Master Thieves

by Kurkjian, Stephen

  Upon climbing down, frustrated by their failure, they turned their ire to two frames in a nearby case that contained five sketches by Edgar Degas. Smashing both frames, they tore the sketches from them. Whether the thieves were interested in the horseracing motif of the sketches or angry at their inability to free the Napoleonic banner, the combined value of the Degas sketches was less than $100,000.

  The thieves spent sixteen minutes inside the Dutch Room, mostly dashing back and forth from it to the Short Gallery on the other end of the second floor. There, although a priceless Michelangelo drawing was nearby, the thieves concentrated their attention on a Napoleonic banner. They labored to get the banner out of the glass-and-wood frame that encased it on a four-foot flagpole at the far end of the gallery. The frame was fastened together by six tiny screws, and the thieves removed them, dropping each to the floor below. The task proved too laborious, however, and the pair finally abandoned the job. But before they jumped down from their perch, they snatched the gold-plated eagle—called a finial—that rested atop the flagpole.

  “To me it’s the biggest mystery in the entire case,” says Anthony Amore, the security director of the museum, who has long analyzed every move the thieves made, baffled by how they decided what to take. “Why did they take what they did, and leave what they did? It just makes no sense to me.”

  Crime scene photos taken after the theft.

  The havoc of the theft is shown in the second-floor Dutch Room, where the greatest masterpieces were taken, leaving behind broken frames and shattered glass.

  Richard Abath, who made the grievous error of allowing the thieves into the museum.

  The frame of Eduard Manet’s Chez Tortoni, taken from the first floor Blue Room, was left on the chair of the museum’s security chief.

  Five prints by Edgar Degas were broken from frames that hung in the Short Gallery.

  The Gardner Museum contained extraordinary masterworks like Titian’s Rape of Europa, said to be the single most valuable painting in all of Boston, but the thieves never went near it, or anything else on the third floor of the museum, for that matter.

  Most baffling was the final painting stolen: Edouard Manet’s Chez Tortoni. It lay on a table in the Blue Room, on the first floor of the museum, beneath a better-known Manet portrait: one of the painter’s mother. Even more mystifying than the thieves’ choice of that painting was that the Gardner’s motion detectors—which had picked up every step the thieves made that night—didn’t show any footsteps leading into, out of, or even inside the Blue Room. With an infrared sensor covering the expanse of the smaller Blue Room, no sign that the thieves set foot in the gallery has ever emerged. In fact, the only footsteps the equipment picked up going through the Blue Room that night were Abath’s, during the two times he passed through the gallery on his patrol earlier in the evening.

  Several weeks after the theft, museum security consultant Steven Keller was called in to review the aftermath and concluded that the Aerotech motion detector equipment the museum used had worked fine the night of the heist. Keller said he tested the equipment himself, trying to avert detection by tiptoeing around the presumed placement of the sensors and crawling on the floor. He failed with every attempt, leaving him with only one explanation: that the Manet had been taken by someone other than the thieves.

  Because of Abath’s conduct and the spate of curious actions that night, investigators have remained suspicious of him and kept open the possibility that he was somehow involved in the scheme. They point out that in 80 percent of major art heists, the thieves have had the assistance of an insider at the museum. It made sense given his friction with Grindle; Abath might have had something to do with the heist. Even the thieves’ final act before leaving the museum, dropping the gold frame in which the Manet had been set on the chair Grindle used in the makeshift office behind the security desk, had the feel of a final insult toward Grindle.

  In 2010 Abath was called before a grand jury, where he admitted to investigators that he prided himself on being able to avoid having his footsteps picked up on the motion detector equipment by “duck walking” through a gallery, like rocker Chuck Berry. But he insisted he had had nothing to do with the thieves or the theft itself, and reminded the grand jurors that he had remained duct-taped and handcuffed in the basement the entire night.

  The thieves didn’t need any help from him, Abath later told me: “They knew exactly what they were doing.”

  But nearly twenty years after the theft, two FBI agents suddenly appeared in the Vermont town where Abath lives with his wife and two sons from a previous marriage.

  “You know we’ve never lost sight of you, never been able to eliminate you as a suspect,” the agents told him. “We’ve kept an eye on your bank account even.”

  “I passed your stupid lie detector tests,” Abath reminded them, referring to the two tests he’d passed soon after the robbery in which he was pressed about any involvement in the heist or associations he may have had with the thieves. While not entirely true—Abath had said he failed a question on the first exam, when he answered “no” to whether he had taken any drugs within forty-eight hours of taking the test—during the second examination, after the FBI’s polygraph specialist had advised him to skip the question about drugs, Abath said he did pass with flying colors. (An investigator familiar with Abath’s tests would not comment for this book, but shook his head no when asked whether Abath was describing the results of his polygraph correctly.)

  Besides, Abath has lived a threadbare lifestyle, in Portland, Oregon, where he moved a year or so after the theft, and later in Vermont, where he and his wife have lived for more than a decade. More than anything else, his modest existence is the most convincing proof that Abath’s culpability stems from negligence rather than any role as an accomplice.

  Yet the man who trained Abath for the night watchman’s position says his story doesn’t add up. JonPaul Kroger insists that Abath had been told specifically to be skeptical of anyone who sought entry into the museum after hours, even if they identified themselves as police officers. In fact, in such events, the night watchmen were trained to take down the names and badge numbers and phone Boston police headquarters to confirm that the officers had actually been dispatched to the museum.

  “It was something I was taught when I did that shift,” Kroger says. “And it was something that I stressed when I taught Abath and others like him.”

  Also, Kroger insists that everyone who manned the security desk knew that the only way to summon the outside world to an emergency inside the museum was through the alarm buzzer behind the desk.

  “To have walked away from that buzzer is beyond negligent,” Kroger says ruefully. “Really it was foolhardy, but then that was Rick.”

  Furthermore, Abath was unreliable. Kroger says Abath was often late or called in sick, saying he was ill or too inebriated to work.

  Most disturbingly, Kroger casts doubt on Abath’s explanation for why he opened the museum’s outside door before taking over the security desk to begin his night’s work, as the computer printout showed he did a few minutes before the thieves showed up. Abath, for his part, contends that he did it routinely to make sure the outside door was locked, and contrary to some speculation, it certainly was not meant as a sign to the robbers that they could begin their theft.

  Kroger insists that the computer printout was checked every day by security supervisors and that if Abath had been opening the side door on a routine basis, the supervisors would have quickly detected it as a security breach and stopped. Kroger is adamant that all night watchmen were trained never to open the museum door except in case of an extreme emergency, such as a fire.

  As for the FBI, it took possession of all the museum’s security equipment and surveillance reports soon after the robbery and has declined to answer questions about Abath’s actions that night or on prior shifts.

 
Abath says that while it was preposterous to think so, he always had in the back of his mind that perhaps the thieves would return someday and provide him a reward as they had promised, to show their appreciation for being so compliant during the robbery. And when he found a package of marijuana in an alley near his Brighton home several months later, he took it as a possible gesture from the thieves and he stopped his daydreaming. No one was ever coming back to thank him and he was lucky to be alive.

  Although he acknowledges that he made errors in judgment that allowed the theft to take place, Abath does not blame himself. Instead, he said he should have been better trained by his superiors.

  Before the thieves left the building, one of them made his way back down the cellar stairs to check on Abath and Hestand. Abath says he could hear the thief breathing steadily, standing there just watching him. Then the thieves left.

  With their small hatchback waiting outside the museum, the thieves didn’t bother to take everything they had stolen in one haul. At 2:40 a.m., both sets of doors were opened, and then closed again just a minute later. Five minutes later, at 2:45 a.m., both sets of doors opened and shut again. The men must have left separately five minutes apart, each carrying a portion of the stolen artwork. Were they able to get all thirteen pieces into the confines of the small hatchback they had been seen sitting in minutes before the robbery? Or had a second vehicle met them outside of the Palace Road entrance to help them? Like so much else they did that night, the question remains unanswered. Just as mysteriously as they’d arrived, the men disappeared into Boston’s still misty night.

  ______________________

  Four hours later, the two security guards who were to take over for Abath and Hestand arrived at the Palace Road entrance to the Gardner Museum and rang the bell. There was no response, and the pair didn’t have a key. One of the reliefs ran to a nearby pay phone and she called Larry O’Brien, the museum’s deputy director of security, at his home in nearby Somerville.

  O’Brien was there in ten minutes. As soon as he entered the museum through a rear door, he noticed a first sign that something was terribly wrong: A clothes hanger, unwound to its full length, was lying at the foot of the candy machine near the rear entrance. Director Anne Hawley was a stickler for keeping the museum clean and debris-free, and O’Brien knew she would have suspended anyone who left a hanger lying there like that, let alone if they’d left it after using it to steal from the candy machine. Had the thieves gotten hungry while pulling off the greatest art heist in American history? O’Brien would later wonder if the famous score had included not only the Rembrandts and the Vermeer but a few candy bars as well.

  Finally, making his way to the security desk, O’Brien realized something much more serious had taken place. His two night watchmen were missing and not responding to his calls on the museum’s two-way radio system, and there, on the chair behind the desk in the makeshift supervisor’s office behind the security desk, lay the empty frame that had once showcased Chez Tortoni, one of Manet’s finest works.

  O’Brien immediately found a phone. He dialed Lyle Grindle at his home.

  “Lyle, you’d better get in here immediately,” he shouted. “I can’t find our security men and there’s sure sign there’s been a break-in.” What he didn’t tell Grindle was that he feared the thieves were still inside the museum and that the night watchmen were dead.

  “Call the police right now, and don’t touch anything,” Grindle said, clearly shocked. “I’ll be right in.”

  ______________________

  Boston police Sergeant Robin DeMarco and Lieutenant Trent Holland were in the midst of picking up their breakfast of egg sandwiches and coffee when they received the emergency call. With sirens blazing, they drove quickly to the Gardner, where two rookie police officers and Lieutenant Patrick Cullity, the patrol supervisor for the district, joined them.

  All these years on the force, and I never knew this was a museum, Cullity thought to himself as he arrived at the scene of the burglary. I always thought it was a big house.

  Inside, the officers were met by O’Brien. He told them immediately that he feared the thieves might still be inside the museum and that the overnight guards were missing.

  “I think they might be dead,” he told Cullity.

  As lead supervisor, Cullity took control of the scene and ordered the two rookie officers—Dan Rice, a former standout college football player, and Kenny Hearns—to begin searching in the basement while he and DeMarco went looking through the upper floors, making their way through the darkened galleries with their flashlights.

  “Jesus, look at this,” Cullity said to DeMarco when they reached the Dutch Room on the second floor. The beam of his flashlight caught the shards of broken glass and broken frames that had been left on the floor. “What did these people do here?”

  “Lieutenant, I think we’ve found something down here in the cellar,” Rice radioed. “Can you get down here right away?”

  There, seated on a perch, still handcuffed, with his shoulder-length curly hair nearly completely wrapped in duct tape, sat Rick Abath. Hestand, too, was nearby.

  “We’re Boston police,” Cullity told them. “Just sit there a couple of seconds longer; our police photographer is on his way and we don’t want to touch or change anything until he gets his pictures.”

  Abath was dumbfounded by the request, but happy to have been found and alive. He sat by quietly but began to fume when one of the officers told him they would have to cut some of his hair to get the duct tape off.

  Upstairs, Gardner director Anne Hawley had arrived and was trying to understand the full extent of what had happened. That would not happen until midday, after her conservator had been allowed under police guard to tour the galleries to assess what had been stolen. But standing there on the first floor, having just arrived after Grindle’s near-frantic call, she shook her head in sadness as the police told of the lost Rembrandts and Vermeer.

  “If I had only followed my instincts, I would have been able to stop this from ever happening,” she told Grindle. “I left my party last night early enough and I wanted to come over here to get some work done. I’m thinking now I would have walked in on them as they were doing this. I don’t care what would have happened to me if I could have prevented this.”

  By mid-afternoon, having been questioned for several hours, first by Boston police detectives and then by a swarm of agents from the FBI’s Boston office who had already taken over the investigation, Rick Abath was told he could go home. When he got to the head of the three floors of stairs that wound up the inside of the house he shared, he shouted out to his roommate and fellow night watchman, John Murray.

  “John, it happened. Everything we warned them about. It happened. Good luck working tonight!”

  Then, as he had been planning for weeks, he got in a borrowed van and drove to Hartford to see the Grateful Dead.

  Abath did not understand the size of the robbery or what had been stolen until he read the headlines the next morning coming out of his hotel in Hartford. Realizing immediately that he had to be considered an accomplice, and that his leaving the city would raise deeper questions, Abath abandoned any plan he had to stay to see the band’s second performance that night and drove quickly back to Boston.

  Part II

  The Search

  Chapter Three

  We’ve Seen It

  There is little doubt that William P. Youngworth was an unreliable source. A petty criminal and a drug abuser, he was known to exaggerate if not outright lie in almost every dealing he had, whether it was with fellow criminals, the police, or reporters. There was perhaps no one he might have misled as prominently as Tom Mashberg, an experienced journalist with a top-notch reputation during his stints at the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and the Boston Herald. By the time Youngworth and Mashberg came in contact, the Gardner’s works had been missing for over seven years. Y
oungworth could have been the key to cracking the Gardner case, providing him with the story of a lifetime in the process.

  Stories abound about how Mashberg was blindfolded by strangers—he had not been—and driven to a secluded warehouse 45 minutes outside of Boston in fear for his life to see the stolen Gardner paintings. Elements of this story are true—but one critical detail, that the proximity of the warehouse was close to Boston, is simply wrong.

  Mashberg began dealing with Youngworth in July 1997, after local police and FBI agents raided Youngworth’s house in the suburb of Randolph, Massachusetts. Mashberg got hold of the FBI report authorizing the raid on the house, which doubled as an antique furniture outlet, and in it Boston FBI agent Neil P. Cronin wrote that he believed Youngworth “could assist with the recovery” of the Gardner paintings. Youngworth had been under FBI surveillance for several months before the raid.

  That was an intriguing possibility for Mashberg, as Youngworth was close to longtime New England art thief Myles J. Connor Jr., who had stolen a Rembrandt from the Museum of Fine Arts in 1973. In the mid-1970s, Connor had also stolen from the Massachusetts State House a document of great historical value known as the Massachusetts Bay Colony Charter.

  The charter was recovered in a raid on one of Connor’s stash houses several months after it was stolen—but the charter was missing the 370-year-old royal wax seal that King Charles I had affixed to the document. That seal was recovered in the raid on Youngworth’s house more than twenty years later, in 1997, which focused Mashberg’s attention on Connor and Youngworth. Connor was behind bars serving a ten-year prison sentence for cocaine trafficking. Mashberg said he soon learned that Youngworth had secretly stored virtually all of Connor’s possessions, including items Connor had stolen from museums through the years, inside Youngworth’s rambling house in Randolph.