New book may solve mystery of Boston museum art heist
In the small hours of 18 March 1990 two men dressed as police officers walked into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston pretending to be investigating a disturbance.
They handcuffed the museum guards, ransacked the museum, sliced old masters from their frames and left, carrying 13 works of art valued conservatively at more than $500 million.
Nineteen years after the greatest unsolved art heist in history the pictures have never been found, despite a $5m reward.
Since then everyone from veteran art thieves to the IRA have been fingered for the theft. The FBI hired a diviner to identify where the paintings are hidden. The Museum’s new security chief says he hears frequently from a caller who insists that former Vice President Dick Cheney was behind the heist.
But as the Museum marked another anniversary last week, a new book claims to have identified the culprits, a pair of Boston mob figures, David Turner, now serving a 38-year prison term for attempting to rob an armoured car, and George Reissfelder, a crook who died of a drugs overdose in 1991, possibly bumped off to keep his silence.
Olrich Boser, author of The Gardner Heist, inherited the case files of art-theft detective Harold Smith, who had vainly pursued the Gardner “caper” until his death in 2005.
Asked where he thinks the paintings are now, Mr Boser said: “My personal feeling is that the paintings are in the Boston area in somewhere in New England. I believe that the thieves perhaps stashed them. They steal art because it’s valuable, but then often it’s sort of an albatross. They don’t know what to do with the paintings. There are, alas, no Thomas Crowns.”
Read entire article at Telegraph (UK)
They handcuffed the museum guards, ransacked the museum, sliced old masters from their frames and left, carrying 13 works of art valued conservatively at more than $500 million.
Nineteen years after the greatest unsolved art heist in history the pictures have never been found, despite a $5m reward.
Since then everyone from veteran art thieves to the IRA have been fingered for the theft. The FBI hired a diviner to identify where the paintings are hidden. The Museum’s new security chief says he hears frequently from a caller who insists that former Vice President Dick Cheney was behind the heist.
But as the Museum marked another anniversary last week, a new book claims to have identified the culprits, a pair of Boston mob figures, David Turner, now serving a 38-year prison term for attempting to rob an armoured car, and George Reissfelder, a crook who died of a drugs overdose in 1991, possibly bumped off to keep his silence.
Olrich Boser, author of The Gardner Heist, inherited the case files of art-theft detective Harold Smith, who had vainly pursued the Gardner “caper” until his death in 2005.
Asked where he thinks the paintings are now, Mr Boser said: “My personal feeling is that the paintings are in the Boston area in somewhere in New England. I believe that the thieves perhaps stashed them. They steal art because it’s valuable, but then often it’s sort of an albatross. They don’t know what to do with the paintings. There are, alas, no Thomas Crowns.”