This Is a Robbery: The World's Greatest Art Heist (2021) s01e02 Episode Script

[eerie music playing]
[raindrops pattering]
[Fisher] If we could go back
to the scene of the crime now,
with DNA and forensic investigations,
it'd be a much different crime scene.
It's 1990.
You had Boston Police first on scene.
By the time the FBI gets there,
the scene's been disturbed.
So, I was very interested in
where's the evidence,
what's the evidence,
and I'd like to review it
to understand what happened.
We knew that the thieves
took the VHS tape
the night of the robbery,
but I wanted to know
if we had the prior VHS tapes.
That's what I went to.
I got the tape, went to the night before.
I wanted to see, "How does opening
the outside door work?"
You can see a car pull up.
You can't really tell
what kind of car it is.
You can see an individual get out.
I couldn't tell what they were wearing.
They could've been in a police uniform.
There should be no way
they're getting in.
That's a locked door.
There's a guard there.
And the protocol is nobody gets in.
Rick was working that night.
The person was just buzzed right in.
Right through both doors.
The night of the robbery,
it happened the same way.
That struck me as odd.
[atmospheric music playing]
Was it organized crime?
Was it a crime of opportunity?
Was it an inside job?
[foreboding music plays]
[man] They said, "Boston Police."
And I buzzed them in.
[intense string music plays]
Boston, a quiet museum,
a daring robbery.
[Abath] I'm the guy who opened the door.
They're looking at me.
[reporter]
The biggest art heist in history.
The 13 art treasures stolen
are worth a half a billion dollars.
Take a look at these composite drawings.
[Murphy]
There's no shortage of possible suspects.
[reporter 2] Gardner Museum
doubling its reward up to $10 million.
[Murphy] How do you eliminate people?
[Green] Why not kill these people?
[Hawley]
I had no idea what I was going into.
It was just horrifying.
[reporter 3] The empty frames
are all that remain on the museum walls.
[atmospheric music playing]
[Fannin] After the robbery,
I think it was a couple of weeks.
I'm sure I heard through the grapevine
that Rick was the guy.
And then he just showed up one day
in Harvard Square.
I could tell that it was You know.
It was rough for him.
He just seemed defeated.
He told me about what happened.
I think I asked him,
I said, "Did you get fired?"
And he said, "No, I quit,
but the FBI wants me to hang around."
[Murphy] 16 Farrington was the house
where Rick Abath lived.
[crowd clamoring]
[band playing rock music]
[Murphy] It was sort of a frat house
kind of atmosphere in Allston.
Sort of a college section of the city.
And he was in a band.
A number of the band members lived there
and other friends lived there.
And it was a bit of a party house.
They used to put on shows.
[Fannin] They're just like cool guys.
You know, all long hair, hippie guys.
They're the type of hippies
that like, were good at chess.
They hung out and they went
in the basement and, you know
smoke weed, drink beer,
and they'd rock out.
The band was called Ukiah.
People found good roommates
and friends and it was just good.
I was like 19 years old.
Good times. [chuckles]
At one point we were over there,
it was like 11:30 or whatever,
and he was like,
"I gotta get a car to go to work."
And I'm like, "You're kidding.
You gotta go to work now?"
Rick Abath acknowledged
that he would show up high to work.
He says he was sober that night,
but we know he's not someone
that always plays by the rules.
[rock music climaxing]
[tense string music playing]
[Abath] Come in
uh clock in
There would be two guards.
Sit around, walk around, basically.
[Murphy] Abath's on duty that night.
The second guard, he calls in sick.
When you hear that, you're like,
a guy called in sick that night
It was St. Patrick's Day.
Mulvey was an older guy.
I had heard that he would
frequently call in sick.
[Fannin] Joe Mulvey liked the job,
but he didn't need the job.
If it had rained a lot and it was
treacherous to get out to his car,
he would call off.
But I don't know if Joe
would've opened the door.
Joe was that type of guy
that would have just been like,
"Mmm, no." [chuckles]
"You can wait there."
If he had come in,
maybe the museum
wouldn't have been robbed.
And then you could say, "Okay,
what about the guy who covered for him?"
Right?
The second guard on duty
had never worked that shift before.
Randy, I think, took that shift.
[scoffs] I think he went that night
thinking he was gonna practice trombone,
and just do a shift
and hang out in the museum.
The guy who covered had a couple hours'
notice that he was working that night.
So, yeah, again,
but that was investigated.
What is unusual is the fact
they actually got in.
That's where I get back to the man-trap.
There's two doors, both locked.
You get buzzed in the first door.
The second door cannot open.
The problem is you could be stuck there
impersonating Boston Police.
[Abath] I could see 'em
on the outside camera,
walking down the street.
They stopped, buzzed the buzzer,
and I just leaned over
to the intercom and said, "Yeah?"
And I buzzed them into the museum.
The fact that this worked as planned
by those two individuals
is hard for me to believe
if they didn't have some knowledge
that they were getting in.
Jesus Christ.
Look at this. Bastards.
My name is Steve Kurkjian.
I am a retired newspaper reporter
with the Boston Globe.
I was a founding member
of the Spotlight Team,
started in 1972.
We find out stuff, we reveal stuff,
and we do it for the public good.
There's our boy.
Two or three months before the theft,
he had let people into the museum
at midnight,
January 1.
A New Year's Eve party.
He is stoned and drugged out of his mind.
He was in a psychedelic fog.
What? It's mind-blowing.
That the security of this palace
with all the majesties of art,
was left in the hands of a guy
who was that negligent.
Uh, it's it's shocking.
[on radio] Down to Magic.
Celtics 5 and 0 this season,
when Bird scores 40 or more
[tense music playing]
[Fisher] Maybe it was two random thieves
decided to hit the Gardner that night,
and, by a stroke of luck,
they were let in.
I have a hard time believing that.
It's then hard for me to believe
they would have known about
the conservator's room.
Know where the VHS tape is.
Spend 81 minutes in the museum.
It seemed to me they knew
the police were not coming.
[Murphy] Richard Abath opened the door,
minutes prior to letting them in.
He says that was his practice.
That's what he always did.
[Fisher] To date, I've never seen
what a guard opening the outside door
looked like on video.
I was never able to find it
on the previous six days.
If there's two guards inside and you have
security cameras and everything's alarmed,
why are you opening that outside door
even for a couple of seconds?
[Kurkjian] No one else I talked to
who did the night shift
ever opened those back doors.
Rick said he did it all the time.
I haven't been able to confirm he did.
If he's an accomplice,
he's telling bad guys
who are waiting outside,
"I'm taking over the desk."
Now this would make Rick
a true accomplice.
Another peculiar thing is the Chez Tortoni
was taken from the first floor,
and also its frame was left on the chair
of the head of security,
and that was viewed as a little bit of a
[chuckles]
to the head of security.
A little bit of a snub.
There was some question
about whether that was personal.
[Kurkjian] Rick did not have a great
relationship with the security director.
People did say Rick
was a pain in the ass.
He acknowledges.
He said, "I was talking all the time
about the security system sucks.
We're in danger here."
The theft was Sunday morning.
Rick had put in his papers to move on
just a few days before.
Could Rick have snatched the painting
and hid it when he went back to the desk?
[tense string music playing]
In 2013, I went to his house.
Knocked, announced myself saying,
"I want to talk about the museum."
And he agreed.
We drove downtown to one of the two places
in the town that allowed smoking still.
Rick was a heavy smoker.
I had an interview with him.
[Abath] New technology.
[Kurkjian] I know. Let's hope it works.
All right, so
Here we are.
Rick
- [Abath] Yes, we are.
- Here we are.
[Kurkjian] We talked,
I think probably by 7:30,
eight o'clock at night,
until closing time, until midnight.
And he told me
as much as he could tell me.
[Kurkjian] Okay, so the thing goes down.
You had already given your notice?
- [Abath] Yes.
- Why give your notice?
[Abath] It was getting in the way
of playing with the band.
[Kurkjian] How long do you stay in town?
What happens afterwards?
[Abath] After the robbery,
I was planning on
calling in sick that next night,
because I had tickets
to the Grateful Dead shows in Hartford.
So I left town and went down to Hartford
to see the shows.
And I had a great time,
drinking and smoking reefer.
Did a bunch of acid the first night,
mushrooms the second night.
Then I came back to Boston.
[Kurkjian] Do you have any idea
how the people who broke in
knew about the museum security?
[Abath] No.
[Kurkjian] You've been
recently questioned by the authorities
about the Blue Room and your
Let's go through all that.
[Fisher] According to motion sensors,
the guard that let the robbers in
had been the last person in that room.
The system had been reviewed by
security experts right after the robbery,
experts that are still around today
in the industry and are well-respected,
and claimed it was working
as it should have, night of the robbery.
[dramatic music plays]
[man 1] Freeze!
[man 2] It could happen like this,
capturing a thief,
saving an irreplaceable treasure,
but it probably won't.
Incidents like these can happen
any time or any place in a museum.
Your job is to spot 'em
and to know what to do.
This film deals with security,
museum security.
Museum security is different
[Keller] I'm Steve Keller,
and I'm president of a company
called Steve Keller Associates.
And we're museum security consultants.
I did a risk assessment
at the Gardner Museum
in the year prior to the theft.
After the Gardner Museum theft,
the museum asked if I would be able
to come to Boston to test the alarms.
I had done some walk tests of the system
while I was at that visit.
I tried everything,
and all of those detectors
detected me each time.
How did that happen?
[interviewer] How long after the theft
were you there doing a walk-through?
Uh, it was a it was a couple of weeks.
This is a printout of the alarm activity
that occurred on that night.
When it comes to the alarm information,
that's the main stuff right here.
This is the important thing,
this printout.
[interviewer] Have you seen this before?
No, I haven't.
I haven't seen the printout at all.
I wish I had.
I wish they would have
shared things with me, but, uh
you know
I understand how it is with the FBI.
It appears that the investigators
made notes along the columns.
[pages rustling]
At 12:27 a.m
an alarm went off for a motion detector
at the exit corridor,
and then, within the minute,
an alarm went off on the entrance corridor
on the other side of the Blue Room.
There's no motion detectors
in the Blue Room itself.
So it appears Rick
passed through the Blue Room
and exited within the same minute.
At 1:24 a.m.,
the outside door to the museum
on Palace Road opened.
And that appears to be
when the thieves entered the museum.,
and then the next alarms occur
at 1:48 a.m.,
which was 24 minutes later.
Which is an awful long time
to linger in one location.
[printer whirring]
- [alarm beeping]
- So at 1:48,
we start to get a series of alarms
on the second floor.
The alarms occurred
in the Dutch Room until 1:51,
and then you start to see
other alarms occurring.
An alarm in the Italian Room,
then it went to the Little Salon.
And then there were
a long series of alarms.
[alarms continue beeping]
There's an alarm in the Dutch Room again,
and then an alarm
in the second floor hallway,
and then there were no further alarms
for four minutes.
But then there's an alarm
in the Little Salon again.
That just was curious to me.
There seems to be a gap in the alarms
from 2:15 to 2:23.
It's a period of eight minutes.
At 2:28 a.m.,
there's another 12 minute gap
until 2:40 a.m.
It appears that there were no alarms
triggered on the first floor
while the thieves were inside the museum.
According to this printout,
the thieves are inside the museum
for 81 minutes,
and they didn't trigger any alarms
for 48 of those minutes.
In those days,
you didn't saturate the museum,
so there might have been hallways
that didn't have motion detection.
I know they had difficulties
running wires in that building.
They also had a fire alarm
that occurred that night.
So it's very possible
that they had a power glitch.
I wish that I would have been
asked about this early on,
because it does change your understanding
of what actually happened.
[Fannin] Some days you'd go into a room
just to see if the motion sensor
would catch you.
You know, they worked, but
they weren't 100% reliable.
[Abath] Well, apparently,
me on my round
is the last time there's any alarm
in the Blue Room.
They wanted to know
how it would be possible
for the thieves to get that painting
out of that room.
- [Kurkjian] How they stole the Manet?
- Right.
Which is a perfectly reasonable question.
And my answer is, I have no idea.
[Kurkjian] Okay.
But the likelihood of your sitting down,
having a few beers, smoking a little dope
and saying something,
- is that about
- [Abath] That's pretty likely.
We were all bitching about
the security in that place.
For Rick to take that painting?
No way.
What's he gonna do with it?
Those guys cut the other ones
out of the frames
and Rick gets to get away with that one?
Please.
I don't wanna put anything
on Rick's shoulders.
I know Rick, he knows me.
Um
If we could've charged somebody,
we would've.
So, I think that speaks for itself.
We never made it to the point
where we could charge somebody.
["I Shall Be Released"
by The Band playing]
[Abath] I was completely panicking.
And then I started singing,
"I Shall Be Released."
I see my light ♪
Come shining ♪
From the west down to the east ♪
[Abath] What happened, happened.
For some reason,
I seem to be the only person
involved in this thing
who's not trying to figure it out.
And that mainly comes down to
I'm glad to be alive.
I shall be released ♪
[Kurkjian]
I think if there is a secret within him,
he said the wrong thing unintentionally
to the wrong person.
Did the bad guys know that there was
only one alarm to the outside world?
It was known by every guard
and every night watchman.
It didn't have to be Rick
who gave them that secret.
[moody, suspenseful music plays]
[Heidorn] It was mid-September 1981.
I was acting chief of security
at the time.
I forget what day it was,
but it was during the day.
Well-dressed fellow
with a briefcase came in.
It was Detective Clark from the FBI.
He showed his credentials.
And when I saw the badge
and the FBI thing
It gets your attention.
He said, "I just thought
you would like to know that
somebody is casing you."
He told me the whole story
about this guy by the name of Royce.
How this guy was an area lowlife.
Royce is gonna throw a smoke bomb
in the courtyard,
and in the ensuing confusion
pull the Whistler and the Matisse
and, I think, the Sargent out.
And they arrested him.
The FBI guy, Mr. Clark,
he said this fellow
had way too much information.
You either have someone
who's willingly giving out information
or you have a tapped resource.
You could've had an insider
friendly with organized crime,
or owed a debt to organized crime,
or a debt to a gambler
or a drug dealer.
And this was sort of payment.
We'll let you in the museum
or give you information.
It could've been that.
Boston's a small town.
Everybody's related, didn't you know that?
Of course there were people
in the museum that had mob ties.
Who didn't, right?
I think that a lot of people
had access to that place.
[Kurkjian] Louis Royce
was an active member of the Rossetti Gang.
And they were always looking for scores.
Banks, armored cars.
That tells me that the Rossetti Gang
knew through Louis
that this museum
was vulnerable to a theft.
[inquisitive music playing]
[Kurkjian]
In '81, the museum's made aware
that vipers are in the grass
and moving towards you.
So, that would seem to me to have been
clear indications
that it's time to get up to speed.
It was a real eye opener
as to how vulnerable we really were.
We sat down and talked with the director,
who was Rollin Hadley at the time,
and a couple of other people,
and sat down and saying,
"Here's the reality. What we gonna do?"
I was a little taken aback that
Mr. Hadley didn't take it as serious.
His attitude was more or less,
"They caught the guy, right?"
I go, "Well, it didn't happen,
but something very similar can happen."
[Kurkjian] It's inattention.
One museum trustee, Arnold Hiatt,
had been recently elevated
to a trustee in the museum,
and he said,
"We have to get a new director
who really cares about
Who's on his or her toes."
That's what they hired in Anne Hawley.
I took over in September of 1989,
but it was practically 1990.
It's such a beautiful environment
that you almost pinch yourself
to be there every day.
This was being in nature and art.
The collection, at the time,
was insured for everything but theft.
But there were lots of initiatives
that I was trying to push forward.
The museum had yet to install
a climate control system.
That was the priority
that I think we all saw.
I'll never forget, it was raining
and there was actually a cloud that formed
in the Spanish Cloister
in front of the El Jaleo,
because the moisture outside
was as high as the moisture inside.
There was a sewer pipe
that broke in one of the galleries.
The cast iron gave way
and sewage started coming down
in the middle of a gallery
with paintings and things like this,
and it's
And that's not good for a museum.
And of course
this just blindsided us completely.
[Hiatt] Anne Hawley,
she was so despondent.
She called me,
she said tearfully,
"You never told me this would happen."
And I said,
"I never knew it would happen."
[interviewer]
Were you ever warned,
"Hey, watch out, you could get robbed,"
or anything like that?
Yeah. No.
When an organization or a person
becomes a victim,
there's just a pile-on that happens.
Calls would come in
from people in prisons
around the country,
that wouldn't talk to the FBI,
they wanted to talk to me
or the security director,
because they said they had information
that they wanted to trade.
But I certainly didn't have the skill set
to be strategizing the investigation.
I want to refer all security questions
to the FBI.
[Hawley] And then, on top of that,
the museum got several bomb threats
and threats on people's lives.
So, there was a whole dark side going on.
[reporter]
Crime is suddenly the dark obsession
of the opulent world of art.
The black tie business
of champagne and culture
and price tags big as the Ritz
has made art burglary
a booming industry.
A shadow enterprise stripped of romance
that experts claim is increasingly
tied to the drug trade.
2,950,000.
We've come this far.
[Smith] It doesn't take
a person with a bad mind
long to start feeling maybe there's
an opportunity here to make money.
In the old days, a cat burglar
pried open the skylight,
came down on the rope
and took the pictures out and so on.
Now people walk into museums
and say, "Stick 'em up!"
The clandestine activity
in the traffic of stolen art, worldwide,
is probably about three quarters
of a billion dollars.
- [interviewer] Billion?
- Yes.
In the 1980s,
the crime of art theft increased,
but it made sense,
because the value of art was rising.
If we're talking iconic works of art
from museums and galleries here,
the sort of things that can't be resold
through the legal art market,
then this is used by the criminals
as collateral.
That's how it works.
[upbeat disco music plays]
[Ellis] If you are the owner of a house
and you decide that you need
some investment money,
you go to the bank
and they will advance you money
against your house.
That's exactly how the black market works.
[Connor] Back then,
cocaine was a pretty big business.
There was a number of people involved
in that business making a buck from it.
I lived in South Boston
in the 1980s and the 1990s.
There was more cocaine in South Boston
than any neighborhood in the city.
It was everywhere.
I mean,
I literally saw people do it on bar tops.
These were not nice establishments.
Did not bring my wife
to these establishments.
But it happened.
[Connor] Say, for instance,
you have a large cocaine shipment,
say, 20 kilos of cocaine,
but you don't have anything more
than 20,000 bucks cash to put down.
But you have several million dollars'
worth of stolen art.
So you give that art as security.
And they hold the art
until they're reimbursed
for whatever the value of the cocaine is.
That's how that goes.
[Ellis] They take
that recorded legitimate value
and they run with anywhere
between three and ten percent of that
as being what it's worth
on the black market to the criminals.
Why do people steal artwork?
Well, there's a number of reasons.
You get it because you wanna
continue to look at it.
You want the reward.
You want the insurance money.
You wanna save yourself from jail,
you wanna get somebody out of jail.
So it's a good bartering piece.
You know, there's a good example
of Myles Connor in Boston
stealing the Rembrandt
from the Museum of Fine Art.
Uh, his intention was, all along,
to use that as a bargaining chip
over his next sentence.
So you gotta look
at the motive behind the theft.
[Leppo] That's all Myles.
Myles did a lot of jail time.
State prison time, federal time.
[inquisitive orchestral music plays]
[Leppo] It's the mid-'70s,
and Myles had a parole violation
with the Feds.
Then he was picked up in Mashpee
with some stolen paintings.
I made a deal that they would reduce
his million-dollar bail down to $100.
Believe it or not,
Myles, he's on the street now.
I got the idea from an FBI agent
that said, "it'll take a Rembrandt
to get you out of this, Connor."
I said, "Okay."
And so, I knew there was
a Rembrandt on loan,
and it was uninsured.
And I knew that it could be taken.
[Leppo] Myles went in,
joined a tour that was going on.
Had somebody with him,
removed the painting from the wall,
went to walk out.
The guards
These guards were not musicians
like at the Isabella Stewart Gardner.
These guys were all retired cops.
[Connor] There was a phalanx of guards.
A friend of mine was down there
with a machine gun.
Not to shoot anybody,
but to shoot at the feet of anybody.
And sure enough, they came down.
He let go of the machine gun.
[rapid gunfire]
When that thing goes off,
it was like a vacuum.
[whooshes] Took 'em all back.
Except for one
that was a retired Polish cop.
And he was convinced that
"I am not letting this kid
take this fucking painting on my watch."
So, he ran down,
he latched onto the painting.
And in the back of the van,
I've got another friend,
with another machine gun.
He aims the machine gun at the guy.
I said, "Do not shoot the guy."
He hits the guy in the head
wh with his gun.
And finally the guy lets go.
[Leppo]
It later surfaced under a lady's bed
to be returned to Mass State Police.
So the Rembrandt was not used
for any monetary value.
[Kurkjian] He got two four-year sentences
combined into one four-year sentence.
Out of that comes this myth
within the bad-guy world,
that having a stolen painting,
a masterpiece,
is a get-out-of-jail-free card.
"The Feds will deal with you.
They'll let you out of jail.
Look what they did to Myles."
[mellow instrumental music plays]
[Connor] Anybody who was a thief,
an art thief,
knew about the Gardner.
You had to.
I've talked with guys and said,
"I've scoped that place out."
I'm not gonna tell you who,
but I've scoped that place out.
It was an easy, easy score,
as they say on the street.
[Murphy] We now know
that a lot of local wise guys
were scoping out the museum.
They were casing it.
But at that time,
the focus was on all these other events.
[Cullen] Put it this way, back in 1990,
if you're an FBI agent,
the way you get a promotion,
the way you get a raise,
do a big Mafia case.
The culture hadn't changed.
That was how you got
your name in the paper,
how you got your people on the news.
Solving an art theft
versus a Mafia prosecution in 1990,
what do you think
is gonna get more attention?
[woman] There was a theft here last night.
Two Rembrandts and a Vermeer.
- Is that why it's closed?
- [woman] Yes, that's why.
[man] The gates at the Gardner Museum
will stay locked
while authorities search for clues
in the daring weekend heist.
[Cullen] When the FBI gets in,
they kinda shut stuff down.
They assert complete dominance
or control of an investigation.
Not only not telling us what's going on,
they're not telling the locals,
not the Staties.
[Brekke] Much like a kidnapping case,
we wanted to be in it from the outset.
When you're at the FBI academy,
you learn about collecting evidence.
It's somewhat rudimentary.
Dusting for fingerprints,
doing tire impressions,
those type of things.
We had low-level training back then.
If the Gardner was robbed today,
it would be different.
There were a lot of things
that weren't taken
that we would have taken today.
In 1990, that wasn't part of the protocol.
And I remember going into
the conservator's room.
That particular door was ajar.
So I dunno who opened that.
I didn't know if the police opened it.
Did the robbers open that door?
I'm not sure.
That's another thing
with crime scenes now.
We know everybody that entered
the crime scene,
where they came from,
when they left.
There's a person at the door
that does all of that.
Back then, yeah, there wasn't.
We figured if we had any luck at all
of obtaining any type
of fingerprint, ridge detail,
it would've been off the duct tape.
The way we had the tape at the time,
it was removed by BPD.
It was all balled up.
That tape then would've been taken in.
Liquid nitrogen would be applied to it.
It would release the bonding properties.
You'd be able to stretch the duct tape out
so that it's straight.
So we were hoping to do that,
but then the tape went missing.
It's gone. It's vanished.
They don't have it. They can't test it.
[Green]
To the best of my knowledge,
the tape was never examined
for fingerprints.
Back then you'd sign it out.
I'd say, "I'm giving this
to the State Police to test."
And off it would go.
So I don't think there was any of that
exchange of paper and whatnot.
It went missing. I think to this day,
they probably don't have any idea
where it's at.
You know,
to this day, that sticks in my craw.
Because of all the things
we probably would have found from that.
They weren't thinking about DNA in 1990,
but you would think that evidence
would be preserved.
They've said, "Chances of finding anything
on duct tape from 29 years ago,
what are the chances?"
You don't know you don't have it,
if you don't look.
There's never been forensic evidence,
DNA, fingerprints,
hair, anything like that
that says, "These are the thieves."
I remember I was sitting in the kitchen,
I'm reading the Boston Globe,
and seeing something about
the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
Reading what happened,
that it was two men
dressed as police officers
that robbed the museum,
it was just like the coin drop.
Like, "Oh my God!"
[suspenseful music playing]
For uniformed policemen to be in
what I recalled as a Dodge Daytona,
this little hatchback.
That seems odd.
When we went to make a statement
to the police in Dudley Square,
I pointed out the patch
that was on a uniform jacket
hanging in the room.
Said, "It was just like that.
It was exactly that."
Then he took it away,
'cause he didn't want me
to presumably have my memory be informed
by the things in the room
while taking a statement.
It looks like these are the notes
that detectives would have taken
when we were interviewed
at the police station.
[Stratman] Interesting.
I didn't recall giving such an explicit
description of the person.
White male, dark hair.
[Clougherty]
Black hair, a mustache.
Medium to dark complexion.
Early 30s, wide eyes,
hair below the ears.
Average height or a little taller.
And I also remember seeing the sketches.
And I thought,
"Neither of these look like the guys
that I got a really good look at."
[Stratman] To my knowledge,
the folks I spoke with at the station
were members of the Boston police force.
I have no recollection
of ever talking to the FBI.
None of the FBI folks
reached out to me later on.
If it was the Boston Police,
was that information shared with the FBI?
I don't know.
But someone who was responsible
for the investigation
never followed through
and contacted me again,
and I was an eye witness.
[Kurkjian] There were 45 agents
working the case right at the outset.
Well, that ended soon after,
within a month,
and those agents went on to other things.
It then evolved down to one agent,
who was 26 years old.
[Cullen] Is that how old
the FBI agent was? He was 26?
That tells you something right there.
You would think, if this was the movies,
they'd make a call.
"Hello, Mr. Desmond."
Some guy picks up the phone
on a beach somewhere.
"Your services are needed."
They'd bring in some real high-powered guy
who had done something like this
somewhere before.
It doesn't sound like that happened.
[Fisher] By the time I get involved,
it's 20 years later.
I spent a lot of time focused on,
"What evidence do we have?"
[interviewer] Was there any identification
you guys could have made
from who had entered the museum
the night previous?
Um, we tried to figure out who that was.
We made the determination
it would be best to release the video
to the public,
and the Globe, New York Times,
and other outlets picked it up.
The car drives up,
you see some light in it.
[reporter] I sat down with FBI assistant
special agent in charge Peter Kowenhoven,
who took me through the 25-year-old video
released publicly for the very first time.
He shows me the guy
he wants your help in identifying.
That's the individual of interest.
He just came in.
You see the corner of his head
as it bounces back and forth.
[interviewer] Begs the question,
had nobody seen that tape?
I don't know.
I had never seen it. I don't
I have never spoken to anybody
that has seen the tape.
A cold case, you don't think of that.
The stuff's been in storage for 25 years.
You don't think of getting it out,
showing it to the public.
You think everyone's seen it
like you have, and they haven't.
[interviewer] What did you think
when that police tape comes out in 2015?
I laughed.
You mean to say
it took all that time to see it?
[dramatic music playing]
The FBI has concluded they know who it is,
and it was potentially
one of the employees.
[Kurkjian] The FBI, they get a call
from a couple of ex-guards,
one of whom says,
"That's nothing suspicious.
That's not a mystery."
She says, "That's Larry O'Brien,
the deputy director."
Why are we learning about this in 2015?
Why 25 years after the theft?
[Hiatt] We didn't have
much confidence in the FBI.
It didn't seem to be the high priority.
We didn't think we were getting,
really, their full attention.
[pulsing, moody music plays]
[Hiatt] They seemed distracted.
I didn't know why at the time.
[Murphy] After the heist,
the largest art heist in the world,
that same week there were
these blockbuster indictments
where 21 members
of the New England Mafia
were charged with racketeering
and loan sharking and murders.
I can tell you, the conversation
wasn't about the museum.
[reporter]
It should lay to rest once and for all
any doubts that La Cosa Nostra
is a figment of law enforcement's
imagination.
How you doin'?
- [man] Good. How's it going?
- Good, good.
[Murphy] But it does seem like
within the criminal world here,
these paintings were
a get-out-of-jail-free card.
This had been done before.
This isn't just conjecture.
Who did it,
why did they do it,
and whom were they connected with
that it would allow them
to get away with this art?
[intense string music playing]