The Biggest Unsolved Art Heist

At 1:24 a.m. on March 18, 1990, two policemen demanded to be buzzed in by the guard at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. At least, they looked like policemen. Once inside the building, the men ordered the guard to step away from the emergency buzzer, his only link to the outside world. They handcuffed him and another guard and tied them up in the basement. For the next 81 minutes, the thieves raided the museum’s treasure-filled galleries. Then they loaded up a vehicle waiting outside and disappeared.

Later that morning, the day guard arrived for his shift and discovered spaces on the walls where paintings should have been. Rembrandt’s “Storm on the Sea of Galilee,” Vermeer’s “The Concert,” Manet’s “Chez Tortoni,” and five works by Edgar Degas were missing. In some places, empty frames were still hanging, the priceless works sliced out with a knife The crime caused a multinational investigation by the museum, the FBI, and many private investigators. To this day, the Gardner heist is the largest property theft in U.S. history—experts believe the value of the stolen art is more than $600 million. Twenty-three years later, the case is still unsolved.

Bob Wittman belongs to a very special group. He tries to find pieces of stolen art. Art theft is a $6 to $8 billion industry, and it’s the fourth-largest crime worldwide. As an agent on the FBI’s Art Crime Team, Wittman spent two years working undercover on the Gardner case before he retired. He believes he knows where the art is. Wittman believes the paintings are in Europe. He doubts the FBI actually knows who the original thieves are. He said he had a chance to solve the case in 2006 but things didn’t work out. Even today he can’t believe that he and they FBI never managed to find even one of the stolen paintings.