The $500 Million Art Heist Nobody Has Solved: 81 Minutes Inside the Gardner Museum

In a museum in Boston, there are empty frames on the walls.

They are not a mistake. They are not waiting for a new exhibit. They have been empty since one night in March 1990, when two men dressed as police officers walked in through a side door and walked out eighty-one minutes later with thirteen works of art.

A Vermeer. Three Rembrandts. A Manet. Five works by Degas. An ancient Chinese bronze. The eagle from the top of one of Napoleon's flags.

Their value has been estimated at around five hundred million dollars. It is the biggest art theft in history.

None of it has ever been found. And the frames stay on the wall, waiting.

Isabella's museum

Isabella Stewart Gardner was a wealthy Boston art collector who spent her life gathering paintings, sculptures, furniture and rare objects from around the world.

She built a museum to hold it all, designed to look like a Venetian palace, with a glass-roofed courtyard full of flowers in the middle. It opened in 1903. She arranged every room herself.

When she died in 1924, her will set a strict rule. The collection could never be rearranged. Nothing could be sold. Nothing new could be added. If the rules were broken, the entire collection would go to Harvard.

That rule is why, after the theft, the museum left the empty frames hanging in place. A tribute, and a placeholder, for the day the art comes home.

A museum on a budget

By the 1980s, the museum was short of money. It had no climate control. It had no theft insurance.

In 1982, the FBI had warned the museum that a criminal gang was interested in robbing it. The museum added sixty infrared motion detectors and some outside cameras. But there were no cameras inside the galleries.

The guards were paid just above minimum wage. And the only way for a guard to call the police was a single panic button at the security desk.

Consultants had recommended improvements. The board had not approved them.

Just after midnight

The night of March 17, 1990, was St. Patrick's Day. Boston was full of people celebrating.

At about twelve-thirty in the morning, some partygoers walking home noticed two men in what looked like police uniforms, sitting in a hatchback car parked on Palace Road, about a hundred feet from the museum's side entrance. They assumed they were police.

Inside, there were two guards on duty. One was twenty-three, a regular on the night shift. The other was twenty-five. It was his first night shift.

At about one-twenty in the morning, the two men in uniforms drove to the side entrance, walked to the door, and rang the buzzer.

"We're here about a disturbance"

The guard at the desk looked at the closed-circuit monitor. He saw two men in police uniforms. They said they were responding to a report of a disturbance.

Museum rules said guards were not to let anyone in at night. But they appeared to be police officers. At one twenty-four, he let them in.

Inside the foyer, they asked if anyone else was in the building. The guard radioed his partner to come to the desk.

Then one of the men said he recognized the guard, and that there was a warrant out for his arrest. He told him to step out from behind the desk.

That took him away from the panic button.

They put him against the wall and handcuffed him. When the second guard arrived, they handcuffed him too.

And then they said: This is a robbery.

The basement

The thieves wrapped the guards' heads in duct tape, covering their eyes. They led them down to the basement and handcuffed them, one to a steam pipe, the other to a workbench.

They went through the guards' wallets and said they now knew where they lived. They told them that if they did not cooperate with the police, they would get a reward in about a year.

By about one thirty-five, the guards were subdued. The whole thing had taken less than fifteen minutes.

Then, for about thirteen minutes, nothing. The motion detectors recorded no movement in the galleries. Investigators think the thieves may have been waiting to make sure no alarm had gone out.

Eighty-one minutes

At one forty-eight, the motion detectors picked up the first movement, in the Dutch Room on the second floor.

What followed was not careful. The thieves pulled Rembrandt's The Storm on the Sea of Galilee and another Rembrandt portrait, A Lady and Gentleman in Black, off the wall. They threw them to the marble floor, smashing the glass. Then they cut the canvases out of their frames with a blade.

From the Dutch Room, they took Vermeer's The Concert, one of only about thirty-four known paintings by Vermeer in the world. A small Rembrandt self-portrait etching. A landscape long thought to be by Rembrandt. And an ancient Chinese bronze beaker, more than three thousand years old.

In the Short Gallery, they took five works on paper by Edgar Degas. They tried to take a framed Napoleonic flag, gave up, and instead unscrewed the bronze eagle from the top of its pole.

And downstairs, in the Blue Room, a painting by Édouard Manet, Chez Tortoni, was taken out of its frame. The empty frame was left on the chair at the security director's desk.

They also took the security videotapes and the printouts from the motion detectors. But they missed something. The motion data was also saved on a computer hard drive, which they did not touch.

At two-forty and two-forty-five, the side door opened. The thieves were gone. They had been inside for eighty-one minutes.

The guards were found by the morning shift, still handcuffed in the basement.

What they took, and what they left

The total value has been estimated at around five hundred million dollars. The Vermeer alone is estimated to be worth about two hundred and fifty million, which may make it the most valuable stolen object in the world.

But what the thieves left behind is just as revealing. They walked past paintings by Raphael, Botticelli and Michelangelo. They never went to the third floor, where a Titian worth a fortune was hanging. They took some low-value items, like the Degas sketches and the flag eagle, and handled priceless masterpieces roughly.

Investigators concluded the thieves were probably not art experts working from a shopping list.

The Blue Room

There is one detail investigators have never been able to explain.

The Manet was taken from the Blue Room, on the first floor. But the motion detectors recorded no movement in the Blue Room during the robbery.

The only footsteps logged there that night belonged to the guard on his earlier patrol, before the thieves arrived.

A security consultant tested the equipment weeks later. It was working.

So how did the Manet leave the Blue Room without anyone setting off the sensor?

The investigation

The FBI took the case. Over the decades, it has followed thousands of leads, many tied to Boston's organized crime world, which was in the middle of a violent gang war at the time.

In 1994, the museum received an anonymous letter offering to arrange the return of the art for two point six million dollars and immunity. The museum signaled agreement in a coded message in the Boston Globe. The writer never followed through.

In 1997, a journalist was taken to a warehouse in Brooklyn and shown a painting that looked like The Storm on the Sea of Galilee. Tests on paint chips later showed they were old, but not from the stolen Rembrandts.

In March 2013, the FBI made a major announcement. It said it had identified the thieves "with a high degree of confidence." They were members of a criminal organization based in the mid-Atlantic and New England. The FBI believed the art had moved through Connecticut and Philadelphia, with an attempted sale in Philadelphia in 2002.

In 2015, the FBI said both thieves were dead.

The statute of limitations on the theft itself expired in 1995. That means no one can be prosecuted for stealing the art. And federal prosecutors have said that anyone who returns the works will not be prosecuted.

What we still don't know

Today, the museum is offering a reward of ten million dollars for information leading directly to the recovery of all thirteen works in good condition.

It is the largest reward ever offered by a private institution.

Nobody has claimed it.

The FBI believes it knows who did it. But it does not know where the art is. Rolled up in a tube in a basement? Hidden in a wall? Sold to a private collector? Destroyed?

And there are still questions about that night that no one has answered. Like how a Manet left a room where no motion sensor ever saw the thieves.

Where do you think the Gardner art is today?