Master Thieves

by Kurkjian, Stephen

  The night watchman could see clearly through the video security system that the men who had buzzed certainly looked like police officers, but he had his orders.

  “I can’t let anyone in,” he called back on the intercom. “We’ve got a new procedure. No one gets in after hours without the approval of my supervisor. I’ve got to find him and I’ll get right back to you.”

  “Hey, we’re looking for someone,” the officer said impatiently. “Let us in!”

  But the night watchman had already gone off to find his supervisor, William L. Miller, who was in a faraway gallery. It took them several minutes to get back to the rear entrance of the museum, and by the time Miller arrived, the police officers had disappeared. Except for filing an “incident report” the following morning with McAuliffe, nothing more was said of the strange episode. That is, until two months later, when Boston woke up to television news bulletins that the Gardner Museum had been robbed of several major works of art, hours after the city’s next holiday, St. Patrick’s Day.

  ______________________

  In early 1990, the two security directors kept their promise to each other to evaluate how secure the Gardner Museum was from theft or other catastrophes. Their tour was barely under way when, at the wooden security desk by the museum’s employee entrance, McAuliffe pointed out what he saw as a major security flaw.

  “Lyle, you don’t have a secure control room,” McAuliffe said, clearly alarmed. “Everything is right out here in the open. You need to build a control room in a place that is secret from the public, a place that isn’t vulnerable to attack.”

  McAuliffe was right. Grindle had a suite of security controls: communication systems to connect the cadre of guards on patrol or on duty in the various galleries inside the four-story mansion; cameras watching activities at several places inside and outside the museum on a closed circuit television system, and taping those activities on a videocassette recorder; a motion detector that silently tracked the patrons as they entered and left the galleries—but they were all out in the open, and solely within reach of the lone guard who manned it. Even the main box that connected the building’s fire alarm system was there.

  Grindle understood perfectly well the problems McAuliffe had raised. He had been on the job at the Gardner for nearly a decade, since the early 1980s, and he was the museum’s first full-time security director. In fact, security at the Gardner had been such an afterthought before he came on board that the man who held the job before him was also responsible for maintaining the grounds that surrounded the museum.

  The Gardner was the first museum Grindle had worked for. A Maine native, he was a criminal justice specialist working for the consulting firm A.D. Little & Co., in Cambridge, where he’d been for more than a decade after a stint in the navy, when he heard about the opening at the museum. At the Gardner he was a no-nonsense boss and, reflecting his military training, a stickler for adhering to meeting schedules and reporting suspicious activity around the museum.

  He was also known for coming down like a hammer on his team for infractions to his many rules, no matter how small. When the candy bars he’d put out for employees to buy for $1 began disappearing, he installed a hidden camera to stop the pilfering. Two security guards were caught on the video and both were suspended.

  The job Grindle was hired to do, to protect the museum’s priceless collection and make improvements in the museum’s security system, was a nightmare assignment. The mansion that housed the museum was built at the turn of the twentieth century, and while its Venetian palazzo architecture may have been stunning to view, the building had never undergone major renovations to accommodate new electrical, plumbing, or ventilation systems. And there was the matter of Mrs. Gardner’s will, which worked against such renovations, as it prohibited the museum’s trustees from altering the building’s galleries in any significant way. If they did, the will stipulated, the museum would become the property of Harvard University.

  For several years after being hired, Grindle acclimated himself by spending his days in an office in the museum’s unfinished basement. When he finally had a proper office built, it was in the “carriage house,” separate from the museum’s galleries, and its only security device was a telephone.

  Grindle knew he had much to do to improve the museum’s security. But once the FBI visited in 1981 and told him that members of one of Boston’s toughest organized crime gangs were scoping out the museum for a theft, he attached a sense of urgency to his work.

  “Bill, it’s not like I’ve been sitting on my hands here,” Grindle told McAuliffe the day they finally did their walk-through of the museum. “I’ve made some progress, but it’s not like I have all the money in the world. And I’ve got a board of trustees I’ve got to work through. Security is only one of the demands on them.”

  Through much of the 1980s Grindle had pleaded with the museum’s board of trustees for money to improve the mansion’s security systems. It wasn’t that the people who ran the museum—the seven-member board of trustees (all white men) and director Roland “Bump” Hadley—were unaware that it needed major renovations. But that all took money, and there was no plan in place to raise the money, or any fervent commitment by the trustees to come up with such a plan.

  In the mid-1980s, the museum was operating in the red. There simply wasn’t enough money allocated to accomplish even a fraction of what Grindle knew needed to be done, never mind the additional money for other improvements, necessary as it turned out, that he hadn’t even imagined. Finally, in 1986, the board voted him a million dollars for various projects. But there was just too much to do, and every job was complicated by the age of the museum building itself.

  Grindle lived in fear that the museum would suffer a catastrophic loss, not from a band of thieves but from a water leak that could not be shut off because of the antiquated pipes and plumbing that ran through the building, or a fire allowed to spread because, for a few years at least, there was no central fire alarm system, only a set of battery-operated units spread throughout the museum’s galleries and corridors.

  Frustrated by the begging and cajoling for money to improve security, Hadley had told Grindle at one point in the mid-1980s that if he was serious, he needed to raise the funds himself. So with the assistance of an intern, Grindle wrote letters to major corporations in and around Boston seeking the funds. He raised more than $50,000, and the money was used to install a new alarm system that alerted security staff to any fires or broken windows.

  At the time the museum’s collection was valued in the billions of dollars. Yet, like most museums of the era, and particularly the smaller ones, the Gardner had no insurance policy in place to protect it from the loss of any of its paintings or antiques. It was considered simply too expensive to protect against such losses. During those years the museum was paying less than $25,000 a year for a range of policies, including one that protected them from liability for patrons who might slip and fall on wet surfaces.

  Frustratingly, Grindle found that it was overly costly to install the wiring needed for video and electronic surveillance systems in a building constructed at the turn of the century and that was lit for the most part with gas lamps. The building even lacked central air conditioning and ventilation, which, even worse than being uncomfortable for patrons, was damaging the artwork. Many summer mornings Grindle would find some of the paintings “sweating,” showing beads of condensation from the heat and humidity that had built up inside the building overnight. In some of the hotter galleries he even resorted to ordering the windows thrown open and fans brought in to cool down the rooms.

  “Four hot days in a row and it gets like a pizza oven in there,” Grindle told McAuliffe as they walked through the museum’s venerable Blue Room. “Only our Tapestry Room, where we hold concerts, is air conditioned.” The room was cooled by a twenty-ton unit that they had installed years before on the roof of the building, Grindle explain
ed.

  A museum trustee for much of the 1980s agreed that the board was slow to recognize the need to raise more money to fund renovation projects.

  “We were slow, I’ll admit it, to deal with things like the climate control problem, insurance, security, and the lack of space,” Francis W. Hatch Jr. told me in an interview before his death in 2010. “But to us the main problem was Bump [Hadley]. He wasn’t a good administrator and he didn’t like anyone talking to us but him. And really, we never paid attention to him.”

  By the late 1980s, Grindle was back hounding the board for more money. He had commissioned a study by the well-regarded security firm Steven R. Keller & Associates. They had recommended the same thing McAuliffe had stressed: a secured control room accessible only to those with a passkey. Keller also recommended dramatic improvements to the museum’s communication system, among them maintaining a sophisticated video surveillance system that kept track of not only every gallery, but also every wall in those galleries, and every corridor leading in and out of them.

  But little financial help seemed to be coming. The museum was still barely scraping by on dividends and interest from Mrs. Gardner’s investments to meet its $1.5 million annual budget. Certainly the money paid by patrons and visitors wasn’t going to cover the bills. Having begun charging for tickets for the first time in 1977, the museum was collecting less than $400,000 a year even a decade later.

  After the theft, the Boston Globe’s art critic wrote a searing critique of the museum’s failure to raise sufficient funds during the 1980s to care for deteriorating conditions. “The truth was, though, that the museum had been in trouble long before the robbery,” the article stated. “The Gardner had simply failed to keep up with standard late-20th-century museum practices. There wasn’t even an adequate place for visitors to hang their coats, let alone a climate-control system to protect the museum’s masterpieces from the extremes of Boston’s winters and summers. The problem was a matter of money and management. The trustees, traditionally a self-perpetuating Brahmin board of seven Harvard-educated men, acted as if fund-raising were tantamount to begging. In the 1980s, when there was big money available for arts institutions, the museum didn’t even apply for big grant money—at a time when the Gardner needed millions of dollars’ worth of climate control and conservation.”

  While not disputing any statistics in the critique, Anne Hawley, then the museum’s director, defended the trustees’ dedication to the museum and contended the article had been motivated by the Globe’s anger in not getting preferential treatment in covering the theft. “First we were robbed, and then we were mugged,” Hawley told the New York Times after the Globe article came out.

  In 1985, after years of his badgering, Grindle and other members of the museum’s senior staff finally convinced the board of the seriousness of his needs, not to mention the need to modernize the premises generally, and the museum hired a specialist in fund-raising to make recommendations. Caroline Standley, who had run a successful campaign for the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem on Massachusetts’s North Shore, advised the board to reach out to well-to-do Bostonians who would certainly be willing to make annual contributions to a capital campaign for the museum.

  “There are people out there who would love to support the museum and its treasures. All they need is to be asked,” Standley told the board. She said she estimated that the museum would be able to raise 30–40 percent of its budget through such a campaign. But the board rejected the initiative, fearing that such members would inevitably want to have a say in the museum operations, and that might lead to a conflict with the board itself, which under Mrs. Gardner’s will had to maintain sole responsibility for the museum’s direction.

  The Gardner’s board members served unlimited terms not because of their love of art or their fund-raising prowess but because they came from the right families. They dismissed Standley’s pleas out of hand.

  “I do know that [the trustees] . . . pretty much wanted to stay in their own little world, which would have been fine, except the outside world was changing and the museum had these space needs that badly needed to be addressed,” Standley said in an interview.

  In 1987, out of frustration from trying to convince the trustees to approve a plan, Standley stepped down from her fund-raising advisory position. A year later, the museum’s deputy director resigned, explaining in a letter to a board member, “I could not work effectively for the museum under the conditions of confusion, indecision, inadequate communication and a lack of defined and shared goals [among] trustees, advisory committee and staff.”

  The next year, in 1989, Hadley submitted his resignation, stating in a final report that he asked the board to keep confidential until 1994 that the failure to establish a fund-raising campaign had doomed him. “The campaign was ended without consulting with the staff charged with fundraising, and good faith between trustees and staff was broken. . . . Until that faith is restored the museum cannot make plans,” he wrote that June. The museum was robbed less than a year later.

  (Their reluctance to overspend on security did not prevent some of the trustees from trying to place blame on Grindle after the theft. At one board meeting, they pressed him on why a lock on one of the security doors the thieves had to pass through once granted access inside the museum was missing. Grindle pointed out that he had requested $500 to fix the broken lock as a prior budget request but it had never been granted.)

  So in early 1990, as their tour of the Gardner building concluded, Grindle and McAuliffe shook hands and promised to keep discussing each other’s security needs.

  “Let’s be sure to grab a drink in Chicago,” Grindle said, referring to the upcoming meeting of institutional security directors in the week leading up to St. Patrick’s Day weekend, 1990.

  ______________________

  “I’ve got a ticket to the Dead in Hartford tomorrow night,” Rick Abath called out to his roommate as he left for work on March 17, 1990. “If I can score another ticket, I might stay for Monday’s show, too.”

  “What about work?” Abath’s roommate called back to him.

  Abath went on his way, as he had done countless times in the past, checking doors and the empty galleries.

  “I’ve already given my notice. What more can they do to me?” Abath shot back.

  It was the sort of smart-ass, know-it-all response Abath was known for around the Gardner Museum, where he was a night watchman. He stood out among the staff of thirty-five security guards, most of whom were college kids or retirees on Social Security, because of his sharp tongue. Abath was also smart and known among his colleagues for persistently questioning his superiors about the museum’s need to spend more money on improving security equipment and paying guards more. But after working the midnight shift for nearly a year, Abath had tired of his night watchman’s job. He was tolerating it only because the job suited his casual attitude and didn’t interfere too much with his real aspirations: making it in the world of rock music.

  Abath’s band Ukiah, a Phish knockoff, was landing a sufficient number of gigs in a few of Boston’s grungier nightspots, so Abath felt sure it was only a matter of time before he could make his way as both the band’s guitarist and manager, not shining flashlights into darkened corners of a small, under-appreciated Boston museum.

  Grindle, the museum’s security director, had hired Abath and appreciated that he had someone he could depend on to work the midnight shift. But in the months leading up to the theft, he had gotten disenchanted with the young man, who never seemed to stop complaining about the most minor of lapses and who rumor had it was showing up for work looking either stoned or tipsy. In fact, Abath had begun to slack off considerably in those final months, and admits to often being under the influence of marijuana or liquor during the nights he would rush to the museum from a Ukiah gig at a nearby club.

  Grindle definitely had no idea of the little party Abath had held for a
few friends at the Gardner a few months before, on New Year’s Eve. Despite being strictly prohibited, Abath allowed several close friends, including two brothers who also worked at the museum, to usher in the new year with a low-key party. Abath supplied his favorite top-shelf Bombay gin.

  “I figure if I have to work tonight, I’m not going to spend it without my friends,” he told them as they camped out among the Gardner’s masterpieces.

  The incident should have cost Abath his job. But the second night watchman on duty with him that New Year’s Eve liked Abath and didn’t report him. In fact, that same man, Joseph M. Mulvey, Abath’s regular partner and an old-timer who had been working security at the museum since the mid-1980s, was scheduled to work the overnight shift with Abath on March 18. But when Abath arrived a half hour before the shift was scheduled to start, he found that Mulvey had called in sick.

  There was a scramble until Randy Hestand agreed to work the shift. Four years older than Abath, Hestand had been hired as a gallery guard at the museum the year before. That night would be the first time Hestand worked as a night watchman, but he knew the shift had long periods of down time, and he brought his trombone along with him.

  “We’ll alternate patrolling the galleries,” Abath told Hestand, reiterating what he’d been told over the phone when he’d agreed to the shift. “It should take about an hour to complete. We document the rounds by turning our security keys in the alarm locks around the building.”

  While one man was doing his patrols—unarmed but carrying a flashlight and walkie-talkie—the other would sit at the security desk, where he could watch a television screen that showed the closed circuit images from four cameras around the building’s perimeter. Those images were captured on a videocassette recorder located inside the small office, where the duty commander customarily sat. The only other piece of equipment, an IBM computer that registered the footsteps of anyone passing through any of the sixty motion-activated infrared sensors spread through the museum, sat close by. The security system had been installed about two years previously at a cost of about $100,000. It was turned on.