Priceless

“Yeah?”

“Police. We have a report of a disturbance in the courtyard.”

The guard was under strict instructions: Never open the door for anyone, ever, no exception. He studied the images of the men on the security camera. They wore badges on their sharp-edged police hats. He saw large radios on their hips. He buzzed them in.

The men in police uniforms pulled open the heavy wooden exterior door, moved through a second unlocked door, and turned left to face the guard at his station. The two men were white, each roughly thirty years old—one tall, perhaps six foot one, the other a few inches shorter and wider. The shorter man wore square, gold-framed glasses that fit snugly on his round face. The taller guy was broad-shouldered but lanky from the waist down. Each wore a false mustache.

The tall one did the talking. He said, “Anyone else working?”

“Yeah,” said the guard behind the desk. “He’s upstairs.”

“Get him down here.”

The guard picked up his radio and did as he was told. When the tall policeman motioned for him to step out from behind his console—away from the button for the silent alarm—the guard did that, too. Before the second guard arrived, the tall policeman said to the first guard, “You look familiar. I think we’ve got a default warrant on you. Show me some ID.”

The guard dutifully dug out his driver’s license and Berklee College of Music identification. The policeman took a quick glance and without a word spun the young guard around against the wall and handcuffed him. When the confused guard realized the cops hadn’t frisked him, it hit him: These guys aren’t cops. But it was too late. When the second guard, also a part-timer and aspiring musician, arrived, the policeman slapped cuffs on him before he could speak.

“You’re not under arrest,” the thief told them. “This is a robbery. Don’t give us any problems and you won’t get hurt.”

“Don’t worry,” the second guard sputtered. “They don’t pay me enough.”

The thieves led their captives down the stairs into the basement, a damp warren of aging, low-hanging pipes and ducts. They took one guard to the end of a passageway and cuffed him to a pipe by a janitor’s sink. They wrapped duct tape around the young man’s eyes and ears, and from the base of his chin to the top of his forehead. They led the other guard to the other end of the basement, to a darker, harder-to-find corner. They wrapped his head in tape in the same manner and latched him to a pipe.

Most museum robberies are over in a matter of minutes, simple smash-and-grab jobs. But the Gardner thieves were able to take their time. Confident that they had prevented the guards from tripping the silent alarm, and likely carrying radio scanners that picked up police frequencies, the Gardner thieves spent an astounding eighty-one minutes inside the museum. They did not even begin to try to remove paintings until 1:48 a.m., twenty- four minutes after they entered the museum. They would then spend a full forty-five minutes in the galleries, ripping masterpieces from the walls, and another twelve minutes shuttling works of art out the service door. We know these minute-by-minute details because motion detectors installed throughout the Gardner tracked the thieves’ movements. Although the robbers grabbed a printout of this record from the security chief’s office before they fled, a computer hard drive preserved a backup copy.

At 1:48 a.m., the thieves headed up the main staircase. They turned right at the second-floor landing, moving along a hallway overlooking the courtyard, and directly into the Dutch Room, through the door marked with the Neptune knocker. The paintings were secured by little more than simple hooks, and the thieves quickly removed the four Rembrandts and rudely set them on the tile floor, scattering shattered and splintered glass from one of the frames. At the easel, they grabbed the Flinck, perhaps believing it to be a Rembrandt, and, shoving the glass case aside, got to work on the Vermeer. Very neatly, probably using box cutters, one of the thieves began slicing the works from their frames.

The other thief headed back past the stairway through the Early Italian Room, turned right, moved through the Raphael Room, past a priceless Botticelli and a pair of Raphaels, arriving in the Short Gallery at 1:51 a.m. This thief easily broke into a cabinet filled with framed sketches, a collection secured only by a century-old lock. In one of the center panels, the man removed five Degas sketches, works in pencil, watercolor, and charcoal. The sketches were relatively minor pieces compared with the far more valuable artwork within arm’s reach of the Degas—a Matisse, a Whistler, and a Michelangelo. Perhaps the thief was a Degas fan; perhaps he was following orders; perhaps he was confused in the darkness and his hurry.

At 2:28 a.m., both thieves were back in the Dutch Room. They abandoned the Rembrandt self-portrait on wood, presumably because it was too heavy or could not be properly cut from its frame, and carried the five Dutch paintings and five Degas sketches downstairs. They removed the videotape from the recorder, ripped out the printout of the recordings by the motion detector, and made for the door. They opened the service entrance door twice, at 2:41 a.m. and 2:45 a.m.

The thieves stole three other works of art from the Gardner that misty morning, creating clues that have long intrigued investigators. They took two relatively valueless items—a Chinese vase from the Dutch Room and a gilded Corsican eagle finial from the top of a Napoleonic banner in the Short Gallery. Why take such minor pieces? Were these souvenirs? Or red herrings designed to trick investigators?

The third clue is most befuddling. The thieves took a three-foot-tall Manet, Chez Tortoni, from the Blue Room. This was the only work stolen from the first floor, and most curiously, the motion detectors did not pick up any movement in this gallery during the robbery. Absent a malfunction, this meant the Manet was moved before the thieves confronted the guards, raising the specter that the Gardner heist was an inside job. Additionally: Whoever took the Manet left its empty frame on the chair by the desk of the security chief, a gesture many interpreted as a final insult.

The mystery of the Manet is like most Gardner clues—intriguing but ultimately useful only to the countless armchair detectives in the bars and salons of Boston and the art community.

THE THEFT SHOCKED Boston and the art world, but it shouldn’t have.

As the value of artwork, from Impressionists to Old Masters, rose steadily at auction houses from the early sixties to the late eighties, so too did the pace of art crime, especially in New England. The thieves began slowly, targeting the region’s many colleges. Schools made prime targets because, as the thieves soon discovered, they held valuable but poorly guarded art and artifacts donated decades ago by long-dead alumni—Hudson Valley School paintings, ancient coins, rifles from the Revolutionary War. If a painting vanished from the walls of the English Department reception room, embarrassed college officials assumed it to be a prank or the work of the town delinquents, not the work of a growing cadre of Boston burglars who found it easier to steal art from a college or a mansion than to rob a bank. Emboldened by success, these thieves expanded their horizons and targeted museums. The most successful New England art thief was Myles Connor, who would become one of a number of Gardner suspects. Beginning in 1966, Connor burglarized the Forbes House Museum, the Woolworth Estate, the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, the rotunda of the Massachusetts State House, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. By the late 1980s, museums had begun to recognize the threat, but moved slowly to address it. When a new director was named to lead the Gardner in 1989, she ordered a review of her museum’s security measures. It was not completed before the 1990 crime.

Hundreds of FBI agents and police officers investigated the Gardner theft, and as the years passed, the mystique and mystery of the heist only grew. Investigators navigated a growing thicket of speculation, one fueled by a cast of characters featuring con men, private detectives, investigative journalists, and wiseguys—all chasing a reward that would climb to $5 million.

No lead went unchecked. Detectives and agents searched a trawler in the harbor, a city warehouse, a Maine farmhouse. When a pair of tourists visiting a Japanese artist’s home spotted what they believed to be The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, an FBI agent and a Gardner curator dashed to Tokyo. They found a fine copy, but no Rembrandt.

Every now and then a con man approached the media and the media bit. One got face time on 60 Minutes, the other on Primetime Live. The con artist who appeared on ABC claimed to be working with Connor, and he repeatedly teased the U.S. attorney’s office in Boston, claiming he could return one of the paintings within an hour, if paid $10,000 and granted immunity.

One newspaper reporter didn’t just investigate the story. In 1997, he became part of it. Under the blazing