| The "old" Gardner heist scenario:
Two guys dressed like cops overpower two guards and then proceed to deflower the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum of over a half billion dollars in rare artwork. Twenty years and busloads of suspects later, there is no evidence, no real clues, and not a single arrest. Not much to show after spending $20 million investigating the heist. Common sense says that something is not quite right here. And common sense is correct.
The "new" Gardner heist scenario:
A brilliant plan, double dealing, unforseen good fortune, surprising misfortune, false clues, overlooked clues, desperation, and a dash of corruption unexpectedly conspired together to pull off one of the all-time most perfect crimes.
The Perfect Plan: The Gardner Heist
 Click: Gardner heist book excerpts>>
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Points to Ponder:
Four Gardner suspects--
Houghton, Hadley, Donati, and Murray--all die within one year of each other. Coincidence?
Other than two, clumsy sketches
of the Gardner robbers, the Gardner guards, the only people to have actually seen the robbers face to face, are never allowed to look through police mug books or to see a police line-up of the usual suspects. Strange?
With a half billion in art
already in hand from the Dutch Room, why go anywhere else in the museum? Why did the Gardner robbers take the risk? Maybe there were two robberies taking place at once. Two shopping lists?
It wasn't just the finial that was so important,
it was the number 1 inscribed on the finial that made it priceless. That's why the robbers wasted so much time trying unsuccessfully to take the entire flag. It was one of the few remaining flags of Napoleon's Old Guard, his special troops. Someone wanted that flag badly enough to risk the entire Gardner heist at getting it. The robbers thought the finial would be a good substitute. It wasn't!
Some have fingered David Turner as one of the robbers.
Turner is in jail doing 40 years! If he knew something, anything, wouldn't he be singing like a canary about the Gardner just to lessen his prison term? It's common sense, anyone would. The man will die in prison. Of course he'd talk. He can't because he doesn't know anything.
Stealing the Gardner art was one thing,
selling it was quite another. Was there a powerful international kingpin, a Dr No-type criminal, art aficionado, at the ready to assist with underground sales? Some say yes, and name names.
The FBI and Interpol claim that stolen art
ranks just behind money laundering, drugs, and arms sales as the fourth leading money maker in criminal activity. The first three: money laundering, drugs, and arms are run by international cartels; stolen art, so the authorities claim, has no such cartel. Is that logical? Why would the criminal cartel industry bypass art? Did that industry have a hand in the Gardner?
U.S. Judge Mark Wolf in a 1999 decision
cited numerous "rogue" FBI agents--as many as fifteen--operating in Boston throughout the '80s and '90s, assisting mobster Whitey Bulger's criminal activities. Chief among the renegade agents were John Connolly (now serving a 40-year jail sentence) and his boss John Morris. Did this FBI misbehavior touch upon the Gardner heist in any way? Some say yes.
Gestapo art trains speeding south toward Switzerland
in April 1945 carried millions of dollars in art, ransacked from all over Nazi occupied Europe. As a young army captain, Ian Fleming's unit encountered several of these trains. Many, however, escaped capture. Did this stolen art help found one of the world's greatest, clandestine cartels? Some think that much of the $6 billion in art stolen yearly is handled by this cartel. Some even point to the total art sweep of the Baghdad Art Museum during the Iraqi War as the cartel's handiwork. Where might the Gardner's Rembrandts and Vermeer fit into the scheme?
FBI Special Agent Falzon was closing in
on Gardner suspect, Rollin Hadley, the Gardner's former live-in art director, but suddenly broke off his investigation and was later reassigned to San Francisco. Was he close to something with Hadley?
How did the Gardner's own board of directors unintentionally assist in the robbery? What was it that they did, and who knew about it?
In 1995, FBI Agent Connolly tipped mobster
Whitey Bulger that an arrest warrant was heading his way. Bulger escaped and has been at large ever since. What's he living on? Fourteen years of clandestine travel, safe houses all over Europe, and protection cost plenty. Why does the ex-Scotland Yard detective, Albert Hill, claim: "Find Whitey and you'll find the paintings?
In 2004, an FBI agent sat in a Dublin hotel room gazing at the stolen Vermeer.
Myles Connor's plan to rob the Gardner was followed to the letter...except for one thing? What was it and why is it so important to the Gardner heist?
See "The Perfect Plan: The Gardner Heist" for more.
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Background to the Gardner Heist