Gardner Museum Heist —Blog

Reformatted information from the WatchDog New England Our Staff page,
saved by the Internet Archive on September 25, 2014.

I don’t know if I will ever write a screenplay about the strange experience I had in August of 2014, with two former members of the Boston Globe Spotlight Team, but I have the title all picked out. I’m going to call it “Gaslight.” But as I have come to understand, to borrow a Stephen Kurkjian trope, when it comes to the Gardner heist investigation, gaslight is mostly the only light there is. You either navigate your way through this sometimes blinding, mostly gloomy netherworld, to sift through the wreckage made of reality, for a few slender strands of historical fact, with which you can pull your way forward, or you can allow yourself to be overwhelmed, and let the liars win.

This was not my first close encounter of the weird kind, inside the Gardner heist defactualized zone, the existence of which points to there being more, much more going on with this case than an investigation into just some "burglars, who would have just as easily stolen a car or somebody's TV, and didn't know what they were doing," as is claimed by the FBI's now retired lead investigator on the case, Geoff Kelly.

The year 2014 was a singularly meager one for Gardner heist news coverage. There was no mention of it around the time of the anniversary of the historic robbery in the Boston Globe that year, as has been the case for decades, with the exception of 2014.

The previous year had featured a nationally covered press conference about the FBI’s “progress” in the case, which didn’t amount to a hill of beans. But only a columnist for a suburban daily newspaper, The Patriot Ledger, Matt Connolly, a retired career prosecutor and former assistant district attorney stated would say so. “I happen to think the FBI is blowing a lot of smoke,” Connolly wrote.

The biggest news from the press conference that day had been the announcement that the FBI knew who the thieves were, but they were not releasing the names.

“There’s little doubt that what the FBI is doing would not have worked for any of us in school, Connolly wrote in that same column. "Although, I have to admit I never tried it. If only I’d have had the guts to say to the teacher, ‘Ma'am I know the answer but it’d be imprudent for me to tell you. So just give me an A.’”

In his prepared remarks, Richard DesLauriers, the Special Agent In Charge of the FBI’s Boston office said, “We have identified the thieves, who are members of a criminal organization with a base in the mid-Atlantic states and New England.’’

He also said that “The FBI believes with a high degree of confidence that in the years after the theft the art was transported to Connecticut and the Philadelphia region and some of the art was taken to Philadelphia where it was offered for sale by those responsible for the theft. That statement implied the thieves were still alive. But then when Tom Mashberg of the New York Times asked Agent Kelly if the thieves were alive or dead, Kelly wouldn't say.

As Christine James of WATD in Marshfield observed in 2016, "What gets released to the public of course in dribs and drabs is very little. First they came out and said we know who did it, and they talked about how they may have gone through Philadelphia at one point. And then recently they released a video, and I'm thinking well do they know who did it or not and why are they releasing the video now?"

Uh huh.

Kelly's claim of "confirmed sightings" was perhaps a bit of narrative housekeeping. In a front page 2010 Boston Globe story by Stephen Kurkjian quoted Kelly as saying that “In the last 20 years and the last eight that I’ve had the case, there hasn’t been a concrete sighting,or real proof of life,” Kelly said.

Kurkjian's Boston Globe as well as Fox 25 and other news outlets had the "confirmed sightings" right in the headline. Did Kurkjian not notice that a front page story, the only Gardner heist story that year directly contradicated his own journalism. He was heavily involve in writing a book on the case at the time. What does the term "authenticity" even mean in a polluted media environment such as this? And Kurkjian's reply to Robinson: "Thanks pal. I think!" Kelly is getting headlines announcing that directly contradicts what he said in what was then the paper of record in the Boston Globe, but what Kurkjian and Robinson are not sure about allowing me into the discussion about the No Escape Room Gardner heist mystery, which Bob Ward reported a decade later at what had become Boston 25News that "the mystery of the Gardner Heist, at 33 years, only deepens." That seems to be the whole idea.

Farfalle with chicken meatballs

A dramatization

Twelve years later Kelly was still the lead investigator on the case, which he himself described as "bizarre." on a podcast called The Consult: Real FBI Profilers

Kelly had been the lead investigator on the case for so long, even after 2014, when Connolly's column ran, that if there was a hoax on the public going on, as Connolly suggested, then that hoax would have to have been part of the mission.

Robinson was one and done. He never replied to my email, or subsequent follow-up emails, or acknowledged receipt of it to me in the first place in any way. He had forwarded my email over to "the expert," a trusted (former) colleague. Butt covered.

What would have been the professional way to handle this, in my view, would have been for Robinson to include the person who asked to be treated as a confidential source (me) in the decision, or at least to inform me of what he was doing, or to just reply to my email, or one of my subsequent emails. Robinson never did any of that.

Robinson wrote of my email to Kurkjian that he was "not sure of authenticity." Maybe it was all a dream. But on the outside possibility that my email was in some sense authentic, given that it concerned what has been called the biggest property crime in the history of the world, the responsible thing to do would have been to treat the email with the kind of care that I had specifically requested in the first sentence, despite his reservations about its authenticity.

For example, on March 4, of 2026, I sent an email to a Boston Globe reporter, Amanda Milkovitz, about a new $2530 annual fee, not covered by insurance, that my primary care physician was about to begin charging all of his patients, if they wished to stay with his practice. He was joining up with an outfit called MDVIP, which "supports affiliated physicians in delivering personalized, preventive care."

At that moment, Milkovits was the Globe reporter covering a closely watched and "contentious grandparents visitation rights trial in the Kent County [Rhode Island] family court." Milkovitz, who was in the courtroom, had a story in that day's newspaper based on her coverage of the courtroom testimony from the day before as well as another story about additional trial testimony in the Boston Globe the following day. I think it is fair to say Milkovits was as busy as any other Boston Globe reporter on the day and at the time I contacted her.

I had not asked to be a confidential source as I had done with Robinson, nor had I asked for any special treatment or consideration in any way. Yet, Milkovits managed to reply to me the same day:

"Hello Kerry, Thank you for your email. I'm unfortunately tied up, but I've forwarded your email to my editors, so they can look at your concerns."

Pretty standard stuff, except when the topic is the Gardner heist or maybe some other off-limits subject areas, apparently.

Kurkjian, one of the original members of the Boston Globe Spotlight Team, was also the Globe's Washington Bureau Chief from 1986-1991, at the time of the Gardner heist, where his own reporting had most notably focused on a personal scandal involving Congressman Barney Frank, a leading liberal voice in the U.S. House of Representatives at that time. Frank survived the scandal.

When Kurjian retired after almost 40 years with the Globe in 2007, he continued on as a free lancer, writing mostly about the Gardner heist.

Less than two hours after I had emailed Robinson, Kurkjian, who shared all of the emails referenced here with me, wrote back to Robinson: "Thanks pal. I think!"

Kurkjian’s response, it is fair to say, suggests some ambivalence about his having received the information I shared with Robinson.

Is this the spirit of inquiry that investigative journalists generally bring to their job? Apparently, when the inquiry has to do with the Gardner heist it is.You have one journalist, who can't forward my email along fast enough, to another journalist who seems a bit put out at having received it.

At least Kurkjian's pointed reply to Robinson offered me a little advance notice that his spirit of inquiry about the Gardner heist case would not necessarily include my efforts.

There is little reason to think Robinson had achieved the kind of professional success he has earned, the esteem of his colleagues he has developed, by treating potential sources in the way he treated me. It does, however, represent one more example of the strangeness on the part of journalists, when the subject of the Gardner heist and the Gardner heist investigation arises. If his response to me was an outlier than perhaps it is because the Gardner heist investigation is also an outlier in the way that it is covered in the news media generally. I certainly hope so.

While not fully vetted at that time, my information represented a strong break, a challenge to the official narrative the FBI was promoting, and seemingly, that was not something Robinson was interested in being a part of in any way, I concluded.

Nonetheless, I had no intention at that time of giving up on this untold, spiked, Gardner heist news story until the facts supported my doing so. To date, twelve years later, they still have not.

I had already been through this rigamarole with Anthony Amore, the security director at the Gardner Museum, the previous year. He had exchanged emails with me for ten weeks in 2013, as he worked to get as much information out of me while at the same time, not endorsing the conclusions I had drawn from the information I was working from at that time in any way, except through his continued willingness to communicate with me.

At one point, he said that he was going to take a news story type article I had written to one of the federal prosecutors working the case, Brian T. Kelly, whom he described as a friend, but I never heard back on his thoughts about it or Amore’s. Kelly left the U.S. Attorney’s Office ten weeks later to go into private practice with Nixon & Peabody.

Eighteen months later Former US attorney Brian T. Kelly, told the Boston Globe “he remains hopeful the masterpieces will be recovered. ‘All it takes is a new lead that leads in a new direction and a lucky break or two,’ Kelly said.”

But a new direction remains what is sorely lacking.

In the absence of FBI backing, it would probably be difficult and unprecedented to report that convicted spy Rod Ramsay should be a suspect, based solely on the information I had collected up to that point. I accepted that. But it could be an incentive for the media to investigate further, and I provided specific steps for doing so in my correspondence. It could also be a reason to attempt to develop some rapport with me. Maybe I had other information that I had been reluctant to share initially.

It was also an opportunity for the media to reconsider the role it had accepted, in taking what the FBI was saying at face value, and in the case of the Boston Globe and others, going above and beyond to disseminate it.

But the Boston Globe seemed to relish the role being the go-to media outlet for the FBI’s questionable assertions and narratives. They could instead openly express some skepticism about the FBI's ever shifting claims, or at least point to the lack of consistency in what the FBI was telling the public, in their reporting. They could question FBI investigators and their surrogates more stringently, and finally begin to ask for some kind of corroboration of some of the FBI’ more dubious, unsupported claims. That has not happened.

Instead the opposite has occurred. If the FBI was a friend in need, there were numerous journalists who were willing to serve in the capacity of friend indeed, like: Bob Ward, Shelley Murphy Kelly Horan Howie Carr, Stephen Kurkjian, Ulrich Boser, and Tom Mashberg, and very few, in fact none locally, except the Patriot Ledger columnist, Matt Connolly, who were willing to push back against the FBI’s tide of questionable claims.

A month after my interview with Kurkjian by way of an email to Robinson, filming of the movie, Spotlight, about The Boston Globe's Spotlight team of investigative journalists who reported on the systematic sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests and the subsequent massive cover-up by the Church, began at Fenway Park, in Boston, owned by the billionaire owners of the Boston Globe, who also own the Boston Red Sox.

The film starred Michael Keaton (Batman1989 ) as Robinson and Gene Amoroso as Kurkjian. A year later, around the time when the movie premiered at the Venice Film festival, Robinson introduced Kurkjian who was giving a lecture, and discussing his book about the Gardner heist case on October 7, 2015 at the public library in Plymouth, MA, Kurkjian’s hometown.

In one passage of his book Kurkjian writes that, "Hardly master thieves," the intruders pulled the majestic Rembrandt from where it hung on the far wall of the gallery and threw it to the marbled floor, shattering the glass in the huge frame," in his title-be-damned book, Master Thieves.

But Robinson was sure enough at least, and even endorsed the authenticity of Kurkjian's book "Master Thieves," which, according to its author, was not about master thieves. To the saying “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” should perhaps be added, or by the friendzy media, like Water Robinson who endorse it.

When "Master Thieves" first came out in February of 2015, Kurkjian said in an interview that “Over 25 years, so many names have been thrown into this. I had to come up with an overview that worked and conveyed – even if it wasn’t absolutely true – the latest and best idea of who was involved and how they did it.”

The Gardner heist case, with all of its sensationalist baggage, seems to have demanded a new genre of writing, one that is neither fiction nor nonfiction. Thanks to the Garnder heist, what with all of the "names thrown into it: by the investigators, there would in the future be written works that are nonfiction-ish, books, like "Master Thieves." Works that are categorized as nonfiction, but are acknowledged to not be conventionally true in the minds of their own authors.

The Dorchester Reporter article was headlined, "Veteran reporter stays on scent of the Gardner heist." Those "so many names," in Kurkjian's book, did not include convicted spy and admitted bank robber Rod Ramsay, a Boston native, whom my research suggested could be involved. Nor did it include the other individuals I had mentioned. If I was correct, Kurkian was staying on a scent, of something, but barking up the wrong tree, albeit one with bushels of government supplied low hanging fruit.

Neither did Kurkjian's book include the name of Brian McDevitt, a Boston area native, from Swampscott, who resided just three miles from the Gardner Museum, at 69 Hancock Street, in Boston's Beacon Hill, when the Gardner heist occurred.

It was at a time when the FBI was seemingly looking everywhere, except locally, for the thieves. In the months following the heist, the FBI's official narrative about their hunt for the thieves could be summed up as, "They’re not around here:"

Two months after the Gardner heist, a May 14, 1990 front page story headlined: "FBI Said To Have Suspects Worldwide In Gardner Theft” in the Boston Globe began:

"The FBI's investigation into the $200 million art heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum has targeted about a dozen suspects scattered across the world, sources said yesterday."

"Investigators are keeping a close eye on the suspects' movements, particularly if they travel in and out of Boston. Sources were divided as to whether any of the suspects were currently in Massachusetts, noting that they frequently traveled from city to city."

A “close eye”? Why were they not questioning these suspects?

Two plus years later, in 1992, Brian McDevitt did a television interview on the top rated national news magazine program Sixty Minutes about his possible role in the heist. Denying any role, he acknowledged on camera that he had spent the night alone at his home, just a few miles from the museum, and that he had no alibi.

In 1993, McDevitt was brought before a grand jury about his possible knowledge of the Gardner heist case. But by that time the 1990 Boston resident was no longer local. He had moved to California. In McDevitt's attempt to rob the Hyde Collection in Glen Falls, NY in 1988, a female delivery van driver went to pick up a package but was "confronted by a man with a gun who forced her back into the van," forced to drive a short distance. She was then "handcuffed, her mouth and eyes were taped, and she was knocked out by an ether-soaked rag."

By the time the FBI began serving up their official narrative, about local toughs being the culprits, McDevitt had left the state, left the country, and was no longer alive. He died in Medellin, Colombia in 2004.

The man that Shelley Murphy at the Boston Globe has been calling a "California screen writer," for over 30 years was neither, nor had he ever been.

1981 mugshot of McDevitt beside a photo of him with Rick Abath in a groupshot from Abath's soundcloud page.

Less than two hours after his reply to Robinson, Kurkjian emailed me: "Mr. Robinson (Robby) passed on your email that you'd sent to him. I worked for him at the Northeastern Initiative [Watchdog New England] and I am pursuing a book on the Gardner theft. I've read your message here, and had some questions. You able to talk about some of the details later today, maybe around 7:30 tonight or tomorrow night?"

That email was the most normal and professional thing about my engagements with Kurkjian and Robinson.

Kurkjian and I spoke at 8 o'clock that night, just nine hours after my email to Walter Robinson. What I had sent Robinson was a 5100 word document with 38 links to mainstream news sources, including the the New York Times, the Boston Globe, The Economist, and the Orlando Sentinel, as well as links to some primary source documents, which were available online, and in the public domain.

The report included several pictures of two of the three individuals I suspected were involved, who were mentioned in the document, alongside the Gardner heist police sketches for comparison.

My report also included two pages worth of specific suggestions on investigative areas that a reporter could look into to determine if the individuals I mentioned were indeed involved.

In my email, I made no claim to having any direct knowledge of the Gardner heist, or of ever having had any personal contact of any kind, with any of the three people I discussed in my document. I had no information about these individuals that was not taken from mainstream media news stories, and primary source documents I found online, with the exception of information about them, and their alleged involvement in criminal activity that had been shared with me several years before the Gardner heist had occurred.

My germ of an idea, my hypothesis, originated with that information told to me about these individuals many years before. And yet despite the modesty of my claims, Robinson was claiming to not be sure of the "authenticity," of my email as if it was purporting it to be the Shroud of Turin.

My information was possibly authentic enough, however, that he forwarded it to Kurkjian. It was authentic enough that I had managed to gain the attention of two Pulitzer Prize winning journalists with it, one of whom, had written dozens of stories about the Gardner heist going back 17 years at that point, and who wanted to interview me that very night, a person whom neither of them knew or had ever heard of before, an individual who had no affiliation with the government, the media, law enforcement, or criminal gangs, and an individual who claimed no direct knowledge of the case.

I was open to sharing this information in further detail with Kurkjian since he had the institutional backing from the Boston Globe to handle whatever challenges that investigating the story might entail.

I was not looking for a byline, payment, or credit of any kind. But I also had no intention of just dropping my efforts, if Kurkjian was not interested, unless there was a solid reason for doing so.

Writing 12 years later, I continue to have two problems with Kurkjian's initial emails to me, in setting up the interview. I have myself conducted a few interviews in my life, some with famous people, like "Weird Al" Yankovic and Bill Maher, for local entertainment 'zines, as well as with Mitt Romney briefly for the Worcester Telegram and Gazette, when he first ran for the U.S. Senate against Ted Kennedy in 1994.

My first problem with Kurkjian was his informing me that he no longer worked with Robinson. Although Michael Keaton, and Gene Amoroso would light up the screen, playing Robinson and Kurkjian, two years later, in the 2016 (Best Picture) Academy Award winning film Spotlight, as far as I was concerned Kurkjian was Roboinson's former colleague, not a current one. He was a guy Robinson used to work with, whom he had forwarded my confidential information to, without informing me of doing so. If he respected the material enough to share it with Kurkjian, he should have respected my concerns enough to let me know he was sharing it with him, which is not Kurkjian’s fault.

My expectation was that if Robinson shared my information with anyone, someone not formally affiliated with Watchdog New England, such as a freelance writer for the Boston Globe, like Kurkjian, that he would ask my permission. That was the kind of consideration I expected when I prefaced my email with a request to be treated as "a confidential source." But he didn’t even let me know he was doing it.

Did Robinson think I didn't know who Kurkjian was? The document I sent specifically referenced a "Special Report," about the Gardner hest case written solely by Kurkjian, and quoted from it.

Why would I contact Watchdog New England if I thought I could get satisfaction from Kurkjian or the Boston Globe?

What if Kurkjian had decided not to follow up with me after Robinson forwarded my email, and I had then decided to start trying to contact Kurkjian, not knowing that he had already received the material I had sent to Watchdog New England and had passed on it?

I never heard from Robinson. My subsequent followup emails to him were ignored. Had I not heard from Kurkjian either, I would not even have known that he had received my email.

Is this how a soon to be one of the most famous investigative reporters in the world treats people who contact him, concerning what is possibly significant information about a historic news story? A story he thought may warrant further looking into by a fellow investigative reporter, a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner who had been covering the story for over a decade?

Perhaps this is how Robinson generally treats potential sources, but his long and storied career suggests otherwise. Given all of the other strangeness about the Gardner heist investigation, and the news coverage of it, I believe there is something about the Gardner heist and its investigation that makes even storied journalists behave in disappointing and unexpected ways.

Most of the Boston Globe articles written by Kurkjian available online at that time included a Boston Globe email address for him, but it was a deactivated account. Still, he was a public person, I could probably find a way to get in contact with him. It likely would have taken an hour or two at that time, and I had considered doing just that after I tried to email him, at one point, and the email bounced back as undeliverable.

In the years that followed Kurkjian would write numerous editorials, including in the Boston Globe, claiming that there were people, who were holding back what they knew.

But Kurkjian, who claimed to be the Globe's "lead reporter" on the case at that time, could not even be bothered including an email on his stories that was not broken, so that people could share what they knew with him.

During a lecture Kurkjian gave on the case at the Foxboro public library in 2017, I pointed out that there was an open pocket knife behind Abath in the crime scene photo he had of him in his slideshow. Kurkjian looked, his shoulders jumped up toward his ears, and he then said it would have to wait for another time. But in none of the subsequent lectures that Kurkjian has done, or in any of the documentaries he has been involved with, has the knife ever been raised as an issue by Kurkjian or anyone.

In any case, the way Robinson treated me was not Kurkjian's fault, so I wasn't happy with the situation but it did not put me off about speaking with him. The other problem I would come to have with Kurkjian's emailed introduction and proposal to me was his statement: "I am pursuing a book on the Gardner theft." "Pursuing," to me suggested Kurkjian was in the early stages of writing a book, that he was at least still gathering information and that the book was still taking shape. But in fact, Kurkjian had already completed his book, by the time I spoke with him. It was available for sale just six months after his emails to me.

As the author of the already completed book "Master Thieves," The Boston Gangsters Who Pulled Off the World’s Greatest Art Heist Kurkjian was not in a position to introduce any major revelations about the case, of the kind I was potentially introducing, about perpetrators who were not the kind of Boston gangsters, the Master-not thieves Kurkjian and the FBI were holding up as the suspects.

In my own experience, I didn't "hear that," when Kurkjian interviewed me. I experienced something quite different. "Structural choices — and maybe bulldog competitiveness — further dull the storytelling" in "Master Thieves," Mason University English professor Art Taylor wrote in his review of Kurkjian's book in the Washington Post.

The investigation of Ramsay's espionage activities mostly covered his time in the Army from 1983-1985, when he was stationed in Germany, as well as some espionage activity he had been involved in, when he lived in Boston shortly after he got out of the Army in 1986.

"At Ramsay’s sentencing—in federal court in Tampa, in August 1992," according to Navarro, "General Glenn K. Otis, Commander in Chief, European Command (CINCEUR) from 1983 to 1988, testified through a signed affidavit that Ramsay and Conrad’s acts of espionage had left the West so vulnerable and so stripped of its own defensive capabilities that its defeat “would have been assured” had the Soviets acted on their intelligence and launched an all-out war."

The 13 pages of meticulously sourced information I had shared was not conjecture. I did not conclude that Ramsay was guilty, I suggested that there was information that justified Ramsay being considered a suspect. And I didn't suggest he had "some role." I said he could possibly be the man with the gold framed glasses who was one of the two men dressed as police officers who entered the museum that night, and did most of the talking, according to the security guard, Rick Abath, who let the thieves into the Museum.

Kurkjian seems to embrace the FBI's lack of enthusiasm for solving the whodunit aspect of the case. A couple of years later in October of 2016, for example, Kurkjian said on WERS that Abath's "involvement, has never ever been, at all been, his involvement with the bad guys has ever been proven."

In an interview with Forbes Magazine on March 10, 2026, Kelly said that Abath "took Manet's Chez Tortoni off the wall, one of the pieces that was ultimately stolen."

There are no question marks in Kurkjian's email because there are no questions in his email to Navarro. Kurkjian doesn't directly ask Navarro anything. Perhaps that's how the pros handle it when they're "in a very delicate, very tentative situation," as Kurkjian described at the Southborough library, but not with potential problem sources like me.

"The most important thing is to keep [your] eye on the narrative," Kurkjian told an interviewer in December of 2015, and my information was not going to be shoehorned into Kurkjian's and the government's publicly disseminated theory of the case.

Also since the Gardner heist took place in the heat of a historic espionage investigation and trial, the information could be classified. As part of his plea agreement, Ramsay agreed to undergo periodic lie detector tests. Before the Gardner heist Ramsay was permitted to drive a cab in Orlando, FL with its numerous military training facilities at that time, but in prison, after the Gardner heist, he was asked to agree to take periodic lie detector tests, to make sure he was not passing along classified information.

Despite what Kurkjian says in his email, I did not urge him to do anything. He is implying that his emailing Navarro has as much, or more to do with my urging him, as with his having seen one or more details in the information I sent, or something that I had said, that had him looking into Ramsay's possible involvement.

"Stephen, interesting story," Navarro begins. What story? The story, as told by Kurkjian in 200 words, is that someone, who is "conjecturing" that Rod Ramsay was involved, and that Ramsay and his roommate, who both look somewhat like the Gardner heist police sketches in Kurkjian's own view, is urging him to consider Ramsay as a Gardner heist suspect, and so he, Stephen Kurkjian, a three time Pulitzer Prize winner and the lead reporter for the Boston Globe on the Gardner heist case, is just casually emailing Navarro at three o'clock in the morning about whether Ramsay should be considered a Gardner heist suspect.

At no point in his reply does Navarro address the issue of whether he had "ever run across any Gardner connection with Ramsay." Instead Navarro answers the major question, not asked by Kurkjian, which is this:

Navarro knows exactly when he met with Ramsay in March of 1990, and in every other month and year, or has an easily accessible record of his exchanges. Six months after Kurkjian's email to him in August, it was reported Navarro had sold the film rights to a book, which had not yet been written, about his investigation of Rod Ramsay, to George Clooney's Smokehouse Pictures.

If Navarro had a meeting with Ramsay around the time of the Gardner heist he could have easily told Kurkjian. When his book came two and half years after Kurkjian contacted him, there was no mention in his book of a meeting, explicitly, or implied that took place between Navarro and Ramsay in March or April of 1990.

By the time of the Gardner heist, Ramsay was cooperating fully and getting kid gloves treatment in the hopes of his continued assistance. Six weeks before Ramsay's arrest, twenty months after Navarro's initial interview with him, he fretted over telling Ramsay that he was flying to West Germany to testify against Clyde Lee Conrad. "I think long and hard about this, telling Rod what I’m doing. Is he more likely to bolt if he hears secondhand, through the press or maybe some buried contact, that I’m testifying at Clyde’s trial or if I tell him myself? (Navarro acknowledges that Ramsay could have contacts in the espionage world a month before his arrest and a month after the Gardner heist.) "Either way," Navarro continues, "the risks are huge. Rod is fluent in German, Japanese, and Spanish; he could lose himself in any one of dozens of places, not excluding Russia itself. And of course, he’s inherently volatile with a proven track record of reckless behavior [emphasis mind] and rash decision-making.

Since cab drivers who rent their taxis like Navarro says Ramsay did, are not employees. They are independent contractors. With "the hours upon hours he spends waiting in line at Orlando International every day in a cab he can pay the rent on only if he gets more fares than time permits." “Why don’t you work the hotels, Rod,” Navarro suggests at one point.

If Ramsay's alibi was a certainty, or he was suggesting it was, he would not have asked this question.

And that was all she wrote for Kurkjian and Rod Ramsay's possible involvement in the Gardner heist. Based on the information I had shared and Navarro's email response, he considered Ramsay's possible involvement "far-fetched," he wrote in an email to me. He did ask me about the other participants, who went into the bank with him in the Vermont bank robbery he was involved in and "plotted." But I did not have that information at that time.

A month after my interview with Kurkjian, filming on location in Boston began on the Academy Award winning movie Spotlight,

In 2017, when the Book Three Minutes to Doomsday came out I told Kurkjian about it, at the Boyden Library in Foxboro, on April 6, 2017. Kurkjian "Is there anything about the Gardner heist in it?" Kurkjian asked me.

"There is zero possibility these guys did it and they know it," I wrote to Kurkjian in an email, after seeing him in Foxboro. It is not their theory. And then the government does not even have the guts to come out and say that's who they think did it and accept the consequences of their lies. And yet they not only don't have the media challenging them or ignoring them, they have you putting it in the newspaper that that is who they think did it under your byline. I have said who I think did it and I have it as a pinned tweet on my twitter page for over a year. And the people I'm talking about are alive."

Only 15 months earlier Kurkjian had asked me three times to meet with him in my home state of Rhode Island. He proposed having lunch at an Irish pub. Originally, I did agree to meet with him, but then I changed my mind after an email exchange with Anthony Amore about, which amounted to one more thing that made me think he could not be trusted.

Subsequent emails from Amore stated, "Keep in mind that you owe him nothing; he's not anywhere close to getting to the bottom of this; and you have nothing to gain from it," and "Beware of 'off the record' promises, Kerry."

In the original information I had sent to Robinson that was forwarded to Kurkjian and was the basis of his interview with me, I had written about how the FBI might have been reluctant to prosecute Ramsay. And now here was Kurkjian, a year and a half later, supporting my contention that the FBI might have been reluctant to "solve" the Gardner heist case.

"Though it has been discounted by investigators," Kurkjian reported in the Boston Globe two months earlier, "four of the former guards had told Kurkjian they believe the person in the Gardner heist eve video, released on August 6, 2015. The article also reported that "Two former guards who knew O’Brien well told the Globe they do not believe the man in the video was O’Brien. His brother also disputes the ID,"

I notified Kurkjian that I was no longer interested in meeting with him.

There is no discussion of any connection between Robert Guarente and Robert Donati in any way in Last Seen Podcast, as Kurkjian claims in his email to me. Donati and Guarente are not even mentioned in any of the same episodes. The only episodes of Last Seen Podcast where Guarente's name is mentioned are episodes five and 9. The only episode of Last Seen Podcast where Robert Donati's name arises is in episode 7.

In a 2012 Boston Globe article by Kurkjian wrote: "Guarente knew Robert Donati, one of the first potential suspects named." That is the complete extent of the Boston Globe's coverage of any connection between Donati and Guarente to date. There is no evidence supporting this claim in the story. In 1997 the Boston Globe reported that, "The FBI says it has no evidence linking either Houghton or Donati to the crime."

In one article Kurkjian supports his claim that Guarente might be involved, by asserting without any evidence that after he got out of prison Guarente invited old friends up to his new home in Maine. "Among those he hosted was Robert Donati of Revere, and David Turner of Braintree, whose names have been associated for years with the Gardner theft."

Kurkjian said that Donati and Guarente were great friends in the Netflix This Is A Robbery. He said Donati was great friends with Myles Connor in the same segment, episode 3, of the Netflix series.

Donati's son likely called Guarente because he was someone who might know what happened to his father, not a shoulder to cry on. Salemme is someone who could possibly know if Donati had been targeted by the rival Salemme gang.

Kurkjian suggested I look in his book to learn about the Donati / Guarente connection, what I found was not a connection, but the opposite of a connection, the impossibility of Donati and Guarente working together on the Gardner heist.

Kurkjian: "I told him [his anonymous source about Donati] that as far as I could tell, the FBI was certain the heist had been arranged by David Turner, who had turned the stolen art over to Robert Guarente."

So while there is an overwhelming amount of poorly laid out information about a gallery of local toughs, who may or may not have been involved in the Gardner heist, there is close to nothing about the actual investigation in Kurkjian''s book. What happened between the time of the heist and when Youngworth popped up seven years later looking to make a deal with the museum to return the art? Kurkjian claimed on Netflix This Is A Robbery, Episode 3, that "Between 1990 when the theft took place and around 1997 there was nothing,"

It also points to a problem with the free exchange of information through the mainstream media, that is accurate, fair and thorough, and not just at Fox News, and MAGA media. This problem persisted prior to the election of Donald Trump in 2016, whose victory received a big and unprecedented boost by James Comey, director of an FBI that had somehow, somewhere along the line become above reproach, in Boston of all places, where the FBI's corrupt relationship with organized crime leader Whitey Bulger was a major news story in 1988, in 1994, in 1997, in 1998, in 2011, and in 2013.

Even when acting in blatantly reproachable ways, as was the case with the Gardner heist anniversary press conference on March 18, 2013, a nationally covered event intended to advise the public on all of the progress in case.

by Kerry Joyce