Most museums and art galleries are well-known for the artwork they showcase. However, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston has been the talk of the town for its missing pieces.
Gardner Museum's largest art heist happened on Mar. 18, 1990, when 13 paintings, including a Vermeer and 3 Rembrandts, were taken in the middle of the night.
A new episode of CNN's 'How It Really Happened' on Sunday, May 19, will feature an interview with one of those guards, Rick Abath. He gave CNN his final TV interview in 2013 before he died in February 2024.
History of Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
The museum was named after its founder, Isabella Stewart Gardner. Stephan Kurkjian, author of 'Master Thieves: The Boston Gangsters Who Pulled Off the World's Greatest Art Heist,' told CNN that Gardner opened her museum in 1903. He said she mandated it would be free of charge to gain the appreciation and attendance of all people in Boston. He claimed that her museum at the time was the largest art collection by a private individual in America.
Heist Aftermath
The estimated value of the thieves' loot exceeds half a billion dollars. However, the most expensive item in the building, 'The Rape of Europa' by Titian, was left behind.
In 2005, the investigation into the stolen artworks took a detour to the French island of Corsica in the Meditteranean Sea.
Two Frenchmen were trying to sell two paintings, including a Vermeer and a Rembrandt. They claimed to be related to the Corsican mafia.
Former FBI Special Agent Bob Wittman conducted a sting to try and buy them. However, the plan failed when the men were jailed for selling stolen artwork from the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nice instead.
In 1975, art thief Myles Connor entered Boston's Museum of Fine Arts and left a Rembrandt inside his coat pocket. He was the first person the FBI has suspected in Gardner's case.
Édouard Manet's 'Chez Tortoni' was stolen from the museum's first-floor Blue Room. The robbers chopped off a part of the front but left nearly all the frames behind.
"To even leave remnants of the painting(s) behind was savage," Kelly Horan, Deputy Editor of the Boston Globe, told CNN. "In my mind, it's sort of like slashing someone's throat."
Furthermore, Wittman said that at the FBI, they found that about 89% of museum institutional heists have inside jobs, which is how these things get stolen.
