who the thieves were in the Gardner Museum Heist in the days, weeks, months and years following robbery, as the public has been led to believe?

Is the Gardner Museum Heist not only one of world’s great property crimes but also one of its greatest mysteries?

Or was the identity of at least a couple of the participants quickly known, but the perpetrators, somehow, beyond the reach of law enforcement and so kept as a closely held state secret. 

In my previous blog post I suggested that there was evidence that the thieves had contacted the FBI but were unable to reach a deal based on three occurrences.  

1. The thieves said they would be making contact.  

2.That the Museum Director said that someone was frantically and quite despicably using threats against her and the museum to get in contact with the FBI. in the months following the robbery.  

3. That a ransom note, which the FBI "continues to take seriously"  implied that the paintings had been taken with the hopes of getting a sentence reduction, but without success.

”Three years after his 2013 retirement, at a speaking engagement in Worcester, MA, the former head of the FBI, Richard DesLauriers said: “I know the Boston FBI office, when I led it, as well as right now, is doing everything they possibly can to return those paintings,” he said.

But DesLauriers did not become head of the Boston FBI until twenty years after the Heist, when the public’s expectations remained and still remain twofold: Apprehension (arrest) of the criminals and recovery the artworks. 

The FBI rejected the arrest/apprehension component of their mission quite explicitly starting in 2010 and with the full support of the Museum.

In an article entitled “Reward, return now focus of case” on March 14, 2010 The Boston Globe reported:

“Federal authorities and museum officials say they worry that someone who knows the location of the missing artwork has kept silent out of fear of prosecution or reprisals from those involved in the heist.”

“As a result, law enforcement authorities who ordinarily vow to catch and punish wrongdoers have adopted the unusual position of trying to woo anyone who knows where the artwork is stashed, with promises of immunity and riches.”

This suggests that not only were they by then abandoning any effort to get the criminals, they are making the claim that catching the bad guys is incompatible with getting the paintings back. 

Human nature being what it is, however, this new public strategy did not dampen the public’s curiosity about the whodunit aspect, it fact, it probably strengthened it, especially given the greater awareness of the Heist because of Ulrich Boser’s popular book “The Gardner Heist” which came out in 2009, and perhaps also a book by Robert Wittman, called "Priceless," which included the author's work as an FBI undercover agent, involved in an FBI sting to recover some the Gardner Museum's stolen art.   

The FBI redoubled their effort to turn their arrest and recovery mission into purely a recovery mission in 2013. In launching a social media campaign initiated by the U. S. Attorney's office for Massachusetts, the Bureau declared that they knew who the thieves were, but also said the culprits would not be named. "We're not in a position to identify those responsible, because it would hinder our ongoing investigation." It would hinder our ability to vet new information and to analyze it,”  the head of the Boston FBI field office, Richard DesLauriers said.  Later that same year in a program broadcast on the BBC, "The World's Most Expensive Stolen Paintings, art critic Alastair Sooke interviewed Geoff Kelly who heads up the FBI's Gardner Heist investigation said: "I can't say about where they [the Gardner Heist thieves] are at this time because the statute of limitations on that theft expired in 1995. So if someone were to come forward tomorrow and say they were involved in the Gardner Heist, there's nothing we could do to prosecute them." 

Allistair Sook: So they get off. 

Geoff Kelly: They did. Absolutely. 

Less than 15 months as the 25th anniversary of the Gardner Heist approached, however, the FBI put out a different scenario from that of Geoff Kelly in 2013, with vague descriptions of thieves, and only then added in that the thieves were dead:

"It was the lower-ranking members of the mob that carried this out, or (mob) associates and they were trying to keep that information from the leadership of the mob," said FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge Peter Kowenhoven.

"You know who took them. Why can't we solve the case?" 5 Investigates' Karen Anderson asked.


"The two individuals that took them and committed this crime are currently dead," Kowenhoven replied. "But to solve this case for us the success would be the recovery of the art and that would be the goal to recover them. 

The FBI also began at this point, "hinting broadly" at the names of specific culprits, which friendly reporters obligingly filled in. 

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for Massachusetts, however, was evidently less than persuaded by the FBI’s claim.  They released surveillance footage from the previous night, five months after the Agent Kowenhoven first stated that the identities of the thieves in police uniforms were known and they were both “deceased.” This reopened the whodunit aspect of the case which the FBI had taken five years to slam shut, which they, for there part, then reopened not at all in response to this initiative by the U.S. Attorney’s Office.    

So since 2010 at least, the FBI has stated that their sole mission is recovery and not identifying the culprits. Arresting and identifying the criminals is not a cold case it is a closed case and has been since at least 2010, at least publicly.

And in 2016, the year following Hawley's departure, the Gardner's Security Director formally seconded that position. “Speaking for the museum, we just want our paintings back,” Anthony Amore said.

In 2017, the museum updated its web page about the theft stating: The Museum, the FBI, and the US Attorney's office are still seeking viable leads that could result in safe return of the art. Nowhere on the page does it say anything about seeking viable leads about the perpetrators of the crime. Further on it states, "anyone with information about the stolen artworks or the investigation should contact the Gardner Museum directly. This "the investigation" wording seems like an ambiguous phrasing that leaves the opportunity for sharing information not directly related to the paintings' recovery open a tiny crack.  

But when was the mission really closed, narrowed to just the recovery of the paintings?

Was it 2009? As far back as 2009 U. S. Attorney Michael Sullivan broached the subject of the Gardner Heist investigation's true and singular mission.  

"What is the real purpose of the Gardner Museum investigation? Is it to prosecute the person or persons that were involved in the heist of is [it] the return of the art work? Here this art work is irreplaceable. And here we are 2009 and we’re saying let’s try to encourage people to come forward with any information no matter how small they might think it is or how culpable they may be and encourage them to provide the information so we can get the artwork back. And if it means immunity we’re certainly receptive to it."

2005? 1995? Is there are a year we can point to when the FBI appeared to be doing what investigators do with respect to apprehending the criminals in the Gardner case? So far there has been no arrests, no paintings recovered. And evidence has gone missing, been ignored, poorly maintained and also misinterpreted at least publicly.  

Key evidence collected by the Boston Police has been lost by the FBI: 

“Despite an exhaustive internal search, the FBI has been unable to find “the duct tape and handcuffs that the thieves had used to restrain the museum’s two security guards evidence that might, even 27 years after the crime, retain traces of DNA.”  

There are other clues that could have been garnered from the duct tape as well.  For example, the security guard Rick Abath claims he was duct taped for seven hours although that does not appear to be the case in the Boston Police crime scene photos.  The glue from the duct tape applied to the skin is going to go through chemical changes over time. The glue is going to have a different consistency and chemical composition after six hours against the skin and exposed to air than after thirty minutes. Also lost by the FBI is the duct tape from the other guard who has not been under the same cloud of suspicion as Abath. The duct tape used on the other guard could have served as a basis for comparison to see if they both were duct taped for the same amount of time or not.  This could have been determined with 1990 technology. 

In addition, Abath claims to have been handcuffed with a second set of handcuffs to “the electrical box” though the FBI claims he was handcuffed to a pipe. Both claim a second set of handcuffs were utilized. But the police crime scene photos only show one set of handcuffs on Abath. Were there two sets of handcuffs in evidence for Abath or just one? 

Other evidence (the now famous surveillance video) was left lying on a shelf for a quarter century, seemingly without any efforts made to preserve it.  

Experts say: “magnetic tapes (like VHS, VHS-C, etc.) stored well, will experience 10-20% signal loss, purely from magnetic remanence decay, after 10-25 years. While losing 20% is not losing the entire picture, it may well be the difference between enjoying a memory and simply displaying it. So the sooner your video tapes are digitized, the more signal can be preserved."

Peter Kowenhoven told boston.com in 2015 that “the six-minute video was sent to the FBI lab, where they hoped to enhance it, using technology that wasn’t available during the original investigation, upon its release, but added that efforts to enhance the video were unsuccessful,” the FBI lab, apparently being the last and final word on possibly enhancing the video, to the FBI anyway, despite their "unsuccessful" attempt.  A frame of the video used as a promo for the the podcast WBUR/Boston Globe podcast, "Last Seen" looks successfully enhanced at least somewhat compared with the original that was release to the public. 

The video has frequently been described as “grainy” in the media. To what extent is this grainy quality attributable to a lack of maintenance or transfer of the tape to a digital medium decades sooner? There are other defects in the video as well, from the moment the Visitor's vehicle first appears in the video excerpt, which impinges on an ability to understand what is shown. 

The visitor's vehicle first appears at the 45:00 mark of the excerpt or 47:54 of the security camera. The time stamp on the video camera has a slight squiggle to it and you can only see a single tail light shining on the car. The next frame seems to have right itself but the next one after that has the same time stamp, 47:55, but the top half of the time stamp is a jumble and only a fain glow of light can be seen of the vehicle. The next frame seems fine but the car seems to have stopped momentarily, and there is still only a single tail lamp lit. At 47:57 you can observe the second tail light going on and the car seems to move. 

Since there is a faint trail from the taillights that extends from the lit tail lamps downward the length of the video frame, it seems likely that one taillight is indeed out as the car makes its first appearance. But greater certainty about this quirky appearance of the visitor's vehicle, would be less a subject of question if not for one of the video's technical glitches at this exact point in the footage.   

“The Justice Department said that the man was allowed into the museum by a security guard but that isn't visible in the footage.”  That part is not shown. The guard buzzing him in is shown but his entrance is first entrance is not. 

And the most significant glitch in the footage occurs at the very exact place where his entrance might have been captured and potentially could have offered the best view of the Visitor from the front if not for these technical issues. 

The surveillance recording alternates between the indoor and outdoor camera at roughly three second intervals throughout. But this consistent sequence is interrupted at the time of the visitor’s entrance. 

The indoor cam is shown at timestamp 49:42 at both 2:14 and 2:16 of the video with 49:43 and 49:44 in between. And 49:44  is shown twice with 49:42 in between.  The best shot of the visitor when he is first inside is at 49:47, where he appears already settled in to his spot, which is at 2:18 of the excerpt.   

In addition, there is also markedly less tonal contrast in the facial areas of the visitor on the surveillance tape compared with virtually everything else on the surveillance video.  

The FBI did not make use of the information on the video at the outset of the investigation, which “would have allowed agents to challenge the account of the security guard, Abath, who from day one has adamantly denied any involvement, former investigators familiar with the case say,” WBRU reported. Yet Abath never told investigators there had been a visitor the night before, one who left the outer museum door wide open for a quick return trip to his car. 

Even without the surveillance video, there was other security equipment operating inside the museum, which tracked the opening and closing of the doors, according JonPaul Kroger, one of the Museum's security personnel who helped train the guard Abath.

That computer printout would then have shown that the employee entrance was opened three times in under four minutes, the night before the robbery,  and in one instance the door was remained open for over twenty seconds.

Another layer of electronic security in use by the Gardner at the time of the theft, which delivered data that could have been used to challenge Rick Abath’s story, were motion detectors tracking the movements of visitors inside galleries, along with adjoining halls and stairways. The motion detectors operated in the museum galleries, including The Blue Room, on the first floor, where Manet’s Chez Tortoni was removed. 

“This was the only work stolen from the first floor, and most curiously, the motion detectors did not pick up any movement in this gallery during the robbery, [or anywhere on the first floor] during the time the thieves were in the museum]. 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,” Robert Wittman wrote in Priceless.

Over twenty five years later Anthony Amore on CBS Good Morning said:

"At no time between 1:24 a.m. and 2:45 a.m., [when the robbers were in the building] did any alarm on this floor get tripped," adding, “The only person who had been in the room that night was Rick Abath when he made his nightly rounds.”   

"Doesn't that mean that he had to be involved in this?" CBS reporter Erin Moriarty ask the FBI’s Geoff Kelly later in the broadcast.  "It's one of the aspects of this case that we continue to investigate,’" said Kelly. Twenty five years later it is something they 

"continue to investigate," but twenty five days earlier, it was not. The fact that Abath's footsteps were the only ones recorded on the first floor was known immediately according to Amore.  


It was "several weeks after the theft, museum security consultant Steven Keller was called in to review the aftermath and concluded that the Aerotech motion detector equipment the museum used had worked fine the night of the heist." 

And that is the only time to date anyone from the Museum, or any active member of the FBI has publicly discussed the motion detector evidence with the media,  and how it adds to the suspicion about Abath's possible role. And this was a quarter of a century after the robbery, although it was known at the outset of the investigation.

Another piece of evidence, this one provided by the Boston Police, the crime scene photos of Rick Abath could have been used to challenge Abath’s claim that “they handcuffed me to the electrical box for seven hours.” The crime scene photos do show Abath handcuffed, but not to anything. And Abath shows no obvious signs of struggle or duress from his ordeal. There is no sign of stretching on the tape around his ankles for example. There is also an open pocket knife and at least two books of matches in close proximity of Abath in the crime scene photos.   

Also if “they duct taped like the bottom of my chin to the top of my head” upstairs as he claims, how did Abath's black Stetson cowboy hat end up downstairs beside him in the basement?  Did one of the thieves carry it down to the basement for him? 

When asked about Abath’s possible culpability the FBI’s Geoff Kelly said in 2005 that Abath had a believable explanation: “Wow. It's easy to look back and say the guards [guards?] should not have let them in but it is a believable way to get into a museum, by having two guys dressed as Boston cops responding to an alarm.” At that point Kelly had been the FBI's lead investigator on the Gardner Heist for over three years and had never met Abath. 

 . 

Abath has “a believable way” of explaining what happened but does it hold up? Does his story neutralize all of the evidence pointing in a direction pointing more directly back at him, that has trickled out into the public domain only after decades and over the course of several years, starting years after Agent Kelly's "Wow!" response to CNN's Dan Lothian, but 15 years after this incriminating motion detector information was known to the FBI. 

“I totally get it. I understand how suspicious it all is,” said Abath in a recent [2012] interview. “But I don’t understand why...I should know an alternative theory as to what happened or why it did happen.” When evidence compromises his believable story, his reply is, essentially that it is not his problem. 

Abath said he had not heard from investigators for 17 years until Agent Geoff Kelly and another agent came up to interview him in Brattleboro, VT in 2007. His name was not made public in the media as the security guard who let the thieves in until 2013.  Ulrich Boser used an alias for the guard's names in his 2009 book, The Gardner Heist.

Through it all, Abath has kept his story straight.  In contrast, the FBI's story has taken many twists, and turns with reporters accepting each new analysis of the nature of the crime, the culprits and the possible whereabouts of the paintings, none of which has ever yielded any kind of tangible result or benefit to the Museum or added anything but confusion to the public's understanding of what happened. 

Additional physical evidence of the Gardner Heist, which is completely impossible to avoid are the frames of the stolen paintings left behind by the robbers. These frames currently hang empty on the walls of the museum, for public display, awaiting the day the paintings return to their rightful place. 

Unlike other evidence, these frames have not been lost, ignored, nor poorly preserved, but they has been misused. This evidence has been mischaracterized, and the mischaracterization of this evidence is the cornerstone, or more accurately the only stone in creating a demographic profile of the thieves that is as inaccurate as the evidence upon which it is based.   

On the day after the robbery the Boston Globe quoted Gardner Heist FBI investigating agent Paul Cavanagh saying, "This is one of those thefts where people actually spent some time researching and took specific things. The job was a professional job."   

Gardner investigators over the decades have redefined professional job in this case to mean “professional art thief,” as if those who believe the job was done by professionals also imagine the culprits were art thieves in the  same way that some other people are defense attorneys or architects. Further, that if the robbery was not done by these professional art thieves of the movies, (and these kind of criminals do not exist investigators say), then the only possibility is that it was done by low-life hoods, as if they were not a variety of other social demographics involved in museum art crime.    

"It was the lower-ranking members of the mob that carried this out, or (mob) associates and they were trying to keep that information from the leadership of the mob," said FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge Peter Kowenhoven at the time of the 25th anniversary.

This line of reasoning is frequently promulgated by the Gardner Museum’s Anthony Amore, however, even Amore cannot resist leaving the whodunit aspect an open question. telling Erick Trickey for Boston Magazine  in 2016 both: “We’ve said in the past we know who the thieves are, but “knowing that hasn’t led us directly to the paintings.” But also: “We’re looking for who the mastermind of the theft might’ve been.”

Criminal Mastermind Simon Bar Sinister

Certainly the Gardner robbers did not make their living over time solely from stealing art. However, it was carried out in a way that involved the kind of discipline, leadership and planning that could be applied to other crime and other professional endeavors. 

This robbery was planned and executed in a manner that unlike any crime known to have been carried out by the FBI’s leading suspects in terms of its professionalism.  There was no brandishing of weapons or shouting at the security guards are a couple of examples of how this robbery was carried out professionally.  In many respects, it was "a professional job." The United States is not a society of low-lifes and professionals, and art thieves cannot be so neatly divided in these two categories either. 

"I've looked at 1,300 art thefts over the years. I've never seen one that comes close to 81 minutes." If the crime was so unlike a typical museum robbery in terms of its execution, then it becomes less likely also that it will be a typical museum robbery in term of the culprits.  Based on the research done by Ulrich Boser writing his widely known work, The Gardner Heist he concluded: "THERE IS NO PROFILE of an art thief -- people swipe paintings and sculpture for countless reasons." (Emphasis Boser's) 

The modus operandi  in terms of the amount of time taken is consistent with one class of criminals, spies, with their meet ups and drops, all carefully executed with minute precision to stymie counterintelligence efforts, and this is certainly an area where convicted spy Roderick Ramsay had extensive experience and training.  

When the Gardner Surveillance video was made public the headline in the press release read: "Historic Footage Connected to Gardner Museum Burglary Released, Public Assistance Sought." They called it a burglary. The Gardner Heist was not a burglary. It was a robbery. If David Turner or any other Merlino gang "low lifes" were involved, federal agents would not be mistakenly calling it a "burglary" even 25 years later.   

Dismissing the thieves as unskilled amateurs is a relatively recent phenomenon. It began in in about 2010.

"Amore and Geoffrey Kelly both say the crime truly looks to be a job pulled off by Boston-area criminal gangs, many of which were busily robbing fine art from museums and estates across Massachsuetts and northern New England as far back as the late 1960s."

In 2005, the FBI's Geoff Kelly said: “The Gardner thieves were professional in some ways, amateurish in others: spending 90 minutes inside the museum seems unnecessarily risky, but the way they got in was clever. ‘It shows good planning,’ says Kelly in the July, 2005 edition of The Smithsonian ‘They had the police uniforms. They treated the guards well. That’s professional.’ The thieves also knew the museum well enough to recognize that its most famous paintings were in the Dutch Room. Once there, though, they betrayed a bush league crudeness in slashing the paintings from their frames, devaluing them in the process. “Given that they were in the museum for an hour and a half, why did they do that?” Kelly wonders.

That same year, 2005, Stephen Kurkjian said to CNN”s Dan Lothian: “Was this a group of professional art thieves, or were they just people who were taking advantage of an opportunity and were pretty much low level thieves who didn't know much about art. and were just rushing through a place grabbing as much as they can. And I think that question still is outstanding.”

Two years later however, Geoff Kelly was still pointing to the data that supported the theory that the thieves were amateurs, with some new embellishments, while leaving out  the parts that suggested they were not amateurs on Season 2 Episode 9 of American Greed.

Kelly: “Still other investigators believe the thieves just grabbed what they saw: ‘One theory is that these robbers didn't know what they were taking. The Gardner museum is a very nondescript building

 "Very nondescript"? 

and thinking this might be a quick score. and all of a sudden they realize they've just committed the larges art heist in history.’” Geoff Kelly said.

Kurkjian, who also appeared on this same segment of American Greed  seemed to pick up on this same claim by Kelly  in his book Master Thieves eight years later:  “As for the notion that there was a “Doctor No” figure who had commissioned the heist to get his hands on a favored painting, one need only consider the crime scene. The paintings were carelessly cut from their ancient frames, their windowed fronts shattered, leaving shards of glass throughout the two galleries the robbers pillaged.”

In a video at the top of a giant "links page" of Boston Globe coverage of the Gardner Heist Stephen Kurkjian can be viewed saying: "The key in my mind is how much damage they did to the paintings. They cut Rembrandts out of the frame. That is not Pierce Brosnan or Steve McQueen looking to steal a masterpiece. That is a lowlife." 

But Pierce Brosnan and Steve McQueen are not art thieves, they represent the most glamorous movie stars of their time. That the thieves were not of Hollywood and therefore of the dregs of society from Boston's Southie or the North End is a false dichotomy.  There is a socioeconomic inference to this "low life" characterization although low lifes come from all social strata. Composer Stephen Sondheim for example,  and President Donald Trump graduated from the same high school as Mafioso John Gotti Jr. and convicted spy Roderick James Ramsay, the now closed boarding school New York Military Academy.   

"As a boy learning about fine art from his mother in Rhode Island and as a college student majoring in Art at Assumption College,  Florian "Al" Monday was a "regular visitor to the Worcester Museum. But his initiation into the world of fine art, didn't stop him from masterminding the theft of a Rembrandt and mistreating the priceless work.  A "true aficionado," who "speaks with astuteness and a touch of opinionated snobbishness about great paintings," Monday personally threw the original frame of Rembrandt's 'Saint Bartholomew' into the Blackstone River because he felt it was weighing him down and hid the painting in a hayloft at a Rhode Island pig farm. Prior to that the painting had been hidden in the drop ceiling of his home.  

If not social class, then a lack of intelligence and learning is certainly implied by the "low life" remark based on the cutting of the paintings.  One of the robbers spent 40 minutes and combined the two robbers were in the Dutch Room for a full hour. This was not a rash, slash and grab heist.  


The Bay State's other Rembrandt robber, Myles Connor, is frequently described as highly intelligent,  he was a successful rock musician, and the son of the town's police chief, growing up in one of the Boston most affluent suburbs, Milton, Massachusetts. 


Another art museum robbery mastermind from Massachusetts, Brian McDevitt was the son of a guidance counselor from the affluent North Shore, suburb of Swampscott, MA. McDevitt, a college graduate living in the Boston's fashionable Back Bay neighborhood at the time of the Gardner Heist, was one of the robbers behind the Hyde Museum robbery attempt in Glen Falls, NY in 1981. 

The Gardner Museum’s chief investigator, Anthony Amore, who called Geoff Kelly “my partner in the FBI,”  in March of 2017, says he is also less than impressed with the professionalism of the thieves, following along with the FBI's dumb-down of the robbers and with very little to support his theory either: 

“People say this was so elaborate,” Amore said to Boston Magazine in 2016.  “It’s not elaborate!” If Abath had followed protocol and called the Boston police, the fake cops would never have gotten into the Gardner. “It was kind of a flimsy plan that worked.” 

But the two thieves were not "fake cops" if Abath was in on the robbery, and it is difficult to determine how "flimsy" the plan was when the plan, was successfully carried out without challenge. It went smoothly and nothing points to carelessness or lack of planning in what is known about the commission of the crime.  

What is the basis for comparison in terms of professionalism.  Was it more or less elaborate than the Hyde Museum robbery attempt? The Museum of Fine Arts robbery, the Worcester Art Museum robbery? The Gardner Heist was either elaborate and professional  or it was not compared with other museum heists. This should not be up for debate thirty years later. It was a settled in the first days of the robbery and should have remained so. The state of the paintings as they were taken from the Museum, may not have met the standard of a persnickety hypothetical Dr. No, but they were certainly in more than adequate condition for negotiation a plea deal, which is what the ransom note sent to the Museum in 1994 said was the motivation behind the crime and as had been done with the Rembrandt a machine gun-armed Myles Connor and crew seized by force from the Museum of Fine Arts in 1975. 

There are also a couple of factual problems with this information as put forth by the FBI's Kelly and author Stephen Kurkjian.  The first is only two of “the paintings were cut out of their frames."  The most valuable painting stolen, by far, worth more than all of the other works combined, Vermeer's “The Concert” was not cut from its frame.   

Neither were the two Rembrandts that were cut, “carelessly cut” as Kurkjian, has written and stated numerous times and as Kelly stated in the Smithsonian article by saying they were “slashed,” in a way that displayed "bush league crudeness. This was falsely depicted in extravagant fashion during an American Greed episode, which juxtaposed  footage of the FBI's Geoff Kelly discussing the cutting of the paintings from their frames with a dramatization of the thieves actually cutting the works in a careless and imprecise manner, inches from where the canvas meets the frame. 

 The Gardner Museum Security Director Anthony Amore described the cutting of the paintings from their frames very differently on the WBUR’s  “On Point” with Tom Ashbrook at the 17:00 mark” in 2010: “It was the two large Rembrandts, 'The Storm on the Sea of Galilee,' and 'Portrait of a Lady and Gentlemen in Black' that were cut, the rest were not cut.”

“They took the large frames off of the wall, dropped the frames, to the floor, they didn't shatter but they were rough with them, and then took a very sharp instrument, we can tell by the grooves left in the stretchers, and cut along the inside of the frame.”

Then Tom Ashbrook says: So the edge of the canvas would have been left in the frame.”

And Amore replies:  “Behind the frame.  Most people picture these jagged edges, the paintings were cut pretty clean.”

Robert Wittman, a former senior investigator and founder of the FBI’s National Art Crime Team, also said the painting were cut from the frames “Very neatly, probably using box cutters in his book  Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World’s Stolen Treasures 

During a lecture Anthony Amore did on art crime at the Strand Bookstore in New York on June 11, 2013 he said:

"You can see that the thieves did a pretty neat cut frankly. I think they used a box cutter. But if you look at the stretcher this here [pointing to a PowerPoint Slide off camera] is the stretcher the paintings was on. And if you saw it in person you would see a very thin deep cut so the thief applied a lot of pressure with a very thin sharp blade. and you can see the line so it was cut pretty neat."

A few days after the Heist reporter Christine Termin gave her eyewitness account in the Boston Globe:  “Behind a yellow banner that read 'Boston Police Special Operations Do Not Cross,' a team of conservators knelt over an empty, splintered gilt frame "A Lady and Gentleman in Black,” collecting  fragments of canvas and paint clinging to the frame.” The young women hovering over it were trying “to consolidate the minute flakes of pigment, readying them for reunion with the painting proper some day.” Amore has likened the paint flakes to "dust" in his Strand Bookstore presentation. 

While there are many points of disagreement between Stephen Kurkjian and the FBI, he and Geoff Kelly both doggedly follow this faulty line of reasoning about how the cutting of a couple of the paintings somehow supports the idea of amateur low life crooks, to the exclusion of just about every other kind of criminal.

Recently the Boston Globe has also used the term “slash” as in “they spent 81 minutes slashing and pulling masterpieces from their frames,” (in an article co-written by Kurkjian) and slash  implies something more haphazard than the actual careful and time consuming cutting which was performed on the Gardner’s two stolen Rembrandts, as they were separated from their frames.

While Amore does not use the cutting of two paintings out of their frames to makes his point, and has stated more than once that he does not believe the paintings have experienced serious irreversible damage as a result of the cutting, like the FBI he does maintain that the Gardner Heist is “a tale of petty thieves in Dorchester and Mafia men in Connecticut and Philadelphia.” as Erik Trickey described it in a Boston Magazine article about the case with a focus on Anthony Amore as a source. 

Scholars and other experts from the art world have long held a different view about the perpetrators. In the same American Greed episode art crime scholar Noah Charney said what he found interesting was what was not taken in the robbery such as Titian’s Rape of Europa, perhaps the most valuable painting in North America, and said that the items taken suggested a “shopping list.” Charney has also stated he believes the paintings were taken by a more sophisticated criminal gang.

Alastair Sooke an art critic for London’s The Daily Telegraph best known for his documentaries on art and art history for BBC television and radio said in December of 2013:

“What can we say about this extraordinary crime? Well, the targets seem to be very particular. Of all the thousands of works of art inside that building, they zeroed in on 13 specific objects. so it seems almost perfect. No one has ever been arrested for the theft. None of the art has ever been recovered. In fact this looks like a sophisticated, well executed, very clever crime. Exactly the kind of crime that we associate with art theft.”

Another possibility is that thieves took the most expensive work that could fit in a nondescript vehicle, a hatchback as opposed to a van, as well as household names, the Rembrandts. The less valuable works could have been taken for use to authenticate during negotiations, or even possibly to vandalize or even destroy in order for the thieves to prove they meant business.   

The Gardner Museum's former Director Anne Hawley who headed up the museum at the time of the robbery has expressed a different view of the thieves from the FBI / mass media profile as well, speculating nearly five years after the fact that the robbery was  "in your face, with an intellectual twist"   And during an On Point with Tom Ashbrook, interview twenty years after the Heist said: “Degas is, these were sort of sketches, they weren't real finished work and Degas was sort of a very cerebral artist and the work was not really as accessible in a way and so I've often really puzzled that. in a way, you know, why that work? And was it somebody who really loved that work and knew about it because it just seems like such a strange choice.

Hawley who was a direct participant in the investigation for the first 15 years, prior to Anthony Amore joining the museum, and still closely interested and involved thereafter, has disagreed on many details and aspects of the crime and how the investigation was carried out from the beginning. 

Former Presidential Democratic Party nominee Michael Dukakis, who was Governor of Massachusetts at the time of the robbery, described Hawley as “highly skeptical about a lot of the stuff,” referring to the Gardner Heist investigation, Kurkjian wrote in Master Thieves

Even stronger ten years earlier, The Smithsonian reported in July, 2005, that “Against this sordid background [An FBI scandal in Boston at around the same time period as the Heist and the early years of the investigation] it is easy to understand why some critics remain skeptical about the bureau’s ability to solve the case. ‘Their investigation was possibly corrupted and compromised from the start,” says the Gardner’s Hawley.’”

It seems doubtful, however, that current federal agents and prosecutors would be covering up corruption from nearly three decades ago.  Also if traditional corruption were involved, the graft would most likely be local in nature. Therefore, an FBI cover-up would likely involve deflecting attention away from the Boston area and its criminal underworld. Instead the FBI continues to consistently localize their narrative, making it a case involving local gangs. But theirs is still a weakly supported, awkwardly  presented theory of the culprits, one that persuades very few, and combined with all of the other missteps, non-steps, and setbacks, has only added to the lingering  cynicism about the FBI in Boston from that era

“That this case has remained unsolved, is an embarrassment to law enforcement, Stephen Kurkjian has said.  And with her front row seat and even a seat at the table of the investigation, from the very outset, Hawley’s suspicions, might reasonably originate, based on all that has happened, maybe not in an investigation that was “corrupted,” but that was possibly in a sense “compromised” is a very good word for it, starting in the earliest stages. 

by Kerry Joyce

The Sword AND The Stone (Part One)

The Sword AND The Stone (Part Two)

The Sword AND The Stone (Part Three)

The Sword AND The Stone (Part Four)

The Sword AND The Stone (Part Five)

The Sword AND The Stone (Part Six)

The Sword AND The Stone (Part Seven)

The Sword AND The Stone (Part Eight)

The Sword AND The Stone (Part Nine)

The Sword AND The Stone (Part Ten)

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