At 1:24 a.m. on March 18, 1990, two thieves stole thirteen works of art from the Italianate mansion, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, including Vermeer's midcareer masterpiece, The Concert.
At the time, one of the two museum guards was sitting behind the main security desk, the other guard was elsewhere. The thieves, disguised as Boston policemen and sporting false moustaches, buzzed the museum's side-entrance door and ordered, "Police! Let us in. We heard about a disturbance in the courtyard." When the door was opened without question, one of the fake policemen demanded identification saying they had a warrant for the young guard. Once arrived at the main security desk, one of the thieves said "You look familiar…I think we have a default warrant out for you." The guard stepped out from behind his chest-high front desk, where he had access to the only alarm button in the museum to alert the police, and handed him his driver's license and student ID. He was promptly handcuffed. When the guard protested that he had never been arrested, the thief replied, "You're not being arrested, this is a robbery. Don't give us any problems, and you won't get hurt." "'Don't worry," the younger guard responded, "they don't pay me enough to get hurt."Quoted material by Stephen Kurkjian, "Secrets behind the largest art theft in history," BostonGlobe.com, March 13, 2005.
Within a few minutes both guards were bound with duct tape, brought to the museum's basement and taped to pipes on hundred feet from each other.
The art sleuth Charley Hill, who had solved various clamorous art thefts and had personally recovered Vermeer's Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid, said he believed the thieves may have chosen St Patrick's Day to stage the heist counting on celebrations which are particularly noisy in an Irish city like Boston.
In a Boston Globe interview made years after the crime, the guard who let the thieves in furnished many details about the evening that had not previously come to light exposing how unprotected the museum was at the time. Both guards were inexperienced. They were often bored since had little to do except making rounds throughout the four-story building and manning the main security desk equipped with four video monitors. One of the guards was a student who played with his rock band until midnight when his shift at the museum began. He admitted that he occasionally smoked marijuana before assuming duty at the Gardner and had invited four friends into the museum for some Christmas season cheer. They sat around getting drunk on wine and appreciating the artwork, he recalled. Occasionally, the guards had made a game of trying to complete their rounds without setting off a single motion detector. It was something to do. The guards later lamented they had been undertrained and had not been instructed what to do if policemen requested to enter the museum.
Police Identikit of the Gardner thieves.
In all, the thieves spent one hour and twenty-one minutes moving through the dimly lit galleries of the museum which had been built by Mrs. Gardner at the turn of the century in order to house her private art collection and share it with the public. The Gardner galleries were protected with motion detectors that sent a silent alert to a computer system located in a small room behind the main security desk. Although the thieves had removed the videotape from the recorder that had captured their images at the side door and in the building, they did not realize their tracks had been captured on the computer's hard drive. Once the guards had been immobilized, the thieves proceeded upstairs to the Dutch room and pulled Rembrandt's Self-Portrait off the wall but were unable to remove the wooden panel out of the heavy frame. The Vermeer and the Rembrandt were prime targets, but in all, thirteen works of art, estimated to be valued at a total of $500 million were carried away. Items taken included a Manet, five drawings by Degas, three Rembrandts. When they had gotten what they wanted, they made two trips to their car to carry all the loot and vanished into the wet night.
Although the thieves had demonstrated considerable audacity, they were not professionals. Some of the paintings were clumsily torn from their frames leaving broken glass and shreds of canvas on the floor; and not all the objects they took were the most valuable. Moreover, they had lost much time attempting to remove a Napoleonic banner hanging above the entry to the Tapestry Room of relatively little value.
The next morning, the security guard who came to relieve the two night guards, discovered that the museum had been robbed and notified the police and director Anne Hawley.
As of today, the case represents the largest property crime in U.S. history.
