Jas: In March 1990, art thieves conned their way into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Massachusetts and made off with more than $500 million dollars’ worth of masterpieces by artists like Rembrandt, Degas, and Vermeer.

Since that time, the FBI’s Boston Division has diligently investigated the case—in partnership with the museum and the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s Office—following leads around the world. More than three decades—and multiple significant case developments—later, the Bureau continues to search for the stolen works. But we need your help.

On this episode of our podcast, we’ll learn about this historic heist; why the stolen pieces matter to the museum, the art world at large, and the FBI; the $10 million reward being offered by the museum to help recover the artwork; and how you can help the Bureau bring the looted masterpieces back to Boston.

I’m Jas, and this is Inside the FBI.

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Geoff Kelly: On March 18th of 1990, right after Saint Patrick's Day festivities were winding down in Boston, subjects posing as Boston police officers rang the night bell for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, claiming they were responding to a disturbance. The guard, against protocol, allowed them into the museum.

Kelly: Once they were in, they instructed this guard to summon his partner down. Less than a minute later, his partner arrived at the watch desk. And at that point, they announced that this was a robbery. They took the guards down to the basement. They restrained them with duct tape and handcuffs, and then they had free reign of the museum, and they spent the next 81 minutes going through it. Most of the works that were taken were taken from the second floor of the museum.

Jas: That was Geoff Kelly, a special agent with the FBI’s Boston Division, who’s been investigating the heist for more than two decades. He inherited the case in 2002, back when he was a rookie agent on Boston’s violent crime squad. But the caper had captivated him since before he joined the Bureau.

This makes sense because the case was historic—the dollar value attached to the stolen art made it the largest property theft case in American history. 

The property was estimated to be worth about $500 million at the time of the heist—a number which the museum’s chief of security, Anthony Amore, calls an underestimation, due to the passage of time and inflation.

But according to Amore, if you see the theft as just a matter of dollars and cents, your perspective is off. 

Anthony Amore: The loss is multilayered. 

Amore: To think just in terms of the dollar value itself is a real mistake.

We're talking about the only seascape that Rembrandt ever painted. You can't put a price tag on that. We're talking about one of only 36 known Vermeers. We're talking about two additional Rembrandts, work by Manet and Flinck and Degas. These are great losses to culture, not just in the United States, but worldwide. 

Jas: And while the public may wonder if the case’s publicity would lead to an influx of traffic to the museum, Amore said that at the end of the day, lost art is lost art.

Amore: The fact is, far more visitors would be coming every day to see a Vermeer, to see the Rembrandts, to see the Manet, the Flinck, and the Degas works without question. So the cultural significance, in the significance of art history itself, cannot be overstated.

Jas: Plus, he said, the thieves behind this heist did more than steal art. They also left a living masterpiece incomplete. This is because its namesake, Isabella Stewart Gardner, curated and designed the institution to be a work of art in its own right. 

Amore: The museum opened in 1903, and when the public was allowed in, they saw that Isabella Stewart Gardner had indeed created a great museum for the country. The museum houses thousands of pieces of art, and the art is arranged in a one-of-a kind scenario where the entire museum itself is a work of art. 

Mrs. Gardner placed each piece exactly where she wanted it. She moved the pieces often during her lifetime, but her will, which went into effect upon her death in 1924, states that nothing here can ever change, so the museum is exactly as Mrs. Gardner left it. The museum houses a vast array of art, ranging from early renaissance Italian art to Dutch art to German wood carvings to Asian art.

It is just a really eclectic collection. It's often described as an Italianate museum because the courtyard is an inverted Venetian palazzo made up of authentic relics. But in all, it is a staggering work of beauty, and nobody comes here to visit without leaving totally mesmerized by what they've seen.

Amore: When you think about the fact that when these pieces were taken from Isabella Stewart Gardner’s collective work of art, you've left the museum less than whole. So, in many different levels, this a tragedy for the art world, for culture in the West and throughout the world, and for people who love art and cultural patrimony.

Jas: The loss is literally marked on the museum’s walls, in its Dutch Room and beyond.

Amore: When people enter the Dutch room on the second floor of the museum where the Rembrandt and the Vermeer was stolen, they are struck immediately by large, gilded, ornate frames that are hanging empty because the paintings are missing. Now, some people believe that we have those frames there because Mrs. Gardner's will says you can't change anything. That's actually not the case.

Amore:  We purposely leave the frames there. We put them back up in 1994, four years after the heist, and we have them there for an important message to the public. And that message is only one thing  can hang in each spot marked by an empty frame, and that is the painting that was once there. So it's a remembrance of what was there. But the frames are also a sign of hope because they’re a message to the public that what was once there will someday return. 

Amore: We make a great effort to make sure that no one ever forgets what was in our museum and remind people that we believe and we will never stop trying to get these paintings back and put them where they belong.

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Jas: So, how does someone investigate a theft that occurred over three decades ago?

Kelly: Over the last 30 years, in the 20 years that I've been the lead investigator, we've conducted [an] investigation literally throughout the world. We've conducted undercover operations, we've utilized informants and sophisticated techniques, all of which makes this really the antithesis of a cold case.

Kelly: The way I've worked this case from the very beginning was working it like a fugitive investigation. 

We're really looking for what we describe as 13 perfect fugitives because they are the perfect fugitive. 

They don't get sick. They don't have to go to the dentist with a toothache. They don't need to pay rent. They don't have to get a driver's license. 

Kelly: And so what we do in any fugitive investigation is publicity. And that's what we've been doing on this case.

Jas: The biggest obstacle in this investigation, Kelly said, has been time. 

Kelly: Unfortunately, people's memories fade, and people die, and people get ill, and people move away. 

Jas: He said FBI Boston has received tips and leads only to discover that the person connected to them is either dead or doesn’t remember the necessary details anymore.

Kelly: If you're going to look back on something that happened 30 years ago, the magnitude of a museum heist, if somebody had an active role in that or they had some firsthand knowledge about the heist, yeah, they're gonna  remember that. But if it was something ancillary, something tangential, like somebody said something to them or somebody showed them something, it may not resonate at the time. And as decades pass, people tend to forget things.

Jas: So, what has the FBI learned since 1990?

First, Kelly said, the FBI believes the stolen pieces are hidden, likely in multiple places. However, their current owners might be unaware of their stolen history or monetary value.

Kelly: We really have a good idea of how we think the heist went down back in 1990 and where the artwork moved over the years, and individuals who were responsible for the theft and may have had some involvement in storing and moving the artwork throughout the past three decades.

Jas: According to Kelly, the FBI believes that at least some of the stolen artwork moved up to Maine, …

Kelly: Down to Connecticut, and possibly down to mid-Atlantic states about 20 years ago. And we're pretty confident about that. And we've done [an] exhaustive investigation which has borne that out. But again, I always temper that by saying that we could be wrong.

Jas: Kelly said the FBI and the museum are open to the possibility that their working hypothesis is flawed. The Bureau can’t discuss particular theories or people it may have investigated in connection with this case. However, Kelly said…

Kelly: We continue to take every tip and credible lead that we receive. We take it seriously, and we vet it out. And unfortunately, what sometimes happens is when somebody has a theory that they've often just concocted from Internet research, they're so certain that it's the correct theory that when we debunk it, they then believe that perhaps we’re engaging in some type of conspiracy or we're not doing our homework because we’re too wrapped up in our other theories.

And the fact is, we take every theory individually, and Anthony and I have run down theories along with other agents in the FBI that go completely counter to what we believe happened that night. But we'll still run it down in the interest of being thorough because we don't want to be shortsighted in what we think may have happened.

Jas: The FBI and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum steadfastly believe the stolen works will eventually return to Boston.

Amore: History is filled with examples of great artwork that has been stolen and recovered, and this is especially true of masterpieces. And typically we find that art is recovered right away because someone has informed on the thieves or a generation later, in which instance, perhaps the scariest bad guy in the gang is no longer so scary or even alive.

So, oftentimes, you see art coming back decades later. A great recent example is a $140 million Willem de Kooning painting stolen from the university of Arizona in the 1980s, and it came back after 32 years because the people who were holding it passed away. And when the estate sale company came to clear out the home, lo and behold, there was this de Kooning masterpiece. It happens very frequently.

We have no reason to think that our art won't come back because [of] the passage of time. And in fact, there are some aspects of that that can help the investigation. So, we remain optimistic.

Kelly: I mean, certainly, when you're an investigator, you have to accept the potential theory that the pieces were destroyed, but that rarely happens. If someone has stolen artwork and they're concerned about getting caught, that's kind of their ace in the hole. The one thing they don't wanna do is destroy it because it could be a potential bargaining chip. 

So, looking to history, it is very, very rare that stolen artwork is destroyed. And we've never received any credible information that any of the pieces were destroyed. 

So while a lot of time has gone past in the world of art, when you're talking about pieces that are 400 years old, 33 years is kind of a blip, and we're confident it's going to come back. 

Kelly: I've been in the FBI for nearly three decades, and one of the things that never ceases to amaze me is the amount of time that this case has been given and the importance that the FBI gives to this investigation, which is really a property case that's more than three decades old. But the FBI management has always understood the importance of this case, not just for the people of Boston and for the Gardner Museum, but for the art world in general.

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Jas: Many of the Bureau’s breakthroughs in the heist investigation have been the result of educating the public about the stolen artwork, Kelly said… 

Kelly: And that's what we continue to do. We ask people to go look at the website, look at the flyers, take a look at these pieces, and hopefully in time somebody’s gonna look at it and recognize one of these pieces.

Jas: If someone recognizes one of the pieces or has information about the crime, they can submit a tip to the FBI or to the museum directly.

Amore: The museum is offering a reward of $10 million for information that leads directly to the recovery of all thirteen of our works in good condition.

While the museum is offering $10 million for the recovery of all 13 pieces, we do have pieces of the reward apportioned for each missing artwork. So, if an individual had information about just one of the pieces, they would be eligible for a reward based on the value of that one piece. 

In addition to the $10 million reward, we're offering an additional $100,000 for information that leads to the recovery of our stolen Napoleonic finial. So, although the finial is part of the $10 million reward, we're also offering that additional reward just for the finial.

Jas: The FBI has no involvement in the administration of these rewards, or any of their governing terms or conditions. You can submit a tip to the museum by emailing reward@gardnermuseum.org.

Kelly: What Anthony and I hope is that we just need that first piece to come back because we believe there'll be a snowball effect, that if one piece comes back and the person who has it—assuming that they weren't involved in the original theft—is not prosecuted and gets a sizable chunk of the reward, that it's going to cause other pieces to come forward.

Jas: You can submit a tip to the Bureau by calling 1-800-CALL-FBI (or 1-800-225-5324) or by visiting tips.fbi.gov. You can also reach out to your local FBI field office, or your nearest U.S. Embassy or Consulate.

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Jas: This has been another production of Inside the FBI. You can follow us on your favorite podcast player, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Google Podcasts. You can also subscribe to email alerts about new episodes at fbi.gov/podcasts.  

I’m Jas from the FBI’s Office of Public Affairs. Thanks for tuning in.