Convicted spy Rod Ramsay as a potential Gardner heist suspect (Part One)
Though his name has never been raised with the public as a Gardner heist suspect by either investigators or the news media, Roderick James Ramsay, a former Boston resident, arrested on espionage charges in Tampa, FL, on June 7, 1990, just ten weeks after the robbery, is certainly someone who remains worthy of consideration. Ramsay was convicted of espionage two years after his 1990 arrest and spent over a decade in prison after his conviction in 1992.
The Boston Globe, New York Times and other news media long ago abandoned hard reporting on the Gardner heist case in favor of “conjecture based on a theory,” mutely disseminated by government officials and their surrogates, like former FBI Gardner heist lead investigator Geoff Kelly, who in retirement has updated his narrative (changed his story). Kelly now claims that the security guard Rick Abath was indeed involved, after publicly suggesting otherwise on numerous occasions for over twenty years. Kelly has a book on the Gardner heist investigation coming out in 2026. Kelly bases his conclusion that Abath was involved on information known to investigators the first week; that the Museum security system did not record anyone going into the Blue Room gallery, where Manet’s Chez Tortoni was taken except Abath (twice).
As Kelly himself said on CBS Good Morning ten years earlier, in 2015: "Someone went into the Blue Room that night, and the only one that went in that room that night was the security guard [Rick Abath], according to the motion sensor." printouts."
But when Abath refused to speak with CBS Good Morning, and said publicly he was not doing anymore interviews, the FBI and its surrogates reverted to their false narrative that Abath was tricked into letting the thieves in.
By April of the following year, the Museum’s Anthony Amore, the FBI’s chief public relations surrogate, with more side gigs than a Las Vegas parking lot attendant said: “We have nothing to point at to say that he [Abath] was involved.”
An FBI podcast on the case starring Geoff Kelly in June of 2023 begins: “In March 1990, art thieves conned their way into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.” Less than two years later, Kelly told the Boston Globe he was convinced Abath was involved. Abath was the guard, the person solely responsible for letting the thieves into the Museum. If he was involved then they didn’t con their way into the museum.
Meanwhile, real facts, which would lead to the kind of real answers the public is surely entitled to after close to four decades, remain unreported. Among those facts are the evidence supporting the possible involvement of Ramsay, along with the Gardner security guard Rick Abath, and others, such as Brian McDevitt. McDevitt lived just three miles from the museum, and had been convicted in an attempt to rob the Hyde Collection, an art museum in Glens Falls, NY, of a Rembrandt and other works ten years earlier.
In a Sixty Minutes interview, McDevitt said that he had no alibi for the robbery and a girlfriend of his at that time, Stephanie Rabinowitz said that McDevitt had asked her to lie, to say he was with her that night. In addition, McDevitt told Rabinowitz he was involved in the heist, she now says.
McDevitt was interviewed on Sixty Minutes about his possible role in the Gardner heist, and was brought before a grand jury in 1994, regarding the robbery. But in Last Seen podcast, Tom Mashberg said: “Very remarkable that between 1990 and 1997 there were very few stories about the crime. There was never, say, an arrest or a suspect being questioned. Bobby Donati, nobody ever had a chance to ask him any questions obviously.”
“Obviously”? Donati did not die until 18 months after the Gardner heist and was under FBI surveillance during at least some of that time, as he made collections from bookies and loan sharks. Kurkjian too, in the same Episode 3 of Last Seen podcast falsely stated that: “Between 1990 when the theft took place and around 1997 there was nothing.”
Real facts have gone unreported, or papered over with false false facts by an iniquitous guild of access-driven journalists and news media gatekeepers, who instead disseminate false narratives and suspect theories, originating from within the investigation itself.
Another example is the highly promoted, highly reported on and reviewed, Last Seen Podcast by The Boston Globe and a local NPR affiliate, WBUR. The Last Seen senior producer claims Kelly “Red Herring” Horan, on her Boston Globe bio page claims that “Last Seen was named a top 10 podcast of 2018 by The Atlantic, the Financial Times, Stitcher, and other outlets.” None of that is true, although it did garner quite a lot of attention, with dozens of local journalists endorsing it on social media at the time of its release in September of 2018. In 2021 and in 2025 the New York Times put it on a list of preferred podcasts.
One called "6 Podcasts About Making and Appreciating Art," and the other was "7 Podcasts About the Art of the Scam."
Last Seen podcast fits neither category, of the New York Times stories, but such is the clickbait power of the keywords [Gardner heist] that articles referencing Last Seen Podcast
and its Gardner heist subject matter, are
page-view powerhouses, real winners, though not necessarily for podcast listeners.
Last Seen podcast does not even fit the category of “true crime,” as Horan acknowledged in an interview two years later:
"As someone who also has enjoyed a fair amount of pot boilers I knew that red herrings would work and so my goal in structuring the entire [Last Seen Podcast] ten episode series, the kind of narrative arc that I wanted to put in place was one where each episode would take you in deep inside a theory, you would meet the central characters of that theory and then you would leave that episode saying 'Aha! that's the one.' only to have the next episode come along and make you doubt that because that was my experience, the experience of reporting this was like whiplash. You know, 'This must be it.' 'No this must be it.' 'He must have done it. No he must have done it.'" —Kelly Horan
Horan’s “narrative arc,” however, was sold to the public as a serious work of investigative journalism: “Iris Adler, Executive Director for Programming, Podcasts and Special Projects at WBUR
said that “the producers of Last Seen have obtained unprecedented access to case files, first-ever interviews and this podcast is the result of a year of investigative reporting to unravel the crime’s many mysteries.’”
It seems the Boston Globe and WBUR were given unprecedented access to case files, just so they could present an assortment of junk theories, “red herrings,” in the words of the person who headed up the project, to present the public with disinfotainment, and they did not “unravel” any of “the crime’s many mysteries.”
A short before its release one of the staff members on the project, Eve Zuckoff, now a city reporter for WBUR, tweeted out: "If you've spoken to me any time in the last 15 months, THIS is the secret @WBUR and @BostonGlobe podcast I've been working on! Please SUBSCRIBE and get ready for SO. MUCH. MORE."
If WBUR and the Boston Globe were serious about unraveling mysteries they would not have made the podcast in secret.
In episode 4 of Last Seen Podcast, called “Two Bad Men,” Boston Globe reporter Shelley Murphy, one of the leading disseminators of Gardner heist disinformation for over 30 years, acknowledged in Last Seen Podcast that: “All these theories are frustrating. For everything that points toward these particular suspects,” she said, “there’s something that points away.”
Frustrating indeed when a journalist spends decades of their career sourcing stories about the Gardner heist from people inside the investigation, who persist in casting aspersions on “suspects” for whom “there’s something that points away,” something exculpatory, something that excludes them from having actually been the actual Gardner heist robbers, effectively deflecting attention from other actual suspects like Ramsay, Abath, and McDevitt, despite strong evidence, and for whom there is little, if anything, “that points away."
It has not been so frustrating, however, that Murphy and The Boston Globe have ever done anything except assist in this disinformation operation, to cooperate fully with it, disseminating the FBI’s dubious, ever-changing narrative, supported with false facts, while profitably propping it up with sensationalist news stories, a ten-part podcast, and a four-part Netflix series.
As full of inaccuracies and outright deceit as the Globe’s Last Seen Podcast, and The Boston Globe’s Gardner heist news stories generally have been, their four-part Netflix series This Is a Robbery was produced and directed by Colin Barnicle and his brother Nick. The brothers are the sons of former Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnacle, who resigned from the Boston Globe after Reader's Digest was set to reprint a Mike Barnacle Boston Globe column, one he wrote in 1995 about a friendship between two young cancer victims, but discovered that the story wasn’t true.
Barnacle’s sons have done numerous projects for the Red Sox, which is owned by the same people as The Boston Globe, John and Linda Henry. Colin Barnicle was an intern for the Red Sox front office when he was a teenager in 2005. Linda Henry, The Boston Globe’s chief executive officer” was also an executive producer of the Netflix Gardner heist documentary. The Barnacle Brothers continue to prosper through their relationship with the Henry’s, winning a Sports Emmy for Outstanding Documentary Series in 2025 for their Netflix series, about the 2004 Boston Red Sox.
In addition, four past and current Boston Globe reporters appear prominently in the series: Stephen Kurkjian, Shelley Murphy, Kevin Cullen, and Tom Mashberg. All four reporters at the time of the documentary had written about the Gardner heist, starting over twenty years earlier. All of the journalists involved in the making of the documentary were current or former Boston Globe reporters.
This Is a Robbery was released in 2021. At that point Murphy and Cullen had worked at The Boston Globe for over thirty years. Kurkjian reported for the Globe over fifty years. He retired in 2007, but stayed on as a freelancer, covering the Gardner heist for the Globe for another 14 years, until 2021.
Mashberg had done freelance assignments for the Globe as recently as October 2025, on the Louvre jewels heist, and was employed by The Boston Globe as their New York Bureau chief and then as a reporter for about three years in total, in the early nineties.
Along with Boston 25’s Bob Ward, these three Globe reporters (Mashberg, Kurkjian and Murphy) account for over ninety percent of the original reporting on the Gardner heist the past ten years, a good deal of it insincere, false and misleading. Cullen covered the case for the Boston Globe in the days following the robbery, but has written little on the case in the last decade.
In 2015 Cullen, writing skeptically about the Garnder heist investigation wrote: “On Thursday, federal authorities released a surveillance video showing a security guard letting a man into the Gardner Museum the night before it was robbed of 13 priceless paintings in 1990. US Attorney Carmen Ortiz said officials hoped someone in the public might recognize the mystery man.”
“How could this crucial piece of evidence just be coming out, 25 years after the city’s most infamous unsolved crime? It seemed like either a breathtaking bit of incompetence by the FBI, or more evidence of the bureau’s reluctance to share information with law enforcement partners and the public.”
But by the time of the Netflix This Is A Robbery, Cullen had been won over. Since his 2015 column about the heist, expressing skepticism about the investigation, Cullen had undergone his own Mike Barnacle, Blarneycle type troubles. The Boston Globe conducted two reviews of Cullen’s past work in 2018, after WEEI had questioned the truth of some of his past work He was given a three month suspension, but managed to keep his job.
The Boston Globe issued a statement on their findings in June of 2018:
“The reviewers found Mr. Cullen’s writing to be ‘among the most appealing that appears in the Globe -- precise, well observed and often standing up for the forgotten man and woman with profound effect.’
However, the review did find some problems. The kind of problems that have been a consistent feature of the Boston Globe’s news reporting, its podcast, and its documentary about the Gardner heist
The reviewers found that “his columns at times employed ‘journalistic tactics that unnecessarily raise questions about his accuracy’ that ‘may open the door to
providing seriously misleading information to the public.’”
By 2021, Cullen was happy to help promote the government’s dubious narrative about the Gardner heist on the Boston Globe’s Netflix series on the case, using those same “tactics,” along with the rest of the Globe gang in the series, that had put Cullen in hot water back in 2018.
Cullen’s statements in Netflix This Is a Robbery, like those of his fellow Globe affiliated journalists, Murphy, Kurkjian, and Mashberg, included some that employed “journalistic tactics that unnecessarily raise questions about his accuracy” that “may open the door to providing seriously misleading information to the public.” In fact if you haven’t got game, you’re not part of the highly compensated Gardner heist guild of journalists who have appeared over and over again in all of these productions for decades.
The newest member of the gang that wouldn’t report straight, Kelly Horan, in October of 2025, left her job as the Globe's Assistant Ideas editor, after a six years.
Horan has enjoyed a mere seven year career as a Gardner heist dissembler, and red herring disseminator. Can her gift for lying with a straight face propel her onward in the Gardner heist landscape?
In 2025, the Boston Globe bought Boston Magazine, which was already an established channel of Gardner heist disinformation.
In 2024, the former editor, Carly Carioli, falsely reported in 2024
that on Sunday, March 17, Connor will once again take center stage when he appears at the Regent Theater in Arlington, in conversation with Gardner Museum security
director Anthony Amore and Myles’s longtime manager and collaborator Al Dotoli, for the premiere of Rock n’ Roll Outlaw: The Ballad of Myles Connor, a new documentary that examines Myles’s incredible backstory—and what he may know about the Gardner heist.
But there was no documentary shown that day and there is still no documentary that has ever been released.
A year later though, there was a cheesy book about Connor, “The Rembrandt Heist: The Story of a Criminal Genius, a Stolen Masterpiece, and an Enigmatic Friendship” by Gardner Museum’s
security director Anthony Amore.
Just how enigmatic the friendship between the Gardner Mueum's head of security, Amore,
and Connor, whom Amore described in 2013 as a "charlatan" and a "huckster."may be is a question for the Gardner Museum’s trustees to decide.
In 2014 Amore said of Connor: "He is one of these guys who committed every type of crime you can imagine. Make a list. Brainstorm on crimes. He can check off every box. You name it. he's done it,
a real bad guy."
Connor is the kind of criminal genius who does a long stretch in prison for selling art, burglarized from an elderly widow, to an undercover FBI agent,
and then does another long stretch in prison, 15 years later, for selling art from the same caper, to another undercover FBI agent. According to Connor's book, The Art of the Heist,
The agent posed as an Italian mobster named "Tony Graziano," with an interest in antique Simon Willard grandfather clocks. Genius!
Ex-con Connor the con artist is a regular also on the Boston Globe's podcasts and documentaries.
He helps reinforce the false narrative that Donati was involved in the Gardner heist, by claiming that Donati was one of the crew who burglarized
the Woolworth Estate in Monmouth, Maine with him on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend in 1974.
But Donati was sentenced to state’s prison earlier that very week. Connor also likes to describe how he and Donati cased the Gardner Museum. In his book he says it was in the summer of 1975 another time when Donati was incarcerated, this time at
the Deer Island House of Correction.
In his book Connor wrote that he and Donati “found ourselves strolling through the lush courtyard garden,” at the Gardner Museum that summer. So what Connor is claiming is that while he was a fugitive from justice, and just a few months after he says he grabbed a Rembrandt off the wall at Museum of Fine Arts, which is just a quarter of a mile away from the Gardner Museum, Connor who Amore claims was a potentially
recognizabl local celebrity because of his musical career as well as his criminal escapades,
went for a stroll in the Gardner Museum. Connor is ill suited for the role of criminal genius in his own fiction as well as in fact.
This go-along-to-get-along (quite comfortably one might add) news coverage of whatever questionable, self-contradicting claims the Gardner heist investigators, and their minions,
are promoting on any given heist anniversary, or any other time, is just one of the many facets of the Gardner heist story, which point to there being more to this case than a simple robbery investigation, something that overlaps with something like the strange case of convicted spy Roderick James Ramsay.
|
