Books |
The Gardner Heist: The True Story of the World’s Largest Unsolved Art Theft
Ulrich Boser
By
Published: Feb 17, 2011
Category:
Art and Photography
Guest Butler Jane Chafin is director of the Offramp Gallery in Pasadena, California. A former painter, she has worked as a registrar at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery and written for the Los Angeles Times.
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In the mood for a fascinating true-crime whodunit about…art?
There’s a lot to chose from — experts speak of a "Lost Museum," where there are enough stolen artworks to make the "Louvre seem like a small-town art gallery.”
But in all that theft, the Gardner Museum robbery stands alone: the largest art heist in history.
Early on the morning of March 18, 1990, two men dressed as police officers broke into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, tied up the two guards on duty and stole 13 works of art, including three Rembrandts and a Vermeer. Estimates place the value of the stolen works at around $500 million. The theft remains unsolved.
The paintings were not insured and in any case couldn’t be replaced with other work because of Gardner’s will, which forbade any changes to her museum. Her command:
"Nothing could be added or taken away. Not a Chippendale chair, not a Rembrandt canvas, not a bamboo window shade. Everything must remain in the same Victorian patchwork of wood-paneled corners and draped alcoves, or the trustees would be required to sell off the collection and donate the profits to Harvard University."
In “The Gardner Heist,” Ulrich Boser stumbles into the Gardner case after contacting veteran art detective Harold Smith in 2005 to write an article about him. Boser soon learns that there is one case that haunts Smith: "Smith had been searching for the missing masterpieces for years. He hopscotched the globe to meet with sources. He spent hundreds of thousands of his own money on leads . . . [he] swore to everyone that he met that he wouldn’t stop working the case until the art hung again on the walls of the museum." [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
The elderly Smith dies suddenly (of natural causes) a few weeks after his initial meeting with Boser, but not before Boser has become interested in the case. With the family’s blessing and access to Smith’s files, he picks up the trail of the investigation and ultimately becomes obsessed with the crime:
It was more like a mystery with a capital M, the sort of enigma that you find in church pews or philosophy lectures or on the canvas of an Old Master painting, something clear and compelling but also abstruse and obscure, something essentially unknowable.
Your hopes will soar and come crashing down as Boser tracks down every lead, only to find countless dead-ends, nefarious characters, encounters with the Irish mob, death threats, bodies in trunks of cars, and endless speculation. Given the danger, what’s the attraction for criminals? This:
Most art crooks are motivated by the lure of easy money and, relative to their size, top-notch paintings represent some of the most valuable items on the planet. A minor Picasso or Van Gogh carries a bigger price tag than the finest diamonds or the purest gold, and a major canvas by an Old Master might have the value of a Gulfstream jet or a small ocean liner.
And because famous stolen paintings are almost impossible to sell, they are used as a type of underworld cash or bond, traded for guns, drugs or jewels.
You will cringe as you read how the thieves mishandled the priceless paintings, breaking them from their frames and slashing them off the stretcher bars, leaving behind "bits of canvas, flecks of paint, and the dreams of countless art lovers."
Speculation about what condition the paintings might be in today will make you want to cry: "An Old Master painting is as dry and brittle as a potato chip, and if it’s removed from its setting, the canvas can bend and buckle and crack, the paint peeling off in thick flakes like dried glue."
After tracking down hundreds of leads and conducting more than 200 interviews, Boser feels he is no closer to solving the case than when he started. He believes that brutal Boston mob boss Ray "Whitey" Bulger holds the key to finding the Gardner paintings. Having been told that Bulger is hiding out in a seaside village in Ireland, Boser impulsively books a flight there. After moving from village to village, strolling the streets hoping to spot Bulger, he realizes his obsession has gotten out of control: "It had been a wild, harebrained scheme from the start. My zeal had gotten the better of me. I felt stupidly naive. There were never any concrete clues of an Irish angle."
In the end, Boser returns home and doesn’t solve the case. He does, however, put forth a plausible scenario based on his research and new evidence that he uncovers by interviewing witnesses the police ignored. His conclusion: due to the untimely and violent deaths of key figures, the mystery may ultimately be unsolvable. Which leaves us, like Boser, wondering — but, as readers, oddly satisfied after a wild ride through the underbelly of the art world.
