On Saturday morning, February 12, Robert Wittman will appear in Hayes Hall at the Phil to regale area residents and guests with tales about art fraud, fakes and forgeries. It’s a sequel to his lecture last year on famous art thefts he worked during his 10-year tenure helping develop the FBI’s art theft program which today consists of a team of 13 special agents supported by three federal prosecutors. But one of the crimes he wasn’t able to solve was the Isabella Stewart Gardner heist, during which two thieves stole 13 artworks that have a combined value of half a billion dollars.
If you have 5½ minutes, there’s a compelling video that takes you through the thieves’ 81-minute rampage through the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum beginning at 1:24 a.m. on the morning of March 18, 1990. It tracks their steps from the basement, where they bound, gagged and cuffed two security guards to pipes in separate rooms, up the spiral stairs to the second floor and into the Dutch Room, where one stole Vermeer’s $100 million painting The Concert, three Rembrandts, a Flinck landscape and a 3,000-year-old-Chinese Ku.
The other thief bypassed the museum’s most valuable piece, Titian’s The Rape of Europa, in order to steal 5 Degas drawings and the top, or bronze finial, of a Napoleonic flag from the Short Gallery. He then went back downstairs to the Blue Room, where he cut Manet’s Chez Tortoni from its frame.
According to the internal alarms, the thieves left by separate doors, four minutes apart. But before leaving, one of the thieves warned the first security guard, a kid by the name of Richard A, that they knew who he was (since they’d taken his driver’s license and museum ID card) and that he’d be given a reward in a year if he kept his mouth shut. His last words were, “Tell them they’ll be hearing from us.”
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is still waiting to hear, and not even the offer of a $5 million reward, the offer of amnesty by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Boston, digital billboards along Interstate 93 in Stoneham and I-495 in Lawrence, or a 12-minute segment on Fox-TV’s “America’s Most Wanted” have flushed out either the thieves or any of the 13 missing artworks.
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