Video raises questions in 1990 art theft
$500M in stolen works never found
In the early hours of March 18, 1990, two men in police uniforms walked up to a side entrance to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, a small but swanky art collection in a historic neighbourhood of Boston.
“Police! Let us in,” they announced into the intercom, “We heard a disturbance in the courtyard.” They were buzzed in. The young security guard on duty was tricked into stepping out from behind his desk and promptly put in handcuffs. “Why are you arresting me?” he demanded. But it wasn’t an arrest. “This is a robbery,” he was told, according to an ArtNews account of that night. “Don’t give us any problems and you won’t get hurt.”
By the time the real police arrived hours later, the men were gone, along with 13 works worth an estimated $500 million US.
Both the thieves, and the art they stole, have been missing ever since; it’s one of the highest-profile heists in history.
Two and a half decades later, new clues in the case are slowly beginning to trickle out. In 2013, the FBI announced that it knew the identity of the thieves, members of some sort of criminal organization based in the mid-Atlantic and New England states (though they didn’t name names). The agency also said the works had been offered for sale in Philadelphia roughly 10 years earlier in 2003, but it didn’t know what’s happened to them since.
On Friday, the FBI told The Associated Press that the two suspects were dead, and that investigators were focused on one thing — finding the missing masterpieces.
That revelation came a day after authorities dropped another breadcrumb for art enthusiasts and amateur investigators, who they hope can help with the case: security footage from just after midnight on March 17, 1990 — almost exactly 24 hours before the theft.
The murky, black-andwhite video appears to show what could be a dry run for the next night’s robbery. First, a car matching the description of the automobile from the heist pulls up next to the museum. A man emerges. Then it switches to an indoor camera pointed at the security desk by the side door where the thieves would later enter.
The young security guard who would wind up in handcuffs the next night — not named in the FBI release but identifiable as 23-year-old Richard Abath — opens the door and admits a man wearing a coat with an upturned collar. They appear to talk and fumble through paperwork then disappear for several minutes.
Then the man walks out. The car drives away.
Speaking to the New York Times, FBI officials were tight-lipped about the tape’s origin and significance. They said that the footage was pulled immediately after the theft, but did not say whether it had been reviewed before 2013, when the FBI appeared to revisit the case with new vigour. Nor did they comment on questions about Abath, “for privacy reasons.”
But, the Times noted, “the release of the video seems to imply ... that his actions are again being scrutinized as part of the investigation into a case that has bewildered the authorities for a quarter-century.”
Abath has long denied any involvement in the theft, though he said he knew that admitting unauthorized visitors was against museum policy. According to the Boston Globe, he has previously admitted to bringing friends into the building after hours at least once before the robbery, but never said that he let anyone in the day before the half-billion-dollar heist.
“What you see in the video does not comport with what we have been told in the past,” Anthony Amore, the museum’s director of security, told the Globe.
United States Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz told the Times that FBI officials have been examining the footage for two years in an attempt to identify the strange man and his car.
The theft that was carried out that night in 1990 was both polished and perplexing.
Abath and a fellow security guard were handcuffed in the museum’s basement, their heads wrapped in duct tape. Then the thieves set about their work.
For the next 81 minutes, the men clumsily and seemingly arbitrarily smashed glass cases and cut paintings from their frames. They made off with a varied and unquestionably valuable haul — three Rembrandts, a Vermeer, a Manet, a Flinck, five drawings by Degas and more. But they inexplicably passed over several more precious works, including a sketch by Michelangelo and a painting by Titian.