Stolen Art Watch, Jeffrey Gundlach, Philanthropist, Renaissance Person, Can Bring Home The Gardner Art

The Gardner Art recovery needs to be taken out of the Govt/FBI and Gardner Museum's hands.
The private sector, in the shape of a Billionaire Philanthropist, needs to step in with a private reward offer structured with a:

Philanthropist Gardner Art Reward Price List
No conditions on reward payment
No scrutiny.

All done with media co-operation in public.
Banner headline the Philanthropist Gardner Art Reward Price List

Then the Billionaire Philanthropist can hand back the stolen Gardner art they recover, seek no Gardner Museum reward, and not reveal how they recovered the said stolen Gardner artworks.

Introducing Jeffrey Gundlach, the Billionaire Philanthropist, Renaissance Person whom I believe has the rescources and is best suited to bring home the stolen Gardner Art, with a private reward offer to counter the uncollectable Gardner Museum reward offer.

 https://buffalonews.com/2018/07/29/albright-knox-philanthropist-gundlach-plans-second-home-on-lincoln-parkway/

Not satisfied with just donating a record amount of money to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, philanthropist Jeffrey Gundlach now wants to live near it.

The billionaire investment manager, who owns a $15 million estate in the Pacific Palisades of Los Angeles, will use a 5,204-square-foot mansion at 76 Lincoln Parkway as his home when in town.
Gundlach bought the 0.41-acre property through Frostridge LLC in 2017 from the estate of Susan F. Surdam, paying $950,000, and he's making interior improvements.

The property is just a few blocks from the museum, but the founder of DoubleLine Capital won't always be there, said attorney Sean Hopkins. So now he's planning to carve out the rear 4,525-square-foot portion of the property into a new lot, on which he'll put up a two-story detached building with a three-car garage and a 1,120-square-foot caretaker's apartment.
Both the existing 2.5-story house in front, which dates to 1926, and the new house in the rear will be stucco.

Plans by architect David Sutton call for adding a new uncovered porch on the front facade of the existing house. The new balcony is designed to mimic the home's original terrace and courtyard. The property is in the Elmwood Village Historic District East.
If approved, construction by Omni-Craft Inc. – the Akron-based firm owned by Gundlach's older brother, Drew – would cost $250,000 and would last four months, according to an application to he Buffalo Planning Board, which will review the project July 30.
The project received three variances from the Zoning Board of Appeals.

Gundlach donated $42.5 million to the Albright-Knox in 2016 to anchor the museum's $100 million capital campaign, then added another $10 million commitment in 2017 when the museum increased its target to $155 million.

The Gardner Museum reward offer started out as a private reward offer from the auction houses Christies and Sotheby's so this would only be reverting to the original private Gardner art reward offer. See link: https://www.nytimes.com/.../auctioneers-underwrite-reward...

Jeffrey Gundlach recovered his own stolen art, see link below:
https://www.businessinsider.com/gundlachs-helped-the-fbi-2012-11?IR=T&fbclid=IwAR0RZoiDu1kxXvbyL4dwuqXywO6PmsnB3f7Akx9DZ7lWzRPQO7_zqj7Bifw

Gardner Art Heist, Last Seen Podcast Episode 9 Reveals Roadblock To Recovery Of The Gardner Art !!

Stolen Art Watch, Gardner Art Reward Price List Will Lead to Gardner Art Recovery

Gardner Art Reward Price List

Establish an itemized reward price list showing the amount that will be received for returning each of the stolen items, to accommodate the possibility that the 13 stolen Gardner artworks are no longer together.

Reward Total $10 million

Vermeer $5 million

Rembrandt Storm on the Sea $3 million

Rembrandt Lady and Gentleman in Black $1 million

Manet Chez Tortoni $500,000

After Rembrandt Obelisk painting $100,000

A bronze eagle finial
(c. 1813–1814) $100,000

Small Self-Portrait
by Rembrandt $50,000

An ancient Chinese Gu $50,000

La Sortie de Pesage

by Degas $ 50,000

Cortege aux Environs de Florence
by Degas $50,000

Three Mounted Jockeys
by Degas
(c. 1885–1888) $50,000

Program for an Artistic Soirée 1
by Degas
(1884) £25,000

Program for an Artistic Soirée 2
by Degas
(1884) ~$25,000

Stolen Art Watch, Kelly Horan Demands Gardner Art Recovery, Turbo Plan Provides Solution

Kelly Horan, host of Last Seen podcast about the Gardner Art Heist, reveals the tragic loss of the Gardner art can be compared to the tragic loss of the infant son of Isabella Stewart Gardner.

It is universally agreed that there is a desperate need to recover the Gardner art, however, until now no-one has offered practial solutions.

The Turbo Plan offers a solution going forward with the Gardner Art Reward Price List and Change .org petition:

https://www.change.org/p/let-s-bring-home-the-stolen-isabella-stewart-gardner-museum-art-a-new-approach?recruiter=886928978&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=copylink&utm_campaign=share_petition

Isabella Left This Art In Our Care — 

'We Need To Get Them Back'

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When I was given the assignment to delve into the story behind the theft of 13 treasures from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum — how did it happen, and why hasn’t it been solved — I knew that my charge would be a complicated one.

I had no idea.

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Working with the Globe and my WBUR colleagues on a podcast about the crime, I met mobsters and con men, wily defense lawyers and frustrated former agents. I bounced between Dorchester and Ireland, the Fenway and New York. I spent countless hours with the museum’s head of security, a man whose every waking moment — his voice, his face, his somber demeanor — is made heavy by his obsession with finding the stolen works.

I basked in the live-wire glow of Anne Hawley, the brilliant and elegant former museum director, who sized up the loss of the most valuable paintings with a few unfathomable questions: What if we could never listen to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony again, or hear Louis Armstrong, or see “Hamlet” performed? Such is the meaning of these missing Rembrandts, the Vermeer and the Manet.

But the most captivating person connected to the largest unsolved art heist in history, someone whose presence I’ve felt every day of this endeavor, is neither a suspect nor a detective. It’s Isabella Stewart Gardner herself.

The French have a term for the descriptive text left in place of art that has been stolen: fantôme. As in, phantom. As in, the ghost of art now gone. Mrs. Gardner knew loss, deep abiding loss, all too well. Which is what makes this robbery, this fantôme, all the more wrenching. To understand Mrs. Gardner, as she is still called at the museum, is to understand what was truly lost on that March night 28 years ago.

Mrs. Gardner was not an unsung presence in the Boston of the late 1800s. She was wealthy, insatiably curious and the life of every party. But I learned that before she was christened “one of the seven wonders of Boston,” before she was described as a “flamelike incarnation of vigor and life” in the thrilling portrait of her by the Swedish painter Anders Zorn, she was nearly done in by death.

Anders Zorn's portrait of Isabella Stewart Gardner on display in the museum's Short Gallery. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)

Gardner lost her only child, a son she called Jackie, before he was 2 years old. It was the heartbreak of her life. In a photograph that I find harder to look at than any of the museum’s empty frames, Gardner stands behind her sitting baby, holding him up. Jackie looks straight ahead. Gardner smiles into the back of the boy’s downy head. You can practically see her inhaling his perfect baby scent.

In 1867, two years after their son’s death and on doctor’s orders, a wan and bereft Gardner boarded a steamer ship with her husband, John Lowell “Jack” Gardner. Destination: Northern Europe. Travel healed. Beauty redeemed. And every couple of years, they did it again, abandoned Boston for wilder shores and life-affirming art. Angkor Wat. The Nile. Venice. Nothing could bring back a lost baby, but there he seemed to be, in the face of the Christ child in Francisco de Zurbarán’s "The Virgin of Mercy." Gardner bought that painting 23 years after Jackie’s death; she never stopped looking for him.

I don’t claim that every piece in Gardner’s vast collection was somehow connected to her recollected son. Hunting after masterpieces — the thrill of the chase, the ecstasy of possession — became her abiding passion. “I suppose the picture-habit (which I seem to have) is as bad as the morphine or the whiskey one — and it does cost,” she wrote to her collector in Europe in 1896, as she awaited delivery of Titian’s quivering, poignant Rape of Europa, for which she paid a record price of 20,000 pounds. (The Gardner thieves, blessedly, passed on this vast masterwork.)

Episode 1: '81 Minutes'

Last Seen

But the whole of it — the books and tapestries and paintings and sculptures, the Venetian palace she created in which to showcase it — all of it was her bid to vanquish mortality. Death had claimed her only child. It would also take her husband in 1898, just as they prepared to buy the filled-in swampland in the Fens on which her museum would be built.

The spirit may be eternal, but the flesh is not. Leave it to Gardner, then, to have devised a work-around for this earthly inconvenience: a last will and testament that stipulated that her museum’s galleries should be left both “for the education and enjoyment of the public forever,” and also unchanged — nothing removed, nothing added.

“Don’t touch!” an elderly Gardner is recalled as having called out to a passel of visitors crossing her Raphael Room when her museum was still known as Fenway Court. Upon her death, in 1924, Gardner made the sentiment indelible. Nothing would touch or ever alter Isabella Stewart Gardner’s stone-and-stucco monument — until two thieves dressed as police officers did.

No mother loves all of her children the same. Who’s to say which of the 13 lost works would cause Gardner the most anguish? She’d written to her collector of feeling an “ache” for the “sea picture,” as she called Rembrandt’s "Storm on the Sea of Galilee." In acquiring Vermeer’s "The Concert," Gardner established herself as a serious collector, even outbidding the Louvre. But each of the stolen pieces was something she’d chosen and, we can assume, cherished.

There are a few show-stopping images of Isabella Stewart Gardner: that incandescent Zorn; a John Singer Sargent portrait that so well captured Gardner’s natural endowments it prompted her husband, otherwise tolerant of his wife’s many flirtations, to banish it from public view. But that photo — a young mother bashful with bliss — is my touchstone for what Gardner’s collection meant to her and what its 13 missing pieces mean for all of us.

She left them in our care. We need to get them back.

Kelly Horan

Stolen Art Watch, Judy Garland Ruby Slippers Recovered, Click Three Times, Wish Hard For Gardner Art Recovery

No place like home: 'Wizard of Oz' slippers found after Arizona donor offers reward

A scene from the 1939 classic "The WIzard of Oz." Pictured from left: Ray Bolger (Scarecrow), Jack Haley (Tin Man), Judy Garland (Dorothy) and Bert Lahr (Cowardly Lion).

MGM

It took 13 years, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation followed the yellow brick road of clues and has recovered a stolen pair of ruby slippers seen in the movie "The Wizard of Oz."
FBI Special Agent Jill Sanborn on Tuesday called the recovery a "significant milestone" at a news conference in Minneapolis. The bureau didn't say whether arrests have been made.
Sanborn said four pairs of ruby slippers are known to exist: A pair at the Smithsonian, a pair owned by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, a pair belonging to a private party and the recently recovered "traveling pair."
"They are more than just a pair of slippers," said Grand Rapids Police Department Chief Scott Johnson. "They are an enduring symbol of the power of belief."

Stolen in 2005

A pair of ruby slippers, known as the "traveling pair," were recovered by the FBI after disappearing from the Judy Garland Museum in Minnesota 13 years ago.

Courtesy of: Federal Bureau of Investigation

The shoes were stolen in 2005 from the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. The museum is Garland's childhood home.
"The thieves not only took the slippers, they took a piece of history that will be forever connected to Grand Rapids and one of our city's most famous children," Johnson said.
In 2017, a person provided information on the shoes and how they could be returned. Investigators believed the person was trying to extort the shoes' owners, according to a statement.
The FBI aided the investigation with its Art Crime Team, laboratory, and field offices in Chicago, Atlanta and Miami. The bureau said the shoes were found during an undercover operation in Minneapolis.
The shoes were taken to the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., to be compared with another pair of ruby slippers.

Arizona reward in play?

Judy Garland as Dorothy, with Toto, in "The Wizard of Oz in 1939.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

An anonymous Arizona donor in 2015 had offered a $1 million reward for information leading to the return of the slippers.
Judy Garland Museum Executive Director John Kelsch told The Arizona Republic at the time that the museum would not say whether the donor was from the Phoenix area.
The donor is a fan of Garland and "The Wizard of Oz."
MORE: Ask Clay: Hidden messages in 'Wizard of Oz'
In his The Republic interview, Kelsch said to claim the reward, the tipster must provide the slippers' exact location or have someone personally turn them in. Also, the slippers must be in good condition for authorities to authenticate them and the name of the thief must be provided.
Museum officials couldn't say Tuesday whether the recovery of the shoes fully met those criteria. Officials also didn't provide an update on the reward.

Who stole the shoes?

The FBI is still looking for information on the theft of the slippers. Multiple suspects were identified.
"There are certainly people out there who have additional knowledge regarding both the theft and the individuals responsible for concealing the slippers all these years," FBI Special Agent Christopher Dudley said.
The public is encouraged to provide information on the theft or extortion plot by calling 1-800-225-5324 or submit information online at tips.fbi.gov.

Art crimes

U.S. Attorney Chris Myers said the FBI's stolen art list contains about 8,000 art and culture items. Since the creation of the Art Crime team, more than 14,850 items have been recovered.
"There is a certain romance in these types of schemes," Myers said. "Sometimes sophistication, but at the end of the day it is a theft."
In 2017, a painting by Willem de Kooning was recovered at an estate sale in New Mexico. The painting, stolen from the University of Arizona Museum of Art in 1985, is estimated to be worth more than $100 million.

Art Crime

Stolen Ruby Slippers from The Wizard of Oz Recovered

Dawn Wallace, a conservator for the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History, analyzes one of the recovered slippers at the Smithsonian's Conservation Lab in Washington, D.C. (Smithsonian photo)

A pair of ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz and stolen from the actress’ namesake museum in Minnesota more than a decade ago has been recovered, the FBI announced today.
The iconic sequined shoes, known as the “traveling pair”—one of at least four pairs used in the film that are still in existence—were stolen from the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota in 2005 and recovered earlier this summer during a sting operation. But the case is far from over.
“From the outset,” said Special Agent Christopher Dudley, who led the investigation from the FBI’s Minneapolis Division, “our top priority was the safe recovery of the slippers.” Although multiple suspects have been identified, Dudley said, “we are still working to ensure that we have identified all parties involved in both the initial theft and the more recent extortion attempt for their return. This is very much an active investigation.”
At a press conference in Minneapolis to announce the recovery, the FBI, along with the Grand Rapids Police Department, asked for the public’s assistance. “There are certainly people out there who have additional knowledge regarding both the theft and the individuals responsible for concealing the slippers all these years.” Dudley said. “We are asking that you come forward.”

Conservators at the National Museum of American History assisted the Minneapolis Division of the FBI in the case of ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz that were stolen in Minnesota in 2005. The museum analyzed and compared the recovered slippers with a pair that has been part of the Smithsonian collection since 1979.

Transcript | Download

“We are still working to ensure that we have identified all parties involved in both the initial theft and the more recent extortion attempt for their return.”

Christopher Dudley, special agent, FBI Minneapolis

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Judy Garland, who played Dorothy Gale in the classic fairy tale film enjoyed by generations of moviegoers around the world, wore several pairs of the red slippers during the movie’s production, dancing her way down the yellow brick road and, at the story’s end, clicking her heels three times and repeating, “There’s no place like home.” The slippers are widely considered to be one of the most recognizable pieces of memorabilia in American film history, and are estimated to be worth several million dollars.
The star’s childhood house in Grand Rapids was turned into a museum in 1975 and remains a repository of The Wizard of Oz artifacts and memorabilia. The slippers disappeared from there in the early morning hours of August 28, 2005, and the crime has weighed heavily on the community, whose identity is proudly associated with Garland’s birthplace.
Despite a vigorous investigation by local authorities at the time, the slippers were not located, and no arrests were made. When the theft occurred, said Grand Rapids Police Department Chief Scott Johnson during today’s announcement, “the thieves not only took the slippers, they took a piece of history that will be forever connected to Grand Rapids and one of our city’s most famous children.”
In the summer of 2017, 12 years after the theft, an individual approached the company that insured the slippers, saying he had information about the shoes and how they could be returned. “When it became apparent that those involved were in reality attempting to extort the owners of the slippers,” Dudley explained, Grand Rapids police requested the FBI’s assistance. After nearly a yearlong investigation—with invaluable assistance from the FBI’s Art Crime Team, the FBI Laboratory, and field offices in Chicago, Atlanta, and Miami—the slippers were recovered during an undercover operation in Minneapolis.

These iconic sequined shoes, known as the “traveling pair”—one of at least four pairs used in The Wizard of Oz that are still in existence—were stolen from the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota in 2005 and recovered earlier this summer during a sting operation.

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Agents from the FBI’s Minneapolis Field Office transported the recovered slippers to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.—where another pair of the ruby slippers has been on display since 1979—for analysis and comparison.
Dawn Wallace, a Smithsonian conservator who has been working for the past two years to conserve the museum’s ruby slippers, which are nearly 80 years old, said a careful analysis led to the conclusion that the recovered shoes were similar in construction, materials, and condition to the museum’s pair. And it turns out the recovered shoes and the pair in the museum’s collection are mismatched twins.
Smithsonian curator Ryan Lintelman, who specializes in American film history, explained that there were probably six or more pairs of the slippers made for The Wizard of Oz. “It was common that you would create multiple copies of costumes and props,” he said. Somehow over the years, the pairs of shoes were mixed up.
Lintelman added that the Smithsonian’s ruby slippers “are among the most requested objects by visitors to the museum. There is an emotional response that visitors have,” he said. “People’s eyes light up.”
“Recovering a cultural item of this importance is significant,” the FBI’s Dudley noted. “So many people of all ages around the world have seen The Wizard of Oz and in that way have some connection to the slippers. That’s one of the things that makes this case resonate with so many.”
Anyone with additional information regarding the theft of the ruby slippers or the extortion plot is encouraged to contact the FBI at 1-800-CALL-FBI (225-5324) or submit information online at tips.fbi.gov.

Resources

• FBI Recovers Stolen Ruby Slippers Used in ‘The Wizard of Oz’

Videos

• Smithsonian Assists FBI in Minnesota Ruby Slippers Case

Stolen Art Watch, $1 Billion Gardner Art Heist, Reward Petition Can Solve Case

Change.org Petition:
https://www.change.org/p/let-s-bring-home-the-stolen-isabella-stewart-gardner-museum-art-a-new-approach?recruiter=886928978&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=copylink&utm_campaign=share_petition

Stolen Art Watch, Gardner Art Heist, The Truth, The Whole Truth, And Nothing But The Truth

Art Hostage aka Turbo Paul having a chit-chat with Tim and Lance on Empty Frames podcast about the Gardner Art Heist and how to recover the stolen Gardner art.
 
Empty Frames podcast

Stolen Art Watch, Gardner Art Fraud Goes Right To The Core, Fake Investigation, Fake Reward, Fake Immunity

Man guilty in Gardner painting fraud scam sentenced

A West Virginia man who pleaded guilty to a wire fraud scam purporting to sell paintings stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum was sentenced yesterday.
Todd Andrew Desper was sentenced by U.S. District Court Judge Rya W. Zobel to time served and three years of supervised release, three months of which will be spent in home confinement, according to an announcement by U.S. Attorney Andrew E. Lelling and Harold H. Shaw, Special Agent in Charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Boston Field Division.
Desper’s attorney didn’t immediately respond to an email.
Prosecutors said Desper, acting under the pseudonym “Mordokwan,” solicited foreign buyers on Craigslist for Rembrandt’s “Storm on the Sea of Galilee” and Vermeer’s “The Concert,” two paintings he claimed were among 13 stolen from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990.
According to prosecutors, the security director for the Gardner Museum engaged in encrypted communications with Desper in an attempt to determine whether he had access to the stolen masterpieces. During the email exchange, Desper instructed the security director to send a cashier’s check for $5 million to a location in West Virginia. In return, “Storm on the Sea of Galilee” would then be sent, concealed behind another painting.
Investigators were ultimately able to determine that Desper had no access to the artwork, or any information about the notorious heist, but was instead engaged in a multimillion-dollar fraud scheme targeting foreign art buyers.

Desper pleaded guilty to wire fraud in February.
The FBI has said two suspects who masqueraded as police officers to rob the museum of $500 million worth of masterpieces are dead.
Federal authorities were notified of the foreign Craigslist notices by individuals seeking to assist in the recovery of the artwork, as well as those seeking the multi-million dollar reward offered by the museum.
Why No Gardner Art Recovery
Making public an unsubstantiated narrative that the Gardner Heist was by local Boston criminal gangs was somehow supposed to help get the art back, but what's left of these gangs are less inclined to cooperate with authorities for a shot at the reward than ever.
 https://twitter.com/gardnerheist?lang=en

These Boston gang leftovers, along with anyone who could help recover the Gardner art do not, and have never, believed the offers of Immunity and Reward and both were designed to decieve.

Anyone who has stepped forward and tried to negociate a Gardner art recovery has been hounded, jailed and their life destroyed, whether deserved or not by their criminal lifestyle.

Everytime someone stepped forward they were led like Lambs to the slaughter, told there is only one deal, give up everything they know to authorities, be prepared to testify against those involved in the Gardner case and just hope and pray the Gardner Museum takes pity and decides to give a nominal reward, never millions of dollars as claimed.

What incentive does that give anyone who could really provide a Gardner art recovery?
The Immunity and reward offers have never been scrutinised and no journalist has dared to question the validity of either the Immunity or Reward offers.
Art Hostage Comments:
It matters not what Art Hostage believes about the validity of the Immunity and Reward offers in the Gardner Art Heist case. The people who need convincing are those who hold or know the location of the Gardner art.
Until these people feel confident they can hand back the stolen Gardner art, collect the reward and not face scrutiny of authorities, the only Gardner recovery effort in town is one of seeking an informant to give a location of the Gardner art.
That has not worked for twenty eights years and counting.
I wish the Gardner Museum and authorities would just state clearly they will not allow the Gardner art to be handed back, reward paid in full, and no scrutiny of those handing back the Gardner art.

Stolen Art Watch, Gardner Case, One Narrative, One Offer, Only Informants Wanted

Amore to speak about Gardner Museum heist in Hingham

How the theft was carried out and where the painting might possibly be at this moment will be a few of the topics covered when Anthony Amore visits the Hingham Community Center on Wednesday, May 9 at 7:30 p.m.

The world-acclaimed Gardner Museum in Boston is unique. With most world-class art museums people flock to stare at historic paintings by master artists. But at the Gardner Museum a good number of ticket-buyers come to stare at empty frames... and a slice of New England folklore.
In the early morning hours of March 18, 1990, a pair of thieves disguised as police officers entered the Gardner Museum and stole 13 works of art by world-renowned artists such as Rembrandt, Vermeer, Manet, and Degas. The works, including Rembrandt’s Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee and Vermeer’s The Concert, are worth more than $500 million. This remains the biggest unsolved art theft in world history.
The Museum is offering a $10 million reward for information leading to the recovery of the stolen works. It’s important to note the reward is for recovering the paintings, not the apprehension of the thieves. This is also the priority of Anthony Amore, Security Director for the Gardner Museum.
“Speaking for the museum, we just want our paintings back,” Amore said in a recent interview with Boston magazine. “I would work as hard as can you can imagine to make sure that the people who come forward, that their names are never exposed. We have methods to do that, to pay the reward, so the person who gets it isn’t named publicly.”
How the theft was carried out and where the painting might possibly be at this moment will be a few of the topics covered when Anthony Amore visits the Hingham Community Center on Wednesday, May 9 at 7:30 p.m.
Twenty-eight years after the artwork was stolen, the museum’s security chief thinks he knows who did it. What has him stumped is where the paintings are now. “The idea of a professional art thief, a cat burglar who goes and steals masterpieces, is fiction,” said Amore. “It has nothing to do with people who want art for their collection. It’s people stealing these things for money.”
In 2011, Amore spun off his historic art-crime research into his book Stealing Rembrandts, co-authored with journalist Tom Mashberg. Hardly any thieves who steal a masterpiece ever do it again, Amore says, because they quickly discover they’re stuck with it. “If you steal hugely recognizable art, you can’t fence it,” Amore says. “One small piece of information could end this tomorrow.”

Anthony Amore

Despite some promising leads in the past, the Gardner theft of 1990 remains unsolved. The Museum, the FBI, and the US Attorney’s office are still seeking viable leads that could result in safe return of the art. Any little bit of information can help. “I’m not looking for someone necessarily to call me and say, ‘Go to Locker 3 in this storage facility,’” Amore said in his interview. “It’s like you put this puzzle together, you start with the borders, and people are giving you pieces.
“If you do puzzles, most of the time, there’s this one piece that’s just like, now it’s all falling together,” he adds. “So I’m not necessarily looking for the big aha! moment. I’m looking for the small aha!moments that I can piece together.”
Tickets to hear Anthony Amore speak at the Hingham Community Center are now on sale at $10 and are available online at www.hinghamcommunitycenter.org, by phone at 781-749-9786, and at the Hingham Community Center at 70 South Street in Hingham.

Stolen Art Watch, Gardner Museum Fundraises With Book and Donate Drive

Art of the theft: Book illustrates Boston museum heist
BOSTON: A new illustrated book about the theft of $500 million worth of artwork from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum went on sale Monday.

The 37-page book "Stolen" was created in response to visitor requests for more information about the 13 pieces stolen in the early morning hours of March 18, 1990, by two men posing as Boston police officers.
No one has been charged and the theft remains the largest unsolved art theft in history.
The thieves tied up two guards then spent 81 minutes in the museum before absconding with Vermeer's "The Concert," Rembrandt's "Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee" and Manet's "Chez Tortoni," as well as a Chinese beaker and a Napoleonic eagle ornament.
The book includes images and the background of each of the works as well as an overview with before and after photos of the galleries from which they were removed.
"Our intention for this book, with its images of the stolen art, is to help keep these masterworks present until we can celebrate their return," museum director Peggy Fogelman writes in the foreword.
The book also includes an essay by museum security director Anthony Amore, who reminds readers of the $10 million reward for information that leads to the recovery of the art.
Donate:  https://www.gardnermuseum.org/join-give

Stolen Art Watch, Gardner Art Heist 2018, Wax Lyrical & Opine With Anthony Amore

 

Gardner museum security chief to run for Mass. secretary of state

M. Scott Brauer/The New York Times

Anthony Amore, the director of security at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, is the first GOP contender for Massachusetts secretary of state this year.

By Matt Stout Globe Correspondent  March 20, 2018

Anthony Amore, the security chief at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and a central figure in the institution’s search for its stolen artwork, is priming a campaign for the Massachusetts secretary of state’s office. .
Amore, 51, who announced his campaign on Tuesday, is the first Republican contender in the race that already features a Democratic primary between longtime incumbent Secretary William F.Galvin and Boston City Councilor Josh Zakim, viewed by some as perhaps Galvin’s most high-profile challenge in his two-plus decades in office.
Amore, a Swampscott resident, said last year that he intended to challenge state Representative Lori A. Ehrlich, a Marblehead Democrat, as his first foray into politics. But in a Boston Globe interviewthis week,he said that shifted in recent months after conversations with party officials, calling the statewide racea “first-in-a-generation” opportunity.
Amore framed his pitch as bringing “fresh leadership” to the office, echoing an argument Zakim has used in his campaign.

“I think that the secretary of state has a primary campaign where he’s going to have to fight. And at the same time, his opponent is a career politician. That’s not something that I am,” Amore said.
“I think I’d bring to this race the same sort of thing Charlie Baker brings to the governor’s office,” he said. “I think I could appeal to the same side of voters.”
Amore’s pivot to the race marks the state Republican party’s latest attempt to fill out its ticket under Baker and Lieutenant Governor Karyn Polito.
State Representative Keiko Orrall, one of the party’s national committee members, is challenging state Treasurer Deborah Goldberg, while two Cape Cod Republicans — Dan Shores and James “Jay” McMahon — are vying in a primary to face Attorney General Maura Healey.
A Republican challenger has yet to emerge to run against state Auditor Suzanne Bump.
Amore has headed security at the Gardner since 2005 — a stretch that has plunged him into the public spotlight on several occasions. The museum and law enforcement have made various appeals for help cracking the infamous 1990 robbery, when thieves disguised as police officers talked their way into the museum, tied up two guards, and stole 13 pieces, including three works byRembrandt.
Before Gardner, Amore worked at the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration, primarily on security at Logan Airport in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
Amore said he plans to continue working at the Gardner — and search for the paintings — during his campaign.

Stolen Art Watch, Gardner Art Pursuit Brings Clenched Fist of FBI and Gardner Museum Crashing Down With God's Own Thunder

Edmund H. MahonyContact Reporter

Robert “The Cook” Gentile, the geriatric gangster suspected of hiding information about the world’s richest art heist — the robbery of $500 million in masterworks from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum — will likely serve about a year more in prison after being sentenced Tuesday on federal gun charges.
U.S. District Judge Robert N. Chatigny told Gentile, 81, he was giving him a break because of Gentile’s age and declining health.
Chatigny sentenced Gentile to a total of 54 months, but gave him credit for the nearly three years he served in jail while awaiting sentencing. Gentile’s lawyer said that with credit for good time, he is likely to be out in just less than 11 months.
Gentile gave an emotional plea for leniency and a sentence that would have allowed him to return quickly to his ill wife, who he said may have only a matter of months to live.

“I wish you could see it in your heart to let me go home to my wife and maybe give her another six months” Gentile told Chatigny.
He said his experience in prison has been horrifying. Gentile’s lawyer, A. Ryan McGuigan, said Gentile had been hospitalized three times during his most recent incarceration.
“Anybody else would have killed themselves,” he said. “They didn’t kill me, they just chained me. It made me a cripple. It made me an old man. I can’t walk.”
His voice cracking, he said “my wife, that’s all I want. Thanks.”
“You have some good points,” Chatigny told Gentile. “Your love for your wife is genuine. You have worked in lawful occupations. but at the same time, you have continued to engage in serious criminal conduct and you don’t really accept responsibility for it. It’s evident to me, this is just who you are.”
In a long argument for leniency, McGuigan read from a sealed legal memo that contained excerpts from secret recordings of Gentile made by two FBI cooperating witnesses. McGuigan said the excerpts show that Gentile repeatedly told the FBI through its informants that he did not know where the stolen art was and could not get his hands on it.
The recordings, which are sealed and not available to the public, suggest that Gentile may have once had access to the paintings but lost that access when an associate of his in Boston died and Gentile went to prison.
McGuigan cited the following excerpts:
- “My friend died and everything disappeared … I have to go find the paintings. You are asking for something that is not even feasible. I have to go out and find the paintings.”
- “I got to go to Boston to see that guy. I’d only be guessing.”
- “I’ve been away a long time and I don’t know where it is. All the people I used to run with in Boston are dead. I’d have to go to Boston to see that guy.”
U.S. Attorney John H. Durham accused McGuigan of “selective reporting of the facts. He said he would not disclose excerpts of the sealed recordings that the government provided to the court in rebuttal.
Gentile, an 81-year old mafia soldier with a criminal record dating from the Eisenhower administration, has been locked in a stubborn stand-off with FBI agents since 2010, when the widow of one of his mob partners told agents she had been present a decade or so earlier when her husband handed Gentile two of the stolen paintings.
The FBI has been charging Gentile with successive gun and drug crimes ever since, hoping — futilely, it has turned out — that the threat of prison would persuade him to divulge something that could help solve one of the the world’s great art mysteries. For his part, Gentile has been mute, insisting he knows nothing about the heist or the missing art — in spite of old age, dire health, lousy prison food, a $10 million reward, failed lie detector tests and a growing body of evidence to the contrary, much of it consisting of his admissions recorded by FBI informants.
Chatigny sentenced Gentile Tuesday at the federal courthouse in Hartford on two sets of gun charges. In the first, Gentile is accused of selling a loaded handgun to a convicted murderer who was cooperating with the FBI. In the second, his is accused, as a convicted felon, of illegally possessing two handguns, a machine gun and a silencer. He has pleaded guilty to all the charges.

Art Heist Suspect Sentenced on Gun Charges

A reputed mobster who is a "person of interest" in an infamous art Heist in 1990 was sentenced on Tuesday in another case.

MANCHESTER, CT — A reputed mobster who is a "person of interest" in an infamous art Heist in 1990 was sentenced on Tuesday to four-and-a-half years in prison on gun charges, a leading prosecutor said.
John H. Durham, United States attorney for the District of Connecticut, said that Ronert Gentile, 81, of Manchester, was sentenced on Tuesday by U.S. District Judge Robert N. Chatigny in Hartford to 54 months of imprisonment, followed by three years of supervised release, for firearm offenses, and for violating the conditions of his supervised release from a prior federal conviction.
Judge Chatigny ordered GENTILE to serve the first six months of his supervised release in home confinement.
According to court documents and statements made in court, on Feb. 10, 2012, Gentile was arrested after a federal investigation had revealed involvement in the illegal distribution of prescription narcotics, Durham said.
Subsequent court-authorized searches of Gentile's Manchester residence resulted in the seizure of 200 Percocet tablets packaged for distribution, two .38 caliber Smith & Wesson revolvers, a .22 caliber North American Arms revolver, a .22 caliber derringer, a 12-gauge pistol-grip shotgun, numerous rounds of ammunition, boxes of 12-gauge shotgun shells, five handgun silencers, other items and approximately $22,000 in cash. according to case details.

Gentle entered a guilty plea to federal drug and firearm offenses and, on May 9, 2013, he was sentenced to 30 months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release.
On March 2, 2015, while on supervised release, Gentile sold a .38 Colt Cobra revolver, which was loaded with five rounds of Smith & Wesson .38 Special ammunition, for $1,000 to an individual he knew to be a convicted felon, Durham said.
The sale occurred at Gentile's residence, where the revolver had been hidden in a couch cushion, the prosecutor indicated.
Gentile was arrested on a criminal complaint on April 17, 2015, and was ordered detained. On April 28, 2015, a grand jury returned an indictment charging him with possession of ammunition by a convicted felon, and sale of a firearm to a convicted felon.
On May 2, 2016, FBI special agents executed an unrelated federal search warrant at Gentile's Manchester residence and seized a .22 caliber Browning semi-automatic pistol, a 9mm Walther semi-automatic pistol, a .380 caliber RPB Industries, M11-Al semi-automatic pistol, and an unregistered silencer, Durham said.
On May 24, 2016, a grand jury returned an indictment charging Gentile with one count of possession of firearms by a previously convicted felon, and one count of possession of an unregistered silencer.
On April 6, 2017, Gentile pleaded guilty to one count of possession of ammunition by a previously convicted felon, one count of possession of firearms by a previously convicted felon, and one count of possession of an unregistered silencer. He also admitted that he violated the terms and conditions of his supervised release, Durham said.
Judge Chatigny sentenced Gentile to 42 months of imprisonment for the three firearm offenses, and a consecutive 12 months of imprisonment for violating the conditions of his supervised release.
Gentile has been detained since his arrest on April 17, 2015, Durham said.
Gentile is a reputed mobster who the FBI acknowledges is a person of interest in the daring theft of classic paintings stolen from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990, a heist valued at $500 million by authorities.
One art historian at the University of Connecticut, when asked what the value might be, hinted that the paintings are priceless in some respects.
See more about the daring art heist here.

Stolen Art Watch,Relentless In His Pursuit of The Gardner Art, Anthony Amore Thwarts Gardner Museum Fraud.

West Virginia man admits to fraud tied to Boston art heist

BOSTON (Reuters) - A West Virginia man pleaded guilty on Thursday to charges he fraudulently offered to sell some of the $500 million in artwork that was stolen from a Boston museum in 1990 and never recovered, even though he had no access to the paintings.

Todd Desper, 48, entered his plea in Boston federal court to wire fraud charges related to a scheme in which he offered to sell two paintings stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in the largest art heist in U.S. history.

Those paintings were Rembrandt’s “Storm on the Sea of Galilee,” and Vermeer’s “The Concert,” which were among the 13 artworks taken in a theft that remains one of the highest-profile unsolved crimes in Boston history.

Desper is scheduled to be sentenced on May 15. His lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The charge of wire fraud carries a maximum sentence of 20 years.

Prosecutors said Desper, using the alias “Mordokwan,” from November 2016 to January 2017 offered the paintings for sale to foreign buyers using Craigslist and directed those interested to use encrypted email accounts to communicate with him.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the museum received tips about the paintings from people interested in helping recover the artwork and who were seeking a multi-million dollar award the museum was offering, prosecutors said.

At the direction of law enforcement, the museum’s security director engaged in communications with Desper, who told him to send a cashier’s check for $5 million to a location in West Virginia, prosecutors said.

But they said Desper, in fact, did not have the paintings and was instead engaged in a fraudulent scheme targeting foreign art buyers. Authorities arrested Desper on May 22, 2017, at his home in Beckley, West Virginia.

The Gardner heist was carried out by two men dressed in police uniforms who apparently overpowered a night security guard who had buzzed them in. The combined value of the 13 works of art is estimated at $500 million.

Due to a quirk in Gardner’s will, the empty frames that held the paintings remain on the walls of the museum she built to house the collection she amassed with her husband.

The art must be displayed the way it was during her lifetime, preventing curators from hanging new works, and leaving a constant reminder of the theft.

Man linked to Gardner museum art heist found competent, sentencing set

In this April 20, 2015, file photo, Robert Gentile is brought into the federal courthouse in a wheelchair for a continuation of a hearing in Hartford, Conn. 

HARTFORD, Conn. — A reputed mobster who authorities believe is the last surviving person of interest in the largest art heist in history has been found competent to proceed to sentencing in an unrelated weapons case.
Eighty-one-year-old Robert Gentile is now scheduled to be sentenced Feb. 27 in federal court in Hartford, Connecticut.

Prosecutors have said they believe the Manchester resident has information about the still-unsolved 1990 heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Thieves stole an estimated $500 million worth of artwork, including works by Rembrandt and Johannes Vermeer.
Gentile's lawyer, A. Ryan McGuigan, said Tuesday that Gentile was found competent during a recent psychiatric exam. The review was ordered because Gentile said at his sentencing hearing that he could not remember having pleaded guilty.