I’d first heard about the Gardner Museum robbery when I was a recent college graduate living in New York, probably a week or so after it occurred. I was at the American Museum of Natural History on the Upper West Side, gazing up at the giant blue whale suspended from the ceiling, when I overheard two elderly ladies discussing the details of a monumental art heist that had just occurred in Boston.
Heist. It’s one of those words that commands attention. Use it in a sentence in a crowded elevator, and someone will invariably listen in. Naturally, I couldn’t help but eavesdrop on their conversation and listened as one woman related to her friend a fabulous tale of fake police officers, outrageous subterfuge, and stolen treasures.
And here it was, a dozen years later, and I just got the case.
Until the implementation of a computerized database system, which arrived a few years after the Gardner robbery, FBI files were in paper form. When a new case was opened and assigned to an agent, written as O+A, the very first document, known as a serial, would be two-hole-punched at the top and slipped into a cardboard jacket, skewered in place with two steel prongs. When the file became too fat to be safely secured with the bent-over prongs, Volume II commenced, although most cases rarely merited a second volume. Each squad had a set of file cabinets that held the hundreds of pending cases for that particular squad, and the whole lot was managed by file clerks known in Bureau parlance as rotors, named after the rotary file cabinets over which they governed. Newspeak eventually changed their job title to Operational Support Technician, or OST, but we still called them rotors.
No agent wants to inherit a case; typically, they’re either unsolvable or there isn’t an AUSA willing to prosecute. It’s common for agents to shop their cases door-to-door at the US Attorney’s Office, moving down the carpeted hallway like vacuum cleaner salesmen, hoping to fund an AUSA who’ll bite. These forlorn cases float from one agent to the next, until eventually the statute of limitations expires; that is, the deadline for prosecution, which is typically five years for most federal crimes. Once the statute has expired, the case can finally be administratively closed. Days before a new agent arrives on a squad, the supervisor typically polls the senior agents to surrender a case or two for the new guy. And that’s how a brand-new agent manages to inherit a full caseload of crap.
The Gardner was no exception. Prior to my tenure, it was a moribund case that nobody wanted. The only difference with this cold case was that pesky statute of limitations, as there is no expiration date for possessing stolen property. The reasoning is logical—if there was a firm deadline for prosecution, thieves could conceivably hold on to stolen property for five years and a day, then claim it as their own.
They could register a stolen car at the DMV or sell a stolen painting at auction. Since the statute of limitations for the possession of stolen property never expires, theoretically the Gardner case would remain open indefinitely.
Yet despite all the challenges, I really wanted this case. And I was intrigued by the biggest challenge of all: the title. The Gardner Museum heist was still carried as UNSUBS. It was the ultimate whodunit.
My first task was to get an idea of the scope of the investigation. Typically, the squad rotor (the file cabinet, not the human) contains every volume of a particular pending case. But due to the sheer size of the Gardner investigation, all but its most current volumes had been relegated to the Closed File Room down on the fourth floor. It was an area rarely visited by most agents, but one which I got to know quite well. Rolling stacks of cabinets extended the entire length of the room, containing a comprehensive collection of all of Boston’s historical FBI cases, arranged numerically by classification. It was surprisingly easy to find the Gardner case, classified as an 87A matter (interstate transportation of stolen property), since it took up nearly an entire file cabinet, sandwiched between other vintage theft cases, many of them ensconced in sepia-tinted file jackets that dated back to the days of J. Edgar Hoover.
And there it was, at gut level: the Gardner case.
Dozens and dozens of volumes, each one sated to bursting with documents, with its successor to the left and its predecessor to the right, representing the manifestation of twelve years of FBI investigation into the heist. I stepped back for a moment to take it all in: twenty-five linear feet of intelligence—about two feet per year, divided every inch or so by a cardboard jacket. It was completely overwhelming. I’d seen big cases corralled into three or four volumes, perhaps five or six, but this was madness. Where to start?
Well, Volume I. I began sliding files out of the stack, and with each pull the volume numbers decreased until I found the very first Gardner Museum case file. I plucked Volume I off the shelf and signed it out on an index card, an atavistic nod to my halcyon days when I’d sign out Your Police in my elementary school library over my librarian’s feckless protestations.
Back at my desk, I started my review at the bottom, since serials were stacked one on top of the other, a ream of paper impaled twice at its head. It was fascinating to relive the heist from the very beginning, albeit vicariously. Serial number one was the opening memo, with O+A scrawled in red pencil on a dog-eared lower-right corner. The memo was “From: Boston, To: FBIHQ,” and it detailed in broad strokes the audacious tale of two UNSUBS who robbed a local museum by posing as police officers and inveigling the night guards. As I continued to peruse the subsequent serials, the emotions of those first days following the robbery were tangible: confusion, disinformation, and the simmering exasperation that there was very little to go on. Police sketches of the UNSUBS, so mundane and ordinary, illustrated both with and without their bushy—and possibly fake—mustaches. A flurry of leads to other field offices, requesting information on any known art thieves who may fit the general description. And the crime scene photos, always haunting, freezing for eternity a moment in time and capturing the latest affront to the social contract; just a slight pull in the threads that weave together the sweater vest of civilization.
I continued to leaf through the serials. Boston was receiving information daily from other field offices and Legats: snippets of intel, rumors from informants, and assorted nonsense. A litany of documents littered the case file: communiques to and from FBIHQ, known as Airtels, which memorialized ongoing efforts in Boston; letterhead memorandums to outside agencies, known as LHMs; and the ubiquitous and infamous Reports of Investigation, known as FD-302s and referred to simply as 302s. Each document was stamped with a precedence, and the Bureau has three: Immediate, Priority, or Routine. All of the initial Gardner communications were marked Immediate.
It’s fascinating to review old 302s, regardless of the case, and read their recounting of some historic crime event, always delivered in the Bureau’s inimitably dry and pedantic narrative. The very nature of the 302—just the facts, ma’am—ensures that even the most thrilling event will be recorded in a manner destined to make it seem dull. Flowery prose is kept to a minimum, and you won’t find many exclamation points in a 302, regardless of how badly a sentence may have merited one.
And all of this information, both incoming and outgoing, was duly recorded by Dan Falzon, the Gardner’s first case agent. The few “latent prints of unknown value” that were collected from the crime scene were run through the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, or AFIS, as well as through international crime databases. I considered this a necessary but futile step in the investigation—the UNSUBS were obviously crooks, and while more sophisticated crime-fighting techniques like DNA were still in their infancy back in 1990, the concept of catching bad guys by comparing their known fingerprints to questioned samples was familiar to anyone who’d ever watched an episode of Dragnet or T. J. Hooker. In my opinion, even inept criminals knew enough to wear gloves during a robbery so they wouldn’t leave prints.
And more to the point, when the UNSUBS first entered the museum, Abath observed that at least one of them was wearing gloves, so it’s reasonable to assume that his partner was also wearing a pair. I doubt they would’ve removed their gloves prior to handling picture frames and opening doors. And since I found it unlikely that the subjects would’ve pulled this one off bare-handed, I was surprised at the amount of effort that was expended to run these meaningless prints through databases, over and over again. It came as no surprise to read that the recovered prints—which most likely belonged to members of the museum’s conservation staff—yielded no meaningful results.
As I reviewed the file, I read that within days of the robbery, the office stood up a video review station in the squad area, where teams of agents scoured every second of the surveillance images contained on the sixteen VHS tapes that were recovered from the museum’s security office, the ones left behind by the subjects. Considering that these tapes encompassed at least fifty hours of video, divided into a multiplex system, it was a monumental task. The review took days to complete and ultimately generated no leads and left no lingering questions.
In those first weeks of the investigation, FBI agents and Boston detectives tracked down and interviewed all of the Gardner Museum employees, yet it was readily apparent that in addition to scant clues, there were even fewer meaningful leads. As with any major investigation, a glut of useless tips poured in from well-intentioned cops and civilians worldwide, and anyone capable of committing a robbery of this magnitude was duly noted and investigated thoroughly.
Eventually, I finished Volume I, after taking copious notes and littering the edge of the file with a riot of multicolored sticky notes. Now it was time for Volume II. This pattern continued until my desk, along with the shelves above it, were cluttered with teetering stacks of case files bearing crenellated margins of Post-its. It was through this process that I learned about the case and began to form my own nescient opinions about what really happened that night.
In September 2005, Anthony Amore was brought on as the new director of security at the Gardner. Anthony was the third security director with whom I’d worked, and while his predecessors were intelligent and well qualified, their primary focus had been on the protection of what remained in the collection, as opposed to the recovery of what had been lost. They dutifully forwarded to me any tips they received about the heist, but they were not investigators. Anthony was an investigator. After serving as a special agent with the Federal Aviation Administration and earning his master’s degree from Harvard, Anthony became the director of the Transportation Safety Administration at T.F. Green Airport in Rhode Island before heading to Boston to become the TSA’s assistant federal security director at Logan.
In addition to upgrading and improving the security posture at the museum, Anthony was conducting his own investigation into the theft, all the while coordinating his activities with me. For tipsters who didn’t feel comfortable contacting me directly—either due to a general intimidation inherent with speaking with the FBI or because of concerns regarding their own criminal exposure—the Gardner Museum presented them with a viable alternative to where they could report their information. And since the reward was being offered by the museum and not the FBI, it made direct contact with Anthony even more attractive. I was fine with that, as long as the intelligence was being disseminated, and for his part, Anthony diligently wrote up his reports and forwarded them to me for incorporation into the case file.
There were severe limitations with this arrangement—specifically, the intelligence flowed in only one direction. Anthony didn’t work for the FBI, so I wasn’t permitted to reciprocate with any details contained within the case file. It was a frustrating arrangement and one that hindered the pace of the investigation. In the summer of 2011, I spoke with Rick DesLauriers, at the time the Special Agent in Charge, or SAC, of the Boston FBI, and lobbied on Anthony’sbehalf. In a conventional criminal investigation, the need to preserve the integrity of a pendingcase is paramount, since any deviation from protocol may jeopardize the integrity of the case ifit goes to trial. With the Gardner investigation, I argued, the statute of limitations regarding the theft itself had long since expired, and for years the FBI had been working the case primarily as a recovery effort. I reasoned that the sharing of intelligence between the Bureau and the museum was crucial to achieving this goal.
Rick had the foresight to weigh the benefits of my request, and ultimately authorized the sharing of case details with Anthony, unencumbered by the traditional restraints and regulations imposed by the Bureau. This unconventional arrangement worked well—exceedingly well—and as a result, the FBI and the Gardner Museum were in a position to freely share intelligence about tips and theories without having to play some silly game of charades. (First word…sounds like… Rembrandt…) Once Anthony had access to relevant details about the case, the revived investigation quickly gained momentum.
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