On Saturday, February 12, local residents and visitors will be treated to lurid tales of art theft and pulse-pounding, death-defying undercover ops to recover irreplaceable cultural objects and artworks. The speaker? Robert K. Wittman, the agent who for a decade spearheaded the FBI’s fledgling art theft investigation program and author of Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World’s Stolen Treasures.
One of the thefts that’s likely to come up during Wittman’s talk still tops the FBI’s list of unsolved art crimes. It happened nearly 21 years ago at the four-story Italian-style mansion Isabella Stewart Gardner built in Boston 108 years ago. Today, it’s a museum. It and the Frick Collection in Manhattan are the only two house museums in the United States.
At 1:24 on the morning of March 18, 1990, two men wearing police uniforms arrived at the museum’s side door and told the night security guard they were investigating a disturbance. The guard, a student at Berklee College of Music, buzzed them in and then came out from behind the security desk when they told him they had a warrant for his arrest. When the second guard, another Berklee student, arrived, the thieves placed the kids up against the wall, handcuffed them, and then bound and gagged them with long strips of duct tape.
The thieves proceeded to the second floor Dutch Room, where they yanked Rembrandt’s The Storm on the Sea of Galilee from the wall and cut it from the frame “with a very sharp knife or box cutter,” Anthony Amore, the museum’s head of security since 2005 told CBS News Correspondent Jeff Glor in March of last year. Then they rolled up the only seascape Rembrandt ever painted and dropped the frame on floor.
The same fate awaited Vermeer’s The Concert, one of only 36 Vermeers in the world. By the time they left the Dutch Room, they’d also absconded with Rembrandt’s Portrait of a Lady and Gentleman in Black, a postage-sized self portrait etching, Landscape with Obelisk by Govaert Flinck (one of Rembrandt’s students) and a 3,000-year-old Chinese bronze beaker.
Down the hall in the Short Gallery, one of them lifted five Degas drawings and a finial that once sat atop a Napoleonic flag before returning to the first floor Blue Room, where they nabbed Manet’s Chez Tortoni.
It took just 81 minutes for the thieves to make off with $500 million worth of art.
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