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Eighty One Minutes: The Gardner Museum Robbery

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Eighty one minutes

The theft of thirteen works from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum remains the largest unsolved art theft in the world. Mireille speaks with a retired FBI art-crime agent and a conservator who still cares for the empty frames that hang in the Dutch Room.

  • How two men in uniform talked their way past the night guard
  • Why Vermeer's The Concert is so hard to sell and so hard to recover
  • The condition of the will that keeps the frames on the wall
  • The reward, the tips and the leads that went nowhere
  • What the museum changed about staffing and doors

An open case, told without speculation about who is to blame.

Transcript
Welcome back to Empty Frames. I am Mireille Thibodeau. In the first episode we watched the Mona Lisa walk out of the Louvre. Tonight we go to Boston, to the small hours of 18 March 1990, when two men in police uniforms pressed the buzzer at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and said they were responding to a disturbance. Eighty one minutes later they drove away with a Vermeer, three Rembrandts and a bronze eagle off a Napoleonic flagstaff. The frames still hang empty in the Dutch Room, because the founder's will does not allow the collection to change. I have spoken to a retired FBI agent who worked the case and to a conservator who dusts those frames. We will go through the timeline minute by minute and explain why stolen masterpieces are almost impossible to sell. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.
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