The 1990 art theft worth half a billion dollars
There comes a time in every young nerd’s life when they have to reckon with the fact that in real life, crime doesn’t work as it does in the movies. Criminals in our world aren’t dashing rogues sticking it to the man, they’re desperate, often morally bankrupt individuals who do not care for honour, charm, art or style.
At least, most of the time. The absolute truth is that crime can sometimes be just as stylish as it is in the movies, after all, where else would it come from if it wasn’t a little bit real? The tough part, as it always does, comes from the morals of it all. These people aren’t doing their work because it fucks over a corrupt businessman or a former partner who stabbed them in the back. They’re doing it because it pays, and they’re doing it to you if the price is right… Yet their methods can still be outrageously cool.
Take the case of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum theft of 1990 as a perfect example of this. The Gardner is one of the crown jewels of the Boston art scene and has been since its opening in 1903. The courtyard alone is still one of the most breathtaking visits you can make in the city, but in the 1980s, times were getting tough. The issue was that the actual Isabella Stewart Gardner, who had curated the museum on its opening, had left it a ton of money in her will on one condition.
That condition being that they wouldn’t sell any of the museum’s collection or purchase any new additions to it. This wasn’t a huge issue initially, but once those funds ran out, they were left with a tough choice. Cut corners when they could or go against the wishes of the woman on the marquee. They chose to cut corners, and the first corner cut was the museum’s security measures. By the early 1980s, the museum’s lax security measures were an open secret amongst its staff.
Really, it was only a matter of time before this information leaked into the real world.
How was this art heist pulled off?
On St Patrick’s Day weekend, two 20-something security guards were working the overnight shift at the Gardner – at around half past one in the morning, two men calling themselves police officers buzzed the security intercom and said they were responding to a disturbance call earlier in the night, and while the fire alarms had gone off earlier in the night, the “officers” wouldn’t take the guards’ reports that it was a false alarm at face value, they wanted to double-check that there were no further issues.
Thus, the guards let them through. Within minutes, the jig was up. The cops weren’t cops at all, and they had the guards bound and handcuffed, knowing that there was only one panic button in the building that would alert the cops and keeping both guards well away from it. The two thieves made off with an astonishing 13 pieces of art, including three works by Rembrandt, five by Degas and a Manet original. Valued at over $200million at the time.
This would only go up, as, unlike most art thefts, the stolen works weren’t returned or recovered. In 2000, the works were revalued, and the total value of the stolen works from the Gardner was no over $500million dollars.
While it’s generally accepted that this job was the work of the Boston mafia, any further information about the heist is nowhere to be found, and to this day, the works are still gone, with the Gardner still hanging their empty frames up in the museum as a poignant reminder of everything that was lost that day.