Master Thieves

by Kurkjian, Stephen

  “I’ll take the first patrol through the galleries,” Abath told Hestand, enjoying pulling a bit of seniority on the older man. “But you see that button?” he asked, pointing to a small round button molded within arm’s reach on the right side of the security desk. “That’s the panic alarm. Hit that if there’s any emergency, and the police will be here in minutes.”

  In fact, that button was the only alarm the museum had in place that could alert the outside world to a problem inside the building. While other museums had instituted a fail-safe system, which required the night watchmen to make hourly phone calls to convey that all was well, the panic button at the Gardner’s front security desk was the only way to summon police to an emergency.

  Abath went on his way, checking doors and the empty galleries. He was midway through his rounds when whatever hopes he had for a routine evening were shattered. Suddenly he heard the fire alarm box just a few feet away from the security desk going off loudly. While the box could pinpoint thirty places around the museum where a fire had started or a window had been broken, this time all the alarm stations throughout the building were blaring out their siren call.

  “What the hell is going on down there?” Abath shouted into his two-way radio.

  “You’d better get down here, Rick,” Hestand said, a slight panic in his voice. “The whole box is going off.”

  Abath ran to the alarm box and shut it down. He reset it and then turned it on again. Once again, its bright lights lit up like a Christmas tree and the sirens wailed throughout the building.

  “What the hell is wrong with it?” Hestand asked.

  “I’ve got no idea,” Abath shot back. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Abath considered calling someone but decided instead to just shut down the box for the night and to make sure a repairman was summoned in the morning. Abath went back to his rounds, starting over from the beginning as his security manual required. He finally completed his tour around 1 a.m. But before he relieved Hestand at the security desk, he made a sharp detour into the anteroom between the museum itself and the outside door. The door was of heavy oak and had been the side entrance to the museum since its construction in 1903. A metal latch that was still in place had been the original mechanism for locking the door, but it now locked and unlocked electronically, with a control switch at the security desk, or manually, as Abath was about to do. Without telling Hestand what he was doing or why, Abath opened the side door and shut it again.

  Outside on the street, two men in a parked car would have seen Abath open and shut the door. They’d been sitting in their dark-colored hatchback on Palace Road, about one hundred feet away from the employee entrance to the museum, for a while, and they squinted through their windows, thick with condensation from their breath that cool night. In the half hour before, the quiet on the street had been suddenly broken when a group of youthful St. Patrick’s Day revelers emerged from a nearby apartment building. There were about five in all, and they were tipsy from the late-night party they’d just left. The men in the hatchback, dressed in police uniforms and wearing police caps, made no move as a couple of the kids danced around them and then climbed one another’s shoulders in the middle of Palace Road.

  “Cops,” a girl who had climbed onto her boyfriend’s shoulders for a brief wrestling match with another couple stage-whispered as she spied the two men. Through the clouded windows she saw that both men were wearing police hats and that the driver had on a coat with a police patch on its arm.

  One of the revelers, Tim Conway, saw them too. He noticed their uniforms and wondered what they were doing in an unmarked car. “They’ve got to be doing surveillance on someone,” he thought and tried to be nonchalant as he walked around to the back of the car to see if it had any medallions or a special license plate to designate it as a police vehicle. There were none.

  For a second Conway considered knocking on the car’s window to ask the two men what they were waiting for, but he also knew he was in no condition to be asking questions of the police. Conway had consumed much of the two six-packs of Irish beer he’d brought to the party and knew he was tipsy. To top it off he was only nineteen, well below the legal drinking age.

  Conway and his friends quickly disappeared into the misty, cool night, leaving the hatchback and its two occupants alone.

  A few minutes later, at 1:20 in the morning, the hatchback started up and drove slowly past the heavy oak door of the Gardner’s employee entrance and parked. Inside the museum, Abath saw the car via the closed circuit television camera that hung over the door, then turned his attention elsewhere. When he looked up again, the two men, dressed in police uniforms, were at the door reaching for the buzzer.

  “Police,” one of the two men said, turning to look at the closed circuit television that hung over the door. “We’re here about the disturbance.”

  Abath was unaware of any disturbance at the museum, or of any call made to 911 to report one. But he also knew that, this being St. Patrick’s Day, anything might have happened on the grounds surrounding the museum and that the closed circuit televisions easily could have missed it. Perhaps someone had climbed over the iron fence and gotten into the grounds in the back of the museum, he thought. Maybe someone in the security post at Simmons College across the street had seen it and called the police.

  Abath pressed the buzzer on the console at his security desk, giving the men access into the museum. As they entered the “mantrap”—the locked foyer that separated the rear door from the actual museum—he could see them clearly. One was taller than the other, and they looked to be dressed in police uniforms, right down to the union pins fastened to their shirt collars.

  “Is there anyone else here with you?” the shorter of the two asked Abath.

  “Just one other,” Abath responded. “He’s on his rounds.”

  “Get him down here, immediately,” the short officer demanded.

  Abath grabbed his walkie-talkie and called Hestand to come back to the security desk.

  Just then Abath noticed that while both had mustaches, the one on the taller of the two seemed fake. In fact, it looked pasted to his face. But before he got to look more closely, the shortest of the pair leaned toward him.

  “You look familiar,” he said accusingly to Abath, squinting his eyes. “I think we have a warrant out for your arrest. Come out from behind the desk and show us some identification.”

  Abath had had no brushes with the law and knew he had no warrants, but his immediate concern was that if he didn’t comply, he’d be arrested and have to spend the rest of the weekend in jail. If that happened, he knew he’d miss those Grateful Dead concerts in Hartford.

  He stood up and stepped away from the security desk. It would be Abath’s second grievous error in judgment. First he’d broken protocol by letting the officers into the museum. Now he was facing them, unarmed and outmanned.

  In a matter of seconds the shorter man had steered Abath to a nearby wall. He forced him to spread his legs and slapped a pair of handcuffs on him.

  Wait a minute, Abath thought to himself. He didn’t even frisk me.

  It was at that moment Abath knew the two men he’d let into the museum weren’t police officers. They hadn’t come to investigate a disturbance. They were there to rob the place, and he had allowed it to happen.

  Abath had his face to the wall when Hestand walked into the room and heard him ask why he was being arrested. Out of the corner of his eye he could see that the taller of the two men had turned Hestand around and was putting handcuffs on him.

  “This is a robbery, gentlemen,” one of the men said almost matter-of-factly. “Don’t give us any problems, and you won’t get hurt.”

  “Don’t worry,” Abath responded sharply. “They don’t pay me enough to get hurt.”

  The thieves quickly wrapped both men in large strips of the duct tape they’d brought in with
them, covering even the watchmen’s heads and eyes. Then, without asking how to get there, the two men led the hapless guards to the basement. They seated Hestand beside an unused sink, which he was then handcuffed to. Abath was led down a long, narrow corridor to a workbench, where the intruders seated and handcuffed him as well.

  After relieving them of their wallets, the thieves told each man, “We know where you live now. Do as we tell you and no harm will come to you. If you don’t tell them anything, you’ll get a reward from us in about a year.”

  You people have no interest in doing anything for me now or a year from now, Abath thought to himself, as he tried to relax as best he could, getting accustomed to being handcuffed to the sink with the duct tape still covering his eyes and face.

  While the thieves went about wreaking havoc inside the museum, Abath’s mental state went from boredom to terror. He knew these guys were serious and that they certainly didn’t intend to get caught. With that in mind, Abath figured they’d likely set fire to the place before they left, and he began to panic. He began to sing, almost chant, Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released” over and over again: “So I remember every face, of every man who put me here.”

  Even so, when Boston police later asked him what the men looked like, Abath could provide only the sketchiest of details. One of the thieves appeared to be in his late thirties. About five feet, nine inches, slim with gold wire glasses and a mustache, though that was probably fake. The other looked to be in his early thirties, six feet tall and heavier, with chubby cheeks. He also sported a mustache.

  “That’s awful!” Abath blurted out when the police showed him the artist’s composite drawing based on the description he’d provided. In the ensuing years all he could remember was that one of the men looked like Colonel Klink from the popular late ‘60s television show Hogan’s Heroes.

  But sitting there handcuffed, helpless while the intruders were doing God knows what, all Abath could do was cycle through his mind, wondering if he had ever seen either of the pair before. Maybe he’d spoken to them in a bar or some other chance encounter and told the thieves about the museum’s miserable security system. Or maybe it was because so many people had worked the night shift over the years and knew the terrible secret that there was only one alarm to alert the outside world of a problem inside the museum and that the next shift didn’t start until 6:30 the next morning, so there was no one to check on things once Abath and Hestand had been subdued.

  The FBI and Boston police artist drew sketches of the two robbers following the heist using recollections of the two night watchmen who were on duty. However, more recently the security officer who spent the most time with the thieves dismissed the accuracy of the images.

  It could have been anybody, Abath thought. How many times had he and his roommates—several of whom also worked security at the Gardner—complained to each other about the lousy security the museum had in place?

  Abath had probably made such claims in his own house, which was less than two blocks away from an antiques store run by a suspicious character with mob ties. William Youngworth, the store owner, was a friend of several members of the Rossetti gang, and would draw much attention to himself in 1997 by claiming he could facilitate the return of the stolen artwork. Had Abath’s complaints—which suddenly seemed to him to be very conspicuous, and perhaps even a threat to his life—somehow been overheard by Youngworth? Or perhaps Abath shot off his mouth about the museum’s security lapses at the Channel, a rock club Abath remembers visiting, or one of the seedier ones where Ukiah played in Brighton or other Boston neighborhoods, some of which had mob connections of varying degrees.

  All these thoughts tumbled through Abath’s mind as he lay handcuffed and covered in duct tape in the museum basement.

  It had taken the thieves about fifteen minutes to subdue Abath and Hestand. It was 1:35 a.m. While Abath sat imagining these conspiracies, the thieves were on their way, moving among the Gardner’s hallowed galleries.

  Strangely, their first footsteps weren’t picked up on the museum’s motion detector until they made their way to the Dutch Room on the second floor at 1:48. The pair may have waited to make sure their presence inside the museum hadn’t been detected and that no emergency calls had been made to the Boston PD. Most important, they made sure no cruisers had been sent to investigate.

  Surely they also had knowledge about the museum’s security system and layout. They knew they had to get Abath away from the panic button located within his reach at the security desk. They knew how to get to the museum’s basement and where to hold Abath and Hestand. Now they knew police had no way of knowing that the heist was under way.

  The Gardner was theirs. They could have spent the entire night inside.

  “Someone is in the Dutch Room. Investigate immediately.” At 1:51 a.m. the motion detector on the first floor typed out that message, but of course no one was there to see it. The two intruders had made their way up the Gardner’s marble steps to the second floor and had entered the gallery where some of Mrs. Gardner’s richest treasures were kept: three large Rembrandts and Vermeer’s The Concert.

  The Storm on the Sea of Galilee was the most valuable of the Rembrandts that Mrs. Gardner had purchased for her museum. The only seascape the master is known to have done, the painting is a dramatic representation of the story told in Luke’s chapter in the New Testament of Christ calming a violent storm that has so frightened his disciples they awoke him. Mrs. Gardner purchased the painting from a London gallery in 1920 after learning of its availability from Bernard Berenson, the young Harvard-educated art specialist she’d hired to locate masterpieces to fill the galleries she envisioned sharing with the world.

  The painting itself was large, at more than five feet in length and four feet in width, and even bigger encased in a golden frame. Hardly master thieves, the intruders pulled the majestic Rembrandt from where it hung on the far wall of the gallery and threw it to the marbled floor, shattering the glass in the huge frame. With its canvas exposed, they cut the painting, which had been completed in 1633, sharply from its wooden backing.

  As they did, a small device suddenly began to screech from a socket on a nearby wall. The size of a night light, the device had been installed to warn the Dutch Room gallery guard that a patron had gotten too close to the canvas, most often to point out that Rembrandt had etched an image of himself among the disciples on the boat. The sound likely shocked the pair, and one of them hunted it down and smashed it to pieces.

  Again there was silence.

  They were just as brutal with the second Rembrandt, A Lady and Gentleman in Black. The two broke its enormous glass frame, cutting it from its wooden backing, too. Although not as dramatic a sight as The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, the painting originally included a young boy waving a wand or stick to the lady’s right. But the figure was removed when the work was completed in 1633.

  The thieves then moved on to a third large Rembrandt, a self-portrait of the Dutch master. Deciding it was too large to transport, the pair left it leaning against a cabinet rather than making off with it. While that self-portrait may have been too large to transport, the thieves did grab a postage stamp–size portrait Rembrandt had etched of himself from the table beneath it. Remarkably, it was the second time the work had been snatched.

  In the only other theft known to have taken place at the museum, the self-portrait had been stolen in a daytime heist in 1970 when a patron diverted a guard’s attention by throwing a bag filled with lightbulbs onto the floor, making a loud crash, and an accomplice snatched the self-portrait from its stand. Although no one was ever arrested in the theft, the drawing was returned to the museum several months later by an art dealer who told authorities that an unknown person had come in to sell it to him, but when the gallery noticed on its back a stamp that showed it belonged to the Gardner, he called the museum immediately to report its whereabouts.

  Now
, two decades later, a far bigger robbery was taking place. The thieves then moved to a small table on the right side of the gallery and concentrated on the two paintings atop it: Vermeer’s The Concert and a painting that had long been regarded as being by Rembrandt, the pastoral scene Landscape with an Obelisk.

  The Concert was by far the most valuable of the thirteen pieces ultimately taken that night. Only 28½ by 25½ inches, the painting could easily bring $250 million at auction, more than $100 million higher than the 2013 sale of Francis Bacon’s triptych, Three Studies of Lucian Freud, by Christie’s New York. Vermeer’s masterwork fully displays his uncanny ability to capture light and dark in great detail. The Concert shows a man and two women playing music, with the late-day light softly entering the room through a window on the left, and casting a different glow to every inch of the oriental rug lying atop a table and every fold of the women’s dresses. Its brilliant whites capture the small strands of pearls each woman wears.

  Without regard for any of this, the thieves removed the great work from its golden frame. Then they did the same to Landscape with an Obelisk, which rested at the other end of the table in the Gardner’s Dutch Room. It has long mystified many as to why this work was among the pieces the thieves took, as it had long before been dismissed as a painting by Rembrandt.

  It’s also a mystery as to why the thieves decided to take the final piece they did from the Dutch Room: a Chinese beaker from the Shang era. Called a ku, the foot-tall vase was one of the oldest artifacts in the museum, dating back to 1200 BC, with its worth estimated at several thousand dollars.