You know, when we talk about a crime scene, we
usually picture something temporary. There's
yellow tape, chalk outlines, maybe some flashing
lights. Right. It's a moment in time. The chaos
happens. The investigation begins. Yeah. And
then pretty quickly, the physical space goes
back to normal. Exactly. The mess gets cleaned
up, bleached, paved over. The world just moves
on. Yeah. But there is one crime scene right
in Boston that has been. I mean, essentially
preserved in amber for more than 30 years now.
It's incredible. If you go to the Fenway area
today and you walk into the Isabella Stewart
Gardner Museum, you are literally walking into
a crime scene that hasn't been cleared since
1990. And it isn't subtle at all. It's not like
there's a little plaque on the wall. Yeah. You
walk into the Dutch room on the second floor,
which is this incredibly opulent, dimly lit gallery
just packed with masterpieces. And you see them.
Right away. Empty frames. Four massive gilded
frames. I mean, these are ornate, heavy, historic
objects in their own right. And they're just
empty. Yeah, just the blank kind of floral wallpaper
staring back at you. Precisely. That damask silk
wall covering is all you see. It gives you this
visceral reaction. You feel it in your gut. It
just feels wrong. It gives me chills every time
I even see a photo of it. It's like a gaping
wound right in the middle of all this incredible
beauty. That's a perfect way to put it. It's
a wound. It's a vigil. I think that's the only
way you can describe it. Those empty frames,
they are the defining image of the single largest
property theft in history. Right. And I think
that's really where we need to start, the sheer
scale of this thing. Yeah. Let's clarify what
largest means here, because I think a lot of
people hear art heist and they immediately think
of, you know, a movie villain stealing a diamond
in a briefcase. Right. Something small and contained.
Exactly. We're not talking about a few million
dollars. We are talking about conservatively
half a billion dollars. At least. The low end
estimate is 500 million. Some go as high as $600
million. Yeah. But honestly, it's theoretical
money at this point. How so? Well, how do you
put a price tag on a Vermeer? There are only,
what, 34, maybe 36 of them known to exist on
the entire planet. Wow. Losing one is like losing
a moon from our orbit. It is a cultural amputation.
It's gone forever. 13 pieces in total just vanished.
Into thin air. Here's our mission for this deep
dive. We have pulled every FBI file we could
get our hands on, every memoir from the original
investigators, all the deep cut reporting on
the Boston underworld, the security logs from
that night, everything. We're going deep. We
want to understand not just what was taken, but
how a heist, this messy and spoiler alert, it
was incredibly messy, has managed to completely
stump the FBI for over three decades. And maybe
the biggest question of all, why are those frames
still empty? Because usually, you know, if art
is stolen, a museum eventually moves on. They
rehang the gallery. They don't just leave a scar
on the wall for 30 years. Right. And to understand
the theft and the scar, we have to go back to
ground zero. We have to transport ourselves to
Boston, March 18th, 1990. That date is absolutely
crucial. The whole crime hinges on that specific
date. It really does. Because anyone who spent
any time in Boston. Or heck, anyone who's seen
a movie about Boston knows that March 18th isn't
just a Sunday. It is the morning after the night
before. The big one, St. Patrick's Day in Boston
is, well, it's a contact sport. That is a very
polite way to put it. The entire city is effectively
hungover. The police force has been dealing with
parades, bar fights, public intoxication, just
massive crowd control. for 24 hours straight.
They're exhausted. Completely spent. The streets
are littered with green plastic beads and confetti.
It's one in the morning. The city's finally quiet.
The adrenaline has crashed and everyone's guard
is down. And sitting right in the middle of this
exhausted city is the museum, the Fenway Court,
as it was first called. And we have to talk about
Isabella Stewart Gardner herself for a minute
because she is the reason this heist plays out
the way it does. And she's the reason those frames
are still empty. Oh, she's an incredible character.
Not your typical wealthy Victorian widow. Yeah.
Not even close. No, she was like the original
disruptor of Boston society. She was a New Yorker
who married into old Boston money, which right
away made her an outsider. And she leaned into
it. She drank beer in public. She was a huge
fan of boxing matches. She collected lions. I
mean, actual lion cubs. She had lion cubs. Yes.
And she built this museum to be her personal
palace. It wasn't designed by some committee
or a board of directors. It was her. and her
alone arranging every single object to fit her
personal vision. And that personal touch isn't
just a fun historical fact. It's actually legally
binding, isn't it? This is the part I found fascinating
in the museum's charter. It's the ultimate dead
hand control. Gardner died in 1924, but her will
was incredibly specific. It created what's known
as a strict deviation clause. Okay, what does
that mean? It basically said, my collection,
as it is arranged, is a single complete work
of art. The arrangement of the paintings is the
art itself. If you move a single painting, if
you sell a painting, or if you buy a new one
to fill a gap... Then the whole thing is forfeit.
Exactly. The entire collection goes to Harvard
University, and the museum is dissolved. Done.
So the directors are completely paralyzed. If
Rembrandt's storm on the Sea of Galilee gets
stolen, they can't just, you know, move a nice
Rubens over from the next room to fill the empty
space. They can't. If they move the Rubens, they
violate the will and they lose the whole museum.
So the empty frame stays. It preserves the arrangement
that Isabella left behind in 1924. It's a legal
obligation just as much as it's a memorial. Which
is... It's poetic, but it's also so tragic. It
just highlights the loss every single day. It
does. But OK, let's look at the museum itself
back in 1990, because I think we all have this
assumption that a place with Rembrandts and Vermeers
has to be a fortress. You know, we're picturing
Mission Impossible, lasers, pressure plates,
armed guards. And the reality was much more like
Paul Blart. Mall cop. It was that bad. It was
dire. You have to remember. In the late 80s,
the Gardner was really struggling financially.
They were asset rich, of course, owning these
priceless paintings, but they were incredibly
cash poor. The endowment wasn't doing well. And
the building itself was suffering. The building
didn't even have a proper climate control system.
I mean, can you imagine a Vermeer being subjected
to Boston's humidity and wild temperature swings?
That's just, it sounds like negligence. It was
a lack of resources. But the security. Yeah.
That was a real open secret. The sources we looked
at all say the security flaws were common knowledge
among the staff. I read that they didn't even
have an insurance policy on the art. How is that
even possible for a nonprofit that's holding
public trust assets? It's actually more common
than you'd think for major museums to self -insure.
The premiums to insure a collection worth half
a billion dollars, even in 1990 money, would
be astronomical. Millions a year. Money they
didn't have. Exactly. So they roll the dice.
The logic is we'll invest in top tier security
instead of insurance. But they didn't invest
in the security. That's the catch 22 here. They
did not. The board of trustees made a really
fateful decision a few years before the heist.
They installed CCTV cameras on the perimeter.
So watching the doors, the exterior walls. But
they decided it was too expensive to put cameras
inside the galleries. Wait, let's pause on that.
So once you're past the front door. You're invisible.
You're a ghost. Yeah. There is no video record
of what happens inside the Dutch room, the blue
room, anywhere. They had motion detectors, which
we'll get to, but absolutely no visual record.
That is just wild. And the human element, the
guards, they weren't much of a backup. No. On
the night of March 18th, the entire safety of
this cultural treasure chest rested on the shoulders
of two, well, two kids. Rick Abath, age 23, and
Randy Heston, 25. And for Hestand, this was literally
his first time ever working the night shift.
Talk about a bad first day at the office. Or
a bad first night. It's unbelievable. But Rick
Abath, he's the more central figure here. He
was a regular on the night watch. He was a musician
in a rock band, a Berklee College of Music dropout,
sort of a counterculture guy. And the whole vibe
among the guards at the Gardner was just... Loose
is being generous. The guards were young, they
were bored, and they were paid peanuts. There
was no rigorous military -style protocol. What
do you mean by that? Well, in most major museums,
especially overnight, you have what's called
a dead man switch protocol. You have to call
a local police station or a central security
hub every hour, on the hour, to say, code 4,
all is well. And if you miss a call? The cavalry
comes automatically. They assume something is
wrong. The Gardner had nothing like that. So
what did they have? The only link to the police
was a single panic button at the main security
desk. You controlled that desk, you controlled
the entire police response. There was no failsafe.
And this wasn't a secret vulnerability. I mean,
the sources talk about a plot from 1982. They
do. The FBI had actually uncovered a plot by
some Boston criminals to rob the museum eight
years prior. That scare did lead to some upgrades.
Specifically, the infrared motion detectors we
mentioned. But clearly, the funding and the urgency
just weren't there to make it truly secure. They
plugged one hole but left the window wide open.
That's a great way to put it. So we have this
vulnerable building in a hungover city. And now
we have to look at the behavior of Rick Abath
that night. Because even before the thieves showed
up, things were... Right. This is what fuels
all the inside job theories we're going to get
into. Absolutely. So earlier in the shift, the
fire alarm panel starts going haywire. It's signaling
smoke in different rooms. The bath goes and checks.
He sees nothing. And he just assumes the system
is on the fritz. So he shuts down parts of the
system. He silences the board. He does. But then,
and he does the thing with the door. The side
entrance, the staff door. Yes. The security logs
show that during his rounds, a bath opened the
side door to the street. just for a moment, and
then closed it again. And he didn't tell his
partner, Randy Heston, that he was doing this.
No. His explanation later was that he was just
checking to make sure it was locked. But you
don't check a lock by opening the door. You check
it by pulling on the handle. Right. Opening it
breaks the seal. It breaks the magnetic contact
on the alarm. And it looks an awful lot like
a signal. Like... The coast is clear. Or it was
just a bored 23 -year -old wanting to get some
fresh air, maybe smoke a cigarette. And that
is the maddening thing about this case. Every
single clue could be part of a massive conspiracy,
or it could just be total incompetence and boredom.
So the stage is set. It is 1 .20 a .m. The city's
asleep. The alarms are glitchy. The door has
been opened and closed. And then a hatchback
pulls up to that side entrance. Little Dodge
Daytona. Two men get out. And they're not wearing
ski masks. They're not in black turtlenecks carrying
grappling hooks. No, they're wearing uniforms.
Boston police uniforms. They walk up to the buzzer.
They press it. And Rick Abath at the security
desk picks up the intercom. Police investigating
a disturbance. Now, you have to put yourself
in a bath's shoes for a second. You're sitting
there, you look at this tiny, grainy CCTV monitor,
the one monitor they actually had watching the
door. You see two caps, two badges. And you know
it's St. Patrick's Day. You know people get drunk,
they jump fences, they cause trouble. It's the
most plausible story in the world. He thinks
a neighbor saw a prowler and called the cops.
Exactly. He respects the uniform. There's the
psychological principle called command presence.
We are conditioned from birth. to obey authority
figures. If a police officer tells you to open
the door, your instinct is to open the door.
Even though the museum's own policy was explicit,
never open the door for anyone at night. No exceptions.
Not for the fire department, not for the police,
not for the pope. He broke the cardinal rule.
He hit the buzzer. And that was it. The click
of that lock opening, that was the sound of history
changing right there. The two men walk into the
airlock. Now, the layout here is important. The
museum had the vestibule. You buzz them through
the outer door. They enter a small room. And
then you have to buzz them through a second door
to get into the museum proper. So Abath still
had another chance. He could have kept them in
that airlock, talked to them through the glass.
He could have. But he's already committed. He
buzzes the second door. They walk right up to
his desk. And this is where the dynamic shifts
from, you know, a routine check to an absolute
nightmare. Because Abath notices something. The
taller cop. His mustache looks weird. It looks
fake. It's like a wax mustache, a prop from a
high school play. And Abath is just staring at
it. But before he can even process it, the shorter
cop goes on the offensive. Brilliant move. He
looks right at Abath and says, you look familiar.
I think we have a warrant out for you. Which
is just... It's genius. It's evil genius. Because
it puts a bath on the defensive immediately.
He's not thinking about the mustache anymore.
He's thinking, oh my God, did I not pay a parking
ticket? Is this about the fire alarm from earlier?
It completely freezes him. The cop tells him
to step out from behind the desk. Show me some
ID. And the moment a bath steps out from behind
that desk, he is stepping away from the only
panic button in the entire building. He walked
right into the trap. They spit him around, hands
against the wall. They cuff him. And just then,
Randy Hestand, the new guy, walks into the room
totally confused about what's happening. They
cuff him, too. And then comes the line. The shorter
man looks at them. He drops the cop voice. And
he says, gentlemen, this is a robbery. Ugh. I
get a pit in my stomach just thinking about that.
It's so cold. But they didn't, like, physically
hurt them, right? They didn't beat them up. No,
they were very efficient. They wrapped duct tape
around the guards' heads, covering their eyes.
They marched them down to the basement. The grace,
man. Handcuffed one to a steam pipe and the other
to a workbench. And they left them with this
really chilling instruction. They said, tell
us nothing and you'll get a reward in a year.
A reward in a year? What does that even mean?
It implies a long -term plan. It implies they
expected to monetize this, get paid, and then
pay off the loose ends. It's so transactional.
It feels like organized crime. It's not personal.
It's business. So by 1 .35 a .m., the guards
are neutralized. The thieves have the run at
the place. And this is where the slick Ocean's
Eleven image completely falls apart. Oh, completely.
Because they spent 81 minutes in there. 81 minutes.
Which is an eternity for a heist. Most bank robberies
are under three minutes. You get in, you get
the cash, you get out before the police response
time kicks in. These guys treated the museum
like a late night shopping spree. But they were
not careful shoppers. They were brutes. That's
the word for it. The looting itself was brutal.
They didn't gently lift these paintings off the
walls. No. It's horrifying for anyone who cares
about art. They go up to the Dutch room on the
second floor. When they get close to the paintings
the proximity sensors, which ironically were
working perfectly, start beeping. So what do
they do? They just smash the censors off the
wall. Then they take these huge, heavy framed
masterpieces off the wall and just throw them
onto the marble floor. The glass shatters everywhere.
And then they took out knives. Yeah. They use
box cutters or some kind of blade to literally
slice the canvases right out of their stretchers.
We are talking about Rembrandts from the 1630s.
The violence of that act is... It's visceral.
And the damage that does. It's irreversible.
You have to understand, old oil paintings, they
get brittle. The layers of varnish harden over
centuries. So when you cut them out and roll
them up, the paint just cracks and flakes off.
It's immediate catastrophic damage. It's not
just theft. It's mutilation of the art. It is.
The sound of a knife cutting through a 300 -year
-old canvas. Yeah. It's enough to make an art
historian weep. They cut Rembrandt's The Storm
on the Sea of Galilee out. They cut his A Lady
and Gentleman in blackout. And then they went
for the Vermeer. The concert. Okay, let's pause
on this one. Why is this particular painting
considered the holy grail of stolen art? Well,
Johannes Vermeer is the absolute master of light.
He was a perfectionist who produced very, very
few works in his lifetime. We only know of about
34 that are definitively attributed to him. So
they're incredibly rare. Incredibly. And the
concert depicts... Three figures making music
in this beautifully lit room. It's intimate.
It's luminous. It is, without a doubt, the most
valuable single stolen object in the world. That
one painting accounts for probably half the heist's
total value. We're talking $250 million for one
piece. And they just took it. But then... Then
their decisions get really baffling. They have
these world -class masterpieces, but then they
start grabbing, for lack of a better word, junk.
This is where we can really start to profile
the thieves. They try to steal a Napoleonic flag
from its display case, but they can't get the
screws loose on the frame. So what do they do?
They just unscrew the little brass eagle finial
from the top of the flagpole. The eagle finial.
That one decision just screams amateur. That
finial is worth maybe a few thousand dollars
as an antique. The thieves almost certainly thought
it was solid gold. So they weren't art historians.
They were just looking for shiny things. Exactly.
They also took a Chinese beaker, an ancient bronze.
Yeah, from the Qing Dynasty. It's incredibly
old, from the 12th century BC. But in terms of
black market value, it's worth thousands, not
millions. And they grabbed that while walking
right past drawings by Raphael, Botticelli, and
Michelangelo. That's the part that gets me every
time. They left the Titian. The Rape of Europa.
It was on the third floor. Experts agree it was
the single most valuable painting in the entire
city of Boston, maybe on the East Coast. And
they didn't even go look for it. So that tells
you they didn't have a specific shopping list
from a collector. It strongly suggests they didn't.
A sophisticated collector, a Dr. No type, would
have ordered the Titian first. These guys were
grabbing what they could reach, what looked fancy,
and what they could carry. It was opportunistic,
even with all the planning that went into the
entry. There's also that weird detail about the
blue room. The Manet painting, Ces Tortoni, was
taken from the first floor. But the motion detectors
didn't pick up the thieves in that room. That
is one of the biggest anomalies of the case.
The detectors track their movements everywhere
else in the museum. We have the printouts. We
know exactly where they walked in the Dutch room,
how long they stood in front of each painting.
But the blue room? Nothing. So what does that
mean? It means either the thieves somehow floated,
or the equipment just happened to fail in that
one room, or... Or someone moved the painting
before the thieves even arrived. Which loops
us right back to the inside job theory. Did a
bath take it down earlier and hand it out a window?
Or did the thieves just manage to stay out of
the sensor's range? We just don't know. So 2
.45 a .m. rolls around. They load everything
into their hatchback. They steal the surveillance
tapes from the VCR. But in a move that proves
they were not tech geniuses, they leave behind
the hard drive that recorded all the motion sensor
data. A huge mistake. They took the visuals but
left the digital footprints. They got in their
car and just drove off into the night. The whole
robbery lasted 81 minutes. And the next morning,
the day shift arrives, they can't get in, the
police are called, and they find Abath and Heston
still tied up in the basement. And the walls
were bare. So the investigation begins. I mean,
a heist this big, the heat is instantaneous,
the FBI takes over immediately, and obviously
the very first person they look at is the guy
who buzzed them in. Rick Abath. It's standard
procedure. You always, always look at the person
who opened the door. And his story had holes.
The weird thing with the side door, the motion
detector mystery in the blue room, it all looked
bad for him. And then, years later, in 2015,
the FBI released this video from the night before
the robbery. And it showed a bath letting an
unidentified man into the museum. at night after
hours. Another major breach of protocol. A huge
one. Abath claimed he didn't remember it. Some
other guards later said the stranger was actually
the museum's deputy security chief, but the damage
was done. It just cast this huge shadow over
Abath. Was it a dry run? Was he showing the thieves
the layout? But what did the FBI ultimately conclude
about him? Well, Abath maintained his innocence
until the day he died, which was just in 2024.
And the lead FBI agent on the case eventually
concluded that the guards were, and I'm quoting
the source here, too incompetent and foolish
to be criminal masterminds. Ouch. Cleared by
reason of incompetence? That's a rough epitaph.
It is, but it meant the investigation had to
shift gears pretty quickly toward the Boston
underworld. You just can't talk about a major
crime in 1990 Boston without talking about the
Irish mob and the Italian mafia. And the biggest,
baddest name on the block, Whitey Bulger. James
Whitey Bulger. the head of the Winter Hill Gang.
Of course, he was a suspect. He basically ran
the city. But the consensus among the FBI and
investigative reporters is that Whitey didn't
do it. Why not? Wouldn't he want that kind of
payday? You'd think so. But the sources we found
suggest he was actually furious about it. He
was reportedly angry that someone committed a
robbery of this magnitude on his turf without
getting his permission or paying him a tribute.
He wanted a cut. He wanted his cut. He actually
had his own people looking for the real thieves
because he wanted to tax them. He saw it as a
sign of disrespect. What about the IRA theory?
I read that one agent thought the fire alarm
glitch was a calling card. Yeah, that was Agent
McShane. He thought the tripping of the fire
alarms might have been a tactic the IRA used
in Northern Ireland to test police response times.
And the IRA had used art theft for funding before.
But ultimately, no solid evidence ever linked
the paintings to Ireland. So the trail led away
from the Irish mob. And... Right toward the Italian
mafia. Yeah. Specifically a crew based in Dorchester.
The Merlino gang. This is the theory the FBI
said they have high confidence in. That's right.
And to understand why this specific gang would
do it, we have to understand the idea of art
as leverage. This is such a key insight because
the biggest question is. Why steal art you can't
possibly sell? You can't put a Vermeer on eBay.
You can't sell it to a legitimate collector without
getting caught. Exactly. It's what's known as
the hot potato. It's too famous. It's radioactive.
But in the underworld, a masterpiece like this
isn't for selling. It's a get -out -of -jail
-free card. Explain how that works, practically.
It's actually pretty simple. Let's say your boss
gets arrested for racketeering or you're facing
20 years for armed robbery. You have your lawyer
make a quiet phone call to the district attorney.
And say what? My client. He might know where
the Gardner art is. If you were to, say, reduce
his sentence, maybe the art finds its way home.
So the painting becomes a hostage. It is the
ultimate hostage. It's a bargaining chip. And
at that time, the Merlino gang was in a lot of
trouble. Their boss, Frank Salome, was under
indictment. They needed chips. So who were the
key players in this crew? Well, you have Carmelo
Merlino, who ran an auto repair shop in Dorchester,
a classic mob front. And then you have his associates,
David Turner and George Reisfelder. These are
rough guys, career criminals. And Reisfelder's
particularly interesting, right? Very. He closely
matched the police sketch of one of the thieves,
the one with the fake mustache, potentially.
And he died of a drug overdose just a year after
the robbery in 1991. And there's that detail
about a painting in his bedroom that just gives
me goosebumps every time. It's incredible. Associates
told the FBI that after the heist. Ricefelder
had a painting hanging in his bedroom that looked
an awful lot like the stolen Manet, Chez Tortoni.
Just hanging on his wall. That is unbelievably
bold. Incredibly reckless. Yeah. But it kind
of fits the profile of these guys. They weren't
art appreciators. They were trophy hunters. But
Ricefelder died. Merlino died in prison, so the
trail goes cold with them. It does. But the FBI
believes they traced the movement of the art
from Boston to Connecticut to a man named Robert
Gentile. Robert Gentile. This guy is a character
straight out of a Scorsese movie. A used car
salesman and mobster from Manchester, Connecticut.
Gentile, who passed away in 2021, was a longtime
associate of the Merlino crew. The FBI's leading
theory is that as the heat got too intense in
Boston, the paintings were handed off to Gentile
for safekeeping. He was the fence or the vault.
And this leads to the famous backyard dig. This
was huge news just a few years ago. It was. The
FBI got a warrant. They stormed Gentile's house.
They brought in ground -penetrating radar. They
were absolutely convinced the art was buried
on his property. He found something. They did.
They found a false floor in his backyard shed.
And beneath it was a ditch, a concrete -lined
pit. But the ditch was empty. It was empty. Gentile's
son later claimed it had flooded years before
and probably ruined whatever had been in there.
Oh, no. Inside Gentile's basement, the feds found
something that convinced them they were on the
right track. They found a handwritten list of
all the stolen paintings with their estimated
black market prices next to each one. That's
just like a smoking gun. Why would a used car
salesman in Connecticut have a price list for
the Gardner art unless he was trying to sell
it? Exactly. But Gentile was as old school as
they come. He went to prison on unrelated charges.
He was old. He was sick. He could have traded
the art for his freedom, for better health care,
for a comfortable end to his life. But he never
talked. He stayed silent. He denied it until
the very end. He always claimed he was being
framed. So the art might have been in a shed
in Connecticut and just rotted away. That is
the absolute nightmare scenario. It is one of
the leading theories, the damage theory. But
there is another story, one that gives a little
glimmer of hope. The story of the sighting. Right.
The reporter Tom Mashberg. This whole episode
feels like something out of a noir film. It really
does. So in 1997, Mashberg, who was a reporter
for the Boston Herald, was in contact with a
criminal named William Youngworth. Youngworth
was an antiques dealer with ties to the Myrtle
Eno crew, and he claimed he could deliver the
art. Or at least prove it still existed. So he
takes the reporter for a ride. A classic late
night ride. They drive to a warehouse in Red
Hook, Brooklyn. It's dark. It smells like gasoline
and damp cardboard. Just flashlights and a storage
unit. That's the scene. Young Roof leads into
a storage unit, pulls out this long cardboard
tube, and he unrolls a canvas. Under the beam
of a flashlight, Mashberg sees a seascape. He
sees the storm, the boat, the waves. He sees
the signature on the rudder of the ship, Rembrandt.
And Mashberg was convinced. He wrote about it.
He said he felt the soul of the painting. He
was absolutely convinced. He noted the cracking
on the canvas, which was consistent with the
kind of damage we talked about. He saw the jagged
edges where it had been cut from the frame. But
experts are skeptical. Why? If he saw it, he
saw it. Well, first there's the unfurling issue.
As we discussed, the storm on the Sea of Galilee
was covered in this. thick, heavy varnish. If
you tried to roll it up tightly enough to fit
in a tube, the paint would likely shatter into
a million pieces. It shouldn't unfurl easily
like a poster. It should be stiff as a board.
So it might have been a good forgery. It's possible.
Or maybe it was done from stolen painting. But
Youngworth also provided paint chips to the reporter
as proof. Scrape them right off the canvas. And
what did the lab results say? This is where it
gets really murky. The chips were from the right
time period. 17th century. They contained the
right pigments, but the chemical analysis couldn't
definitively match them to the specific oils
used in that Rembrandt. However, some of the
tests suggested the chips could be a match for
the Vermeer. For the concert. Yes. But the whole
thing fell apart. Youngworth wasn't doing this
for his health. He wanted full immunity, all
$10 million of the reward, and the release of
his friend, a legendary art thief named Miles
Connor from jail. And the Fed said no. The Feds
don't negotiate with criminals like that. They
said no and the lead went cold, just vanished.
Which brings us to where we are today. It's been
over 30 years. The case is still open. And the
legal landscape has changed in a really important
way. The statute of limitations for the theft
itself. It expired back in 1995. Okay, explain
what that means for our listeners. If I'm the
guy who stole it, I can't be arrested for stealing
it anymore. Correct. You cannot be prosecuted
for the specific crime of robbery that happened
on March 18, 1990. That ship has sailed. However.
There's always a however. You can still be prosecuted
for possession of stolen property, which is a
continuing crime. As long as you have the art,
you are actively committing a felony. So whoever
has it is still trapped. They are. But the U
.S. Attorney's Office has offered this incredible
deal. They have stated very clearly and publicly,
if the art is returned, there will be no prosecution,
total immunity. They just want the culture back.
And there's the money. The reward is now at $10
million. It is the largest private bounty ever
offered for stolen property. $10 million. You
could buy an island with that. You could disappear
forever. And yet. Still silence. Why? There are
really three main theories on why they haven't
been recovered. The first is the hot potato theory
we talk about. The art is just too radioactive.
Everyone in the world knows what it looks like.
To show it is to get caught. So it just stays
hidden in a basement, terrified of the light.
Okay, what's theory two? The code of silence,
or omerta. The people who know where it is are
gangsters who would rather die in prison than
be labeled a rat. We saw that with Robert Gentile.
And the third theory. The one I really hate to
think about. The tragedy theory. That the art
is just destroyed. That these amateur thieves
stored these delicate centuries -old masterpieces
in a damp basement or a sweltering attic. That
the temperature fluctuations caused the paint
to flake off and separate from the canvas. That
they've basically turned to dust and mold. That
the empty ditch in Gentile's shed really was
the final resting place. It's a possibility we
have to consider. I just refuse to accept that.
Most people in the art world do too. Art is surprisingly
resilient. And leverage is only useful if the
asset still exists. If it's a pile of dust, it's
worth nothing. If it's a painting, it's worth
your freedom. So as we wrap up this deep dive,
it all comes back to those empty frames on the
wall. They're such a powerful symbol. They really
represent hope. The museum hasn't filled them
because they truly expect the art to return someday.
They are in a way keeping the lights on for the
concert in the storm. They're waiting. It's just
a perfect storm of lax security, opportunistic
gangsters, and this tragic, tragic loss of our
shared cultural heritage. But the story isn't
over. No, it's not. And here's a provocative
thought to leave you with. We often imagine these
paintings are in the castle of some drug lord
in Colombia. or in a secret vault in Switzerland.
We think of a Bond villain. Right. But given
the intensely localized nature of all the main
suspects, Dorchester, Revere, Connecticut, it
is highly probable that these masterpieces are
still within a short drive of where we're sitting
right now. They're not in Saudi Arabia. They're
still somewhere in New England. Very likely.
They could be in someone's attic. They could
be behind a false wall in a suburban home. It's
even possible the person who has them now doesn't
even know what they are. You mean like granddad
passed away, he left this weird dusty roll of
canvas in the garage, and nobody's thought to
look at it for 20 years? It's entirely possible.
Or maybe someone is sitting on them right now,
just terrified, not realizing that the $10 million
is real and the promise of amnesty is real. They're
just paralyzed by the weight of the secret. So
if you're out there listening and you're cleaning
out your attic this weekend, maybe take a second
look at that old painting. And remember the reward.
$10 million. No questions asked. The empty frames
are waiting. Thanks for diving deep with us.
Until next time.