Eccentric art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner had only the purest intentions when she opened her beautiful Venetian villa to the public, so that everyone could admire one of the best private art collections.
Her museum Boston bearing her name officially opened its gates in 1903 and she continued until 1924, when she left the world, to expand her collection, giving the world the opportunity to admire works of art by great painters that remained private until then.
Her collection was hailed from the first moment as of immense importance for the history of art. Gardner had literally plowed the globe to buy remarkable paintings, works by the greatest masters of painting, from Botticelli and Titian to Rembrandt and Vermeer, to name just a few.
It was the work of her life, a life of travel and art. Her museum lived through golden moments in the 20th century, until that barren day of 1990 at least, when two men managed to complete with great success one of the greatest robberies of all time, in loot terms.
They stole 13 paintings worth more than $ 500 million. Even today, 30 years later, it remains the greatest robbery on private property that never became. The higher the pay, the more than $ 10 million.
Even worse for the case, the last link of a possible criminal chain that may have known something recently slipped out of the hands of the authorities…
The night of March 18, 1990 was like another night for the two guards on duty at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, with Rick Abath and Randy Hestand noticing anything unusual.
Shortly after midnight, a Dodge Daytona stopped outside the museum's side door. An hour later, at 1:20 p.m., two men were knocking on the door. It was police officers and asked to enter the building to investigate a complaint of disturbing the peace.
Abath opened them immediately, "breaking the protocol," as the museum still claims, and saw them arrested very soon.
True conception believed that it was, although somewhat overdone. The guard spoke to the police about a misunderstanding, until he noticed at one point that the mustache he was wearing was fake.
The police arrested the second guard and handcuffed them in the basement. There they were tied up and told what they were whispering about: they had not really been arrested, they were just victims of robbery.
Completely undisturbed, they toured the corridors of the museum and stole works they seemed to know in advance. They went to the "Dutch Chamber" and removed two of his paintings from their frames. Rembrandt, a painting by Vermeer and another by Hofert Flink.
Their movements were "surgical". Then they stole a small Chinese cup of the Shang Dynasty and a drawing with Rembrandt's self-portrait on a table.
They then went to the next room and removed five drawings by Edgar Degas and an imperial silver eagle from Napoleon France.
In the end they went to a third room, always on the same floor, and stole a painting by Manet. They tried to make one Bonaparte flag from the wall, but they did not succeed.
By 2:45 a.m., they had become useless. In fact, they went to the car twice, in order to safely transport the valuables. The museum was equipped with motion sensors, so all their movements were recorded.
The guards remained handcuffed in the basement until 8:15 the next morning, when police arrived. In 81 minutes, more than $ 500 million worth of artwork took off.
And 30 years later, they remain silent…
The two robbers managed with their simple plan to represent the police to disarm and tie the guards within 11 minutes from the time they rang the bell.
All they were asked was to stay quiet in the basement. They were even promised that if they carried out this simple order, then in a year they would receive a reward for their cooperation.
Within an hour, they removed Tables from their frames and even broke the protective glass cases that some brought. The museum, however, had many more works of art and some were even more expensive.
The police felt from the first moment that their choice was not random at all. Why didn't they grab Titian, the museum's most expensive work of art, and take Rembrandt's little self-portrait? Either they knew nothing of art or, on the contrary, they knew very well what they had to get.
Their work, moreover, was given up professionally. For days the authorities searched the museum for traces and never found anything. The lack of evidence was frightening.
The museum reached a fee of $ 2018 million in 10 (out of the 5 million that were) "for information that will directly lead to the recovery of all 13 projects in good condition".
He still gives $ 100.000 today just for the Bonaparte eagle. Believing, of course, that these astronomical sums would open many mouths. And yet!
Despite the sometimes promising federal investigations, the robbery at the Gardner Museum remains unsolved. FBI and the U.S. Attorney General's Office are still looking for evidence to clarify the case, although it has now become even more difficult.
And we explain…
Investigations may not have been successful since 1990, but in the following years the FBI came close to a local spy with close ties to the Mafia. And Mafia in Boston and Massachusetts used to mean one thing: Whitey Balzer.
"If these paintings are not found, and I hope that does not happen, it will not be due to a lack of effort from the FBI, the museum and the attorney general," said FBI agent Geoff Kelly, who led 12 years of research.
The FBI said it was looking for the "godfather" of Boston, but also him IPA, who had connections in Boston, but nothing came up against them.
However, the federalists believed several times that they came close to investigating the case, speaking steadily about the city's Mafia and its tentacles.
At one point, federal officials said they had located the stolen paintings in two possible areas (Connecticut or Philadelphia) and paid for more information.
In fact, in 2013 they appeared extremely sure about the identity of the robbers. Who were they? We never found out, as the FBI said they were dead and the offense was statute barred from 1995!
The investigations did not stop, however, because although no one would pay for the robbery, the projects remained unanswered. And the museum wanted them fervently. Finding them was now a matter of honor for the FBI.
In these 30 years have been interrogated is the truth an incredible number of people. From ordinary visitors to the museum in the days before the robbery to notable art thieves, gangsters, and even petty criminals.
The only item left to federal agents at one point was an elderly man mafia of Boston. Robert Gentile was in jail for a gun case and authorities had cracked him down.
Officially, Gentile was a seller of used cars that had dived him in 2018 for gun ownership and ate for 54 months. The "godfather" even said that the case was set up by the FBI to talk about the robbery of the museum. He was threatened with years, he said in prison if he did not open his mouth, at least since 2010.
He himself said and still claims that he knows nothing. However, the widow of his closest associate, also a notorious Boston mobster, Robert Guarente, had confessed to agents that she had seen with her own eyes her husband give Gentile one of the stolen paintings.
The FBI believes that Guarente had taken the paintings from the thieves themselves, without intermediaries.
Agents searched 2012 for links to the two criminals and found "incriminating evidence" about Gentile in his home: police hats, counterfeit signals, $ 20.000 in cash, weapons, and a list of stolen paintings and their prices at black market.
Gentile claimed that the list was from a link in Massachusetts, in order to exploit the fear with the famous thefts in case they cheat a naive collector.
The lie detector, however, concluded that there is… 99,9% probability that Gentile is lying about his innocence. The time spent in however prison did not bear fruit and the criminal was released in March 2019 due to good behavior, serving 35 months of his sentence.
It may have been the last chance for the FBI to learn something about the case, as all this dense web of suspects, links, theories, and even certainties never came out.
The only thing left of the brazen robbery, the biggest theft of works of art by an individual, are these empty frames on the walls of the museum, as a timeless reminder of the evil that man hides inside…