Pod Insights Infamous America BOSTON HEISTS Ep. 3 | Gardner Museum: “You Can’t Sell A Rembrandt” About this episode In the 1970s and 1980s, Boston and the greater New England region seem plagued by art thieves. Myles Connor becomes the most notorious thief of the era, and he and others notice that the eclectic Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is a vulnerable target. The FBI likely thwarts an attempted robbery, and, as the 1980s progress, events start to align for the biggest art heist in history.
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1:05 Speaker 01 Two days before Thanksgiving 1970, there was only one person in a popular gallery of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts. The gallery, called the Dutch Room, was on the second floor of the art museum, and its name reflected its primary theme. The Dutch Room was the home of paintings by famous Dutch masters like Jan Vermeer, Rembrandt van Rijn, and Anthony van Dyck. But the Gardner Museum was an eclectic space. Every inch of the gallery was packed with a dizzying array of objects. So even though the Dutch Room was primarily for artwork by Dutch painters, there were lots of other things in the gallery.
1:46 Speaker 01 There were German and Italian paintings. There were antique cabinets, tables, and chairs from Germany, France, Italy, and England. There was an ancient Chinese drinking vessel called a cu, which was made sometime between 2000 and 1000 B.C. At 3,000 years old, the cu was one of the oldest objects in the museum. Lastly, there were a couple etchings, which looked like penciled drawings. One of the etchings was a self-portrait of Rembrandt, which he created around the year 1633. The Rembrandt etching was tiny, about half the size of a classic square Post-it note. It was in a small gold frame, and it hung on the side of a cabinet near the entrance to the gallery.
2:32 Speaker 01 And on Tuesday, November 24th, 1970, two days before Thanksgiving, it was stolen from the Dutch Room.
2:43 Speaker 01 The only visitor in the gallery that morning was a college student named John Calderwood. Calderwood stood in a corner of the room, probably appearing as though he were studying the Italian painting on the wall that was called "Portrait of a Woman in Black and White." Just before 11:00 a.m., he pulled an unusual object out of one of his pockets. It was a lightbulb, and he had another one in his other pocket. Calderwood dropped the lightbulb on the cobblestone floor, and the fragile glass bulb exploded with a loud and sudden pop.
3:17 Speaker 01 Three security guards rushed to Calderwood's side as he stooped to pick up the pieces of the shattered bulb. While the guards were distracted, someone slipped into the Dutch Room, snatched the small Rembrandt etching off the cabinet near the door to the gallery, and smuggled it out of the museum. When the confused guards turned back around and scanned the room, one of them discovered the missing Rembrandt etching. The police arrested John Calderwood, and he stood trial for his suspected participation in the robbery, but he was acquitted for lack of evidence. His actions were certainly suspicious as hell, but there was no proof that he was involved in the crime. He did something weird, but not illegal. And the authorities never discovered the identity of the thief,
4:02 Speaker 01 so there was no way to directly connect Calderwood to the robber or the robbery.
4:09 Speaker 01 Immediately after the robbery, Roland Hadley, the director of the Gardner Museum, notified the Art Dealers Association of America about the heist. Several months later, in 1971, an anonymous art dealer in New Rochelle, New York, 200 miles south of Boston, called Hadley. The dealer had apparently bought the etching without knowing it had been stolen, and then discovered the backstory through the Art Dealers Association. Roland Hadley happily accepted the return of the etching and agreed not to ask any questions. Soon, the tiny Rembrandt etching was back in its place, hanging on the side of the cabinet near the door to the Dutch Room, where it would stay for the next 19 years, until it
4:53 Speaker 01 was stolen again.
5:06 Speaker 01 From Black Barrel Media, this is Infamous America. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer, and this season, we're telling the stories of two of the most infamous heists in American history, both of which happened in Boston: the Great Brinks robbery of 1950 and the historic art heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990. This is episode three, "The Gardner Heist, Part One: You Can't Sell a Rembrandt."
5:34 Speaker 01 In the 1970s, the New England region seemed to experience a golden era of art theft, and the most notorious thief of the time was Myles Connor. Connor was a wild man who came from a law enforcement family in Milton, Massachusetts, about 20 miles south of Boston proper. Connor's father was a city cop, one of his brothers was a state cop, and Miles became a robber. In his early twenties, he became the frontman for a local band called Myles Connor and the Wild Ones. At the same time, he started stealing whatever could be stolen. In 1963, when Connor was 20 or 21 years old, he stole antiques from a museum in his hometown of Milton.
6:17 Speaker 01 Two years later, he stole antiques from a house in Maine. If Connor is to be believed, it was his first of possibly three robberies in the state of Maine over the next 10 years. In addition to an escalating series of art heists, he also escaped from jail, got into two shootouts with police, suffered three gunshot wounds, and dabbled in drug dealing. And, he is also credited with creating a mythos in the Boston criminal underworld. If you steal a valuable painting, you can use it as leverage to get yourself out of jail. Myles Connor was the first person to successfully do it in Boston, but he didn't come up with the idea.
6:58 Speaker 01 The origin of the "artwork as leverage" concept is generally credited to a German-born, American-raised, master thief named Adam Wirth. In 1876, Wirth's brother was in jail. Wirth and an accomplice stole a painting from a London art gallery. Wirth hoped to use the painting to raise the money to bail his brother out of jail. The brother ended up getting out of jail on his own, so the painting wasn't needed. But the concept of stolen artwork as a form of collateral was born.
7:35 Speaker 01 Ninety-six years later, in April 1972, thieves broke into the estate of a wealthy widow in Monmouth, Maine, and stole fifty paintings. Two years later, in May 1974, thieves broke into the same estate and stole twenty-two items. Most were paintings, but the haul also included two huge antique grandfather clocks. Myles Connor is typically credited with being part of both robberies. There was no physical evidence to tie anyone to the actual robberies, which was why no one was ever charged with the robberies themselves. And in terms of the second robbery, it's only Connor's word that puts him at the scene of the crime. According to Connor, he and his friend Bobby Donati
8:20 Speaker 01 broke into the estate and stole the paintings and the grandfather clocks. Six weeks later, in July 1974, Connor was arrested while trying to sell five of the stolen paintings to undercover agents. So if he didn't participate in the second robbery, he certainly had access to the goods afterward. And that was what led him to his most famous robbery, the one that created the "get out of jail free" idea. According to Connor, an FBI agent told him at the time of his arrest in 1974, "You're gonna need a Rembrandt to get out of this one." And so, the idea was born: steal a painting in order to get out of charges of selling stolen paintings.
9:03 Speaker 01 After Connor's arrest, his lawyer was able to get his bail reduced to a manageable sum. Connor paid it and walked out of jail. A few months later, Myles Connor committed the most infamous robbery of the era. On Monday, April 14, 1975, Myles Connor and an accomplice walked into the Boston Museum of Fine Arts with a plan that was brilliant in its simplicity. According to the museum's director of security, Monday was the slowest day of the week in terms of visitors, and the noon hour was the slowest time of the slowest day. At about noon, two men bought tickets to the museum and walked straight to the gallery
9:46 Speaker 01 which housed a portrait painted by Rembrandt von Rein. The portrait of a woman who may have been Rembrandt's sister was fairly small, about the size of a modern-day desktop computer screen, but it weighed 20 pounds. The painting was nearly 350 years old, and it had been hanging in the museum for 45 years. The two thieves started wrangling the painting off the wall, and they were quickly confronted by a security guard. One of the thieves pulled a pistol, which he had concealed in his clothing, and forced the guard to back off. The other thief finished grabbing the painting off the wall, and the two men sprinted for the exit. They left most of the guards behind, but as they rushed outside, one guard continued to follow.
10:31 Speaker 01 Like most of the others, the guard was a former police officer, but he was also 66 years old. Regardless, the guard ran after the two thieves. The thieves, one still clutching the painting, raced down the short flight of concrete stairs from the doors of the museum to the turnout area where The weather's getting colder, and maybe some thoughts are starting to drift in the direction of holiday gifts. Even if you're not there yet, it's still time for sweatshirts and hoodies, in most places, which I wear almost every day while I'm working. My newest purchase from Quince is the Flow Knit Performance Hybrid Pullover Hoodie. It's a long name, but it's ultra-soft, lightweight, and amazingly affordable. Three big retailers are charging
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11:57 Speaker 01 behind the wheel. The guard nearly stopped the thieves, but the man with the gun smashed the guard on the head and knocked him to the ground. Then the thief with the gun, or possibly the getaway driver, fired at least three shots to keep everyone else away. The thieves leapt into the vehicle, the driver hit the gas, and the car roared away from the Museum of Fine Arts. The brazen daylight robbery, the almost literal definition of a smash-and-grab job, was a success. The only Myles Connor knew it could be a success on a much deeper level. Stealing the painting wasn't the point of the job. Returning the painting was. Myles Connor knew he was going to prison, but now he believed he could get himself out.
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13:52 Speaker 01 By the end of the day on April 14, 1975, reporters from the Associated Press had contacted the Museum of Fine Arts, the famous auction house Sotheby's, and interestingly, the other art museum in Boston, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The Gardner Museum, as it's usually called, is only about four blocks from the Museum of Fine Arts. It takes about 10 minutes to walk from one museum to the other. And the statements of the representatives of Sotheby's and the Gardner Museum are prescient and somewhat funny when viewed with the safety of hindsight. Roland Hadley, the director of the Gardner Museum, said of the Rembrandt, "There's no market for this painting. You can't sell a Rembrandt. Nobody's going to
14:36 Speaker 01 buy the thing." Though, of course, you could buy a Rembrandt etching, as Hadley had learned five years earlier when it was stolen from the Gardner. James Fack of Sotheby's, one of the auction houses that handles the sale of valuable artwork, backed up Hadley's statement about the Rembrandt when he told the Associated Press, "It's impossible to sell, really. The only way to dispose of it would be in a very, very private way in some remote corner of the world."
15:08 Speaker 01 In the vast majority of cases, James Fack would have been right. Secret deals for stolen artwork are usually brokered in private rooms by shady characters. But not in the case of the Rembrandt from the Museum of Fine Arts. And James Fack can be forgiven for not thinking of another option. That's because it had never happened, at least not in Boston. But local art thief Myles Connor was nothing if not pioneering. Connor was on the run for five months after the Rembrandt heist. He was captured in September 1975, and by that time, he was facing a prison sentence of 13 years for robbery and parole violation.
15:49 Speaker 01 He talked to the FBI and floated the idea of returning the Rembrandt in exchange for a reduced sentence. In short, the FBI said hell no. But the US Attorney, who would have to prosecute the case in court, wanted the painting back. Connor successfully bypassed the FBI and made a deal with the US Attorney. For the return of the Rembrandt, which Connor had only stolen for this exact purpose as a bargaining chip, the US Attorney agreed to reduce Connor's sentence from 13 years to two years and four months. With that, a Boston underworld mythos was born. If you can trade a valuable piece of art, the authorities will let you out of prison.
16:32 Speaker 01 That wasn't exactly what happened to Myles Connor, but it was close enough. And that idea was widely believed to be one of the two reasons for the biggest art heist in the world, a heist which Connor said he started talking about at the same time he was in the middle of his saga with the Rembrandt from the Museum of Fine Arts. Connor said that in the 1970s, he and his friend Bobby DiNati started discussing the idea of robbing the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The Gardner had been in business for more than 70 years, but the slow grind of time was taking its toll on the museum.
17:13 Speaker 01 Isabella Stewart Gardner broke ground on her museum in 1899. Isabella Stewart grew up in a wealthy New York family before the Civil War. When she was 20 years old, she married Jack Gardner, from a wealthy Boston family. Isabella's father gave the newlyweds a house on Beacon Street in Boston as a wedding present, and they lived there for the rest of their lives. Three years after they married, Isabella gave birth to a son, but he passed away from pneumonia at the age of two. She was not able to have more children, and she suffered from depression after the loss of her son. But the wealthy couple spent years traveling the world, and the experience brought Isabella out of her dark period.
17:57 Speaker 01 During that time, she developed a love of art, and she and Jack collected pieces on their trips. When Isabella's father passed away in 1891, she inherited $1.75 million. That's the equivalent of more than $50 million today. She began acquiring a serious art collection, and she and Jack started discussing the dream of building an art museum. Jack died suddenly in 1898 at the age of 61, and he left most of his estate to Isabella. She decided to realize their dream of building a museum, and she bought a marshy patch of
18:34 Speaker 01 ground in the Fenway neighborhood of Boston. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum opened its doors in 1903. Eight years later, the Boston Red Sox broke ground on a baseball stadium less than a mile away, which would be called Fenway Park. That same year, 1911, the most famous painting in the world was stolen, though, interestingly, it was the theft that made the painting so famous. Overnight, from August 20th to August 21st, 1911, three men hid in a closet in the Louvre Art Museum. The weather's getting colder, and maybe some thoughts are starting to drift in the
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20:03 Speaker 01 Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK. And when Quince asks you where you heard about them, let them know it was Infamous America. It's the best way to support the show. Museum in Paris, France. In the early morning hours of August 21st, when the museum was empty and silent, they slipped out of the closet and went for one specific painting, Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. The three men removed the portrait from its glass case, removed the painting from its frame, draped a blanket over it, and walked it out of the museum. "It was the most colossal theft of modern times," wrote Margaret Ruth Schuster of the El Paso Herald.
20:48 Speaker 01 Except, she wrote that sentence eight years after the heist, by which time, yes, it had become a colossal heist. But at the time, the Mona Lisa was not one of the most famous paintings in the world. It wasn't even the most famous painting at the Louvre. It was appreciated by art critics and historians, but it was not generally viewed with awe and reverence by the average person. In point of fact, no one noticed it was gone for more than a day. The heist was what made the Mona Lisa famous worldwide. Quite literally overnight, from August 20th to August 21st, 1911, the value and popularity of the Mona Lisa skyrocketed.
21:30 Speaker 01 And that phenomenon ruined the plan of the ringleader of the Trio of Robbers. He was a handyman who worked at the museum, and he wanted to sell the painting after the heist. But with 60 detectives on his trail and a global spotlight on the painting, the Mona Lisa was too hot to sell. When the robber finally made an attempt to sell it more than two years after the heist, he was caught and the painting was returned to the museum. In Boston, news of the robbery caused Isabella Stewart Gardner to hire armed guards to patrol her museum. That was fine at the time, but the problem was, security at the museum didn't advance much over the next 70 years.
22:19 Speaker 01 In November 1970, college student John Calderwood and an unidentified accomplice used the simplest trick known to man to steal the small Rembrandt etching from the Dutch room of the Gardner Museum. At some point in the 70s, Myles Connor might have been discussing the idea of robbing the Gardner with his friend Bobby Donati. And at least one other thief had the same thought at about the same time. Louis Royce wasn't as well-known as Myles Connor, but he had pulled off his share of robberies. By the late 1970s, he was working with the Rossetti Gang, a crew of the Italian mafia in Boston. In February 1981, Louis Royce, Ralph Rossetti, the namesake of the gang,
23:03 Speaker 01 and Ralph's nephew Stephen Rossetti, stole paintings and jewelry from the home of a wealthy couple in the Boston area. Stevie Rossetti found a potential buyer for the stolen goods. Five months later, in August 1981, Ralph and Louis met the buyer to negotiate the sale. During the meeting, Louis Royce mentioned that he had been planning a robbery of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Unfortunately for Royce and Rossetti, the buyer was an undercover FBI agent. The FBI arrested Royce and Rossetti, and that was how the agency learned that there was a new threat against the Gardner Museum.
23:47 Speaker 01 A couple weeks later, an FBI agent showed up at the Gardner Museum and met with the man who was the acting head of security at the time. The agent basically said, "You don't know how close you were to being robbed." The leaders of the museum met to discuss the situation. Roland Hadley, the museum's director, was satisfied that no additional action needed to be taken. In his opinion, the system had worked. The FBI had stopped the robbery before it happened. Therefore, the museum didn't need to take measures to beef up its security. But the decision wasn't entirely about Hadley's mentality. By the early 1980s, the museum was struggling financially.
24:29 Speaker 01 Virtually everything needed to be upgraded, and there wasn't enough money to do it all at once. Finally, toward the end of Roland Hadley's tenure as director in 1988, the museum hired a security expert named Stephen Keller to evaluate the system. Keller made recommendations, some of which were instituted immediately while others were reserved for a later time. The most important measure which was instituted immediately was the installation of state-of-the-art motion sensors throughout the building. But beyond that, there wasn't much the museum could afford to do. There were other serious problems which needed to be addressed, and those would be the top priorities of the new director.
25:12 Speaker 01 Roland Hadley retired in 1988, and the trustees hired 45-year-old Ann Holly in September 1989. She was the first female director of the museum, and she had her work cut out for her. The museum had been in business for 86 years, and it couldn't go one more year without a climate control system. If the museum couldn't preserve its artwork, there was really no point in doing anything else. So, Ann Holly's first big job was to install a climate control system. As that major project and other structural priorities ate up resources, the museum limped along through the rest of 1989 and into 1990 with a security system which was good in
25:56 Speaker 01 some ways but lacking in many others. The first few minutes of the new year were an entertaining and distressing example.
26:10 Speaker 01 Like millions of others around the world, 23-year-old Rick Abbott partied hard on New Year's Eve, 1989. Rick was a true character. He had dropped out of the Berklee College of Music in Boston and lived with several other guys in a house about two and a half miles from the Gardner Museum. He drank a lot of beer, smoked a lot of weed, dabbled in some other drugs, and played in a band with his housemates. Rick was also a security guard at the Gardner Museum, and he typically worked the night shift. In the early morning hours of January 1, 1990, Rick and several friends left a party at Rick's house and traveled to the Gardner Museum. The security guards on duty that night
26:54 Speaker 01 buzzed the group into the building, and the revelers continued their party for a couple hours in the central courtyard while surrounded by artwork which many considered priceless. Presumably, neither Ann Holly, the new director, nor the trustees, nor the heads of security knew about the breach in protocol until long afterward. According to the man who trained the night guards, the number-one rule was, "Don't let anyone into the building. No one." But it was clear that some guards took the instruction more seriously than others, and they may have been receiving mixed signals from their bosses.
27:35 Speaker 01 Most of the guards, especially the night guards, were young people in their early twenties. The overnight shifts were long, boring, and tedious. They consisted of sitting at the security desk or walking through the museum to do regular rounds on each floor. Between the rounds and the time at the desk, there was one constant: nothing ever happened. And if the night guards weren't supposed to let anyone into the building, that was easier said than done. In the years following 1990, several of the guards gave interviews where they made the protocols seem messy at best. Some said they never received any specific instructions about how to handle visitors after hours.
28:18 Speaker 01 Others allowed pizza delivery guys to enter the building, or spontaneous partiers like Rick Abbott and his friends when they showed up in the early morning hours of January 1st. One guard told the Last Seen Podcast that the new museum director, Anne Holly, brought visitors to the museum multiple times after hours. Was it really practical to expect a 20-something security guard to say no to the director? How about the security guard's direct superior? What if the deputy director of security showed up unexpectedly in the middle of the night and asked to be let in? Did he really expect the security guard to say no? That was what happened on St. Patrick's Day, 1990, when Rick Abbott was working the night shift.
29:03 Speaker 01 In fact, Rick had two visitors that night. St. Patrick's Day, March 17th, fell on a Saturday in 1990. On Friday night, Rick Abbott reported for his overnight security shift at the Gardner Museum. No later than 45 minutes after midnight on Saturday, March 17th, the camera above the security desk inside the Palace Road entrance to the museum recorded the first visitor of the night. Rick was sitting at the desk, and he buzzed the visitor into the building without hesitation. The visitor was another night shift guard, Joe Mulvey.
29:46 Speaker 01 Joe appeared to be in his 60s, and he likely wasn't working that night. Joe seemed to chat with Rick for a few minutes, and then he left the museum at 12:48 a.m. Less than one minute later, a second visitor arrived. Rick Abbott buzzed him straight into the museum. For a short period of time after the security tape from that night was made public in 2015, there was some mystery about the second visitor. But former guards from 1990 eventually identified the man as Larry O'Brien, the Deputy Director of Security. O'Brien was in the museum for exactly four minutes, and he left at 12:53 a.m.
30:28 Speaker 01 While there was some initial mystery about O'Brien's identity, he was quickly cleared of suspicion. But that 10-minute period just before 1 a.m. on March 17th seemed to show a loose pattern. If there was a strict rule to allow no one to enter at night, then it either had exceptions for employees who stopped by for whatever reason, or it wasn't taken that seriously. That's why, for many, it wasn't surprising when the same thing happened almost exactly 24 hours later. A little after 1 a.m. on Sunday, March 18, 1990, Rick Abbott was back at the security desk at the Palace Road entrance to the Gardner Museum when two men dressed as Boston police
31:12 Speaker 01 officers showed up at the door. They told Rick they had been called to investigate a disturbance at the museum. Like the previous night, Rick didn't hesitate. He pressed the button at the security desk, which unlocked the door and allowed the two men to enter. Unlike the previous night, the visitors on March 18th didn't leave in under five minutes. They stayed for 81 minutes and stole $500 million worth of artwork in one of the longest and most lucrative robberies in history.
31:55 Speaker 01 Next time on Infamous America, it's the story of 81 minutes of fear, confusion, excitement, and mystery. Two men dressed as Boston police officers pull off the biggest art heist in history. And the only record that might be more impressive than the value of the stolen items is the number of unanswered questions which are still associated with the crime. It's truly astounding. That's next week on Infamous America.
32:26 Speaker 01 Members of our Black Barrel Plus program don't have to wait week to week for new episodes. They receive the entire season to binge all at once with no commercials. And they also receive exclusive bonus episodes. Sign up now through the link in the show notes or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com. This episode was researched and written by me, Chris Swimmer. It was produced by Joe Guerra. Original music by Rob Valier. Thanks for listening.
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