This Is a Robbery: The World's Greatest Art Heist (2021) s01e01 Episode Script
They Looked Like Cops
[wind howling]
[traffic noise in distance]
[eerie music playing]
[man] The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
was a art thief's delight.
[suspenseful music plays]
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.
[blows smoke out]
[man 2] 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.
[engine revving]
[man 3] 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.
[man 3] But it was a good time
to commit a crime.
- [motorcycle engine revs]
- [siren wails]
[woman 1] 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.
[clock ticks]
[Clougherty] I was a witness.
[clock machinery whirring]
[atmospheric music playing]
[Clougherty] 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.
[Stratman] 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.
[Clougherty]
Two men in the front seats.
[Stratman]
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.
[Clougherty]
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 [chuckles]
if it hadn't been for
what happened later.
[VCR machinery creaking]
[dramatic music playing]
[man 1]
The biggest art heist in history.
[intricate orchestral music]
Boston, a quiet museum, a daring robbery.
[man 2] Vipers are in the grass
and are moving towards you.
[man 3] The 13 art treasures stolen
are worth a half a billion dollars.
Take a look at these composite drawings.
[man 4]
I have the paintings with me. Now what?
[man 5]
Easy to use as international currency.
[woman 1] Japan.
- [man 2] France.
- [man 5] Dublin.
[man 6] Saudi Arabia.
I know that's where they went.
[woman 2] These paintings were
a get-out-of-jail-free card,
and everybody knew it.
[man 7] How are those paintings
gonna get people out of prison?
What are we talking about this shit for?
[woman 2] Who could carry off
something like this?
[man 5]
Italian mob or Irish mob.
- How you doing?
- Good.
[man 4]
Everybody is whacked.
[woman 2] There's murders
on both sides, it's violent.
- [explosion]
- Jesus!
As long as you didn't do anything,
you got nothing to worry about.
[woman 1]
I had no idea what I was going into.
It was just horrifying.
[man 8] For now, the empty frames
are all that remain on the museum walls.
[atmospheric music playing]
[Anne Hawley] 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.
[Shelley Murphy] 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.
[Hawley]
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.
[bright, inquisitive music plays]
[Vigderman] 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.
[Karen Sangregory] 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.
[Aaron Fannin]
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.
[Heidorn]
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.
[reporter] 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.
[Cullen]
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.
[siren squawking]
But in the area where the museum is,
it's generally quiet.
[Sangregory]
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.
[phone rings]
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.
[suspenseful music plays]
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.
The security cameras had been turned,
the office door had been busted.
There was a frame in there.
It was like, "Oh."
And there was a crowbar
leaning against the wall.
The chief hands me the crowbar.
He's like, "Here, hold this!"
And so I'm holding this crowbar
and my mind is thinking,
"This is part of the scene
of the crime, right?
This is evidence. My hand prints
My hand prints are on this crowbar!"
And then my next thought was,
"He gave me this so that
I can pummel someone with it."
It's like I went in with this open vision
and curiosity, like,
"Whoa!"
And then it just, like [whooshes]
shrunk down really fast.
And then it was like,
"Where's the guys? Where's the guys?"
And then the next thought was,
"Are the bad guys still here?"
He picks up the phone
and called the Boston police.
[sirens echoing]
It seemed like all he could say was,
"I'm calling from the Gardner.
[panting] We've got big trouble.
We've got big trouble."
[kettle whistling]
[Hawley]
Must have been about eight o'clock.
We had some friends
come over for breakfast
when I got the phone call
from the security director.
And he said,
"There's been a theft
and you need to come right now."
[indistinct radio chatter]
To me, it felt instantaneous.
Like, the street was lined with cars.
I ended up sitting
at the alarm control center.
And the police come in,
and it was the first order of business
to plop down this big box of donuts
on the counter.
Right in front of me. Like, "Whoo!"
[indistinct police radio chatter]
[Sangregory]
They went up and worked their way down.
No one knows what's going on.
We don't know where the guards are yet.
I had never done the rounds
like the night guards had,
but I had heard there were tunnels
under this building.
And I'll never forget
this astonished look
on the cop's face, and he says,
"Oh my God.
If there's a body to be found,
it'll be in a tunnel."
[ominous music plays]
As it turned out, the guards were located
down in the basement.
Tied up in the duct tape and everything.
The day of the robbery
was the first and last time
I was ever at the Gardner Museum.
I was a forensic photographer,
and I was also
an image analyst for the FBI.
I may have gotten there about 9:15 or so.
Those shots there were taken by BPD.
They photographed Rick.
Randy was in the other shot.
But they seemed to concentrate on Rick
and how he was taped up.
He was duct taped.
His head and his hair
in a roundabout fashion.
And then his hands were bound.
Which I thought was kind of odd.
They had a little pad.
Why would you tape around the head?
Why not just put tape on his eyes?
I've seen people who were killed.
They were taped.
But Rick's taping,
I never saw anything like that.
I thought that was kind of odd
that he was taped in that fashion.
We were thinking, "Jeez,
if these were any real serious hoods,
why not just kill these people?"
Dead men tell no tales.
[dramatic, moody music playing]
[man] Wait a minute. Go ahead.
[Hawley]
I think I got there around 8:30, maybe,
or quarter to 9:00.
I can't remember exactly.
The FBI was there,
and they wouldn't let me in
to any of the galleries,
so I had no idea what I was going into.
And when I got into the galleries,
it was just
- [slams door]
- horrifying.
[woman] Did you think you would be
- [man 1] How's that?
- [man 2] Good.
- [indistinct chatter]
- No.
[Green] When I first entered,
I saw the golden frames
overlapping one another.
And you could see
that someone had used a knife.
The paintings weren't unscrewed
from the back, they were cut out.
I found that pretty interesting.
Why did they cut them?
It wasn't like cutting a piece of paper.
As the conservators explained,
the paintings are not just one canvas.
You can't cut them out
and then roll them up like blueprints.
They said it'd be time-consuming
and difficult cutting these things.
[Sangregory] We were starting
to hear things, like, "What?
They just cut this stuff
out of the frames?
[grunts] Oh my gosh."
It was, and it still is,
completely unbelievable.
It was incomprehensible to me
that even if you were wanting to steal art
that you would treat it that way.
[indistinct speech]
[Hawley] There were 13 works
that were taken altogether.
In terms of art historical works,
the most important work lost
is the Rembrandt seascape,
Storm on the Sea of Galilee.
It's Rembrandt's only seascape,
and that was
brutally cut out of the frame.
As was the Rembrandt portrait
of The Lady and Gentleman in Black.
That was also cut out of the frame,
and that picture had been altered
at some time in the past.
There was a man and a woman,
and a space between them.
When they X-rayed it,
there was a child
between the man and the woman.
Apparently, the child died,
and it was too painful,
and it was painted out by Rembrandt.
The Vermeer picture's called The Concert.
And you have a woman
just about to burst into song.
Vermeer's paintings,
there aren't that many.
Some say 33, some say 35.
For me, that Vermeer was
the toughest one to realize,
"Boy, that thing is gone."
As a guard,
that was one of my favorite pieces
to just study.
You could just be there
and you could just almost like talk to it.
And then, of course, there was the Flinck,
Obelisk in the Landscape.
The Chinese beaker.
That actually was the oldest work taken.
Those were the works
that were in the Dutch Room,
along with an etching of Rembrandt.
The Rembrandt self-portrait
was also off the wall.
And I thought, "Oh my God, that too?"
And I pulled the frame out
and the picture was still there.
Then, from the Short Gallery,
there were five works on paper.
Degas depicting jockeys riding horses,
beautifully drawn and executed.
And then, in that same gallery,
the Napoleonic finial
from the Napoleonic flag.
They kinda theorized that that's where
probably they were out of time.
Where they tried to unscrew the finial.
The, uh, screws were in
the cigarette receptacle.
They hadn't gotten through
taking all the screws out,
so they figured it was time to go,
that these particular items
may have just been an afterthought.
And then finally,
from the first floor, the Blue Room,
a Manet called Chez Tortoni.
[Heidorn] There are
significant paintings missing.
Ballpark figure on the cost
is about $200 million.
[Hawley] The FBI didn't have
an art squad. Nobody did.
It was just devastating.
[reporter] Uh, in terms of the rooms
[Hawley] So, they were struggling
to get up to speed on it.
And, of course, we were shattered.
It was like a death in the family.
[reporter] That's precisely why people
I was just totally numb.
[Arnold Hiatt] We were told by the FBI
we needed to get a reward going
before the trail gets cold.
That was considered to be
the most important move we could make.
So, I called someone I knew
who was in the Philippines at the time.
He was also the chairman of Sotheby's.
"What do you want from me?" he said.
And I told him we needed
a million dollars.
Sotheby's and Christies stepped in,
offering this million-dollar reward.
[multiple phones ringing]
We were just overcome
with calls coming in.
The phone system broke down.
[ringing continues]
A group of us
were just really around the clock
working to get the reward out.
I operate under the assumption
that we are going to return
Get these returned,
because we are a world-class museum.
[Hawley] The press was brutal for a while.
Just brutal.
[reporter]
How long have you been director?
For six months.
- [reporter 2] Guards, how old were they?
- I don't know.
- How long have they worked for you?
- Do you know? I don't know.
[reporter 3] What happened?
Would you say that the guards
screwed up in this thing?
Or were they taken advantage of?
The FBI's handling all of that.
We will
I don't have more to say now,
but we will continually update you
if there is any new information.
[tense music playing]
[Tron Brekke] I was there that morning.
And I think I was maybe
the first FBI agent on the scene.
Boston PD was already there.
This was designated as a major theft,
and I had responsibility
for the violent crimes program,
which included
kidnappings, bank robberies,
fugitives, that type of thing.
As I recall,
they showed me the security area
that had been breached.
These guys obviously had some idea
of what they were doing.
[tense music continues]
I had to sit down
with the supervisor of the squad
that would handle violent crime like this.
We tried to figure out,
"What do we do? Who do we look at?
Where could these things have gone?"
I only saw the guards briefly upstairs.
There were other people
that were interviewing them
in this conference room.
I could see on the security camera
looked like two cops out there.
They come to the door, they rang the bell,
and they said,
"Boston Police. We got a report
of a disturbance on the premises."
I buzzed them in.
[door buzzing]
They asked me if I was alone,
and I said that no,
my partner was off doing a round.
They said, "Get him down here."
The cop turned to me and said,
"Don't I know you? Don't I recognize you?
I think there's a warrant out
for your arrest.
Can you step out from behind the desk?"
And he said, "Up against the wall."
The guy who was dealing with me
was taller and skinny
was wearing these gold frame
round glasses, if I remember correctly.
He had a mustache.
It looked really greasy.
It was probably a fake mustache.
And he handcuffed me.
Cuffed my partner.
Very dramatically said,
"Gentlemen, this is a robbery."
[reporter]
The FBI released these pictures
after conversations with guards
at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
[reporter] Suspect number one
is described as a white male
in his early 30s,
approximately 5'10" tall, 160 pounds,
dark hair,
and wearing gold wire-rim glasses.
Suspect number two is described
as a white male in his early 30s also.
Approximately 6" tall with dark hair.
I don't think the sketches
was that reliable.
How long did they see them?
Did they get a good look?
Were they wearing fake mustaches?
Take a look at these composite drawings.
They may, in a manner of speaking,
be worth several hundred million dollars.
If, that is,
they bear a striking resemblance
to the two men who inspired them.
[Brekke] With something like this,
we try to take a minute,
step back and say,
"Okay, where do we go from here?"
This is not a crime of opportunity.
These guys were not dressing up
for Halloween in policeman's uniforms
saying, "Gee, a good idea, let's go rob
the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum."
You know, this was planned out.
[Robert Fisher] A lot of planning.
They had duct tape, handcuffs, uniform on.
They were ready to get in.
I've done organized crime cases for years.
I've done wiretaps.
I think I know
how criminals think and act.
- I don't think it was a cold call.
- [door slams]
You analyze the 13 pieces
that were stolen.
It just seemed like they had
either cased the place
or given specific information
about what to look for,
what's on our shopping list.
A finial off the Napoleonic flag?
[Fisher]
It's confounding.
It's hard to figure out
why you would, in a museum,
with priceless pieces of art,
waste precious time with this finial
that is essentially worthless.
[Brekke]
They had taken a Chinese artifact.
[Fisher] A Chinese ku.
It's old, it's somewhat valuable,
but not even close to some of the other
items of art just in that room.
Was the Chinese artifact a diversion?
There was one self-portrait of Rembrandt
where his eyes follow you around the room.
They tried to steal that
and they took it down off the wall,
and for some reason, it was left behind.
And they don't know if it was
just too big or they forgot it.
[Fisher] One thing that stuck out
was the Rembrandt etching.
It's the size of a postage stamp.
The frame isn't much bigger.
And yet somebody wasted time
unscrewing that
and then taking apart the whole frame
and taking only the etching.
Right, if you're carrying out
the biggest heist in history
and you dunno
if the police are coming,
and you have limited time
to get valuable artwork,
are you gonna waste time
with an etching that isn't that expensive,
waste precious moments
taking it out of a frame
that you could
stick in your pocket regardless?
I would say no.
[Brekke] The paintings themselves,
everybody knows about it
so you can't sell 'em on the market.
At least not on the open market.
Sold, 43 million.
[reporter] Even at a time
when prices are setting records,
dealers and curators say these paintings
would be difficult to fence.
Many believe they were hired
to steal what they took.
But unless they had a buyer
already lined up,
it may have been one of the dumber
robberies in recent history.
[reporter 2]
Given that these pieces are well-known,
who could possibly keep them?
That's a very good question.
Only probably a person who is determined
to keep them private
for the rest of their life.
[reporter 1]
Some masterpieces are so valuable,
they may be too hot to sell.
Which raises the question:
were these thieves
working for a collector?
[Brekke]
The Storm on the Sea of Galilee
is the only seascape
that Rembrandt ever painted.
Who is gonna have that
in their living room?
We started speculating.
"Well, maybe it's a oligarch in Russia,
and he's got it in his basement
and he goes down there
and he looks at it."
You know, the only Rembrandt seascape
in existence.
A lot of people have speculated
that it was a Dr. No theory.
[Monty Norman's
"James Bond Theme" playing]
Some rich oil baron or billionaire
wanted these particular items,
and they paid a crew
to carry out the robbery.
[Fisher] It's somebody probably looks like
a villain from one of the Bond movies.
He's sitting there with his cognac
and his trophy wife
or girlfriend next to him
admiring the art that was stolen
from the Gardner.
I was the unwanted child
of a German missionary
and a Chinese girl of good family.
Any thought that these paintings
are hung on the walls of Mr. Big
who has them stolen to order
is utter rubbish.
The problem with your Dr. No theory
is that as soon as he's commissioned it,
and the thieves see there's,
in the case of the Gardner Museum,
a reward for information
leading to the recovery,
what are they gonna do?
They're gonna cash in.
They're gonna set the guy up
and get their reward.
[chuckles] No.
Dr. Nos and so on don't exist.
You get some
very professional criminals.
But they don't know how to handle art,
what to do with art.
And that's usually their undoing.
Where you've got a professional art thief,
the theft is professional, it's skilled.
The artwork has been taken
because they know
how they're gonna dispose of it.
That's when you've got a problem.
[tides rolling in]
My name is Steven George Xiarhos.
I'm the deputy chief of police
here in Yarmouth.
Yarmouth is historic, quaint, quiet.
And, looking back,
a good place to commit a crime.
So, in '88,
I get called out to this scene.
Pulling up to this beautiful museum,
the Bangs Hallet House,
and seeing the immediate aftermath
of a really serious crime.
They went in the back door,
they overpowered the caretaker,
tied her up,
taped her mouth shut, her eyes,
then stole all of these items.
They knew what they were looking for,
they had been inside,
and they were very successful.
And then disappeared.
So you start putting pieces together.
You work with local police,
and then state police, and then federal.
And through all that, that name came up,
this man named Myles Connor.
[camera flash pops]
[reporter 1] Myles Connor,
a legendary outlaw from Massachusetts.
[reporter 2] In 1975, he stole a Rembrandt
from the Museum of Fine Arts.
[dramatic music playing]
[man] I first met him,
I believe it was in Mattapan Square,
when he had either a cougar
or a mountain lion on a leash.
[growling]
I said, "That's Myles Connor."
And I introduced myself.
And I followed his career.
And then got to represent him.
Myles was the man.
He could play the guitar and sing.
And he put on a great show.
He might've been really a big star,
but everything always was interrupted
by his other activities.
Myles Connor.
Yeah. He did a show at the
- [man] The Beachcomber?
- Yeah, exactly that.
[tides rolling in]
[hip bass line playing]
My wife in her younger days
would go there
with her sisters and a few friends
and see his shows.
He was a robber, a thief
a killer.
[Myles Connor Jr.]
Depends upon whom you ask,
but in general,
I'm known as an art thief.
And some people
consider me the biggest art thief
in this country
because I've robbed a number of museums.
But then again,
I was a rock and roll guy.
Smoke rainbows
The halo out ♪
[Leppo] Myles Joseph Connor Jr.
His father was a police officer,
his step-brother
was a state police officer,
his other brother is a priest.
His favorite line was,
"Where did they go wrong?"
He was a criminal.
He was this 5'7 ", 5'8" guy
with this booming voice.
He was a member of Mensa,
he was like, brilliant.
[man] He has a doctor's knowledge
of human anatomy,
and is a student of Eastern philosophy.
[Murphty] He was always pulling off
crazy capers and getting into trouble.
Anybody in law enforcement
that hears my name,
I'm sure must think that I'm running
second neck-to-neck to Attila the Hun.
[Murphy] He robbed museums up in Maine,
he had shootouts with police.
[gunshots]
Myles was shot three, four, five times
at once.
And went through surgery
without anesthesia.
[Murphy] He was the definition,
the quintessential art thief.
[Xiarhos]
When this crime happened in Yarmouth,
we tried to find him.
One day, I'm in my office
and I get a phone call.
"Detective,
I heard you were looking for me.
My name is Myles Connor."
He said, "Yes, that's my thing,
but I want you to know
I had nothing to do with this."
No one really saw anything,
but the cop in me wants to lock him up.
[Connor]
Take a peek here if you want to.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven,
eight, nine.
No, I think that's wrong.
Actually 11 to 12. [laughs]
You lose count.
When the Gardner Museum happened,
yeah, we thought back to this.
It wasn't too long after, you know.
Whoever did this, that's their world.
Art theft.
It's not like breaking into a house
and stealing a TV.
This is different.
Whoever did this and Gardner,
in my opinion, may be connected.
They absolutely have done it before,
they probably did it again,
and that's professional thieves.
[man] How many art heists have you done?
[Connor] Probably 30. Thirty-plus.
[man] How many
did the authorities know about?
[Connor] Very little.
He was so well-prepared to do something.
You just don't go into a museum
and decide to take a painting.
It's the getaway
that's the big thing here.
And Myles was a great escape artist.
He had always said, not necessarily to me,
that the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum,
that that was on his bucket list.
Any reasonable person on the planet
would assume
that you masterminded it
from the beginning.
Myles Connor,
the biggest art thief in the city.
He would be suspect number one.
If he wasn't in jail
at the time that this happened
On the day of the robbery
of the Gardner Museum,
I was in federal custody.
[man] The FBI nailed him in a sting
involving art he'd stolen years before.
The judge gave him 11 years.
Which means that when the Gardner
was hit in 1990,
the master thief Myles Connor
was behind bars.
But there's a saying that the guards came
and knocked on my cell door
to make sure I was there.
But I think that's more legend
than it is fact.
[eerie music playing]
[Murphy]
I think there was a feeling
that somehow
this would shake out fairly quickly.
And then as time dragged on,
they realized this stuff was just
way too hot to handle,
that it was gonna take some time.
[Fisher] I started in Public Corruption
March of 2010.
My first week was the 20th anniversary.
It was a cold case, it was 20 years old,
so I took time going back through,
looking at other angles.
I wanna take this through step by step
how it happened.
Not only minute by minute,
but second by second.
How did this thing play out?
And how many things had to go right
for these two robbers
to still not be caught?
[Murphy] What we know
is that 23-year-old Richard Abath,
sort of a music school dropout,
is on duty that night.
Maybe around midnight or so,
Rick Abath takes the first shift
to do the rounds upstairs.
He says there were fire alarms going off,
and that he ends up
shutting off the fire alarm.
He comes down and relieves
the other guard at the desk.
But what he does is
he opens the outside door
and shuts it about 10 minutes
before the thieves show up.
[Fisher] The first thing we know
is that outside door
that they entered through
was open 15, 20 minutes
before they enter it.
Why?
[Murphy] So, now at 1:24 a.m.,
two men dressed as police officers
show up at the door.
They say they're there
to investigate a disturbance.
Rick Abath says he buzzed the door
and let them in.
[door buzzes]
They say, "I might have a warrant
for your arrest. Step away from the desk."
Now he's removed himself
from the only place
where he can get help from the outside.
There's a button
that will alert Boston Police
that there's a problem at the museum.
And now the thieves spend
81 minutes in the museum,
helping themselves.
[Fisher] Ten minutes in a robbery
seems like an eternity.
That's what has always stood out for me,
the fact they were comfortable enough
to be in there for 81 minutes.
That's an incredibly long time to spend
when you have people tied up
and you don't know if police are coming.
[Murphy] Another peculiar thing.
In the Dutch Room,
there was a secret panel.
There's a door that leads downstairs,
and it was slightly ajar
when the investigators
arrived that morning.
Which also raised the question,
who'd know there was a door?
[Fisher] There were security cameras,
but the thieves knew
where the VHS system was,
so they took tape from that evening.
We know that at least one
of the proximity detectors went off.
I think the Rembrandt.
[alarm wailing]
If an alarm like that goes off,
typically they get out of there,
in case that alerted somebody.
But these thieves didn't.
I don't see how this was pulled off
without inside information.
[sinuous string music playing]
My understanding is at the guard desk,
there was an old printer there
that prints out
the motion detector alarms.
Somebody took that.
They took the printout, the paper.
But it was 1990,
so they probably didn't realize
that there was a hard drive somewhere
that had the data.
[Murphy] The most peculiar thing about
what happened during those 81 minutes
is that most of the stolen artwork
was taken from the Dutch Room.
There were also some items
taken from the Short Gallery.
The Chez Tortoni
is the only piece
that was stolen on the first floor,
from the Blue Room.
And the only person
that the hard drive can show
whose steps went into that room
[whirring]
[beeping]
[tires screech]
were those of Richard Abath
when he was doing his rounds
in the museum.
[Fisher] Best we can tell in the data,
they never entered that room.
So, that means somebody
either took it off the wall before
or after the police got there.
["Intruder" by Peter Gabriel playing]
I know ♪
Something about ♪
Opening windows and doors ♪
I think it happened before the robbery.
I know ♪
How to move quietly ♪
To creep across creaky wooden floors ♪
Number one,
you've gotta look at the inner circle.
I know ♪
Where to find precious things ♪
In all your cupboards and drawers ♪
[Murphy]
Looking at it through today's lens,
the question is,
"Whoa, why wasn't there immediately
a lot of focus on Richard Abath?"
[Abath] Once I sat down with the FBI,
I I knew.
I was like,
"I'm the guy who opened up the door.
They're gonna be looking at me."
[intense string music playing]
[traffic noise in distance]
[eerie music playing]
[man] The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
was a art thief's delight.
[suspenseful music plays]
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.
[blows smoke out]
[man 2] 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.
[engine revving]
[man 3] 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.
[man 3] But it was a good time
to commit a crime.
- [motorcycle engine revs]
- [siren wails]
[woman 1] 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.
[clock ticks]
[Clougherty] I was a witness.
[clock machinery whirring]
[atmospheric music playing]
[Clougherty] 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.
[Stratman] 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.
[Clougherty]
Two men in the front seats.
[Stratman]
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.
[Clougherty]
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 [chuckles]
if it hadn't been for
what happened later.
[VCR machinery creaking]
[dramatic music playing]
[man 1]
The biggest art heist in history.
[intricate orchestral music]
Boston, a quiet museum, a daring robbery.
[man 2] Vipers are in the grass
and are moving towards you.
[man 3] The 13 art treasures stolen
are worth a half a billion dollars.
Take a look at these composite drawings.
[man 4]
I have the paintings with me. Now what?
[man 5]
Easy to use as international currency.
[woman 1] Japan.
- [man 2] France.
- [man 5] Dublin.
[man 6] Saudi Arabia.
I know that's where they went.
[woman 2] These paintings were
a get-out-of-jail-free card,
and everybody knew it.
[man 7] How are those paintings
gonna get people out of prison?
What are we talking about this shit for?
[woman 2] Who could carry off
something like this?
[man 5]
Italian mob or Irish mob.
- How you doing?
- Good.
[man 4]
Everybody is whacked.
[woman 2] There's murders
on both sides, it's violent.
- [explosion]
- Jesus!
As long as you didn't do anything,
you got nothing to worry about.
[woman 1]
I had no idea what I was going into.
It was just horrifying.
[man 8] For now, the empty frames
are all that remain on the museum walls.
[atmospheric music playing]
[Anne Hawley] 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.
[Shelley Murphy] 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.
[Hawley]
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.
[bright, inquisitive music plays]
[Vigderman] 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.
[Karen Sangregory] 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.
[Aaron Fannin]
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.
[Heidorn]
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.
[reporter] 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.
[Cullen]
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.
[siren squawking]
But in the area where the museum is,
it's generally quiet.
[Sangregory]
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.
[phone rings]
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.
[suspenseful music plays]
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.
The security cameras had been turned,
the office door had been busted.
There was a frame in there.
It was like, "Oh."
And there was a crowbar
leaning against the wall.
The chief hands me the crowbar.
He's like, "Here, hold this!"
And so I'm holding this crowbar
and my mind is thinking,
"This is part of the scene
of the crime, right?
This is evidence. My hand prints
My hand prints are on this crowbar!"
And then my next thought was,
"He gave me this so that
I can pummel someone with it."
It's like I went in with this open vision
and curiosity, like,
"Whoa!"
And then it just, like [whooshes]
shrunk down really fast.
And then it was like,
"Where's the guys? Where's the guys?"
And then the next thought was,
"Are the bad guys still here?"
He picks up the phone
and called the Boston police.
[sirens echoing]
It seemed like all he could say was,
"I'm calling from the Gardner.
[panting] We've got big trouble.
We've got big trouble."
[kettle whistling]
[Hawley]
Must have been about eight o'clock.
We had some friends
come over for breakfast
when I got the phone call
from the security director.
And he said,
"There's been a theft
and you need to come right now."
[indistinct radio chatter]
To me, it felt instantaneous.
Like, the street was lined with cars.
I ended up sitting
at the alarm control center.
And the police come in,
and it was the first order of business
to plop down this big box of donuts
on the counter.
Right in front of me. Like, "Whoo!"
[indistinct police radio chatter]
[Sangregory]
They went up and worked their way down.
No one knows what's going on.
We don't know where the guards are yet.
I had never done the rounds
like the night guards had,
but I had heard there were tunnels
under this building.
And I'll never forget
this astonished look
on the cop's face, and he says,
"Oh my God.
If there's a body to be found,
it'll be in a tunnel."
[ominous music plays]
As it turned out, the guards were located
down in the basement.
Tied up in the duct tape and everything.
The day of the robbery
was the first and last time
I was ever at the Gardner Museum.
I was a forensic photographer,
and I was also
an image analyst for the FBI.
I may have gotten there about 9:15 or so.
Those shots there were taken by BPD.
They photographed Rick.
Randy was in the other shot.
But they seemed to concentrate on Rick
and how he was taped up.
He was duct taped.
His head and his hair
in a roundabout fashion.
And then his hands were bound.
Which I thought was kind of odd.
They had a little pad.
Why would you tape around the head?
Why not just put tape on his eyes?
I've seen people who were killed.
They were taped.
But Rick's taping,
I never saw anything like that.
I thought that was kind of odd
that he was taped in that fashion.
We were thinking, "Jeez,
if these were any real serious hoods,
why not just kill these people?"
Dead men tell no tales.
[dramatic, moody music playing]
[man] Wait a minute. Go ahead.
[Hawley]
I think I got there around 8:30, maybe,
or quarter to 9:00.
I can't remember exactly.
The FBI was there,
and they wouldn't let me in
to any of the galleries,
so I had no idea what I was going into.
And when I got into the galleries,
it was just
- [slams door]
- horrifying.
[woman] Did you think you would be
- [man 1] How's that?
- [man 2] Good.
- [indistinct chatter]
- No.
[Green] When I first entered,
I saw the golden frames
overlapping one another.
And you could see
that someone had used a knife.
The paintings weren't unscrewed
from the back, they were cut out.
I found that pretty interesting.
Why did they cut them?
It wasn't like cutting a piece of paper.
As the conservators explained,
the paintings are not just one canvas.
You can't cut them out
and then roll them up like blueprints.
They said it'd be time-consuming
and difficult cutting these things.
[Sangregory] We were starting
to hear things, like, "What?
They just cut this stuff
out of the frames?
[grunts] Oh my gosh."
It was, and it still is,
completely unbelievable.
It was incomprehensible to me
that even if you were wanting to steal art
that you would treat it that way.
[indistinct speech]
[Hawley] There were 13 works
that were taken altogether.
In terms of art historical works,
the most important work lost
is the Rembrandt seascape,
Storm on the Sea of Galilee.
It's Rembrandt's only seascape,
and that was
brutally cut out of the frame.
As was the Rembrandt portrait
of The Lady and Gentleman in Black.
That was also cut out of the frame,
and that picture had been altered
at some time in the past.
There was a man and a woman,
and a space between them.
When they X-rayed it,
there was a child
between the man and the woman.
Apparently, the child died,
and it was too painful,
and it was painted out by Rembrandt.
The Vermeer picture's called The Concert.
And you have a woman
just about to burst into song.
Vermeer's paintings,
there aren't that many.
Some say 33, some say 35.
For me, that Vermeer was
the toughest one to realize,
"Boy, that thing is gone."
As a guard,
that was one of my favorite pieces
to just study.
You could just be there
and you could just almost like talk to it.
And then, of course, there was the Flinck,
Obelisk in the Landscape.
The Chinese beaker.
That actually was the oldest work taken.
Those were the works
that were in the Dutch Room,
along with an etching of Rembrandt.
The Rembrandt self-portrait
was also off the wall.
And I thought, "Oh my God, that too?"
And I pulled the frame out
and the picture was still there.
Then, from the Short Gallery,
there were five works on paper.
Degas depicting jockeys riding horses,
beautifully drawn and executed.
And then, in that same gallery,
the Napoleonic finial
from the Napoleonic flag.
They kinda theorized that that's where
probably they were out of time.
Where they tried to unscrew the finial.
The, uh, screws were in
the cigarette receptacle.
They hadn't gotten through
taking all the screws out,
so they figured it was time to go,
that these particular items
may have just been an afterthought.
And then finally,
from the first floor, the Blue Room,
a Manet called Chez Tortoni.
[Heidorn] There are
significant paintings missing.
Ballpark figure on the cost
is about $200 million.
[Hawley] The FBI didn't have
an art squad. Nobody did.
It was just devastating.
[reporter] Uh, in terms of the rooms
[Hawley] So, they were struggling
to get up to speed on it.
And, of course, we were shattered.
It was like a death in the family.
[reporter] That's precisely why people
I was just totally numb.
[Arnold Hiatt] We were told by the FBI
we needed to get a reward going
before the trail gets cold.
That was considered to be
the most important move we could make.
So, I called someone I knew
who was in the Philippines at the time.
He was also the chairman of Sotheby's.
"What do you want from me?" he said.
And I told him we needed
a million dollars.
Sotheby's and Christies stepped in,
offering this million-dollar reward.
[multiple phones ringing]
We were just overcome
with calls coming in.
The phone system broke down.
[ringing continues]
A group of us
were just really around the clock
working to get the reward out.
I operate under the assumption
that we are going to return
Get these returned,
because we are a world-class museum.
[Hawley] The press was brutal for a while.
Just brutal.
[reporter]
How long have you been director?
For six months.
- [reporter 2] Guards, how old were they?
- I don't know.
- How long have they worked for you?
- Do you know? I don't know.
[reporter 3] What happened?
Would you say that the guards
screwed up in this thing?
Or were they taken advantage of?
The FBI's handling all of that.
We will
I don't have more to say now,
but we will continually update you
if there is any new information.
[tense music playing]
[Tron Brekke] I was there that morning.
And I think I was maybe
the first FBI agent on the scene.
Boston PD was already there.
This was designated as a major theft,
and I had responsibility
for the violent crimes program,
which included
kidnappings, bank robberies,
fugitives, that type of thing.
As I recall,
they showed me the security area
that had been breached.
These guys obviously had some idea
of what they were doing.
[tense music continues]
I had to sit down
with the supervisor of the squad
that would handle violent crime like this.
We tried to figure out,
"What do we do? Who do we look at?
Where could these things have gone?"
I only saw the guards briefly upstairs.
There were other people
that were interviewing them
in this conference room.
I could see on the security camera
looked like two cops out there.
They come to the door, they rang the bell,
and they said,
"Boston Police. We got a report
of a disturbance on the premises."
I buzzed them in.
[door buzzing]
They asked me if I was alone,
and I said that no,
my partner was off doing a round.
They said, "Get him down here."
The cop turned to me and said,
"Don't I know you? Don't I recognize you?
I think there's a warrant out
for your arrest.
Can you step out from behind the desk?"
And he said, "Up against the wall."
The guy who was dealing with me
was taller and skinny
was wearing these gold frame
round glasses, if I remember correctly.
He had a mustache.
It looked really greasy.
It was probably a fake mustache.
And he handcuffed me.
Cuffed my partner.
Very dramatically said,
"Gentlemen, this is a robbery."
[reporter]
The FBI released these pictures
after conversations with guards
at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
[reporter] Suspect number one
is described as a white male
in his early 30s,
approximately 5'10" tall, 160 pounds,
dark hair,
and wearing gold wire-rim glasses.
Suspect number two is described
as a white male in his early 30s also.
Approximately 6" tall with dark hair.
I don't think the sketches
was that reliable.
How long did they see them?
Did they get a good look?
Were they wearing fake mustaches?
Take a look at these composite drawings.
They may, in a manner of speaking,
be worth several hundred million dollars.
If, that is,
they bear a striking resemblance
to the two men who inspired them.
[Brekke] With something like this,
we try to take a minute,
step back and say,
"Okay, where do we go from here?"
This is not a crime of opportunity.
These guys were not dressing up
for Halloween in policeman's uniforms
saying, "Gee, a good idea, let's go rob
the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum."
You know, this was planned out.
[Robert Fisher] A lot of planning.
They had duct tape, handcuffs, uniform on.
They were ready to get in.
I've done organized crime cases for years.
I've done wiretaps.
I think I know
how criminals think and act.
- I don't think it was a cold call.
- [door slams]
You analyze the 13 pieces
that were stolen.
It just seemed like they had
either cased the place
or given specific information
about what to look for,
what's on our shopping list.
A finial off the Napoleonic flag?
[Fisher]
It's confounding.
It's hard to figure out
why you would, in a museum,
with priceless pieces of art,
waste precious time with this finial
that is essentially worthless.
[Brekke]
They had taken a Chinese artifact.
[Fisher] A Chinese ku.
It's old, it's somewhat valuable,
but not even close to some of the other
items of art just in that room.
Was the Chinese artifact a diversion?
There was one self-portrait of Rembrandt
where his eyes follow you around the room.
They tried to steal that
and they took it down off the wall,
and for some reason, it was left behind.
And they don't know if it was
just too big or they forgot it.
[Fisher] One thing that stuck out
was the Rembrandt etching.
It's the size of a postage stamp.
The frame isn't much bigger.
And yet somebody wasted time
unscrewing that
and then taking apart the whole frame
and taking only the etching.
Right, if you're carrying out
the biggest heist in history
and you dunno
if the police are coming,
and you have limited time
to get valuable artwork,
are you gonna waste time
with an etching that isn't that expensive,
waste precious moments
taking it out of a frame
that you could
stick in your pocket regardless?
I would say no.
[Brekke] The paintings themselves,
everybody knows about it
so you can't sell 'em on the market.
At least not on the open market.
Sold, 43 million.
[reporter] Even at a time
when prices are setting records,
dealers and curators say these paintings
would be difficult to fence.
Many believe they were hired
to steal what they took.
But unless they had a buyer
already lined up,
it may have been one of the dumber
robberies in recent history.
[reporter 2]
Given that these pieces are well-known,
who could possibly keep them?
That's a very good question.
Only probably a person who is determined
to keep them private
for the rest of their life.
[reporter 1]
Some masterpieces are so valuable,
they may be too hot to sell.
Which raises the question:
were these thieves
working for a collector?
[Brekke]
The Storm on the Sea of Galilee
is the only seascape
that Rembrandt ever painted.
Who is gonna have that
in their living room?
We started speculating.
"Well, maybe it's a oligarch in Russia,
and he's got it in his basement
and he goes down there
and he looks at it."
You know, the only Rembrandt seascape
in existence.
A lot of people have speculated
that it was a Dr. No theory.
[Monty Norman's
"James Bond Theme" playing]
Some rich oil baron or billionaire
wanted these particular items,
and they paid a crew
to carry out the robbery.
[Fisher] It's somebody probably looks like
a villain from one of the Bond movies.
He's sitting there with his cognac
and his trophy wife
or girlfriend next to him
admiring the art that was stolen
from the Gardner.
I was the unwanted child
of a German missionary
and a Chinese girl of good family.
Any thought that these paintings
are hung on the walls of Mr. Big
who has them stolen to order
is utter rubbish.
The problem with your Dr. No theory
is that as soon as he's commissioned it,
and the thieves see there's,
in the case of the Gardner Museum,
a reward for information
leading to the recovery,
what are they gonna do?
They're gonna cash in.
They're gonna set the guy up
and get their reward.
[chuckles] No.
Dr. Nos and so on don't exist.
You get some
very professional criminals.
But they don't know how to handle art,
what to do with art.
And that's usually their undoing.
Where you've got a professional art thief,
the theft is professional, it's skilled.
The artwork has been taken
because they know
how they're gonna dispose of it.
That's when you've got a problem.
[tides rolling in]
My name is Steven George Xiarhos.
I'm the deputy chief of police
here in Yarmouth.
Yarmouth is historic, quaint, quiet.
And, looking back,
a good place to commit a crime.
So, in '88,
I get called out to this scene.
Pulling up to this beautiful museum,
the Bangs Hallet House,
and seeing the immediate aftermath
of a really serious crime.
They went in the back door,
they overpowered the caretaker,
tied her up,
taped her mouth shut, her eyes,
then stole all of these items.
They knew what they were looking for,
they had been inside,
and they were very successful.
And then disappeared.
So you start putting pieces together.
You work with local police,
and then state police, and then federal.
And through all that, that name came up,
this man named Myles Connor.
[camera flash pops]
[reporter 1] Myles Connor,
a legendary outlaw from Massachusetts.
[reporter 2] In 1975, he stole a Rembrandt
from the Museum of Fine Arts.
[dramatic music playing]
[man] I first met him,
I believe it was in Mattapan Square,
when he had either a cougar
or a mountain lion on a leash.
[growling]
I said, "That's Myles Connor."
And I introduced myself.
And I followed his career.
And then got to represent him.
Myles was the man.
He could play the guitar and sing.
And he put on a great show.
He might've been really a big star,
but everything always was interrupted
by his other activities.
Myles Connor.
Yeah. He did a show at the
- [man] The Beachcomber?
- Yeah, exactly that.
[tides rolling in]
[hip bass line playing]
My wife in her younger days
would go there
with her sisters and a few friends
and see his shows.
He was a robber, a thief
a killer.
[Myles Connor Jr.]
Depends upon whom you ask,
but in general,
I'm known as an art thief.
And some people
consider me the biggest art thief
in this country
because I've robbed a number of museums.
But then again,
I was a rock and roll guy.
Smoke rainbows
The halo out ♪
[Leppo] Myles Joseph Connor Jr.
His father was a police officer,
his step-brother
was a state police officer,
his other brother is a priest.
His favorite line was,
"Where did they go wrong?"
He was a criminal.
He was this 5'7 ", 5'8" guy
with this booming voice.
He was a member of Mensa,
he was like, brilliant.
[man] He has a doctor's knowledge
of human anatomy,
and is a student of Eastern philosophy.
[Murphty] He was always pulling off
crazy capers and getting into trouble.
Anybody in law enforcement
that hears my name,
I'm sure must think that I'm running
second neck-to-neck to Attila the Hun.
[Murphy] He robbed museums up in Maine,
he had shootouts with police.
[gunshots]
Myles was shot three, four, five times
at once.
And went through surgery
without anesthesia.
[Murphy] He was the definition,
the quintessential art thief.
[Xiarhos]
When this crime happened in Yarmouth,
we tried to find him.
One day, I'm in my office
and I get a phone call.
"Detective,
I heard you were looking for me.
My name is Myles Connor."
He said, "Yes, that's my thing,
but I want you to know
I had nothing to do with this."
No one really saw anything,
but the cop in me wants to lock him up.
[Connor]
Take a peek here if you want to.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven,
eight, nine.
No, I think that's wrong.
Actually 11 to 12. [laughs]
You lose count.
When the Gardner Museum happened,
yeah, we thought back to this.
It wasn't too long after, you know.
Whoever did this, that's their world.
Art theft.
It's not like breaking into a house
and stealing a TV.
This is different.
Whoever did this and Gardner,
in my opinion, may be connected.
They absolutely have done it before,
they probably did it again,
and that's professional thieves.
[man] How many art heists have you done?
[Connor] Probably 30. Thirty-plus.
[man] How many
did the authorities know about?
[Connor] Very little.
He was so well-prepared to do something.
You just don't go into a museum
and decide to take a painting.
It's the getaway
that's the big thing here.
And Myles was a great escape artist.
He had always said, not necessarily to me,
that the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum,
that that was on his bucket list.
Any reasonable person on the planet
would assume
that you masterminded it
from the beginning.
Myles Connor,
the biggest art thief in the city.
He would be suspect number one.
If he wasn't in jail
at the time that this happened
On the day of the robbery
of the Gardner Museum,
I was in federal custody.
[man] The FBI nailed him in a sting
involving art he'd stolen years before.
The judge gave him 11 years.
Which means that when the Gardner
was hit in 1990,
the master thief Myles Connor
was behind bars.
But there's a saying that the guards came
and knocked on my cell door
to make sure I was there.
But I think that's more legend
than it is fact.
[eerie music playing]
[Murphy]
I think there was a feeling
that somehow
this would shake out fairly quickly.
And then as time dragged on,
they realized this stuff was just
way too hot to handle,
that it was gonna take some time.
[Fisher] I started in Public Corruption
March of 2010.
My first week was the 20th anniversary.
It was a cold case, it was 20 years old,
so I took time going back through,
looking at other angles.
I wanna take this through step by step
how it happened.
Not only minute by minute,
but second by second.
How did this thing play out?
And how many things had to go right
for these two robbers
to still not be caught?
[Murphy] What we know
is that 23-year-old Richard Abath,
sort of a music school dropout,
is on duty that night.
Maybe around midnight or so,
Rick Abath takes the first shift
to do the rounds upstairs.
He says there were fire alarms going off,
and that he ends up
shutting off the fire alarm.
He comes down and relieves
the other guard at the desk.
But what he does is
he opens the outside door
and shuts it about 10 minutes
before the thieves show up.
[Fisher] The first thing we know
is that outside door
that they entered through
was open 15, 20 minutes
before they enter it.
Why?
[Murphy] So, now at 1:24 a.m.,
two men dressed as police officers
show up at the door.
They say they're there
to investigate a disturbance.
Rick Abath says he buzzed the door
and let them in.
[door buzzes]
They say, "I might have a warrant
for your arrest. Step away from the desk."
Now he's removed himself
from the only place
where he can get help from the outside.
There's a button
that will alert Boston Police
that there's a problem at the museum.
And now the thieves spend
81 minutes in the museum,
helping themselves.
[Fisher] Ten minutes in a robbery
seems like an eternity.
That's what has always stood out for me,
the fact they were comfortable enough
to be in there for 81 minutes.
That's an incredibly long time to spend
when you have people tied up
and you don't know if police are coming.
[Murphy] Another peculiar thing.
In the Dutch Room,
there was a secret panel.
There's a door that leads downstairs,
and it was slightly ajar
when the investigators
arrived that morning.
Which also raised the question,
who'd know there was a door?
[Fisher] There were security cameras,
but the thieves knew
where the VHS system was,
so they took tape from that evening.
We know that at least one
of the proximity detectors went off.
I think the Rembrandt.
[alarm wailing]
If an alarm like that goes off,
typically they get out of there,
in case that alerted somebody.
But these thieves didn't.
I don't see how this was pulled off
without inside information.
[sinuous string music playing]
My understanding is at the guard desk,
there was an old printer there
that prints out
the motion detector alarms.
Somebody took that.
They took the printout, the paper.
But it was 1990,
so they probably didn't realize
that there was a hard drive somewhere
that had the data.
[Murphy] The most peculiar thing about
what happened during those 81 minutes
is that most of the stolen artwork
was taken from the Dutch Room.
There were also some items
taken from the Short Gallery.
The Chez Tortoni
is the only piece
that was stolen on the first floor,
from the Blue Room.
And the only person
that the hard drive can show
whose steps went into that room
[whirring]
[beeping]
[tires screech]
were those of Richard Abath
when he was doing his rounds
in the museum.
[Fisher] Best we can tell in the data,
they never entered that room.
So, that means somebody
either took it off the wall before
or after the police got there.
["Intruder" by Peter Gabriel playing]
I know ♪
Something about ♪
Opening windows and doors ♪
I think it happened before the robbery.
I know ♪
How to move quietly ♪
To creep across creaky wooden floors ♪
Number one,
you've gotta look at the inner circle.
I know ♪
Where to find precious things ♪
In all your cupboards and drawers ♪
[Murphy]
Looking at it through today's lens,
the question is,
"Whoa, why wasn't there immediately
a lot of focus on Richard Abath?"
[Abath] Once I sat down with the FBI,
I I knew.
I was like,
"I'm the guy who opened up the door.
They're gonna be looking at me."
[intense string music playing]