- A Boston museum with over a billion dollars
in priceless paintings:
the site of one of the largest art thefts in history.
- The Vermeer is one of the most valuable
paintings in the world.
[tense music]
- Despite security precautions,
the thieves walk right in. [buzzer buzzes]
- This could have been Fort Knox.
But you let the people in,
then it really doesn't matter how much security you have.
- The brazen theft is only the start of the story.
Soon, there are multiple suspects
and a trail of dead bodies.
- His throat was slashed so deep
that he was nearly decapitated.
- Now that's a message.
- And above all, one burning question:
will the invaluable paintings ever be found?
- The paintings could be here, the paintings could be there.
What happened to the paintings?
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
- The masterminds behind every great heist
see what most people don't...
♪ ♪
Risking everything to pull off the score of a lifetime.
It takes a bold plan...
♪ ♪
The right team...
and the skill to stay one step ahead of the law.
♪ ♪
[suspenseful music]
♪ ♪
[energetic music]
♪ ♪
- [chuckles] It's the 1980s,
and as art prices skyrocket,
professional thieves turned from robbing banks
to robbing museums.
Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
is one-of-a-kind.
A gem of a target, thanks to its peerless collection
of old masters.
When it opens in 1903, the Gardner boasts
the largest private collection of art in America.
♪ ♪
- Isabella Stewart Gardner is a force of nature.
She's five feet tall, shock of red hair.
She was someone who used her wealth
to create something to leave to the city of Boston.
♪ ♪
- She built, in my opinion,
one of the most beautiful museums
that this world has ever seen.
- Nothing can prepare you, really,
for the experience of walking into the Gardener.
It is a riot, a visual feast.
[suspenseful music]
♪ ♪
- That museum is jam-packed with very expensive artwork,
priceless artwork.
♪ ♪
She had the Vermeer, which is one of
what, 31 or 32 in the world?
- Vermeer's "Concert." What an amazing painting.
♪ ♪
- You have various Rembrandts.
- "Christ on the Sea of Galilee."
- A museum like no other.
You'd find something new every time.
♪ ♪
[upbeat music]
- When Isabella Stewart Gardner dies in 1923,
her will establishes an endowment
to keep the museum open exactly how she left it.
- The will stipulates that no paintings
should be taken away, and nothing added either.
- She was not going to lose this museum
to some future generation that had terrible taste
or a bad vision or didn't share her love for it,
so she wrote a will that stipulates that
nothing can be removed or even moved.
- Unfortunately,
Gardner's will also prevents the museum
from making necessary upgrades to its security systems.
- But without her leadership it began to fray,
and I think security was one of the things
that was fraying badly.
- By 1981, the museum security is so outmoded
that one East Boston mob crew can't resist an easy score.
- The museum had classical music concerts twice a week.
They were going to set off smoke bombs at the recital...
[classical music being played]
Cause all sorts of havoc,
and then steal what they wanted to steal.
♪ ♪
[alarm wailing]
Well, they got caught by the FBI.
But now the idea of the museum was vulnerable,
that gets known.
- After this close call, the museum decides
to finally make several security improvements.
[suspenseful music]
- One of them was a motion detector system.
They put sensors in the doorways
of each of the galleries.
- And there is a dot matrix printout
of all of their movements
that's being fed through a printer in the guard station.
[dot matrix printer whines]
- High-tech solutions are only as good
as the people who use them,
so the board establishes new security protocols
for the guards.
- There would be two night shift guards on duty.
One would be walking through the museum
going floor to floor, checking the rooms
to make sure there were no issues or disturbances.
The other guard would be at the guard desk,
and monitoring the systems by the Palace Road door.
- Now under the desk, there's a button
that he could push and alert to the police.
[suspenseful music]
- The Palace Road door leads directly
into a last line of defense for the guards.
- There's a man trap.
When you have those visitors,
you can let them in the first door.
And then when that door shuts,
they're kind of locked in there, right?
They can leave, but they can't get in the museum.
- Despite the new systems,
a new pair of professional thieves spot a weakness.
They picked the perfect date for a fresh heist attempt...
March 17, 1990.
[rowdy upbeat music]
- March 17 is a holy holiday in Boston.
St. Patrick's Day.
♪ ♪
- [chuckling] It's a boozy riot across the city.
♪ ♪
[suspenseful music]
- The first few hours of the St. Patrick's night shift
start like any other.
The two guards take turns patrolling the museum.
- It's these two young men in their early 20s
who are guarding the museum.
Rick Abath, a Berklee College of Music school dropout,
with long ringlet rockstar hair,
and Randy Heston, who is also a music student.
He likes the night shift, he says,
because it gives him a chance to practice his trombone.
- So Randy takes the desk.
His job is to sit at the desk, monitor cameras.
Rick does his first rounds.
♪ ♪
- All the lights were out in the museum during third shift,
and you would walk around with a flashlight.
♪ ♪
- During the second rounds that Rick does,
a fire alarm goes off.
[bell ringing]
No smoke condition, nothing that indicates a fire.
They turn it off.
[alarm falls silent]
- What we understand is that
Rick Abath goes to the Palace Road door
and opens it and closes it
and comes back into the museum.
♪ ♪
- So we're talking about March 18, 1990.
Early morning hours of the-- past midnight, 1:00.
♪ ♪
It's a little bit rainy, misty.
Not too cold.
- And that's when two individuals
walk up to the Palace Road door...
♪ ♪
Ring the doorbell.
[tense musical crescendo]
[suspenseful music]
- The two thieves have a clear, detailed plan.
They start by approaching the museum
wearing stolen police uniforms.
The only question is will their disguises work?
- So there they are, outside the door.
There's a closed circuit TV camera
shining right down on them.
Inside the museum less than 30 feet away
and Rick sees these two men
announcing themselves police officers.
"We're here to investigate a disturbance."
"What disturbance? There's no disturbance here."
- The policy at the Gardner Museum is
nobody gets in the museum after it's closed.
Even if it's Boston Police or law enforcement,
what you're supposed to do is call Boston Police.
- Rick Abath is familiar with the protocol,
but he chooses not to follow it.
He lets the two men inside the first door.
Thanks to the man trap,
he has one more chance to look them over.
- Rick, he was very trusting
and a good-hearted person.
He decided it'd be OK to let them in.
♪ ♪
[buzzer buzzes]
And unfortunately, it went totally wrong.
[tense music]
- Instead of following protocol,
Rick buzzes them in and the heist is on.
- This could have been Fort Knox.
But you let the people in,
then it really doesn't matter how much security you have.
- By letting those two men into the museum,
Rick Abath unleashed the greatest art heist in history.
♪ ♪
[upbeat music]
♪ ♪
- March 18, 1:24 a.m.
Two thieves posing as policemen
make it through the first security door
at the Gardner Museum.
- He saw the uniforms and just assumed
that they were telling the truth.
- Guard Rick Abath has one last opportunity
to stop them getting any farther.
Instead, he buzzes them in.
- Then Rick says to them, "There's nothing going on."
[dramatic tense music]
They ask, "Who else is in the museum?"
"There's one other guard." "Call him down."
And Rick has a two-way radio. He calls down Randy.
- As that second guard comes to the guard desk,
the individuals claiming to be Boston police officers
tell the guard at the desk, "Can I see your ID?
And at that point, the alleged officers say,
"There's a warrant out for your arrest."
- And Rick says, "Mo, no, no, no, no, no.
I'm not wanted for anything."
By stepping away, he is going to be out of reach
from hitting the alarm bell.
The one security alarm bell the museum has
to the outside world.
- And at that point,
they place handcuffs on the first guard.
The other guard who came down to the first floor,
they tell him to get up against the wall.
- And Randy's going, "Oh, my God.
What is going on? What did Rick do?"
But then no sooner is he wondering this,
then he's being handcuffed.
- That's when the one bad guy declared,
"Gentlemen, this is a robbery."
- The fake police take control of the real guards
and tell them what will happen
if they tell the cops anything about the robbery,
and it's not pretty.
- Tells them, "We now know who you are and where you live.
"Keep quiet, cooperate, and don't ever say anything
or we're going to come hunt you down."
- They proceed to tape their eyes
so they can't see where they're going and then they're moved.
Both led down to the basement.
♪ ♪
- At that moment, those guards didn't know
if they were going to live or die.
- With the guards under control,
the men now have free reign of the entire museum.
But their movements are still being tracked
by the motion detectors throughout the building.
- The dot matrix printer that is tracking movement
through the galleries shows exactly where they went,
for how long, and what they did there.
It's the closest thing, I think,
to sort of peeking through a keyhole
and watching the whole thing unfold.
- The two thieves head to the second floor
filled with masterpieces of the Dutch Golden Age.
They start with a painting
worth an estimated $100 million,
Rembrandt's "Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee."
- It's an enormous painting on which we see Christ
and the Apostles at sea in a storm.
♪ ♪
And the apostles look like
they're staring death in the face
and Christ alone is just serene among them.
And if you look very closely, there's Rembrandt.
He's painted himself in it.
So it's a remarkable painting.
It's full of movement and fury and it's his only seascape,
so it is one of a kind.
♪ ♪
The way they take it is brutal.
[abrasive dissonant music]
They slash it from its rosewood stretcher.
[dramatic music]
They slash it right out of the frame.
- They did the same butcher job
to the prize of the room, Vermeer's "Concert."
- So they're really wreaking havoc inside the room.
♪ ♪
- What they did to priceless art was violent.
[jazz music] [glass shatters]
- There's broken glass and splinters everywhere.
- They take a Rembrandt etching.
It's about the size of postage stamp,
but it's in a very elaborate frame.
And we know that they spend the time
unscrewing every screw on that frame.
Requires a special tool.
- If you're stealing millions of dollars' worth of paintings,
you would imagine time would be of the essence.
That you wouldn't be spending time unscrewing this item
and taking it out of the frame when frankly,
you probably could have put it in your pocket.
- And they took one more thing from the Dutch room,
which doesn't fit with the theme of that room.
A 12th century Chinese gu, or beaker.
- It's an ancient Chinese vase that they decided to take.
You'd think you could just grab that off the table,
but that was actually screwed to the table.
So somebody wasted significant time
getting that gu, which, again,
is not close to being in the top 300 items of value
in that museum.
♪ ♪
- There seems to be no pattern to the items they're taking.
They aren't the most valuable, nor the easiest to carry.
The violent way the thieves
cut the paintings from the frames...
[scoffing chuckle]
Suggest they don't understand the true value of the art.
[dramatic music]
- In the Short Gallery,
they take five equestrian sketches by Degas.
Not his usual fare.
- It just seemed like, "Oh, those look like nice drawings.
Let's take those, too."
♪ ♪
- And they also tried to take a silk Napoleonic flag.
- But they couldn't get that banner out of its frame.
But they take the finial...
the eagle-shaped finial at the top of the flagpole.
[tense music]
- They take the final painting of the heist
from an entirely different part of the museum.
- There's a painting taken from the Blue Room,
which is on the first floor.
And that is Manet's "Chez Tortoni."
It's a portrait of a man wearing a top hat.
He has brown eyes and he's kind of looking at you
in this beguiling way.
- And what's interesting is that
there's no motion detected
in that room during the robbery.
- While they may not know a lot about the art
they're stealing, they do seem to know a lot
about the museum's security setup.
- The bad guys, when they left,
they saw the motion detector transcript
was being printed out at the guard's desk
and they ripped that out to steal the transcript
of where they had been, how they had done it.
- Now what they didn't realize
is that the computer hard drive kept a record
of what was on that printout.
So while they took the paper,
we were able to determine after,
by using the hard drive of the computer,
where they had been.
[VCR clicking]
Then the thieves go into the security office
and take the videotape from that evening.
So obviously, we couldn't see
what the security cameras showed during the robbery.
♪ ♪
One leaves first, and a few minutes later,
the second leave, and that's it.
They get in the car, presumably, drive away.
And those paintings or individuals
are never seen or heard from again.
- What we know is that the thieves were in the museum
for 81 minutes, which is an astonishing length
of time for a heist.
Most heists are smash-and-grab.
You know, three minutes tops.
It makes me wonder...
[laughing] Why didn't they take more?
- In those 81 minutes,
the thieves take 13 priceless pieces of art
and vanish into thin air.
The museum sits quiet for the next five hours.
♪ ♪
- So it's the morning of Sunday, March 18.
The guards for the next shift show up.
♪ ♪
- The day shift comes and realize there's a problem.
The guards aren't here.
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
- We've reached a new frontier here
in the annals of art crime.
♪ ♪
I mean, this is brazen. This is big.
♪ ♪
[dramatic music]
- At 7:45 Sunday morning,
the day shift arrives at the Gardner Museum.
Normally, the night guards buzz them in.
Not today.
[tense music]
♪ ♪
As soon as they step inside, they know something's wrong.
After they enter the Dutch room,
they call the police.
- Boston police come. They sweep the museum.
- They find a scene of destruction.
It's very clear that this has been a very brazen
and very violent robbery.
- Investigators are alarmed by the destruction they see
and the art they don't.
- They took all of the Rembrandts off the walls.
- It's a half a billion up to a billion dollars' worth
of paintings.
- One of them, mercifully, was not stolen.
It's a large self-portrait of Rembrandt at the age of 23
that was off the wall and turned away from the doorway.
- It was worth many, many times more than the etching.
It seems like they took it off the wall
and then forgot about it.
- Ten minutes after they arrive,
the police locate the missing guards.
- They find the two guards
gagged and bound in the basement of the museum.
- Each is handcuffed about 50 feet away from each other,
and their heads are duct taped.
They're duct taped this way,
they're duct taped around their eyes.
- So of course, that was traumatic for them.
- Relieved that both guards were alive,
authorities immediately work with them
to build a description of the suspects.
- What these thieves looked like
depended on the memory of the two men who had seen them.
- They believe they had Boston Police uniforms.
One was, I think, shorter and stocky.
- Dark eyes, dark hair, olive skin.
- One was thinner, wiry. One had glasses on.
- The other has kind of a bowl cut and dark eyes.
- Both of them had mustaches,
but they kept on pressing the mustache down,
so it gives a belief that they were false.
- That's about all.
- Even more important than what they looked like
is how well they seemed to know the museum's
new security features.
- They had gotten the guards away from the panic button.
- And they knew where the cellar door was.
- They know where to get the videotape
in the security director's office,
and they know to take the printout.
- In this case, it could be an inside job.
- As news of the robbery shocks the art world
and tips start coming in,
the FBI focuses on the most obvious possibility.
This was an inside job.
♪ ♪
The FBI takes particular interest
in the security guard
who made one too many mistakes that night,
Rick Abath.
- Rick Abath is a 23-year-old music school dropout
who loves the Grateful Dead
and jamming with his band, Ukiah.
- He was just a cool, mellow guy.
Nothing about Rick said to me that he was subversive
or he was up to no good.
- I think that a lot of the speculation in this case
about Rick Abath's motives and guilt
revolve around that one act of opening the door
and closing the door
and coming back inside before the heist.
That's a weird thing to do.
- Why are you checking the outside door?
Because you can see it. There's a window right there.
You can just look and see if it's ajar.
- Is he just making sure the door is locked,
or is he signaling bad guys that it's safe to come in?
- There's one more thing that makes Rick a prime suspect.
- One of the masterpieces, the Manet,
is stolen from that first floor Blue Room.
- Based on the printout from security,
the thieves footsteps are never found downstairs
in the Blue Room where the "Chez Tortoni" is taken,
and the empty frame is left on the security director's chair,
which seems like a little bit of a--you know.
It's a little bit of a slap, maybe.
- Despite the lingering questions,
the FBI'S investigation can't find any evidence
tying Rick Abath to the crime.
- I worked the case for six years.
There was never enough evidence to charge anybody.
Whether a guard, an insider,
never enough to pull the trigger on an indictment.
- Rick Abath is now a dead-end for investigators,
the first of many.
Over the next several months,
the FBI looks into every clue they unearth,
including a tip that the art thieves have ties to the mob.
[chuckles]
More than a year after the heist,
they get a fresh lead
from the Massachusetts State Police who've been monitoring
a crooked car shop called TRC Auto.
[suspenseful music]
- TRC Auto is owned by Carmello Merlino...
♪ ♪
An Italian mob guy who has a crew of criminals.
They're heavy hitters, these guys.
You need a criminal?
You go there, you can get yourself a criminal
to steal anything you want.
- The Massachusetts State Police
have been keeping eyes on these guys for quite some time
for, amongst other things, drugs, stolen items,
as well as the heist itself.
- At the time, there were informants
who claimed that Carmello Merlino
had some hand either in the actual heist
or knew where the artwork was.
- Law enforcement starts to get ins on the TRC gang
because very quickly, they know that this is the gang
that is most likely the source of the heist.
- The FBI takes a closer look at drug dealers, thieves,
and enforcers surrounding Merlino.
Two men quickly rise to the top
of a possible suspects list--
George Reissfelder and Lenny DiMuzio.
- Some people thought they matched the sketches
that both guards cooperated in.
- Reissfelder in particular does more than
just fit the description.
There are whispers that he may have one of the paintings.
- The thing for Reissfelder
that elevated him to the top of the list
is the fact that his own brother
claimed to have seen Manet's "Chez Tortoni"
hanging over George's bed at his apartment in Quincy.
- Authorities are eager to talk to Reissfelder
and discuss his personal art collection.
They don't get chance.
In March of 1991,
he's found dead under suspicious circumstances.
And the Manet he supposedly held?
Nowhere to be found.
- You have a guy who is not an injector found dead.
The needle was still in his arm.
And those who knew him said he didn't inject drugs.
He was afraid of needles, actually,
so it's a little suspicious.
- What's interesting about it is that Carmello Merlino
was there at the house.
He went into his apartment before the police arrived.
And if the "Chez Tortoni" really was over George's bed,
then Carmello could have gone in there
and moved it beforehand.
♪ ♪
- With Reissfelder permanently out of the picture,
investigators turn to his alleged partner
in the crime, Lenny DiMuzio.
But just like the Gardener paintings,
DiMuzio is missing.
- Lenny DiMuzio visits his sister,
disappears on that visit.
[suspenseful music]
- A year after the Gardner Museum heist,
and one of the possible suspects is already dead.
Another, Lenny DiMuzio, is missing.
Three months after Reissfelder's body is found,
DiMuzio resurfaces, dead.
- Lenny DiMuzio is found over in East Boston
in the trunk of a car...
and he's been shot multiple times.
- Another dead-end.
Could this be Carmello Merlino cleaning up loose ends
or something else?
A message to other crew members
who may have ties to the heist?
♪ ♪
With their best leads stymied, law enforcement gets creative.
Some say it takes a thief to catch one,
so they turn to New England's most notorious art thief,
Myles Connor.
[psychedelic rock music]
- If Myles hadn't been in prison at the time,
people would have figured, "Case solved. It's Myles."
But there was some speculation that perhaps,
he knew who did it.
- When authorities interview him in jail,
Connor tells them quite a tale.
- While Myles Connor is sitting in federal prison
in California, he receives a visitor,
a friend who said, "We did this thing.
We did it for you. We're going to get you out."
And by we, he means Bobby Donati and him.
And it makes total sense to Myles.
- Connor's connection with Bobby Donati runs deep.
They've stolen paintings before.
[energetic music]
- In the 1970s,
he and Bobby Donati cased the Gardner.
They were walking through the Short Gallery,
and Bobby Donati looked at the top of a silk Napoleonic flag.
He looked up at the bronze eagle finial and said,
"I like that." [laughs]
I mean, you can kind of picture it soldered
onto the hood of a Cadillac.
♪ ♪
- Investigators soon uncover something
even more interesting.
Donati has close ties to TRC Auto and its boss.
- Bobby Donati is drawn to this TRC gang.
I think he finds in Carmello Merlino
a father figure, a patriarch that they could please,
that they could do things for.
- And there's a further tie to the heist.
He's a race fan. Donati loves the horses.
- And it has been suggested
that he just liked these Degas horse sketches.
He just liked them. [laughs]
Just took them.
- Police scour the streets of Boston looking for Donati.
Unfortunately, someone else finds Bobby first.
- Donati is ambushed outside his home.
They surprise him at night. They grab him.
It's obvious there's been a struggle.
You know, blood on the porch.
And then he's found days later in the trunk of a car.
- Bobby Donati was stabbed multiple times,
and his throat was slashed so deep
that he was reportedly nearly decapitated.
- Now that's a message.
- Not only are the leads drying up,
but the bodies are piling up.
- The issue with so many of these theories and suspects
is that almost all of the prime suspects are dead.
[suspenseful music]
- In 1997, seven years after the heist,
a desperate Gardener Museum ups the reward money
to a whopping $5 million.
It works.
A few months later,
an antiques dealer comes forward
with some bold claims and some bold demands.
[upbeat music]
- Bill Youngworth had a store in Brighton.
♪ ♪
He claims that
he can broker the return of the artwork.
♪ ♪
And he has demands.
He wants the $5 million reward
and he has some criminal charges pending against him
which he wants to get dismissed.
- And he wanted Myles Connor,
the notorious New England art thief,
released from prison.
♪ ♪
- Billy Youngworth is willing to prove
he really has the goods, but he doesn't trust the FBI.
Instead, he makes a tantalizing offer
to a "Boston Herald" journalist.
Youngworth will show the journalist
one of the masterworks stolen from the Gardner
if he agrees to write about it.
- The journalist gets into a car
with people he doesn't know
and doesn't know what's going to happen on the other end.
[suspenseful music]
- He was blindfolded and driven to someplace
outside of New York and taken to a warehouse.
- You can imagine the anxiety.
He enters a warehouse,
which is completely dark inside.
There, he's walked in and shown by flashlight
some tubes in the corner.
- And the reporter recounts this canvas being unfurled,
and what--he's only allowed to see it for a glimpse.
[suspenseful music]
- Seven years after it went missing,
a Boston journalist catches a glimpse
of one of Rembrandt's masterpieces
in a dingy warehouse in Brooklyn.
- He sees "The Storm on the Sea of Galilee."
They roll it back up and said, "There it is."
And they take him back.
The next day, he starts writing his article.
Big headlines:
"We've seen it!"
Front cover, "Boston Herald,"
with a picture of "The Storm of Galilee" on the front.
And it makes a noise throughout the world.
- I mean, everyone was like, "oh, my God.
Is this the first credible sighting of this painting?
♪ ♪
- After seven long years, the museum is eager
to make a deal with Billy Youngworth,
but the FBI is, well, less trusting.
They have some demands of their own
if Youngworth wants the money:
more solid proof than one man's word.
[suspenseful music]
- The "Herald" also asked for some other proof,
and was provided some paint chips
that Youngworth claimed came from the Rembrandt.
- A few months later, the FBI analyzes the sample
and says, "This is not from that Rembrandt."
- They're ruled out
as being from "Storm on the Sea of Galilee."
- The FBI thinks the painting is fake
and Youngworth is a con artist.
They refuse to make a trade.
- When I was interviewing conservators about
how likely it would be
that "Storm on the Sea of Galilee"
could have been rolled and then unfurled.
They say the painting would have been destroyed
because there's so much lacquer on it.
- There was no follow-up
from the U.S. Attorney's office in Boston about it
because they believed that
he was peddling in fake paintings.
♪ ♪
- Although interest in the missing artwork
is at an all-time high since the heist,
the investigation is at an all-time low.
With no new leads,
the FBI circles back to the nagging suspicion
that the TRC gang is responsible...
so they plant someone on the inside.
- It was around the time that this informant
started working at TRC.
Well, he reports back to his FBI agent
that they're talking about the Gardener there.
- With all eyes back on the garage,
investigators turn their gaze to someone new...
a frequent visitor there, Bobby Guarente.
- If you make a Venn diagram of all the bad guys,
and I did do this-- [laughs]
Everybody kind of crosses paths with everybody,
and Bobby Guarente is in the middle of it.
- Guarente is an interesting character.
He's sort of a jack-of-all-trades,
and he is able to move fluidly
through a lot of different areas
and amongst different groups.
A lot of people used Guarente
because he was trusted by most people in this industry
that they're in as much as people can be trusted.
- My sense is Donati reached out to him.
The only person I know who had the network
that could fence it was Guarente.
- If Bobby Guarente had a hand in moving the artwork,
the FBI is unable to get any answers from him.
He dies in 2004.
Surprisingly, from natural causes.
But this time,
Guarente's death is not a total dead-end.
- The FBI and the museum get tips about a home
that Bobby Guarente owned in Maine,
reported to have a spot big enough
to hide a very big painting like "Storm in the Sea."
And they find a hiding spot
that fits exactly this description.
When they return the key to Bobby Guarente's widow Elene,
she said, "I've seen those paintings.
My Bobby had some of those paintings."
- Although the prize paintings
are no longer in their hiding place,
the FBI believes they were there.
More importantly, they think they know where they went.
- Elene Guarente tells a story about being in Portland, Maine
with her husband, Bobby Guarente,
and another fellow, Bobby Gentile,
this Connecticut mobster.
- [chuckles] Everyone has a best friend here.
Bobby Gentile is a small-timer
out of Manchester, Connecticut,
right outside of Hartford.
- Guarente and Gentile have dinner with their wives
at this seafood restaurant.
At one point during that meal, they got up
and went to the parking lot and went back inside.
And then on the way home, Guarente said,
"You don't have to worry about those pictures anymore."
He passed them to Bobby Gentile.
[suspenseful music]
- It's now May, 2012,
22 years since the Gardner Museum heist,
and the FBI has chased leads
from Boston to Brooklyn to Maine.
Their hunt now turns to Connecticut
and a small-time crook named Bobby Gentile.
- So here's Bobby Gentile in his 70s,
living on a leafy street in Manchester, Connecticut,
when he's served with a warrant by the FBI
to search his property.
They don't find what they're looking for in the house.
They leave, they come back
with a warrant for the garden shed.
- There were probably ten, 15 vehicles.
They had beagles and golden retrievers
and video cameras, guys in lab coats.
I mean, this was the production.
- They used side scan sonar
to see if there was anything buried in the yard.
And there was a void under the shed.
- And that's where they hit pay dirt.
[tense music]
- More than two decades after the hunt began,
the FBI is searching mobster Bobby Gentile's home,
and they find a secret compartment
under a backyard shed.
- I'm sitting outside of the shed,
and they're cutting into the floorboards.
The excitement was palpable.
And then they pull the floorboard up,
and everybody's looking over the top.
And then it's just...
defeat.
It's empty.
- Despite their disappointment,
the FBI finds evidence
that's both intriguing and incriminating.
- In the basement, they have the "Boston Herald"
from the day after the theft.
Inside is a sheet of paper,
and it has all 13 pieces that were stolen
with what the piece would buy on the black market.
- And unfortunately for my client,
they found a lot of guns
and a few police uniforms, uh, which was, uh,
tough to explain.
- It all looks really bad for Bobby Gentile.
The circumstantial evidence is strong
that he had something to do with the heist.
- Looking at serious prison time
for the illegal weapons,
Bobby Gentile agrees to tell the FBI
everything he knows about the stolen art.
- The only way that they're going
to be able to verify that information is on a polygraph.
And he says, "I'll tell them anything they want."
So they put up a whole bunch of pictures on the wall,
of all of the objects that were taken.
And they say, "Have you ever seen this one?"
He says, "No." "Have you ever seen this one?"
- Fails it. Every question they ask him.
- Like most aspects of this case,
the interrogation of Bobby Gentile
creates more questions than answers.
Gentile is sent to prison for the rest of his life,
which may not be very long.
- I was called by the U.S. Marshals office
and they said, "Your client is dying."
I drive to the hospital.
He was very upset and he kept saying over and over again,
I can't die here, I can't die here.
So I said to him,
"Bob, there has to be something that you know.
"There has to be, because there's all this smoke
"around this case, and it's all over you.
You have to know where this fire started."
And I said, "And if you just give that to me,
you can die at home in your bed with your wife."
And he looked at me desperately,
and tears were coming down both of his eyes.
And he just said,
"There ain't no paintings, kid.
There ain't no paintings."
- Bobby Gentile survives that health scare,
but dies in September, 2021,
and the location of a $1/2 billion in stolen art
may have died with him.
- Authorities believe that Gentile, at one point,
knew where that artwork was.
- You know, maybe they were in the ditch.
They were ruined in a flood that took place
in the back yard of the Gentiles' house.
- Though the FBI is still trying to recover the artwork,
they now believe they know
who committed the original robbery:
suspects George Reissfelder and Lenny DiMuzio.
The fate of the art is not as clear.
- The FBI holds a press conference
that says, basically,
"We know who did it and we know where the artwork went.
We just don't know where it is right now."
- They believe that the thieves were dead.
They had very good information that the artwork changed hands,
that it went through organized crime circles
from Boston to Connecticut to Philadelphia.
One theory is somebody had them all together in one place
and died or was murdered
and they're buried and we can never find them.
But it's hard to imagine that they're all in one place.
- It's been over 30 years.
I have a hard time believing, if they were broken up
amongst multiple groups of people,
that nothing would have come forward after this much time,
particularly with a huge reward.
- Today, the whereabouts of the 13 pieces of artwork
remains a mystery,
and finding them is still as urgent as it was
on March 18, 1990, the day of the heist.
- I do think the key for this investigation
is for more people to know about it.
If they're still around,
somebody will come across one of them,
and they need to understand the significance of it.
- These don't belong in some crawlspace
in an attic somewhere.
These belong back on the walls.
- We'll work to get them back. And who wins?
Our grandchildren win.
[dramatic music]
- Until the artwork is returned,
the frames hang empty in the museum.
The reward for any information leading to the recovery
now stands at 10 million bucks.
The Gardner robbery remains
the largest art theft in world history,
and one of history's greatest heists.
♪ ♪