Priceless

by Robert K. Wittman

  The Dutch painting was offered without fanfare. No one could know that it was destined to become the centerpiece of the twentieth century’s largest and most mysterious art heist.

  As the bidding began, Isabella Stewart Gardner of Boston held a lace handkerchief to her face. This was the signal to her broker to keep bidding. No. 31 was an oil on canvas, a work by Johannes Vermeer, the seventeenth-century Dutchman whose genius was not yet universally recognized. He called the painting The Concert. The work portrayed a young lady in an ivory skirt with black and gold bodice playing the harpsichord. A second woman in an olive, fur-trimmed housecoat stood by the edge of the instrument, studying a note card as she sang. At the center of the painting, in more muted hues of brown and green, a gentleman with long black hair, his back to the painter, sat sideways in a bright terra-cotta-backed chair.

  Although works by Vermeer were not nearly as popular or as valuable then as they are today, Gardner faced tough competition as she vied for No. 31. The other bidders making a play for The Concert were agents representing the Louvre and the National Gallery in London.

  From her seat in the auction room, Gardner could not see her straw bidder. She simply trusted that he could see her.

  The bids climbed steadily past twenty-five thousand francs and Gardner kept her handkerchief in place. The bidding slowed, rising in smaller and smaller increments, until Gardner’s man won it with a final bid of twenty-nine thousand. Afterward, she learned that the Louvre and the National Gallery had dropped out because each wrongly presumed that Gardner’s bidding agent also worked for a large museum—in that day, it was considered bad manners for one museum to drive up the price against another. The museums were dismayed to hear that the winner, this cheeky woman with the healthy checkbook, was an American, and that she planned to take The Concert home to Boston.

  I DON’T KNOW if Isabella Stewart Gardner ever met Albert C. Barnes—she died in 1924, the year before he opened his museum outside Philadelphia.

  But Dr. Barnes and Mrs. Gardner strike me as kindred souls: Each assembled an astounding private art collection. Each built a museum to showcase these works to the public, displaying them in an eclectic, educational style. Each lived on the grounds of the museum, and each left a strict will that stipulated that the galleries remain precisely as arranged, not one frame moved, not ever.

  Gardner was not a self-made millionaire like Barnes; few women of the nineteenth century were. She inherited the fortune her father had made in the Irish linen and mining industries. Yet Gardner spent the final thirty years of her life in the same manner as Barnes. She traveled extensively to Europe, snatching up important Renaissance and Impressionist works, pieces by Titian, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Michelangelo, Raphael, Botticelli, Manet, and Degas. Her ample resources and skilled negotiators enabled her to compete against the world’s great museums.

  Gardner and her husband, Jack, traipsed the globe on grand adventures, and she documented them in a diary with broad cursive strokes. An entry from November 17, 1883, is typical. She wrote of a trip by oxcart to Angkor Wat: “A small Cambodian, naked to the waist, fans me as I write. Within the walls of Angkor Thom have already been discovered one hundred and twenty ruins.…” Gardner returned repeatedly to her favorite city, Venice, island of art, music, and architecture. When she decided to build a public museum for her collection in Boston, she found a plot of marshland along the Fenway and designed a building in the style of a fifteenth-century Venetian palazzo, filling it with as many authentic European pieces as possible. She imported columns, arches, ironwork, fireplaces, staircases, frescoes, glass, chairs, cassoni, wood carvings, balconies, fountains. Like Barnes, Gardner disliked the cold, clinical museums of the day, in which paintings hung side by side with affixed labels explaining the significance of each work. She arranged her museum the way Barnes would twenty-five years later in Pennsylvania, decorating it with more subtle forms of art—furniture, tapestries, and antiques. She designed a great, glass-roofed, flower-filled Mediterranean courtyard in the center of the four-story museum, allowing the warm light of the sun to fall into the most important galleries. Gardner built an organic museum, one to be appreciated as a living thing. As the museum’s official history notes, “Love of art, not knowledge about the history of art, was her aim.”

  The Dutch Room, home to the Vermeer and four Rembrandts—and later the scene of a great crime—was arranged in typical Gardner style.

  She flanked the entryway with a pair of husband-and-wife portraits by Hans Holbein the Younger and hung a large bronze knocker of Neptune on the door. On the left, between a Van Dyck painting and the door, Gardner placed her first important purchase for the museum, a dark Rembrandt self-portrait from 1629, a painting similar to the one I rescued in Copenhagen. Underneath Self-Portrait, she placed a carved oak cabinet framed by two Italian chairs. To the side of the cabinet, she nailed a postage-stamp-sized framed Rembrandt etching, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

  Virtually everything Gardner displayed in the Dutch Room was an imported work of art, most of it from the seventeenth century. The red marble fireplace was Venetian; the refectory table, Tuscan; the tapestries, Belgian. The Italian ceiling was decorated with scenes from mythology—Mars and Venus, the Judgment of Paris, Leda, Hercules. The floor was covered with rust-colored tiles specially commissioned from Mercer’s Moravian Pottery & Tile Works in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.

  On the south wall, against patterned olive wallpaper above sets of salmon, aqua, and rouge chairs, Gardner hung seven paintings. There were works by the Flemish artists Rubens and Mabuse, but the wall was dominated by two of Rembrandt’s better paintings, A Lady and Gentleman in Black and The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, his only seascape. Around these paintings, Gardner arranged Barnes-style accoutrements, including a twelfth-century Chinese bronze beaker.

  The most unusual arrangement in the room stood along the wall by the exterior windows. There stood an easel with two paintings positioned back to back. In front of each painting, Gardner set a glass case filled with antiques and a chair. The first faced the rear wall: Landscape with an Obelisk, an oil painting on oak panel that was long thought to be a Rembrandt but later discovered to be the work of Govaert Flinck. The second painting faced the entrance to the Dutch Room, and the position of the chair beneath it seemed to mimic the bold square splotch of terra cotta on the chair at the center of the painting.

  The Concert was the most valuable piece in the room.

  CHAPTER 19

  COLD CASE

  Boston, 1990.

  THE LARGEST PROPERTY CRIME IN U.S. HISTORY began very early on a Sunday morning in March 1990.

  St. Patrick’s Day fell on a Saturday that year and revelers across Boston were still stumbling from bars into a light drizzle and growing fog. Inside the Gardner museum, two young security guards worked the graveyard shift. One made rounds through the third-floor galleries. The other sat behind a console of cameras on the first floor.

  At 1:24 a.m., two men dressed in Boston police uniforms approached the museum’s service entrance along Palace Road, the narrow one-way street forty yards from the main doors on The Fenway. One of the men pressed the intercom button.

  The guard at the desk, a college kid with dopey curly black hair that fell below his shoulders, answered. “Yeah?”

  “Police. We have a report of a disturbance in the courtyard.”

  The guard was under strict instructions: Never open the door for anyone, ever, no exception. He studied the images of the men on the security camera. They wore badges on their sharp-edged police hats. He saw large radios on their hips. He buzzed them in.

  The men in police uniforms pulled open the heavy wooden exterior door, moved through a second unlocked door, and turned left to face the guard at his station. The two men were white, each roughly thirty years old—one tall, perhaps six foot one, the other a few inches shorter and wider. The shorter man wore square, gold-framed glasses that fit snugly on his round face. The taller guy was broad-
shouldered but lanky from the waist down. Each wore a false mustache.

  The tall one did the talking. He said, “Anyone else working?”

  “Yeah,” said the guard behind the desk. “He’s upstairs.”

  “Get him down here.”

  The guard picked up his radio and did as he was told. When the tall policeman motioned for him to step out from behind his console—away from the button for the silent alarm—the guard did that, too. Before the second guard arrived, the tall policeman said to the first guard, “You look familiar. I think we’ve got a default warrant on you. Show me some ID.”

  The guard dutifully dug out his driver’s license and Berklee College of Music identification. The policeman took a quick glance and without a word spun the young guard around against the wall and handcuffed him. When the confused guard realized the cops hadn’t frisked him, it hit him: These guys aren’t cops. But it was too late. When the second guard, also a part-timer and aspiring musician, arrived, the policeman slapped cuffs on him before he could speak.

  “You’re not under arrest,” the thief told them. “This is a robbery. Don’t give us any problems and you won’t get hurt.”

  “Don’t worry,” the second guard sputtered. “They don’t pay me enough.”

  The thieves led their captives down the stairs into the basement, a damp warren of aging, low-hanging pipes and ducts. They took one guard to the end of a passageway and cuffed him to a pipe by a janitor’s sink. They wrapped duct tape around the young man’s eyes and ears, and from the base of his chin to the top of his forehead. They led the other guard to the other end of the basement, to a darker, harder-to-find corner. They wrapped his head in tape in the same manner and latched him to a pipe.

  Most museum robberies are over in a matter of minutes, simple smash-and-grab jobs. But the Gardner thieves were able to take their time. Confident that they had prevented the guards from tripping the silent alarm, and likely carrying radio scanners that picked up police frequencies, the Gardner thieves spent an astounding eighty-one minutes inside the museum. They did not even begin to try to remove paintings until 1:48 a.m., twenty-four minutes after they entered the museum. They would then spend a full forty-five minutes in the galleries, ripping masterpieces from the walls, and another twelve minutes shuttling works of art out the service door. We know these minute-by-minute details because motion detectors installed throughout the Gardner tracked the thieves’ movements. Although the robbers grabbed a printout of this record from the security chief’s office before they fled, a computer hard drive preserved a backup copy.

  At 1:48 a.m., the thieves headed up the main staircase. They turned right at the second-floor landing, moving along a hallway overlooking the courtyard, and directly into the Dutch Room, through the door marked with the Neptune knocker. The paintings were secured by little more than simple hooks, and the thieves quickly removed the four Rembrandts and rudely set them on the tile floor, scattering shattered and splintered glass from one of the frames. At the easel, they grabbed the Flinck, perhaps believing it to be a Rembrandt, and, shoving the glass case aside, got to work on the Vermeer. Very neatly, probably using box cutters, one of the thieves began slicing the works from their frames.

  The other thief headed back past the stairway through the Early Italian Room, turned right, moved through the Raphael Room, past a priceless Botticelli and a pair of Raphaels, arriving in the Short Gallery at 1:51 a.m. This thief easily broke into a cabinet filled with framed sketches, a collection secured only by a century-old lock. In one of the center panels, the man removed five Degas sketches, works in pencil, watercolor, and charcoal. The sketches were relatively minor pieces compared with the far more valuable artwork within arm’s reach of the Degas—a Matisse, a Whistler, and a Michelangelo. Perhaps the thief was a Degas fan; perhaps he was following orders; perhaps he was confused in the darkness and his hurry.

  At 2:28 a.m., both thieves were back in the Dutch Room. They abandoned the Rembrandt self-portrait on wood, presumably because it was too heavy or could not be properly cut from its frame, and carried the five Dutch paintings and five Degas sketches downstairs. They removed the videotape from the recorder, ripped out the printout of the recordings by the motion detector, and made for the door. They opened the service entrance door twice, at 2:41 a.m. and 2:45 a.m.

  The thieves stole three other works of art from the Gardner that misty morning, creating clues that have long intrigued investigators. They took two relatively valueless items—a Chinese vase from the Dutch Room and a gilded Corsican eagle finial from the top of a Napoleonic banner in the Short Gallery. Why take such minor pieces? Were these souvenirs? Or red herrings designed to trick investigators?

  The third clue is most befuddling. The thieves took a three-foot-tall Manet, Chez Tortoni, from the Blue Room. This was the only work stolen from the first floor, and most curiously, the motion detectors did not pick up any movement in this gallery during the robbery. Absent a malfunction, this meant the Manet was moved before the thieves confronted the guards, raising the specter that the Gardner heist was an inside job. Additionally: Whoever took the Manet left its empty frame on the chair by the desk of the security chief, a gesture many interpreted as a final insult.

  The mystery of the Manet is like most Gardner clues—intriguing but ultimately useful only to the countless armchair detectives in the bars and salons of Boston and the art community.

  THE THEFT SHOCKED Boston and the art world, but it shouldn’t have.

  As the value of artwork, from Impressionists to Old Masters, rose steadily at auction houses from the early sixties to the late eighties, so too did the pace of art crime, especially in New England. The thieves began slowly, targeting the region’s many colleges. Schools made prime targets because, as the thieves soon discovered, they held valuable but poorly guarded art and artifacts donated decades ago by long-dead alumni—Hudson Valley School paintings, ancient coins, rifles from the Revolutionary War. If a painting vanished from the walls of the English Department reception room, embarrassed college officials assumed it to be a prank or the work of the town delinquents, not the work of a growing cadre of Boston burglars who found it easier to steal art from a college or a mansion than to rob a bank. Emboldened by success, these thieves expanded their horizons and targeted museums. The most successful New England art thief was Myles Connor, who would become one of a number of Gardner suspects. Beginning in 1966, Connor burglarized the Forbes House Museum, the Woolworth Estate, the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, the rotunda of the Massachusetts State House, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. By the late 1980s, museums had begun to recognize the threat, but moved slowly to address it. When a new director was named to lead the Gardner in 1989, she ordered a review of her museum’s security measures. It was not completed before the 1990 crime.

  Hundreds of FBI agents and police officers investigated the Gardner theft, and as the years passed, the mystique and mystery of the heist only grew. Investigators navigated a growing thicket of speculation, one fueled by a cast of characters featuring con men, private detectives, investigative journalists, and wiseguys—all chasing a reward that would climb to $5 million.

  No lead went unchecked. Detectives and agents searched a trawler in the harbor, a city warehouse, a Maine farmhouse. When a pair of tourists visiting a Japanese artist’s home spotted what they believed to be The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, an FBI agent and a Gardner curator dashed to Tokyo. They found a fine copy, but no Rembrandt.

  Every now and then a con man approached the media and the media bit. One got face time on 60 Minutes, the other on Primetime Live. The con artist who appeared on ABC claimed to be working with Connor, and he repeatedly teased the U.S. attorney’s office in Boston, claiming he could return one of the paintings within an hour, if paid $10,000 and granted immunity.

  One newspaper reporter didn’t just investigate the story. In 1997, he became part of it. Under the blazing headline “We’ve Seen It!,” the Boston Herald reported that one
of its star journalists, Tom Mashberg, was led blindfolded to a Boston warehouse in the dark of night, and shown a curled, badly damaged canvas that resembled The Storm on the Sea of Galilee. Mashberg’s source later sent him photographs of the Rembrandt and paint chips supposedly of seventeenth-century vintage. Although an initial analysis suggested the chips were authentic, further tests by the government showed they were not.

  Shady mob links to the Gardner heist surfaced repeatedly, and most drew breathless press coverage across Boston. Four times in the space of a decade, the papers reported, a wiseguy with alleged ties to the Gardner case died under suspicious circumstances. When two more reputed mob associates were arrested for conspiring to rob an armored car, they alleged that FBI agents had set them up as part of a scheme to win the paintings’ return. As all of this mob-Gardner speculation swirled, alleged Boston mob boss Whitey Bulger—a man the media identified as a prime suspect in the Gardner case—fled the United States on the eve of his arrest for unrelated murders.

  Almost every new twist and detail from the Gardner investigation made the papers and the eleven o’clock news—from the dead, indicted, and fugitive mobsters to the false sightings in Japan. The Herald reporter recounted his story for a national audience in Vanity Fair and inked an option for a movie deal. Harold Smith, a respected private art detective, was featured in a well-received documentary film about the heist.

  Even the normally tight-lipped FBI joined the fray, feeding the hype. For a story marking the anniversary of the crime in the mid-1990s, the lead FBI agent in Boston gave an on-the-record interview—highly unusual for a street agent working an active case. He told the New York Times, “I can’t imagine a whodunit as nightmarish as this, considering the pool of potential suspects. It’s mind-boggling.”

  Mind-boggling, perhaps. Frustrating, for sure.