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Gardner Museum Art Heist Update

2014-04-30 | 🔗

Just about a year ago, the FBI informed the press about new developments in the case of the massive art theft in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum that took place on March 18, 1990. We'll cover the updates, then hear the original episode on the theft. Read the show notes here.

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This is an unofficial transcript meant for reference. Accuracy is not guaranteed.
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I just realized that the first letter of every line of this new spells help me. It seems, like everyone's critic, these days blessing the world with our slightest opinions on our own many platforms, I'm scotch benefits, and I break on this February. Tenth guns, citizen critic, a new podcast, where we predict the critics in review, the reviews of your favorite movies, music, television, toasters, toiletries in paint, colors, listen, do citizen critic on the eye, heart, radio, an apple pie, guests or wherever you get your bike assets, Welcome to you. Do you missed in history class from house upwards dot com, hello and the to the Tracy on, and I'm Wilson Holly from Gonna do something a little different today are the next, but do not the alarm.
I'm taking a little bit of time off to handle some personal business? Yeah, do not thought anything scary Naturally, this is a busy life and the life things happen in such a way that you gotta take a moment that back and work amounts will normally what we do when we have when one of us is taking time off, or both of us are taking time off. As we record extra effort. In the weeks leading up to it so that everything continues, uninterrupted, seamlessly, yeah that the time did not for that we would have had to record like for extra episodes in a week, and that is not actually manageable. That is how research falls apart, What we really do for today and for a couple more episodes after today is that we are going to talk about some episode updates, yeah, which a lot of people out yeah. So what we're gonna do user go into tat takes a new information about what's going on, and then we will. Let you listen to the absent,
Archive today, we are talking about the huge art death from the oil Isabella Steward Gardner Museum in Boston Massachusetts, from our episode originally called. What's the highest value art haste in history, we get so any letters about yes, so, just about a year ago, we are recording this. In April of twenty fourteen, the F B, I informed the press about new developments. In the case of the art, after the isabella do regarding a museum and that that originally took place on March Eighteenth, nineteen, ninety thieves who addressed as Boston police officer, gain entry to the museum that night by basically walking up in saying they were cops, and then they walked off with multiple pieces of art. Including a vermeer and three Rembrandt'S- and these were worth about five hundred million dollars- and this was such a dramatic and simultaneously simple art theft- that it has led
museums to dramatically revamp their security practices. Since then, we didn't have much to add to the story. Beckoned, twenty thirteen, but now seems like a good time to talk about it down, special agent Richard. The lorries said that the F B, I believed, with quote a high degree of confidence, that it knew where the art was taken after the theft, as well as the identities of the two men who committed the original breakin. They didn't name the men, however, and the location of the art is still unknown, and this announcement was also about publicizing the case. The F b I asked for the public's help in solving the crime and spread the word about the ongoing five million dollar reward for information leading to the recovery of the paintings in good condition. That sounds like a huge role but remember the valley, You of the stolen items was more than five hundred million right, so this is where our episode becomes a brief public service announcement
FBI, asks for anyone with information about this crimes are called in at one hundred call FBI and that's one hundred two to five five three to four or to submit tips online at tips that fbi dot com before we turn you over to Katy and Sarah, who were the original hosts of this episode? We're gonna take a brief moment and have a word more sponsor this so it is brought to you by the all new twenty twenty four explorer Tracy. I know that you have been thinking about an interesting thing lily, which is why your pic would be for the greatest exploration vehicle of all time. Yeah, I'm gonna go with the research vessel petrol that was owned by the link Paul Alan found, so many shipwrecks which our listeners love, that we started to make jokes about it like we were like, and this is a shipwreck.
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You could do all of this and more with the all new twenty twenty four explore that all new twenty twenty floored explore the greatest exploration vehicle of all time. This episode of stuff you miss than history classes, brought to you by Norton three sixty with lifelike what they are shopping online with a smartphone. Its super feels like ear. Personal information is just right there in your hand, but that's not always the case, because, as soon as you hit submit your personal information, could start going other places. In fact, whenever you shop Bank or browse online, your personal invoking get out of your control, and that can we be vulnerable to cyber criminals. More threats demand more protection. That's why Norton and Lifelong are now part of one company Norton three,
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hello. I welcome to the task Katy, unfair daddy our story is going to start with the highest value, art history. So that's a pretty good place right. It's also a story about moustaches and from there is going to take us all the way back to turn of the century. Boston with socialite art collector, who loves back thing in the house of Worth and baseball, and she entered building one of the most beautiful art collection from the countries that we have a lot to talk about funding for everyone today, so we're going to set are seen witches the Isabella, Stuart Garda Museum. It's this quiet, tucked away venetian Palace on the Fenway in Boston and its march, eighteenth nineteen. Ninety as Saint Patrick, say, revellers are coming back
Way home and at one twenty four, a m, the museums, Buzzer sounded. The guard forgot to see what looks like to Boston policemen outside wearing Amish. Equally large moustaches, we kind of thought of the hot cup here from arrested, developed, but the police. They need to check out a reported disturbance to the guards let the men but later there cuffed bounden, duct tape and after shutting off the video cameras, the fees head up to museums, dutch room and their first target is an early self portrait by Rembrandt. But it's a heavy panel in this heavy guilt frame and it won't come So they just leave that one on the floor. The canvas Rembrandt's are a little easier to deal with them, the thieves them out of their frames, which so much worse than the book of health being written. Then I think and run off with Christ,
in the storm on the sea of Galilee and a lady and gentlemen in black to Rembrandt they're gone now. Next is Vermeer's the cancer which we take from an easel and then a gobert flank, and then they move on with these big works and they take another Rembrandt, a little tiny etching about the size of a postage stamp and a bronze chinese speaker before passing by all these other amazing work, the body celli a rough I'll, a frying jellicoe before taking five joined by the guy, and all of this happens under the John singer, sergeant portrait of the museums, founder, Isabella, Stuart gardener and Sarah said in a movie you'd have to film it with her eyes in the porch watching the whole matter goes to come and heart they try to take up. Lack of Napoleon's Imperial Guard, but they can't get it either. So they end up just taking the little blonde video of an eagle at the top and the final thing they take
the many oil which is kind of often by the way you look it up. It's a guy. Writing if a top hat and they don't touch Titian Europa. Even though, is the most valuable thing in them. I am so they spend ninety minutes inside this whole time and they tell the guards you'll be hearing from us and about a year, but now it's twenty years later there ve been offers of immunity of five million dollar reward and all of this art, which is that at two hundred million to five hundred million dollars. It's just gone I did so much art these old masters, high renaissance paintings. Famous american works, really extensive asian collection.
But they all end up in this beautiful tiny venetian mansion with a lush, enclosed, courtyard, fountains and statuary should look up online. It's really gorgeous that's because for nearly forty years passed and had a really great collector, these socialite Isabella Stuart gardener and Isabel s short with born in eighteen, forty in New York City and her There was a wealthy merchant and her family even claimed dissent from the royal story, but that's Canada, a dubious claim, that's just when addressing the people to the related to American got right. She was educated in private schools in New York and Paris and she befriended Julia Garden. Broad. She eventually married her friends, older brother, John L, gardener known as a jack in eighteen sixty and they moved to Beacon Street and Boston together, but her enter, to the art world was partly brought on by a personal tragedy
their son John Gardener, the third known as Jackie, died when he was two years old of pneumonia and she fell into a deep depression and she gets really stick and her doktor recommend that Jack her travelling, and so they go to Scandinavia in Russia, in Vienna, in Paris and by the time she can back, she's feeling a lot better and they have also started to pick up little pretty move along their course, their travels and bring them back to their beacon, Hell Home, have any more children other they do raise. There are three orphans nephews and they travel even more extensively after that, the Middle EAST, Central Europe, Asia, all around the United States, although perhaps, unsurprisingly, considering the museums design, their favorite spot was Venice, where they stated the plot. So Barbara, and Isabella, very social woman too. So don't think I've just heard her husband. Often these private travelled all the time. The museums archive actually have seven thousand letter.
From one thousand, corresponding so she's a busy lady, she's, really social, but that doesn't mean she's necessarily popular with the Boston Brahmins she's different she's got all this travelling mingling with american exports like Henry James Singer, sergeant James Mc Neill, Whistler, and she's generally very extravagant spending thousands of dollars on these paintings, Charles Worth Clothing and jewels, she's, an outsider, yeah she's, never totally accepted by that society, but she's so bathing and she cuts her own profile, and you know who wouldn't want to hang out with her sterile without us. I know she's really great, but one critic wrote that she was there dashing of fashion local finishers, who can order the whole symphony orchestra to her house for private musical. So here you go and her tastes were really broad. It wasn't just ass. She was interested in
She was also really into the Red Sox and boxing and Hockey Harvard football and horse races. So she had There are clear, but it doesn't take long for her to get. You know beyond picking up pretty little souvenirs on her travel and get into really serious, are collecting, and she does this by the Med eighteen ninety days and start hanging up all her paintings at her beak and ale house, leading the extras share. So can imagine like oh gosh. Where am, I can even put this Rembrandt ages thought an adviser to Bernard Bearings and who does a lot of her buying and she is also befriended. Some influential people in the eastern art world, like open, Cora Kaluza, his famous for writing the book of tea and helping to preserve japanese artistic styles today, there's a copy of the book
yeah her first major old master purchase comes in eighteen. Ninety two in its ever mere the concert, eventually stolen in the highest and it cost her. Just over six, thousand dollars and kind of weird to think of now you, Look, if you imagine old masters, paintings always being expensive and in high demand, but that's not really the case Eighteen. Ninety two: this was a pretty progressive purchase and she heads off and a few years later, american buyers think American industrialized, with lots of money, are snatching up all the old master paintings they can grow and you'd. You told me something call from a book you are reading about green and painting. It was a book by Cynthia Thoughts, men called old masters new out. I think I can want to read it now, but she said that a lot of this rush on european art and specifically or masters works that were being held in England,
came because the English started importing American Green and consequently their prices fell in their land value fell, and you have all these Lord, who are making ready anymore running the pinch yeah and meanwhile, there inheritance taxes are going out, their property taxes are going up and there are more willing to sell off the old Rembrandt, have in the manner and meanwhile, of course, we have our american tycoons getting fabulously rich, but also wanting to cultivate culture. It might remind you of our Hearst POD very much earth and because Americans are building all these new big museums, they need art to fill them up with, and this in turn influences generation
in order to be able to go and see these great works from old master from the italian radicals and not have to go all the way to Europe to see a painting gardeners, not just about the old masters, though she's. Not here, your average art collector, she wrote barons and nineteen hundred you know- or rather you don't know that I adore GINO and really dont adore Rembrandt. I only like him and he wrote back. I am not anxious to have you own braces of Rembrandt's, like any welder millionaire answer is a big job of luxury likes that another point in infidelity, her love for a talent, Renaissance art makes her by bought it Shelley's D the creature for fifteen thousand dollars in that's. Actually, the first bought a celli to come to the United States and she likes contemporary art. We ve already mentioned she's friends with fingers sergeant and whistler
and she sees herself not just as a woman, decorating her home and kind of fitting into that victorian standard of fire. I don't know between realm for women, but We're like a renaissance patron of the Ark Gonna like learn, led manager. Yeah error is more specifically Isabel, just day who we mentioned are in our Catherine domenici fat cats recently and in eighteen. Eighty six, her friend Henry James, takes her to singer sergeants London studio, to see Madame acts, which is, of course a very famous. Very lovely painting, and he does a head on full body painting of her in front of a venetian brocade, which James describes, as he Byzantine Madonna, with a halo and sergeant displays it. As a woman and enigma, there really does look like a halo, the brocades pattern of directly behind painting, leaning on chairs into a public space where everybody could come and appreciate her works of art, and she helps with the design with the construct
build a museum, and she wanted to make her private face in our Beacon Hill home with castle because it has this mix of styles. You walk into one room, that's decorated in a certain way and then into another. That's completely different and all of this faces an on a gorgeous courtyard, with windows and balconies honestly, look like they be an capulet polar affiliates, gonna leave out of one of the balcony with any effect and the museum open to the public in nineteen o three and she has a phoenix above the door along with a coat of arms and in those and balconies. Let us look like they be in a capitalist, polar. Surely it's gonna leave out of one of the balconies that any second and the museum
open to the public in nineteen o three and she has a phoenix above the door along with a coat of arms and gets her own personal motto, which is the more pleasure which are like that. It's a pretty bold statement to make at the at the gate of your museums and she's, slows down on the collecting later in her life, to try to leave the museum with a nice endowment when she died and nineteen twenty four after series of strokes, she'd saved up a million dollars for the museum with enough left over for charitable donations, for the prevention of cruelty to children into animals and the museum is given to Boston as like institution with the cats. Nothing can be changed, rearranged added or removed, although in two thousand and nine a mass cheese, its court did decide that there could be an addition made by Renzo Piano. Who did the high museum addition here and land to fill?
The short story, as if you go to the gardener museum today, it's gonna, look exactly like Isabella Sort, gardener intended it to luck. It's it's her house, the term museum except that, of course, the nineteen. Ninety thieves went so kind as to follow her wishes. So when you entered the dutch room, there are gaping frames, were masterpieces should be so that brings us back to a higher and the question where our gardeners missing masterpieces and there's a good chance that they ve actually been destroyed by now and ferry was explaining this to me. She said that sometimes art was too hot to unload, which I love because palace she has a secret life Nixon I'll make a high now ballads, but they're, probably part of the dark shadow. We are black market, where art is often used as collateral instead of cash for a drink. I had an idea that I would be collateral.
According to Alexander Smith, who worked with the artless register, it keeps the huge long record of all the hundreds of thousands of artwork that are missing, stolen sheep. She says that, with tighter banking regulations, it has become difficult for people to put big chunks of money in financial institutions without getting notice. So now thieves go out and steal a painting, so it's easy cash. I guess, but we want to make it clear that most deaths are as glamorous as say. The two thousand to heist in Paraguay, where thieves, Dugan, eighty foot tunnel or a gardener ice with
false mustache, never Thomas Crown affair. According to estimates Sony an article by Robert Pool. It's usually just someone with insight access to lift a stored work and walked off because, of course, most museums dont have their whole collection. How alliance story imagine a print that in a museum statesmen, nobody thinks anyone will notice, since the gardener heist is ostensibly the highest profile job in the world. There have been times leads tips and desire of theories, some of which will tell you one is that the Irish staged it to use as a bargaining chip for jailed members, and this was another thing if you think of of artwork being used. Ass. They can also sometimes abuses get out of jail free cards because his immunity, India, because authorities will want to get artworks back so desperately. There they'll offer immunity to anybody involved
their ideas that it was planned out by a musician who had performed with Roy orbits them before he was now for another five. Another. Is that and are hidden in Ireland, horses country much maybe early, maybe there that connection, and some also have said that it was so many of the stolen goods were horsey You feel like that. The biggest catches are all equestrian subjects and since the irish law so much, maybe early. Maybe there that connection Some also have said that it was taken as security by Boston Crime, boss, James Whitey Bolter, with the help of compromised FBI agents. Sir, you know a little bit more about and then I do will border and the local FBI office did work together. They work together to bring down an italian crime family which, consequently with also vultures main competitor in Boston, but it leads
him buying off some of his FBI, handlers than an FBI supervisor John Connally and vultures still one of the FBI's ten most wanted fugitives and he's been charged with racketeering, conspiracy, narcotics, tradition and nineteen counts of murder, so people think she's the only guy in Boston at the time who would have been able to get those paintings out of the country, since he had this FBI action and our latest word comes from April, two thousand and ten and the Boston Globe, and not that the
Why was hot on the trail of the art which this time was being held there corsican gang that that bureaucratic in fighting and an inability for the FBI to work with their french counterparts blew the whole thing up. So in conclusion, the art is still missing and we hope that its being well cared for and that some day it will find its way back to its lovely home in Boston. Meanwhile, there's plenty of needs to see at the museum and it now carries much better that insurance and a much more intense the charity system than it used to and another side note. If your name is dollar, you can go to the museum for free. We might need to change their names and go visit,
a quote. Our final quote from barons and on gardener, which I will let you read Saracens, you love her and that is she lives at a rate and intensity and with a reality that many other life pale, then shyly and that's. The final word Mr Gardiner this episode of stuff, you miss than history classes, Brass EU by W W, formerly wait watchers. They have a new might be to be program at their most groundbreaking and customize programme. Ever I joined Debbie W because I was really looking for something that was going to help encourage me to make healthier eating choices. They have really done that when you joined them W W program, you will take a personal assessment. It asking questions you're eating habits in your behaviors minute, scientifically matches you up with which plan is going to be the best for you
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There are lots and lots of pictures on their website, which is at Gardner Museum dot. Org you can go to their collection. Page can see floor plans of what all of the galleries look like. You can get a sense of what all of these beautiful beautiful rooms. Look like a lot of the collection you could. Also see online. So if you are somewhere far away from Boston Massachusetts, but this awesome museum and awesome how sound really intriguing to you You can go to the museums website and get a sense of a little of it for yourself, and we will also put a link to that in our shone out. If you would like to write to us about this or anything else, you can wear it. History pie, gas, tat, discovery, dot com were also on Facebook. At Facebook. Dotcom flash missed in history and on twitter at Miss industry are tumblr, is missed in history that tumblr com interventions. Countries that complex miss than history. Our very own website is act.
W W W that MR history dot com and our period website that has the forks dot com, if you would like to learn more about what Holly and I and Katy and Sarah all talked about today. You can come to our website, but the words their museum in the search bar and you will find an article called ten impressive art heights, which includes the story of this, are theft. You can learn about all of that and a lot more at house. Therefore, not more or less and thousands of other topics. Stuff works. Audible dot com, is the leading provider of downloadable, digital audio books and spoken word. Entertainment, audible. More than one hundred thousand titles the cheese from to be downloaded to your ipod or mp3 player, gotta, audible, pie
cast dot com. Flash history to get a free audio book download of your choice when you sign up today. This episode is brought to you by Norton Lifelong when you shop, bank and browse with your smartphone. It feels like your personal info is right there in your hand, but when you hit submit it can go far away, leaving you potentially vulnerable to cyber criminals. More threats demand more protection. Norton three sixty with lifelong is an all in one cyber safety membership. Devices, identity and all my privacy. No one can prevent all cybercrime and identity theft, but Norton three. He would lifelong is your ally in today's connected world, save twenty five percent off your first year. Goaded Norton, Dotcom, slash history. I'm broke sure, I'm America's number one gossip colonies. I Tell you about my new celebrity podcast naughty, but nice Rob Shooter
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Transcript generated on 2020-02-03.