Arthur Brand. Courtesy of Arthur Brand.
Arthur Brand, a private Dutch investigator known as the “Indiana Jones of the art world” is making headlines once again. This time, it’s because of a CBS This Morning news segment
in which he claims scientific certainty that a half-billion-dollar
trove of paintings stolen in 1990 is currently secreted in Ireland.
“I’m 100 percent sure that they are in Ireland. Hundred percent sure. No doubt in my mind,” Brand told interviewer Seth Doane.
He says he has “leads” that point him to the current
whereabouts of the masterpieces, taken 27 years ago during a nighttime
heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in Boston. And these leads
point him to the Irish Republican Army, or IRA.
“We have had talks with… former members of the IRA—and after
a few Guinnesses, after a few talks—you can see in their eyes that they
know more,” Brand claims.
The FBI and Gardner security director Anthony Amore reportedly still believe the paintings are in the US.
artnet News reached out to Amore following the most recent round of
headlines. In an email this morning, Amore said: “We have explored all
of the angles Arthur has mentioned many years ago, to their natural
conclusion. Today, there is not one scintilla of evidence pointing to
Ireland or the IRA. If Arthur has some new to share, I am always happy
to listen.”
Art Hostage Comments:
Arthur Brand, claims in the article on Bloomberg, below he is negociating with former IRA members to recover the Gardner art.
These
leads are Irish drug dealers who work out of the Netherlands.
Furthermore,
Arthur Brand claims a Dutch criminal had photo's of the Gardner art
back in the 1990's and was trying to sell them in Europe. This criminal
was Michel Van Rijn and he sold them to Irish criminals, but sadly they
were copies/fakes and Michel Van Rijn scammed the buyers, who could not
get them authenticated for obvious reasons.
These fake Gardner
artworks have been passed through many hands over the years and if they
are ever recovered it will become clear very quickly they are good
quality fakes. Therefore no reward would ever be paid out and the reason
given will be because they are copies, true or false.
However,
this is not to say some of the original Gardner artworks might be held
by Irish people, but this latest attempt by Arthur Brand is chasing the
fake Gardner art sold by Michel Van Rijn.
Cracking the Biggest Art Heist in History
For
nearly three decades, detectives have sought to solve the theft of $500
million of artwork from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.
They think the end is near.
By
Nina Siegal
It’s still regarded as the greatest unsolved art heist of all time: $500 million of art—including works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Degas, and Manet—plucked from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston on March 18, 1990, by two men posing as police.
The
museum had offered a $5 million reward for the return of all 13 pieces
in good condition. Last month, the bounty was suddenly and unexpectedly doubled to $10 million.
For such a long-unsolved case, the investigation is surprisingly active into the disappearance of the artworks, which include paintings, a Chinese vase and a 19th century finial of an eagle.
Anthony Amore, the museum’s director of security, says he works on the
case every day and is in “almost constant contact” with FBI
investigators. Tipsters still call all the time, with leads that range
from the vaguely interesting to the downright bizarre. Among them:
a psychic who offered to contact the late Mrs. Gardner’s spirit, and a
few self-styled sleuths who reckon the paintings can be found with metal
dowsing rods.
Most of those go nowhere. Whether the works will ever be
recovered, or if they still exist at all, is one of the great questions
that has divided the art world.
“Those paintings are gone,”
said Erin Thompson, professor of art crime at the John Jay College of
Criminal Justice in New York. “Either because they were destroyed
immediately after they were stolen, or because they’ve already been
beaten up so badly by being moved around in the back of cars.”
But
there is one outside detective respected by Amore—Arthur Brand, a Dutch
private investigator—who believes not only are the artworks still
intact, but also that he can bring them home. This year.
“It’s
almost certain that the pieces still exist,” Brand told me. “We are
following two leads that both go to the Netherlands, and we are now
negotiating with certain people.”
Brand, 47, has
become one of the world’s leading experts in international art crimes. A
British newspaper once called him the “Indiana Jones of the art world”
for his combination of crack negotiating skills and uncanny instincts
for finding stolen art.
In the past few years, Brand has posed as the agent of a Texas oil millionaire to help Berlin police find two enormous bronze horses from the German Reichstag. He worked with Ukrainian militia members to secure the return of five stolen Dutch masters to the Westfries Museum in the Netherlands. He negotiated with two criminal gangs for the successful return of a Salvador Dali and a painting by Tamara de Lempicka, together valued at about $25 million, to the now-closed Scheringa Museum of Realist Art, also in the Netherlands.
Brand
acts as something of a liaison between criminals and the police.
Controversially, he’ll try to make deals that allow the culprits to go
free, because he says his primary goal is saving the art from the trash
heap.
“There are very few like him who understand the reality of this sort of crime,” Amore said.
René
Allonge, the chief art investigator with the Berlin State Office of
Criminal Investigation, said his team had been searching for Hitler’s
bronze horses since 2013. He contacted Brand at the end of 2014, met him
in 2015, and they conducted the investigation and searches jointly, “as
far as it was legally possible.” Ultimately, Brand played a
crucial role in the discovery of the bronze horses, as well as other
populist bronzes from the Nazi era, he said. “He succeeded in
penetrating a very closed scene of collectors of high-quality Nazi
devotionalia, where we finally found the sculptures that we were
searching for,” Allonge wrote in an email.
Brand’s
reward in some of these high-profile cases is often the glory and
nothing more. Scheringa had originally offered a €250,000
bounty ($280,000) for the Dali and Lempicka, but the museum had shut
down by the time they were recovered. Brand was paid an hourly fee and had his expenses reimbursed, though he declined to say by whom. For finding Hitler’s horses, he got no cash at all, just a lot of free publicity, he says.
“He’s
not the guy to charge you for every hour he works,” said Ad Geerdink,
director of the Westfries Museum, for which Brand recovered five
old-master paintings from a militia group in Ukraine. “He knew that we
are a small organization with not many resources, so the fee was very,
very friendly.”
The biggest bonus Brand’s ever
received for solving a case was about €25,000, he says. He adds
that he’s investigating the Gardner case for the glory. “It’s the Holy
Grail in the art world,” he said.
It’s estimated that only 5 percent to 10
percent of stolen art is ever recovered, largely because the works
are impossible to sell publicly.
“People will steal
art first and then think about what to do with it second,” said
Thompson, the art crime professor. “Often they’ll destroy the work of
art to get rid of the evidence.”
Shortly after seven
paintings by Picasso, Monet, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and others, valued in
the tens of millions of dollars, were stolen from Rotterdam’s
Kunsthal museum in 2013, they were burned by the mother of one of three
Romanian thieves arrested and charged in the burglary. She confessed to
investigators that she was scared after police began searching her
village.
Alternatively, paintings are used as bargaining chips in
criminal cases. That’s how Italian police recently located two stolen
Van Goghs.
In 2002, thieves broke into the Van Gogh
Museum in Amsterdam with a sledgehammer—just because they saw a weakness
in the museum’s security, not because they knew what they were after.
The opportunists sold the works for €350,000 to alleged Italian mobster
Raffaele Imperiale. (The art was said to be worth tens of
millions—although it never came to market, so it’s impossible to know.)
In a seaside town near Naples, Imperiale stored the canvases in his mother’s kitchen cabinet
for a dozen years until prosecutors closed in. In August, Imperiale
disclosed their location in an attempt to improve his standing with the
courts, his lawyers, Maurizio Frizzi and Giovanni Ricco, told me.
Prosecutors subsequently reduced his sentence by about two years, they
said.
But often, the thieves are only persuaded to let go of works if
they think they’re going to sell them on the black market. This is where
someone like Brand can come in. In 2014, he created a character
to help solve the case of the missing Reichstag bronze horses. He
pretended to be an agent for “Dr. Moss,” a fictional American collector
who had gotten rich in the oil business, loosely based on the character
J.R. Ewing from the TV show Dallas. He has also posed as the
representative of princes and sheikhs, or even as a criminal himself.
“Whatever works, works,” he said. He draws the line at wearing costumes.
Brand says he almost never deals with the original
thieves. Stolen art tends to move through many hands. Sometimes, the
ultimate recipient doesn’t know that what they have was stolen.
“In
many cases, I have to deal with a person who has a problem: They’ve
been screwed by another criminal group,” Brand said. “They can either
pass art along to another criminal group, or they can burn it. That’s
even worse. What they won’t do is take the work to the police and say,
‘We found these Van Goghs.’ Because the police will ask where they got
them.”
That’s
where Brand has an opportunity to become the middleman. He can promise
the sellers they won’t get in trouble, then get assurances that the
police won’t make arrests.
Brand’s style works
particularly well for snaring amateur crooks, said Noah Charney, founder
of the Association for Research Into Crimes Against Art. A lot of
people who steal art assume there are collectors out there who buy on
the black market, like characters in heist movies. In fact, almost none
exist, he said.
“People have always collected art to
show their erudition and to advertise their wealth,” he said. “If you
buy something that you know or suspect was stolen, you can’t show it to
anyone.”
Criminals don’t always know that. “They get
desperate and then turn to someone like Arthur Brand,” someone they are
willing to believe is the real deal, Charney said.
Six-foot-two,
with a shock of blond hair and bright blue eyes, Brand could be played
in the movie of his life by Liam Neeson or Ralph Fiennes. His sleuthing
is an adjunct to his primary and less dramatic job—helping buyers who
have been swindled, conned, or overcharged for art.
“About
70 percent of what I do is just in the office, visiting clients,
visiting dealers, talking to people, and saying, ‘Give him his money
back!’” he said. “The other 30 percent is walking around talking to
criminals, talking to police, informants, and going undercover
sometimes.”
Brand first became connected to the art world as a student,
through collecting ancient Roman and Greek coins. “I found out that
there were a lot of fakes out there, and I didn’t want to spend my
hard-earned money buying fakes,” he said.
In 2002,
Brand received the first of many tips, rumors, and leads about the
Gardner case. He heard that back in 1991, people in Holland had
photographs of the paintings in storage. By following up, he became
convinced that the paintings were never sent to the Netherlands, but
photographs were being circulated by people trying to sell the paintings
to someone there.
Sometime around 2010, he heard
that the works had ended up in the hands of former members of the Irish
Republican Army. But he soon suffered a setback with the death of one of
his top sources, a former IRA member.
Brand believes
the original thieves were small-time burglars who sold the pieces to a
criminal gang in the U.S. before they were killed in the early 1990s. At
some point in the mid-1990s, he thinks, the works were shipped to
Ireland by boat and ended up with top-ranking IRA commanders.
For
the past 12 years, Amore and the FBI have worked around a theory that
local gang members in the Boston area may have been involved. They are
fairly certain that the two thieves who committed the crime died shortly
afterwards, Amore said.
But Amore believes the works
are still in the U.S. “Art that is stolen in America tends to stay in
America,” he said. “I’d be happy to be proven wrong.”
The statute of limitations on the theft ran out in 1995, and
the Office of the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts has considered
offering immunity for information that leads to its return. The museum
mostly cares about getting the works back, Amore said. That’s partly why
they raised the reward.
“It was important for the museum to show its commitment,” he said. “We’re telling the public this is how serious we are.”
Brand
says the higher reward may help speed things up. He isn’t convinced,
though, that the criminals involved will trust the FBI to live up to the
deal, despite his assurances.
“For me, it’s not
about getting people arrested,” he said. “We’re not talking about
murders here. If a big criminal has them or the Pope, it doesn’t matter.
The important thing is to get them back.”
Brand says this case could be cracked within months. He won’t elaborate, but if his leads are good, he’ll have to work fast.
Amore
also says that he and the FBI may be close to solving the case, and
they have leads that are “making the haystack smaller.” He, too,
declined to share specifics. “We feel we’re on the right path,” he said.
The FBI is more measured. “The investigation has
had many twists and turns, promising leads and dead ends,” said Kristen
Setera, an agency spokeswoman in Boston. “It has included thousands of
interviews and incalculable hours of effort. The FBI believes with high
confidence that we have identified those responsible for the theft, even
though we still don’t know where the art is currently located.”
Brand is confident he can find out.
“Somebody
I’m talking to knows something,” he said. “These people are not idiots.
They know that they can’t just hand them over and walk away with
impunity. They think even if they’ve been offered immunity, the police
will have some tricks up their sleeves. What I can do is I can provide
them a way to return the works without ever having contact with the
police. I can even promise them that they can get the reward.”
Would Brand really hand over $10 million?
“If I can be the one who can bring them to the museum,” he says, “give me a good glass of Guinness, and that’s reward enough.” —With assistance from Hugo Miller.
Boston police found Richard Abath handcuffed and duct-taped in the basement of the Gardner Museum after it was robbed in 1990.
Evidence in Gardner Museum thefts that might bear DNA is missing
David L. Ryan/Globe Staff
Despite an exhaustive internal
search, the FBI has been unable to find the missing evidence in the
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum art heist.
By Shelley Murphy and Stephen Kurkjian
Globe Staff and Globe Correspondent
The trail had been cold for years when the FBI announced in
2010 that it had sent crime scene evidence from the Isabella Stewart
Gardner Museum to its lab for retesting, hoping advances in DNA analysis
would identify the thieves who stole $500 million worth of
masterpieces.
But behind the scenes, federal investigators
searching for a break in the world’s largest art theft were stymied by
another mystery. The duct tape and handcuffs that the thieves had used
to restrain the museum’s two security guards — evidence that might, even
27 years after the crime, retain traces of DNA — had disappeared.
The FBI, which collected the crime scene evidence after the heist,
lost the duct tape and handcuffs, according to three people familiar
with the investigation. Despite an exhaustive internal search, the FBI
has been unable to find the missing evidence, thwarting its plan to
analyze it for potential traces of the thieves’ genetic material,
according to those people, who asked not to be identified because they
are not authorized to speak publicly about the case.
It’s unclear
when the items vanished — although two people said they have been
missing for more than a decade — and whether they were thrown away or
simply misfiled, the people said.
The lost evidence marks another setback in an ongoing investigation
that has been plagued by the deaths of suspects, defiant mobsters,
fruitless searches, and a litany of dashed hopes. None of the 13 stolen
treasures, which include masterpieces by Vermeer and Rembrandt, have
been recovered, and no one has been charged.
The FBI declined to comment on the missing evidence, citing the
ongoing investigation, but defended its handling of the case. Harold H.
Shaw, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Boston office, said the
bureau has devoted significant resources to the investigation, chased
leads around the world, and remains committed to recovering the artwork.
“The
investigation has had many twists and turns, promising leads and dead
ends,” Shaw said. “It has included thousands of interviews and
incalculable hours of effort.”
The FBI completed DNA analysis of some museum evidence in 2010,
according to Kristen Setera, an FBI spokeswoman. She declined to say
what items were tested or what, if anything, the tests showed.
The
heist remains one of Boston’s greatest mysteries. Promising leads have
led nowhere, leaving investigators at a crossroads. Most notably, a
seven-year effort to pressure a Connecticut mobster for information has
come up empty.
Robert Gentile, 80, faces sentencing in August on
gun charges but could walk free if he cooperated with federal
authorities, his lawyer said. Despite the enticement, and a hefty
reward, Gentile denies knowing anything about the stolen artwork.
Finding
the treasures may require a new approach, according to several former
law enforcement officials who worked on the case. They suggested that
investigators should restart the investigation from scratch and review
the evidence in a contemporary light.
Carmen Ortiz, who recently stepped down as US attorney for
Massachusetts, said authorities should shift their strategy, perhaps to
include appeals on social media, and expand the investigative team.
“Get
around the table with some fresh eyes, in addition to those who know
this case very well, to give it a new look,” Ortiz said. Ortiz’s
successor, Acting US Attorney William Weinreb, said the investigation
remains a top priority.
A former assistant US attorney, Robert
Fisher, who oversaw the Gardner investigation from 2010 to 2016, said
investigators should “go back to square one” and study the crime as if
it just happened, analyzing each piece of evidence with the latest DNA,
fingerprint, and video technology.
“What if it happened last
night, what would we do this morning to try to crack this case?” said
Fisher, an attorney at Nixon Peabody.
Told that the Globe had
learned the duct tape and handcuffs left behind by the thieves were now
missing, Fisher said he hoped they would be found.
“Frankly, it
could be enormously helpful,” Fisher said of the missing items. “I think
present-day forensic analysis of evidence like that could lead to a
break in the case.”
However, he said the tape may yield no viable DNA, depending on its condition.
Anthony
Amore, the museum’s security director, said investigators are pursuing a
number of new leads following last month’s announcement that the reward
for information leading to the recovery of the artwork had doubled to
$10 million until year’s end. Dozens of tips were received, he said.
“I
operate in the realm of hope,” said Amore, who has worked with the FBI
and US attorney’s office on the investigation for nearly 12 years. “We
are never going to stop looking for these paintings.”
The brazen heist — the largest property crime in US history — occurred in the early morning hours of March 18, 1990. Two
thieves disguised as police officers claimed to be investigating a
disturbance when they showed up at the museum’s side door on Palace Road
in Boston’s Fenway neighborhood. They were buzzed inside by a
23-year-old security guard, who, by his own admission, has never been
eliminated as a suspect.
The thieves wrapped duct tape around the
hands, eyes, and mouths of the two guards on duty, then left them
handcuffed in the museum’s basement as they spent 81 minutes slashing
and pulling masterpieces from their frames.
In the days after the
robbery, FBI and Boston police crime scene analysts scoured the museum
for clues. They lifted partial fingerprints from the empty frames but
found no matches in the FBI database.
At the time, DNA evidence was in its infancy. But scientific advances have since opened new doors for investigators, cracking unsolved cases across the country.
DNA experts said it’s possible the thieves’ DNA couldbe
pulled from the duct tape, although the chances are slim. Success
hinges on a number of variables, such as how the evidence was preserved
and how many people handled it while freeing the guards and storing it.
“Certainly
people have retrieved DNA from samples that old, but how much you can
get is the big question,” said Robin Cotton, director of the Biomedical
Forensic Sciences Program at the Boston University School of Medicine.
Analysts
would also need DNA samples from the police officers who removed the
tape to distinguish their DNA from the thieves, Cotton said.
Tom
Evans, scientific director of the DNA Enzymes Division at New England
Biolabs, an Ipswich firm that conducts DNA testing, said technology has
come so far that it may take only a single cell to identify someone
through DNA analysis. But DNA breaks down over time, especially in hot
or humid conditions.
“Twenty-seven years later, it might work and it might fail,” Evans said.
The
statute of limitations on the theft expired years ago, but authorities
could still bring criminal charges for hiding or transporting the stolen
artwork. The US attorney’s office has offered immunity in exchange for
the return of the paintings.
Four years ago, the FBI announced it
was confident it had identified the thieves — local criminals who have
since died — and had determined that the stolen artwork traveled through
organized crime circles from Boston to Connecticut to Philadelphia,
where the trail went cold around 2003.
In 2010, the FBI began
focusing on Gentile after the widow of another person of interest in the
theft, Robert Guarente, told agents that her late husband had given two
of the stolen paintings to Gentile before he died in 2004.
Federal
authorities allege that Gentile offered to sell some of the stolen
paintings to an undercover FBI agent in 2015 for $500,000 apiece. They
remain convinced that he is holding back what he knows.
However,
Gentile’s lawyer, A. Ryan McGuigan, said his client insists he has
nothing to offer investigators and recently told him, “They could make
the reward $100 million and it wouldn’t change anything because there
ain’t no paintings.”
Another person who has come under renewed
scrutiny in recent years is Richard Abath, the guard who opened the door
for the thieves. A Berklee College of Music dropout who played in a
rock ’n’ roll band while working at the museum, he has steadfastly
maintained that he played no role in the heist.
Authorities have
said that motion sensors that recorded the thieves’ steps as they moved
through the museum indicate they never entered the first-floor gallery
where Manet’s “Chez Tortoni” was stolen. Only Abath’s steps, as he made
his rounds before the thieves arrived, were picked up there, they have
said.
Steve Keller, a security consultant hired by the museum,
said he tested the motion sensors after the theft and determined they
were reliable. He said he entered and left the room several times where
the Manet had been stolen, even crawling on his hands and knees in an
effort to avoid detection. Each time the sensors detected his presence.
Abath declined to comment.
Former
US attorney Brian T. Kelly, who previously oversaw efforts to recover
the Gardner artwork, said he remains hopeful the masterpieces will be
recovered.
“All it takes is a new lead that leads in a new direction and a lucky break or two,” Kelly said. Shelley Murphy can be reached at shelley.murphy@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @shelleymurph. Stephen Kurkjian can be reached at stephenkurkjian@gmail.com Art Hostage Comments:
So many false leads, controlled oposition etc.
The FBI insist any Gardner art recovery is done on their terms and includes arrests/indictments etc.
The Gardner Museum has also been bullied into towing the line therefore any reward includes conditions that allows refusal of reward payment, for example the insistance on all the art work being recovered in "Good condition" before any reward would be paid out.
The museum’s trustees also felt they were being kept in the dark about
the status of the investigation. Trustee Francis W. Hatch, Jr. recalled
one meeting held ostensibly to gain a briefing from the agent and
supervisor on the case. “They wouldn’t tell us anything about what they
thought of the robbery
or who they considered suspects,” Hatch recalls. “It was
very embarrassing to all of us.”
"Hatch
convinced the trustees that the museum needed to hire a fi rm to
investigate, and stay in touch with the FBI on its probe. IGI, a private
investigative firm based in Washington begun by Terry Lenzner, who had
cut his teeth as a lawyer for the Senate Watergate Committee, was put on
retainer, and the executive assigned to the case was Larry Potts, a
former top
deputy in the FBI. Fearful that their authority was being undercut, the FBI’s
supervisors
in Boston complained to US attorney Wayne Budd, who fired off a memo
warning the museum that it faced prosecution if it withheld information
relevant to the investigation. Hatch responded, saying in his letter
that he
was “shocked and saddened” by Budd’s attempt to “intimidate”
the museum and that it cast “a pall over future cooperative efforts.”
From Master Thieves by Stephen Kurkjian
Wow! It's almost as if one of the thieves was untouchable,
like because he was the star witness testifying in a German court in absentia
against the ringleader of the longest running spy ring in American history,
Clyde Lee Conrad, and was also implicating himself and two other spies he
himself had recruited, at that time, like Boston area native Rod Ramsay, or
somebody like that.
Ramsay's college roommate at Charles River Park in Boston
1980-1981 was Darryl Nitke. Nitke had been roommates at Eton College with
Muhammad Khashoggi, they remained friends and Nitke's brother in law and
business associate Bedros Bedrossian was formerly business partners with with
Muhammad's sister, Nabila Khashoggi in the mid-80's. http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1985-06-10/business/8501230280_1_computer-foreign-visitors-smith-gallery
Nitke was a guest on the Khashoggi yacht for a cruise in 1982.
The Gardner Museum doubled the reward right before Khahsoggi died after a long
illness on June 6, 2017. #LOCALTOUGHS
Interesting that the announcement for doubling the reward to ten million
came out 5/23/17 as Adnan Khahsoggi was dying of Parkinsons Disease. He
died 6/6/17.
He had a very elaborate network set up for stolen fine art transit.
"In
addition, more than thirty paintings, valued at $200 million, that
Imelda Marcos had allegedly purloined from the Metropolitan Museum of
Manila, including works by Rubens, El Greco, Picasso, and Degas, were
being stored by Khashoggi for the Marcoses, but it turned out that the
pictures had been sold to Khashoggi as part of a cover-up. The art
treasures were first hidden on his yacht and then moved to his penthouse
in Cannes. The penthouse was raided by the French police in a search
for the pictures in April 1987, but it is believed that Khashoggi had
been tipped off. He turned over nine of the paintings to the police,
claiming to have sold the others to a Panamanian company, but
investigators believe that he sold the pictures back to himself. The
rest of the loot is thought to be in Athens. If he is found guilty, such
charges could get him up to ten years in an American slammer."
Some of the Gardner art may have reached the Middle East, making it much harder to recover.
Some of the Gardner art may be in terrible condition preventing any recovery because any reward would be negated by this, see Gardner museums conditions of recovery in "Good condition"
The Gardner case has been a political tug of war, with all sides refusing to give an inch. Food for thought:
If they believe the thieves are deceased why did they only just recently
stipulate that the thieves are not eligible for the reward?
From this article: "Plagued by the deaths of suspects,
defiant mobsters."
Beat that local toughs theory into the ground Boston Globe. Last month the FBI
said the know who the guy in the video is, but they're not saying if he was
there for a legitimate reason or not. So obviously he wsa there for an
illegitimate reason. And he most certainly is not a local tough so the whole
local tough or any kind of mafia type theory is thoroughly discredited.
Abath has no known associations with local toughs and this guy talking to ABath
is not a local tough or any kind of mafia type. Kurkjian reported in November
of 2015 that four security guards said it was retired Lt. Colonel and Gardner
Security supervisor Larry O'Brian, which is ridiculous, but it points to the fact
that by his haircut, clothing, and comportment, this was a guy who could be
mistaken for a security supervisor. Could Donati, or DiMuzio, or Reissfelder,
be mistaken for a security supervisor by security guards on a surveillance
video? I don't think so.
There has never been a scintilla of evidence supporting that theory. The whole
theory was just a full employment for program FBI agents and their friends in
journalism. And the dead suspects were just convenient props who would not be
able to stand up for themselves, be publicly vetted or file a lawsuit.
From the New York Times in March of 2015 by Tom Mashberg:
Notice that Mashberg doesn't say they look like the police sketches. Nor does
Kelly get quoted saying that. How absurd? It's like trying to translate the
Soviet house organ Pravda into Russian.
In the Globe's article about the Powerpoint 3/17/15, a couple of weeks later,
Shelley Murphy, evidently couldn't bring herself to mention Leonard DiMuzio by
name. Can you blame her? DiMuzio, the victim of an unsolved homicide, was an
honorably discharged Marine Corp corporal, and a Viet Nam vet. He does NOT
resemble the police sketch. The New York Times described him as a
"skillful burglar" which probably means they had not caught him yet.
Reissfelder, a bad check writer, who liked to talk like a tough guy spent 16
years in prison for a robbery/murder he did not commit and was exonerated.
After he got out in 1982, he slept with the lights on.
But get ready for the real "CATCH" from this article by Murphy about
Reissfelder
"The catch: Reissfelder was 50 at the time of the heist, and the guards
estimated one thief was in his late 20s to early 30s and the other was in his
30s. However, Kelly said he doesn’t believe the age estimates were
reliable."
So Kelly says he thinks that two guys in their twenties one a 27 year old with
a Master's Degree from the New England Conservatory can't differentiate between
someone in their 30's and a 51 year old drug addict who had spent half of his
adult life in Walpole State Prison.
And Robert Gentile is the only "defiant" mobster. He says he didn't
do it. Stephen Kurkjian says he wasn't involved. Kurkjian's name is on this
article. How is Gentile's defiance any kind of "plague?"
The I.T. Revolution did not end yesterday morning and it is not ending tomorrow
morning. Get real. The paintings may or may not come back but the truth about
who did it is coming out. It was not local toughs.
The Boston FBI conducted the "investigation" the
way they were told from higher up, in Washington from the beginning. It's time
for Washington to leave Boston alone on this now.
“The place is so wonderful now that we tend to forget what a horrendous thing
it was to have happened,” [back then Governor Michael] Dukakis recalled
recently. “The wearing of police uniforms always bothered me, and then the
SEEMING difficulty of being able to identify them.”
Hawley too, he said, has shared with him and his wife, Kitty, a very close
friend, her frustration that the FBI has been unable to recover any of the
stolen pieces. “She’s frustrated, HIGHLY SKEPTICAL about a lot of the stuff,”
he said. “She’s gotten tired with everything. Enough already.” from Master
Thieves by Stepehn Kurkjian
Dear Washington: Enough already!!!
This was not made public until 2013:
"We also were threatened by criminals who WANTED attention from the FBI
Nobody knew really what kind of a cauldron we were in." Anne Hawley
12/4/13 https://youtu.be/WwnQs1BvvlU?t=44
What kind of criminals WANT attention from the FBI?
I don't know what kind of cauldron we're in, but from the smell of it, I think
I know what it is we're sharing it with.
Who cares? I mean it is bad, but they already know who did
it. This seems like a diversionary, gaslighting, in-emergency-break-glass,
non-story designed to regain control of the narrative by pumping up pointless
data with media steroids and pumping it out into the information stream on
this.
CNN was somehow compelled or persuaded to re-write an article about the Gardner
Heist reward being doubled to ten million written by Charney. They didn't
acknowledge any errors, but they did put in this disclaimer:
You can see Charney on American Greed Season Two Episode Nine "Unsolved:
$300 Million Art Heist / Preying On Faith" on Hulu matter of factly
contradicting the FBI's Geoff Kelly who appears on the same episode to discuss
the Gardner Heist https://www.hulu.com/watch/46551#i0,p5,d0
Then on Friday Emily Rooney smeared Charney at the end of the show, describing
this established art theft expert incompletely as an art novelist, and one who
is indifferent to facts, and whose original story had "ten egregious
errors." But Rooney has not said what any of the errors were and CNN is
not doing a correction. So all we have for egregious errors in the public
domain is Rooney's description of Noah Charney's professional background,
character and ability to render facts on paper for a news story. https://youtu.be/jmfXv-MT8nM?t=344
And the Gardner Heist story is one place where this rivalry is playing itself
out. It is a prelude to what appears to be just how things are going to be for
a while and getting rid of Trump is not going to solve it.
Charney's story (the current version) suggests that raising the reward is an
act of desperation. One thing we know is that the suggestion of a Boston Globe
editorial from the time of 25th anniversary is unlikely to be considered no
matter how hopeless things get in this 27 year old saga:
Gardner Museum Doubles Reward For Stolen Art To $10M
Nearing
30 years after the infamous Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist, the
search is still on for the missing masterpieces — and now, the reward
has been doubled.
The museum's Board of Trustees announced Tuesday that it is doubling
the from $5 million to $10 million for information leading to the return
of the 13 stolen artworks.
The announcement came a day after the feds arrested a West Virginia man who had offered to sell some of the paintings on Craigslist. He was bluffing about having the paintings and is now charged with wire fraud.
But the new reward comes with an expiration date. The increased offer is only available until midnight on Dec. 31, 2017.
“These works of art were purchased by Isabella Stewart Gardner for
the ‘education and enjoyment of the public forever,’" said Steve Kidder,
president of the Gardner Museum’s Board, in a statement. “It is our
fervent hope that by increasing the reward, our resolve is clear that we
want the safe return of the works to their rightful place and back in
public view.”
This isn't the first time that the reward has been raised in hopes of
recovering the valuable works. The paintings were stolen on March 18,
1990 in what is the largest property crime in U.S. history.
In 1997, the museum increased the reward money from $1 million to $5,
making it the largest private reward in the world, according to the
museum.
"Twenty years later, the announcement of a $10 million reward sends a
strong message that museum officials are serious about their commitment
to bring the works back," the museum said in a statement.
The doubling of the reward was under discussion for a year and approved by the museum's board on Tuesday.
The stolen artworks include works by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Manet and
Degas. The 13 missing pieces are worth an estimated $500 million. The
Concert is only one of 36 total paintings by Vermeer and The Storm on
the Sea of Galilee marks Rembrandt's only seascape, according to the
museum, and both are among "the most valuable stolen objects in the
world."
Museum officials are looking to hear from anyone with information about the paintings' whereabouts.
“We encourage anyone with information to contact the Museum directly,
and we guarantee complete confidentiality,” said Anthony Amore, the
museum’s security director, in a statement. “This offer is a sign that
our investigation remains active. Our hope is that anyone with knowledge
that might further our work will come forward.”
Though it's been 27 years since the artworks were stolen, museum officials remain hopeful.
“Typically stolen masterpieces are either recovered soon after a
theft or a generation later,” Amore said. “We remain optimistic that
these works will ultimately be recovered.” Anyone with information can contact Amore at (617) 278-5114 or by emailing theft@gardnermuseum.org.
BOSTON (CBS) – The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum has
announced that it is doubling its reward for information leading to the
return of 13 works of art that were stolen in 1990.
The museum’s Board
of Trustees announced Tuesday that it has increased the reward from $5
million to $10 million. The reward is “available immediately” but
expires at midnight on December 31, 2017.
“We encourage anyone with information to contact the Museum
directly, and we guarantee complete confidentiality,” said Anthony
Amore, the Museum’s Security Director. “This offer is a sign that our
investigation remains active. Our hope is that anyone with knowledge
that might further our work will come forward.”
“We encourage anyone with information to contact the Museum
directly, and we guarantee complete confidentiality,” said Anthony
Amore, the Museum’s Security Director. “This offer is a sign that our
investigation remains active. Our hope is that anyone with knowledge
that might further our work will come forward.”
Empty frame at Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (CBS)
On March 18, 1990, two men disguised as police officers tied up the security guards and stole 13 pieces of art, including rare paintings by Rembrandt, Degas, and Vermeer from the museum in Boston.
In 1997, the museum increased its reward from $1 million to $5 million.
The new $10 million reward is available immediately but expires at
midnight on Dec. 31.
The combined value of the art is estimate at $500 million. It remains the largest art heist in history.
Art Hostage Comments:
Art Hostage has been calling for this for over a decade as it might temp those who have the ability to hand back the Gardner art.
However, there are further things that need to be offered to reassure those who might consider stepping forward.
The conditions of any returned Gardner art being in so called "Good Condition" is a block as condition will likely play a big part. A complete tarrif should be published with a reward amount for each stolen Gardner artwork.
The so called immunity offered by the Boston DA needs to be made public and what exact conditions would be applied.
The distinct lack of specifics prevents progress.
The ability of anyone stepping forward to walk away if they feel they cannot get legal assurances is the biggest factor in no-one stepping forward.
Finally, there are things going on behind the scenes and as ever, hope springs eternal that some Gardner art might be recovered.
Odds are a minor work such as a Degas drawing would be offered as a test case, then if successful, followed by Rembrandts Storm on the Sea.
Any hand back of Gardner art should be done by way of a location given, Catholic Church confession box being the Art Hostage location of choice, then no-one needs to be arrested at the recovery.
Robert "The Cook" Gentile, the geriatric gangster and key
person of interest in the $500 million Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
art heist, has agreed to plead guilty to federal weapons charges that he
has long complained were contrived by the FBI to force his cooperation.
The
plea agreement, reached Tuesday, appears likely to end a bitter
standoff between the 80-year old Hartford hoodlum and investigators
hunting for 13 masterworks that disappeared in the 1990 Gardner robbery
in Boston, the world's most expensive and perhaps most baffling art
theft.
It is unlikely, however, to move investigators any closer to the missing art.
Since
the widow of a mob associate tied him to the art in 2015, investigators
have attacked Gentile with cooperating witnesses, informants,
undercover lawmen, secret tape recordings and an endless string of his
own incriminating statements. The result is what prosecutors presented
in court as a persuasive case that, while not involved in the actual
robbery, he was part of a Mafia crew that later acquired some of the art
and he had personal possession of two paintings for at least a brief
period about 15 years ago.
A
variety of sources said Gentile could plead guilty in U.S. District
Court in Hartford next week to as many as five felony weapons charges.
Information was not available on what sentence he can expect. But it
could be relatively short if Gentile gets credit for the time he has
been jailed since his last arrest.He
has been imprisoned for much of the past past seven years following
convictions and arrests on drug and gun charges. Late last summer,
wildly overweight and confined to a wheelchair, Gentile collapsed at an
institution for federal prisoners outside Providence.He was taken
first to a Rhode Island hospital, moved to a private hospital for
inmates in South Carolina and eventually to a federal prison in North
Carolina that serves as a nursing home for aging convicts. In recent
days, much recovered, he was transferred to a state prison in Bridgeport
while his lawyer, A. Ryan McGuigan, and Assistant U.S. Attorney John
Durham negotiated a guilty plea. Neither would comment on the case.
A
source with knowledge of the events said Gentile has experienced a
remarkable turnaround. He was unable to walk six months ago, but has
slimmed down and ambles when permitted, with a walker.
"He looks like a million dollars," the source said.
When
he was first tied to the heist, Gentile agreed to cooperate, but
federal prosecutors tore up the agreement within months after they
determined he was lying to a federal grand jury.
Afterward, the
FBI made him the target of a series of drug and gun stings, telling him
in every case that he would be treated with leniency if he helped
recover the art. Gentile repeatedly denied having knowledge of the art.
After
his release from a sentence for drug sales, Gentile was arrested again
within months for selling a loaded handgun to a convicted murderer
working as an FBI undercover operative. While in prison awaiting trial
on the gun charge the FBI searched his house — the third such search —
and found three more guns and a silencer.
A federal judge once remarked that Gentile's modest ranch home in Manchester was a "veritable arsenal."
During
interviews with The Courant, Gentile denied having any knowledge of the
robbery or the art and said, if he might have suggested otherwise, it
was because he was trying to swindle people who were offering to buy it.
He said the information collected by the FBI is false.
"Lies," he said. "All lies. A frame-up."
In
what became characteristic of the standoff between Gentile and the
authorities, Durham rejected Gentile assertions in court last year. He
said, among other things, that:
Gentile and mob partner Robert
Guarente tried, but failed, to use the return of two stolen Gardner
pieces to obtain a reduction in a prison sentence imposed on a Guarente
associate. Durham revealed no additional detail, but knowledgeable
sources said the beneficiary of the effort was to have been David
Turner, who is serving 38 years for conspiring to rob an armored car.
While
he was confined in a federal prison in Rhode Island on drug and gun
charges in 2013 and 2014, Gentile told at least three people that he had
knowledge of the stolen Gardner art. Durham suggested in court that
Gentile and one of the people drafted some sort of contract involving
the art, but would not elaborate outside court.
Guarente's wife
told Gardner investigators early in 2010 that her husband once had
possession of stolen Gardner art and transferred two paintings to
Gentile before Guarente died from cancer in 2004.
Gardner
investigators had reason to suspect Gentile since about 2010, when he
submitted to a polygraph examination and denied having advance knowledge
of the Gardner heist, ever possessing a Gardner painting or knowing the
location of any of the stolen paintings. The result showed a likelihood
of less than 0.1 percent that he was truthful. Gentile claims the
examination was conducted improperly.
Some of the most important
art ever created disappeared about 1:30 a.m. on March 18, 1990, as St.
Patrick's Day celebrations wound down around Boston. Two men dressed as
police officers bluffed their way into the museum, a century-old,
Italianate mansion that was full of uninsured art and protected by an
outdated security system
Among the missing art: a Vermeer, a Manet
and five drawings by Degas. Two of the paintings — "Storm on the Sea of
Galilee," Rembrandt's only known seascape, and Vermeer's "The Concert" —
could be worth substantially more than $100 million.
