The Gardner Heist. Art Theft. Conversation: Still Unsolved, Gardner Heist Remains Largest Art Theft in History | Art Beat. Twenty years ago this week, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum was the site of the biggest art heist in history. Two men dressed as police officers broke into the Boston art museum and stole 13 masterpieces, including five Degas, three Rembrandts and one Vermeer. The works are worth an estimated $500 million. “The people who went into that museum were expert thieves,” Ulrich Boser, author of “The Gardner Heist,” told me. “At the same time, I don’t think that they knew much about art.
They cut two of the Rembrandts out of their frames. If they had known anything about art, if they had taken a drawing class in high school, they would know that that could potentially destroy these works forever.” I spoke to Boser, who has been following recent developments in the case, to see if authorities are any closer to catching the thieves: Transcript is after the jump. Editor’s note: Read about the FBI’s Art Theft Program and see details about the Gardner heist here. ULRICH BOSER: That’s right. 'The Gardner Heist' cracks into art theft. By Maria Puente, USA TODAY Everybody loves a mystery, but the mystery of who stole $500 million in art from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on March 18, 1990, is just plain maddening.
It's maddening that this spectacular theft — a dozen artworks, including a Vermeer, three Rembrandts and five Degas — turns out to have been preventable: Poor security and inside help enabled two thieves dressed as cops to get in, tie up the guards and spend leisurely hours cutting Old Masters from frames. It's maddening that the list of suspects — brutal Boston gangsters, creepy con men, small-time hoods, veteran art thieves, Irish terrorists — has only grown in the past 19 years.
Museum officials and art lovers, FBI agents and art detectives, journalists and filmmakers, and especially author Ulrich Boser all have been driven to a kind of Gardner madness over the years, chasing innumerable leads down innumerable dead ends. The Gardner Heist does not solve the case, but it comes close. The Gardner Heist: The True Story of the World's Largest Unsolved Art Theft (9780061451836): Ulrich Boser.