Factual Errors in Last Seen Podcast Episode 8
1. HORAN: “At 5:30 in the morning on Christmas Eve, 1980, Fred Fisher, then the 40-year-old director of the Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, New York, awoke to a telephone call from police. Someone had tried to rob the museum.
The robbery attempt was on December 22, 1980, so the phone call would have been on December 23rd, not Christmas eve.
The Post-Star December 26, 1980:
A van driven by Mary ------- W------, 26, of Watervliet, arrived late Monday [December 22, 1980] When the driver left the van to pick up the package, she was allegedly confronted by a man with a gun who forced her back into the van and made her drive to Oakland Avenue in Glens Falls, which runs parallel to Warren Street and behind the Hyde Collection. So it was December 23, not “Christmas Eve.”
http://gardnerheist.com/Hyde_Robbery_12_26_1980.pdf
2. HORAN: “When he was arrested in Glens Falls, McDevitt
explained his alias to police by saying “I was doing this to avoid trouble with
Massachusetts authorities regarding a particular legal affair.” That’s con man
code for felony.”
That’s not any kind of code, con man or otherwise. McDevitt was saying his alias was defensive
in nature, intended to avoid the authorities and consequences of his past actions, not as part
of a plant to commit more crime.
3. HORAN: “An article in The New York Times outed him [McDevitt] as a prime suspect in the Gardner heist.”
The New York Times said he was an intriguing suspect, not a prime suspect. And he wasn’t outed, he came out:
“William J. McMullin, a spokesman for the F.B.I.'s Boston division, would neither confirm nor deny the identity of the suspect. But Brian M. McDevitt, a screenwriter who moved from Massachusetts to California about two years ago, acknowledged that he had submitted to F.B.I. questioning in his lawyer's office in Boston about the robbery…McDevitt garrulously discussed the case by telephone” for the story.”
When McDevitt was on Sixty Minutes sixth months later, Morley Safer observed "you do get the distinct feeling that he [Brian McDevitt] wants you to believe he did steal the [Gardner Museum] paintings."
4. HORAN: “Brian McDevitt served two years for kidnapping and attempted robbery.”
“McDevitt, who was 20 at the time, served a few months in jail for the attempted robbery.” —Boston Globe 3/18/17
Convicted of unlawful imprisonment and attempted grand larceny, they [McDevitt and Michael Morey spent less than a year in jail. “Loot: “Inside the World of Stolen Art” by by former FBI Art Crime investigator Thomas McShane
5. RODOLICO: “Former FBI Special Agent Thomas McShane was also in Boston on March 18, 1990. He’d been among the first on the scene of the robbery at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.”
McShane was also NOT in Boston on March 18, 1990
"I was summoned to Boston on the Monday after the weekend robbery." From McShane’s book “Loot” page 307
6. HORAN: “His fingerprints would be among the first to be sent to FBI headquarters in the wake of the Gardner Museum robbery.”
Mr. McDevitt said he had been questioned for an afternoon and had allowed himself to be photographed and palm-, hand- and fingerprinted. So it was over a year and a half before anyone’s fingerprints were sent to FBI headquarter in the “wake” of the Gardner Museum robbery. Eighteen plus months is not “in the wake” of the robbery.
7. MCSHANE: “Brian Michael McDevitt. He was interviewed by the FBI and immediately afterwards he took off to California. This is a con man of a nature of Bernie Madoff.”
Media coverage would seem to contradict this claim that McDevitt was interviewed by the FBI before he took off for California in around June of 1990. Part of McDevitt’s attention-getting campaign for his status as a Gardner Heist suspect, was his talking about the extent to which he was being investigated by the FBI.
If the interview with the FBI in 1992 was the second interview and his second refusal to take a lie detector test, he would have said so. If they had met with him in 1990 to the extent that he refused to take a lie detector test, which McShane wrote in his book, then why did they wait until 1992 to fingerprint him?
Here is a report that suggests that a suspect fitting McDevitt’s description was being scrutinized, but not interviewed from page 1 of the May 14, 1990 Boston Globe: Suspects' movement are under close scrutiny by federal agents, including one suspect who was under surveillance during a recent arrival at Logan Airport. Investigators are looking at some suspects because methods they have employed by previous robberies closely resemble those used in the March 18 theft. This would certainly describe McDevitt who lived at
Two stories, one in the Boston Globe and one in the New York Times seemed to suggest that this interview of McDevit by the police was something new for him: “
“Speaking by telephone from Los Angeles, Mr. McDevitt said he had been questioned for an afternoon and had allowed himself to be photographed and palm-, hand- and fingerprinted,” in around Autumn of 1991.”
There was a day last autumn [1991] when Brian McDevitt siting in the office of his small loft house in Hollywood Hills, proposed writing a screenplay about a brazen art theft during which thieves hid the stolen treasures deep in a German cave. Just a few weeks later, McDevitt found himself at the center of an investigation into the largest art theft in history, when the FBI summoned him back to his lawyer's Salem office and asked him what he knew about $200 million in paintings missing from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Boston Globe 6/2/92
In his Sixty Minutes interview, McDevitt seemed intent on maximize the extent he was being watched and suspected by the FBI, so it would have been in his interest to mention he had been interviewed in 1990 if that were the case.
