Still missing after all these years
Art enthusiasts and police officers are still on the lookout for pieces from the largest art heist in US history
The hallway in the Brooklyn, New York, warehouse was dark and the space cramped. But soon there was a flash light beam, and I was staring at one of the most sought-after stolen masterpieces in the world: Rembrandt’s Christ In The Storm On The Sea Of Galilee. Or was I?
My tour guide that night in August 1997 was a rogue antiques dealer who had been under surveillance by the FBI for asserting he could secure the return of the painting — for a $5 million reward. I was a reporter at The Boston Herald, consumed like many people before me and since with finding the Storm, a seascape with Jesus and the Apostles, and 12 other works, including a Vermeer and a Manet, stolen before dawn in March 1990 from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, a cherished institution in Boston.
The theft was big news then and remains so today as it nears its 25th anniversary. The stolen works are valued at $500 million, making the robbery the largest art theft in US history.
Which explains why I found myself in Brooklyn, 300km from the scene of the crime, tracking yet another lead. My guide had phoned me suggesting he knew something of the robbery, and he had some street credibility because he was allied with a known two-time Rembrandt thief. He took me into a storage locker and flashed his light on the painting, specifically at the master’s signature, on the bottom right of the work, where it should have been, and abruptly ushered me out.
The entire visit had taken all of two minutes.
Call me Inspector Clouseau — I’ve been called worse in this matter, including a “criminal accomplice” by a noted Harvard law professor — but I felt certain I was feet from the real thing, that the Rembrandt, and perhaps all the stolen art, would soon be home. I wrote a front-page article about the furtive unveiling for The Herald — with a headline that bellowed “We’ve Seen It!” — and stood by for the happy ending.
It never came. Negotiations between investigators and the supposed art-nappers crumbled amid dislike and suspicion. Gardner officials did not dismiss my “viewing” out of hand, but the federal agents in charge back then portrayed me as a dupe. Eighteen years later, I still wonder whether what I saw that night was a masterpiece or a masterly effort to con an eager reporter.
Federal agents today continue to discount my warehouse viewing. (They say they have figured out the identity of my guide, but I promised him anonymity.) Still, the authorities are intrigued by some paint chips I also received in 1997 from people claiming to control the art. I wrote at the time that they were possibly from the Rembrandt, but the FBI quickly announced that tests showed that they bore no relationship to the Storm.
In a recent interview, though, FBI officials told me that the chips had been re-examined in 2003 by Hubert von Sonnenburg, a Vermeer expert who was chairman of painting conservation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Von Sonnenburg died the next year.)
His tests determined the chips were an exact match for a pigment known as “red lake” that was commonly used by the 17th-century Dutch master and had been used in the stolen Vermeer ( The Concert). The crackling pattern on the chips was similar to that found on other Vermeers, von Sonnenburg concluded, according to the authorities. Perplexed? Me, too.
Such have been the vicissitudes in my coverage of the case for nearly two decades, during which I have gathered hundreds of investigative documents and photos, interviewed scores of criminals and crackpots, and met with dozens of federal and municipal law enforcement officials and museum executives.
In 2011, I wrote a book about art theft with The Gardner’s chief of security, Anthony Amore. We omitted the Gardner case because Amore said the hunt had reached a delicate phase.
Four years later, his quarry remains elusive. But it turns out that the assumptions that he and the FBI special agent now overseeing the case, Geoff Kelly, were forming then became their active theory of the heist. The short version? It was the handiwork of a bumbling confederation of Boston gangsters and out-of-state Mafia middlemen, many now long dead.
Admittedly, that is far less startling than other theories floated over the years, which attributed the theft to Vatican operatives, Irish Republican Army militants, Middle Eastern emirs and greedy billionaires. And new deductions pop up all the time, like those in a book due out this month that combines elements of the FBI theory with a few twists.
Before I get into the theories, though, some background. The Gardner museum was created by Isabella Stewart Gardner, a wealthy Boston arts patron who amassed a world-class collection of paintings, sculptures, Asian and European antiquities, and curiosities like letters from Napoleon and Beethoven’s death mask. In 1903, she arranged her 2,500 or so treasures inside a just-finished Venetian-style palazzo that became her home as well as a museum open to the public. Upon her death (in 1924), not one item could be moved from the spot she had chosen to display it.
But after midnight on March 18, 1990, as St. Patrick’s Day festivities from the day before were winding down, her edict was broken. Two thieves dressed as Boston police officers persuaded a guard to let them in to investigate a “disturbance”. They handcuffed him and another watchman in the basement, duct-taped their wrists and faces and, for 81 minutes, brazenly and clumsily cut two Rembrandts from their frames, smashed glass cases holding other works, and made off with a valuable yet oddball haul.
It included the Rembrandts, Vermeer’s Concert, Manet’s Chez Tortoni, Degas sketches, a bronze-plated eagle, and a Shang dynasty vase secured to a table by a bulky metal device that by itself probably took 10 minutes to pull apart. Left behind were prizes like a Titian, some Sargents, Raphaels and Whistlers, and, centimetres from the Degas works, a Pietà sketch by Michelangelo.
Anyone who expected the art to appear rapidly on the black market or to be used for some kind of ransom was disappointed. Instead, there was dead silence. Seven years later, the museum raised its reward to $5 million from $1 million. After a quarter-century, empty frames still mark where the missing Storm and other works once were on display.
Anticipating a wave of interest, and possible criticism, on the eve of the robbery’s 25th anniversary, the investigators, Amore and Kelly, recently showed me a PowerPoint presentation that detailed their best sense of what happened.
Though the efficacy of their efforts remains unclear, Amore, who was hired by The Gardner in 2005, and Kelly, who has his own museum identification badge, have spent a decade sharing tips and chasing leads.
In one peculiar instance, they said, they approached the producers of the television show Monk in the mid-2000s because a tipster spotted a painting that looked like The Concert in the background of a scene. The painting turned out to be only a copy used as a prop.
Amore and Kelly’s current theory dates to 1997, when informants told the FBI that they had heard a mid-level mob associate and garage supervisor from Quincy, Massachusetts, Carmello Merlino, talk about trading the stolen art for the $5 million reward.
In 1998, the FBI, as part of a sting, arrested Merlino and some associates on their way to an armoured car depot and carrying heavy weapons, including grenades. Investigators said that they promised him leniency if he helped them find the art but that he denied knowing of its whereabouts.
Several years later, Kelly and Amore said, informants drew their attention to two associates of Merlino, George Reissfelder and Leonard DiMuzio.
DiMuzio, who was shot to death in 1991, was a skilful burglar who had long been involved with the Merlino gang. The investigators say that Reissfelder, who died of an apparent drug overdose the same year, owned a 1986 red Dodge Daytona, the same model of car that several witnesses have said they spotted idling outside The Gardner on the night of the break-in.
The two passengers in the Daytona, the witnesses said, were dressed as Boston police officers.
In addition, the investigators said, two members of Reissfelder’s family have said they saw The Gardner’s stolen Manet on Reissfelder’s apartment wall three months after the robbery — a brazen act, to be sure. The investigators called it a “confirmed sighting”.
The investigators said they believed there had been a second sighting of one of the stolen items, though I’m sad to say it was not my encounter in the warehouse. A tipster, they said, told them in 2009 that he had seen a work resembling Storm in Philadelphia. Two years ago, at a news conference in Boston aimed a drumming up leads in the case, Kelly and Amore outlined this theory but did not identify Reissfelder or DiMuzio as suspects. But on his PowerPoint, Kelly showed me that Reissfelder and DiMuzio closely resembled police sketches of the two men who had entered the museum.
Still, those men are now dead. So is Merlino, who died in prison in 2005, as is Robert Guarente, a reputed Maine mobster suspected of having once harboured some of the art.
Investigators say they are hopeful of locating the trove, even if many of their suspects are now in their graves. They were buoyed, for example, in 2009, when Guarente’s widow, Elene, told them her husband had turned over some of the stolen art to a reputed Mafia associate, Robert Gentile of Connecticut, in a parking lot in Portland, Maine, in 2002.
Investigators searched Gentile’s home in 2012 and found pistols, ammunition and silencers — but no paintings. Gentile, who officials say had ties to organised crime figures in Philadelphia, has said he knows nothing about the art.
Kelly and Amore say they are convinced that, based on the 2009 sighting and other information, some of the art made its way from Maine to Philadelphia, where it was shopped around.
“The art was seen as too hot, and there were no takers,” Kelly said.
What happens now? The investigators keep looking.
“Mrs Gardner would have expected us to battle every day to get back her art,” Amore said.
Kelly said he rejected the notion that the art was destroyed by the thieves as soon as they realised they had “unwittingly committed the crime of the century”.
“That rarely happens in art thefts,” Kelly continued. “Most criminals are savvy enough to know such valuable paintings are their ace in the hole.”