Issues → October 1992 →

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Robbery

20 years later and none of the art has been found

by Evan McLeod Wylie

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Credit: John Jude Palencar

It's been 20 years since the robbery at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in March 1990. This Yankee Classic is from October 1992.

Investigators still don't know who pulled off the greatest art theft of the century at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. But they have a pretty good idea how they did it.

There were a number of visits to the museum, probably by women. They would use women because women blend in much more easily. Among art museum visitors, women far outnumber men. They could have been sent alone or in pairs. They might even be part of a bus tour group. They bought the guidebooks and rented the audiocassettes for the ape tours and drifted around looking over the galleries that were going to be hit and the paintings that were going to be taken. Meanwhile somebody else was checking out the museum security: What guards are on at night? When do the shifts change? When is the best time to go in? That kind of inside information could have been picked up in casual conversation from someone who had worked at the museum. When they had it all together, they picked the date. A weekend is always a favorite time for criminals and a holiday weekend such as St. Patrick's Day is perfect.
--Charles Moore, Massachusetts private investigator who specializes in art thefts

The time is 2:00 A.M., March 18, 1990. Tires hiss on Fenway Park Drive as a light ram sweeps across Boston. Through the mist streetlamps cast a pale glow upon celebrants from St. Patrick's Day parties as they straggle down Palace Road past the walled gardens and tall windows of the four-story, pale-brick Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Within the darkened structure rain spatters on the skylights of a balconied Venetian courtyard where, amid Greek and Roman sculptures, a spectacular display of flowering yellow jasmine trees, blue cineraria, creamy white lilies, and Chinese-red nasturtiums heralds the approach of another Easter.

Below the courtyard, in a long corridor in the pitch-black basement, two museum guards lie prone on the concrete floor, arms and legs manacled to heating pipes, rendered deaf, mute, and sightless by broad strips of duct tape wound around their heads. In a second-floor gallery several individuals kneel in front of a huge marble fireplace. The burnished red-tile floor is covered with flecks of oil paint and shards of splintered glass as they use knives, hammers, and chisels to strip some of the world's most famous paintings from their gilt frames. It's 3:30 A.M. before the last of the loot is carried out the side door and the gang vanishes. It is the most spectacular art theft of the century and the greatest robbery of modern times.

A wondrous oasis of serenity, charm, and unsurpassed beauty, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is unique among the world's great museums. It is the only private art collection in which the building and the entire collection are the creation of a single individual, an exuberant, flamboyant socialite who shocked, scandalized, and utterly fascinated Victorian Boston. Behind the public facade, however, was an intelligent, complex woman, a warm-hearted friend and generous benefactor to young writers, artists, sculptors, scholars, and musicians.

After numerous visits to the European capitals with her husband, Jack Gardner, a wealthy Boston businessman, she became an avid collector of fine art. "The greatest need in our country was Art," she once wrote. "We were a very young country. There were few opportunities of seeing beautiful works of art. I decided to make it my life's work if I could."