Art Theft!
I’ve been meaning to blog about art theft for weeks – maybe even a month! I’m not going to post about art theft in general, though. I’m going to write about the theft that occurred at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston (as you can see in the picture above, the empty frames still hang in their original positions). I will, however, grant a brief mention (I think I made that phrase up, btw) to the robbery that happened at NYC’s MofAA. From mofaa.org:
“Three masked men entered the MofAA’s Emil Buerhrle gallery yesterday and made off with portions of the Turnley Collection - without the appropriate rights. Lifting over $6MM in politically important pieces through a skylight via helicopter. ”
How does that go unnoticed? (Also, how does the grammatical incorrectness of those 2 sentences go unnoticed?) The Isabella Stewart Gardner theft is “the biggest art theft in American history,” and if you recover the priceless paintings about which I’m going to write, you’ll win a handsome $5 million.
- On March 18, 1990, two white males posing as Boston police officers gained admittance into the museum.
- The men told security they were there responding to a “call of disturbance within the compound.”
- Security let the men in, though it was against museum policy. (That easy, eh?)
- Once inside, the unarmed men “abducted” the 2 security guards: handcuffed and bound with duct tape, they were placed in separate parts of the basement.
- From my understanding, since the men didn’t break in from the outside, no security alarm was activated, and they took the surveillance footage on their way out.
- Between 1:24 am and 2:45 am the men stole twelve works whose estimated worth is around $300 million.
- Works thefted: 6 Degas pieces, 1 Manet painting, 3 works by Rembrant, 1 Vemeer, 1 Flinck painting, a Chinese Bronze Beaker.
Here’s where it gets ridiculous:
- Suspect #1: “wearing a dark, shiny mustache, appearing the be false”
- Suspect #2: “black [hair], medium length, puffy with additional length in back, rounded off just over the collar” (what does that even mean?), “black shiny mustache appearing to be false”
I got all this from the FBI official report on the theft. Isn’t the whole thing crazy, though? After the Beastie Boys finished filming the music video for “Sabotage,” they did a quick change into BPD uniforms and pulled off one the greatest unsolved art heists of the 20th century!