Short: Isabella Art Theft

future episodes. But with that having been said, on with the show thinking sideways manoation, it's a mystery short stories of things we simply don't know the answers to. Hi there. So today we're going to do something a little bit different.

As everybody knows normal, what a routine is is we'll jump into a big story and that will take up, you know, forty five minutes to an hour, and sometimes we come across smaller stories which are really interesting but they don't equate to a full show, and we'll we'll sometimes pack those into one episode several a minute time,

like the Yes Yes. Unfortunately, sometimes there's episodes that just don't lend themselves to that, and we've all I know, the all three of us have come across stories where we wanted to do that, but we couldn't find a way to tighten other stuff. We'd like to have an overarching theme. Yeah, and we decided that, what the heck, We're not going to leave those stories behind. So occasionally we're gonna do a short, a bonus episode. Yeah, and that's what this is gonna be, is a little bonus episode.

And this is gonna be They're gonna be random. We're not gonna try and do this on a regular basis, but occasionally when we come across these, put them out for you, and they'll be steeply discounted because there's so much shorter. So let's see them on your internet bill will cost very much at all. They will be ten percent for the normal free price of all episodes. Yes, that's perfect. So with that, let's go ahead and go

into this short story. So this whole story, I'm going to start out and just preface this by saying it sounds like it should be out of a movie. It really does sound like a bad movie script right here. We did actually two weeks ago, didn't we We talked about a bad movie script. Yeah, and this cause it could have been a good movie. I've seen good movies that were based on this, this this kind of heist. Yeah, yeah, there there are some. But but here is what happens.

We're going to talk about briefly. Here the Isabella Art theft on the morning of March eighteenth, nine in Boston and my morning you mean we hours, correct, Yes, the wee hours of the morning, one twenty something in the morning is about when this whole thing starts. Two people, two men wearing police uniforms, walked up to the side entrance of the Isabella Art Museum and they pressed the buzzer to get in, and when the guard you know, hit the the intercom, they said, police a lot of sin,

we heard about a disturbance in the courtyard. Okay, well he let them in right there side unseen, and I was I was asking about thinking about that. So they didn't have a security camera, he couldn't actually see. Oh yeah, well if they did. These guys were dressed up in police uniforms, so they looked like cops. And I don't imagine that they were high quality videos. This is the

camera probably wasn't that great? Yeah about that? The garden so I could at least see that they appeared to, because now in the museum there were two security guards. One of them was working at the main desk and the other one was somewhere else in the museum, presumably doing his rounds whatever his job was at the moment when they these guys get in, they go to the main security desk and one of him says to the security guard on duty, you look familiar, and I think

we have a warrant for your arrest. And they somehow convince this guy to step out from behind his desk where he has access to the only police wired alarm, at which point they put him against a wall and they handcuff him. The other security guard a couple of minutes later, shows up and they put him in cuffs, and one of these guys, one of these guards, says, well, why are you arresting me? And this is where the ball drops. One of the two men says the guys

dressed up his cops says, you're not being arrested. This is a robbery, you idiot. Yeah, don't give us any trouble and we won't hurt you. Um. And at that point what they do is they take these cards down to the basement. They duct taped them to some pipes. They duct taped their mouths shut. They put a duct tape all over their heads and left breathing holes for their noses and that was it. Tore out all their hair on the way taking that stuff off down. I

don't even want to think about that. So the guards are completely disabled at this point. So the thieves have pretty much all the time in the world. They've got the run of the joint. They're absolutely right. They go upstairs to the Dutch Room, which is named such because it's full of paintings by Dutch painters, and they they immediately go up to a Rembrandt painting, at which point

and an alarm actually goes off. Now this alarm evidently was only inside of the museum because all they had to do was smash it and it went off and nobody is alerted. Not the most system to know. At this point, these guys basically have the run of this whole museum. For the reports are eighty one minutes, an hour and twenty minutes. They're in there doing whatever they

want to do. Well, they weren't exactly that's smart about what they did because the first thing they did was go up to a Rembrandt painting, uh, and this is Rembrandt's self portrait from sixty nine, And they yanked the painting off the wall and then they can't figure out how to get it out of the frame because it's wood. Because it's wood. Yeah, Rembrandt painted that on wood on canvas. That's why you don't want to even try to go

out of the frame. You know, they should have they should have thought about that about you know, just meane something like that. You don't want to try to mess with it in anyway at all because those things are very delicate and old and I and I have a serious issue with this whole thing that I'll talk about later that goes along at basically, what these guys do is from that point forward they throw that painting on

the floor because they relaze they can't get did. And then they start going through the museum and they start, I kid you not, cutting canvases out of their frames so they can roll them. It's good for the painting, which is terrible because whenever that gets reremounted, you have now just lost so much of the painting. Well, it's gonna crack and in the viewing area is gone. Because if you think about it, if a painting is on a frame, if the let's just say it's a one

by one that is the frame. Well, now you've got an inch of it rolled across the side and an inch across the back to staple it in place. Plus whatever the actual frame may cover the the exterior frame. You've just lost inches beautiful, beautiful piece of work. Yeah, I've lost all that real estate tape those things up. You don't attack in each corner. It's not it's not

a movie poster. Yeah, that's that's not how it works. So, like I said, they were focusing on a lot of canvas works at this point, and they started running through the place. They stole a total of thirteen pieces of art. These are things that are ranging from there's Rembrand, Mr uh Man A and thega. There was sketches that were done by him. Evidently there was five sketches by him

that they took. They are like really valuable. Well, you know, the value on that kind of stuff is a little weird because their sketches and he would I mean it's literally he was sketching the painting ahead of time, so you can see images of them and they you can see the variances, and he was kind of figuring it out. But there is a lot of value in watching someone

like that work. Uh. The other things they took is there was an artifact that was from the Shang dynasty and a fine old it belonged on a Napoleonic flag. I mean, it's it's really it's just kind of haphazard what they took. It would have been nice if they because these guys are probably just criminals, you know, And and it would have been nice that they've gotten somebody who knew what he was doing. That's the thing that they passed up some more valuable stuff, number one, a

lot of more valuable stuff. And if they've gotten a little expert help or at least advice, they could have maybe done less damage to the artwork themselves. And then then I don't know how much they damaged it because they've never been seen again obviously, of course, but it would have been nice. Sooner or later, they're probably going to show up. Unless these guys were complete morons and they just left him rolled up in their basements somewhere

that eventually flooded. I don't even want to think about that. That makes me so sad. Yeah, I mean, I don't I don't want to think about that. The total theft, the value of that total theft, and I believe this is today's number or today's dollars, is five hundred million dollars. Uh So it is the largest private theft or largest robbery of private property recorded. Now the gallery itself, what they've done is to kind of pay homage to it

and waiting for those species to come back. They've got some empty frames that are hanging, so they they're not just ignoring that this happened. They're kind of saying, hey, we know these were stolen and everybody else should know. I think is what their their idea is behind that. But yeah, it's just it's really really weird. The museum itself put out a reward of five million dollars for information leading to the recovery of these pieces of work,

which is still available today. It is, and at the time, the FBI hunted down a number of leads, but they didn't get any results and nothing ever came of that. That was We're twenty four years later and the FBI obstensible he still has squat. They say that they have suspects, and they used the phrase significant suspects, but they will

say who they are. Um, there's there's talk according to some of the theories that have seen that say that the art was moved from Boston to Connecticut and Philadelphia and this is from the FBI. This is what they think happened. But then they don't know where it went from there. Uh and and they don't know anything after that. They say that they have some DNA and that DNA is Remember I said they duct tape the guards. They say they have DNA off the duct tape, but they

don't say anything else. In other words, they said, oh, we have something, We're not going to tell you what it is. I think about it is if they were wearing gloves when they duct tape the guards. If they were, but if they weren't wearing gloves, and wouldn't their fingerprints be all over that duct tape? Well that depends, you know. I mean, if I touch a piece of duct tape and I pulled my finger away and then the duct tape doesn't get stuck to something else, yes, I should

leave a fingerprint. But if I leave my fingerprint and then that duct tape gets ruled around a guard's head and mashed into the other side of another piece of duct tape. Yeah, I imagine that it's going to be unusable. Yeah, I mean, it's it's conceivable that they did that. I mean, so if I'm holding just the end of it and then I wrap it around his head and bring it back over the top of the piece that I was holding and slot it down, that's going to destroy my fingerprints. Well,

these guys bright enough to be there. I have no idea. I think that there would have had cloves on it. Well another I mean the other thing that we you know, it's it's not like, oh, we have the fingerprints, therefore we obviously like know who it was because there's not actually like a record, like you know, if somebody if I committed a crime and like they had my fingerprints, they still wouldn't be able to find me because my fingerprints don't exist in right, So you know, you have

to there's so many things. Their DNA would have to be in a database somewhere, their fingerprints would have to be in a database one. But these guys are the suspects that they have in this crime. We're all well known criminals who had been arrested in the past. Correct, Well, and we're about to get there, and that's not exactly right. And that's that's the hard part about this is there's there's kind of two theories that I can find of potential of where the art might have gone, but we're

not sure. There is one that it says that this was, if not run by the mob, mob organized and so mobsters were doing it. And yeah, that's right, it's the freaking mob again. Yes, it's the mob again. There is a guy whose name is Robert Garante. Would say that he died in two thousand four, but he's been linked as kind of the central figure in the investigation for this, and he was known to be an organized crime and he seems to be connected to just about every other

mob abster that gets linked to this story. But of course he died, so they can't question him, they can't do anything to him. But his widows says that she remembers him giving at least one painting to somebody back in two thousand and three, and in two thousand and three there was some mention that maybe they had surfaced, but she when she looked at all of the paintings, the photos of him. She's like, no, that doesn't look

like anything that he gave this guy. So he could have given somebody something that he bought an Ikea for all she knows. Yeah. You know the other thing about it is we're not on theories yet. Well, I mean we kind of are, because that's one theory is that you know, this guy is is the one who organized

the whole thing. Um, I mean, there's there's another theory, another lead that you'll find out there that says that the paintings were sent overseas and so they went from here to Italy to France and this was all orchestrated by kind of a shady art dealer in New York for some figure of like twenty five million dollars. But none of that has ever been substantiated because of course we haven't found any of them. So they're gone. And that's I mean that that really is. This is not

a normal story. That is. The theories is that this guy did it, and he gave it to the mob, and the mob sold them underground somewhere, or somebody shipped them overseas, and they're they're in both cases, they're in somebody's private collection hanging in their living room or their office. It could have been like a actually commissioned by some mobster back from the Old Country who's had a huge

villa on the Mediterranean. It's like, and I want some art, and so he commissioned these guys to go nab some of these particular worst of art. But it doesn't sound like they knew what they were after. Again, it was haphazard what they grabbed, random stuff. But I mean that's where the story ends. And personally, this is one of those stories that really really makes me mad, not because I don't have good theories for it, but because it makes me mad when people steal old art, because old

art is fantastic, even if you're not into art. I'm into art. I think it's really great, but some people are. But if you go to a museum and you look at those giant paintings and you can see what somebody did, there's a reason that museums are quiet spaces because usually people are staring at it in awe. So I feel like, you know, they've they've not just stolen it from the museum, they've stolen it from everybody. Absolutely. They're they're like looters,

you know, people who loot archaeological sites. They're stealing our heritage, so that's a good reason to be so I I really I classify these guys as a one jerks, and I really hope the mob's not listening. Is I don't want to get in trouble for saying that, But the moms a one jerks. No, I mean I think that that's fair. It's you know, it's part of human history, it's part of our progression, and it's I'm right there with you. I just get so. I think that's so.

Is that our lady to you? This was committed by a couple of I don't know. That's the thing is that, I mean, this is what the f I released. But you know, they could they could be hedging their bets, or they could just be this is a cold case. And let's just say it was a mob. And what is the Lincoln, this dude that we haven't seen from forever because he's been dead for ten years and I

don't know, no idea. Apparently every year they have a press conference on the anniversary of it, and they they reiterate that there's a five million dollar reward, and every year they do this and so far, you think somebody would have come forward, somebody's cleaning lady or somebody, you know, that's what that's what leads me to think that they actually succeeded. I mean, some people think they were stashed

away somewhere. Um, I think they might actually have succeeded in getting them overseas into the hands of some private collector who has him hanging and as his mansion. Now, so this guy is not incentivized by five million bucks, you know more than that. Yeah, if they were squirreled away somewhere in a storage unit or somebody's basement, and obviously you know, they probably would have surfaced. And that because the statute of limitations on the crime has expired.

It has so if you come forward with those patents, they can't prosecute you for it. You just hand them over and get five million bucks walk away scot free. Absolutely, And so that's why I suspect that they're not in the US anymore, or if they're in the US, they're in the hands of a private collector. Quite likely, that's what I would guess. Well, I wanna, I wanna before I forget send out a big, a big thank you

to Mike who sent this story to us. I really, I really got into it and it obviously I liked it enough that it's our first mini episode. UH. If you want to hear more from us, you can always find episodes on our website. That website is Thinking Sideways podcast dot com. Of course, links for the story will also be on the website, so the things that we

use for our research. Most folks are using iTunes to download the shows and subscribe, so if you're there, please take the time to subscribe and leave us a comment and a rating. We really like that. We are of course on other places such as Stitcher and tune in, and you can always find us on Facebook. We've got the Facebook page and the Facebook group, and we are on Twitter Thinking Sideways take the g off of it. We changed that up so it's a little awesome it um.

And of course, if you've got thoughts on this story, any stories, you just want to chat and share some ideas with us, feel free to send us an email. The email address is Thinking Sideways Podcast at gmail dot com. Um. And also, if you have the paintings or you know where they're at, I'll give you a million bucks. Okay, million bucks, that sounds good to me, and with that, we're gonna we're gonna shut this one down. So thanks a lot, ladies and gentlemen. We'll talk to you soon. Hi, guys,