The Sword AND The Stone (Part One) Was there a credible attempt to negotiate a deal for a return of the paintings in the days following the Gardner Heist? “It remains the most tantalizing art heist mystery in the world , the Associated Press reported on the Gardner Robbery’s twentieth anniversary The leads also “have been tantalizing and plentiful , but have unswervingly led to a dead end,” according to The Boston Globe. Ulrich Boser authored a “ tantalizing whodunit: about the crime and if all that was not tantalizing enough, in 2013, the FBI’s Geoff Kelly acknowledged that it is  “kind of a little tantalizing” for the FBI to say they know who did it without sharing that information with the public.   The dictionary defines “tantalizing” as having or exhibiting something that provokes or arouses expectation, interest, or desire, especially that which remains unobtainable or beyond one's reach.  What makes the Gardner Heist mystery “tantalizing” is not j...

Time is on side of Gardner art thieves Some statutes of limitations running out as investigators check all leads By Daniel Golden  BOSTON GLOBE December 16, 1994 Less than a year before some statutes of limitations could run out on the most valuable art theft in American history, Daniel Falzon thought that the "Dr. No" long imagined to have engineered the crime had finally surfaced. Two transplanted Bostonians had been invited last April to tour a private art gallery in Japan owned by a wealthy artist with organized crime ties. As the collector showed them around, the visitors were shocked to see mounted on the ceiling what appeared to be "The Storm on the Sea of Galilee" by Rembrandt -- one of the masterpieces stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum the morning after St. Patrick's Day, 1990. Falzon, the FBI agent assigned to the case, believed there was no existing copy of the Rembrandt seascape. After months of negotiating with Japanese of...

Link to Part 1  When  the Visitor first appears  inside we have the best view of him that appears on the entire tape.  His dramatic, first appearance is a challenge.  He seems to have come out of nowhere and looks as if he has been standing for there a while. There is no greeting or formalities shown. He has his notebook out of his pocket. It  already open and he looks to be thumbing through the pages.   This is hardly a magician's trick, but to accomplish this in three seconds or even four seconds as some might conclude from look solely at the time-stamp,  would take effort.      For comparison, at the  nine second mark  of the video we can see the older guard takes about three seconds to go from the entrance to situate himself at the counter nearest the entrance. The video switches from outdoors to indoors in three second intervals. And how is it that the guard's trip from the door to the counter is c...

One of the least mysterious things about the “ Gardner Museum Surveillance Excerpt ,” as the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office dubbed it, is the individual who stars in it. Why did the head of the FBI’s Boston office Vincent Lisi , announce his retirement one week before its release in 2013?   It was j ust two years after the then head of the FBI Boston office Richard DesLauriers  retired.  In 2013 DeLauriers also announced his retirement   only two months after the last attempt to   engage the public on the Gardner Heist.  And that attempt was also   initiated by the Massachusetts U. S. Attorney’s Office , and not the FBI. Perhaps the Massachusetts U. S. Attorney's office hoped to duplicate the success from finding Whitey Bulger through crowdsourcing in 2011.  Crowdsourcing may work for finding people, but not inanimate objects like paintings and the FBI was only interested in finding paintings, not people.  The video seems mor...

The release of the Gardner Museum surveillance video from the night before the robbery, on August 6, 2015, should go down in history as the worst crowd sourcing campaigns ever. Locals pronounce it crowd saucing.  Perhaps it should be spelled  "saucing," too, since that term more accurately reflects this peculiarly half-hearted effort at community engagement.  The silent surveillance video itself is so dense in clues and information that, set to music, in the right hands, it could practically qualify as an interpretive dance.  The video itself has become part of the culture, the world of art in its own right,  as part of a series of works by Kota Ezawa called “Gardner Museum Revisited” It all begins mundanely enough.  At the very start, the video shows a very tall, older guard staring blankly ahead, like a million other souls working overnight on a weekend, safeguarding the belonging of others...