This Is a Robbery: The World's Biggest Art Heist

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum…

was a… art thief's delight.

Everybody talks about the Gardner.

This is… this is it.

The biggest art theft in the history of the world.

Millions of dollars' worth of artwork.

They disappeared.

Somebody had to know something.

Every reporter in this town eventually did something on that heist.

We were all hitting our sources saying, "What's up?"

People didn't seem to know.

The crime occurred in 1990 on St. Patty's Day.

Whatever drunken revelry was occurring across the city, who knows?

Happy St. Patty's Day.

But it was a good time to commit a crime.

- -

With this case,

it is really Boston's biggest unsolved mystery,

in addition to being the largest art heist in the world.

Everybody has a theory.

The people that did it…

maybe they're dead.

Maybe some who were involved are still alive.

When I start to think about the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

and the drama and the obsession with getting the paintings back

and the whole obsession around everything,

I keep talking about it because it's fascinating to me,

because I was there.

I was a witness.

That night, I had plans to meet friends.

It was quiet on Palace Road.

The street's very dark…

just lit by this really faint amber glow from the streetlights.

We were outside the building and I asked my friend Justin,

"Can you give me a piggyback ride?" Jumped on,

and we started walking down the street.

We're goofing around, we'd had beers,

and I noticed that this car has its running lights on.

We're coming from behind it.

When I get up close to it, I see that there are people in it.

Two men in the front seats.

There's a glare from a streetlamp,

but I can see the shoulder of a policeman's uniform.

Boston police uniform,

it's got a sort of distinctive keystone shape.

When we saw the officer,

thinking at that time that they had come to end the party,

our feeling was, "Let's just go."

I do remember that the car was parked…

right next to the Gardner Museum.

I probably wouldn't have remembered this night…

…if it hadn't been for what happened later.

The biggest art heist in history.

Boston, a quiet museum, a daring robbery.

Vipers are in the grass and are moving towards you.

The 13 art treasures stolen are worth a half a billion dollars.

Take a look at these composite drawings.

I have the paintings with me. Now what?

Easy to use as international currency.

Japan.

- France. - Dublin.

Saudi Arabia. I know that's where they went.

These paintings were a get-out-of-jail-free card,

and everybody knew it.

How are those paintings gonna get people out of prison?

What are we talking about this shit for?

Who could carry off something like this?

Italian mob or Irish mob.

-How you doing? -Good.

Everybody is whacked.

There's murders on both sides, it's violent.

- -Jesus!

As long as you didn't do anything, you got nothing to worry about.

I had no idea what I was going into.

It was just horrifying.

For now, the empty frames are all that remain on the museum walls.

With works of art,

they're only works of art because you're interacting with them.

I mean, they can't exist without you.

I was the director of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

from 1989 to 2016,

and the first woman to be a director.

The museum had become inward-looking.

It hadn't connected deeply to the community.

So, I was brought in

to bring the museum back to life, was sort of my charge.

I grew up in Dorchester.

I went to South Boston High School.

And the first time I went, I fell in love with the place.

I had been through all the galleries

and I can remember so vividly The Storm on the Sea of Galilee.

Loving that one in particular.

This is gonna make me sound like a wicked snob, and I'm not.

It's sort of like the MFA in Boston was like the Louvre,

and the Gardner Museum was like the d'Orsay.

So pretentious, I can't believe I said it.

Has more character. Put it that way.

It's such a beautiful environment

that you go to another place.

I like to call it the "a-ha" moment

or the epiphanic moment, which is a little too heady to say.

It's built to echo a Renaissance Venetian palace.

It's very plain on the outside.

You're just shocked when you come inside to this verdant, luscious courtyard

that is at the center of the museum,

and all the galleries on every floor surround it.

And then every gallery…

has its own theme.

It's probably one of the most

extraordinary creations by an individual anywhere.

When Isabella Stewart Gardner built the museum,

she broke ground in 1899.

There was nothing here.

It was a swamp.

And when she died, she left her infamous will.

She said that if anything were permanently changed,

the collection should be crated, shipped to Paris for auction,

and the money should go to Harvard University.

She was an eccentric in a world where being eccentric

was a way of getting out of the house for women.

I believe she was flirtatious.

She didn't mind being a little sexy.

And she dressed to show it off.

Which, you know, wasn't part of the time.

Before the museum was open, she wanted to test the acoustics,

but you have to have people in the room listening to the music.

But she didn't want anybody to see the place.

She was connected to the Perkins School for the Blind…

and she had the blind children come in

and be the bodies listening to the music to test the acoustics.

You know, it's not a museum.

It was her work of art.

It's an architectural spectacle.

To this day, I still have dreams about the Gardner Museum.

All of that stuff really seeped in.

As a gallery guard, we had all this time to spend

intimate time with the collection.

There's no downside to working in a Venetian palace.

It was just beautiful.

We had the Titian Rape of Europa.

We had the Raphael,

Matisse,

Rembrandt.

And it was just that whole environment.

To feel like you could reach out

and touch something from that long ago.

Here I am, staring at the actual marks

made by the actual hand

of this guy when he was, like, my age.

You just can't get any better than that.

If you got the call

to work overnight shift, you were happy to do it.

It was kind of a treat.

You were like, "Cool. I get to go stay all night."

All the lights in the museum were off,

and you just had your flashlight and a walkie-talkie.

You'd do your round, walk through the museum.

It was pretty spooky.

And then you'd sit at the desk…

and wait for something to happen.

And…

nothing ever happened.

That's the problem of the night watch.

Day after day, week after week,

year after year of nothing happening.

Just absolute benign-- Nothing happening.

And then March 18th, 1990.

Today is Sunday, March 18th, 1990.

A beautiful day in South Boston.

Now, as the parade gets underway, it's 48 degrees.

We'll see a high of 52 and clear skies.

St. Patrick's Day in Boston,

the day itself,

I'd call it just a drinking day.

People'd be drinking all day,

rolling into Saturday, then right into Sunday.

And Boston has its parade on Sunday.

It's not on the 17th.

The parade in Boston is confined to South Boston.

It draws in hundreds of thousands of people from outlying areas.

Quick march!

The other thing, it would attract an enormous police presence.

But in the area where the museum is,

it's generally quiet.

It was a total normal day.

Just coming in to work on Sunday morning in my role

to replace the two guys that would've been there all night

at the alarm control center desk.

Normally, one or both of them would be in there and they would buzz us in.

Nothing like that was happening.

There was no response, this was completely unprecedented

and very odd.

Too much time is passing.

So, I called the chief of security and told him we couldn't get in.

He said, "I'm coming in."

He took us around some kind of a back door.

As soon as we got in there,

you just knew something is really, really wrong.