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.