The Effect
The setting is the Gardner Museum, known as, quote: ‘a museum like no other’ and home of the largest private collection of art in America. The day is the 17th March 1990. St Patrick’s Day, in fact, and through the misty streets of Boston revellers are swarming, the sounds of their singing and merrymaking ringing across the city.
The Gardner Museum itself, by contrast, is quiet. Two guards are on the night shift, and they take it in turns to keep an eye on the place. While one patrols the museum’s various floors and galleries, the other is installed behind the front desk, monitoring the security cameras and entrance. Then they swap duties. The gallery patrols are always conducted by flashlight, as it is museum policy to keep all lights off during the night shift.
On this particular night, the first guard patrols the floors armed with his flashlight, on his initial pass around the museum noticing nothing untoward. But on his second pass, a discordant, wailing noise assaults his ears. It is, he realises, the museum’s fire alarm. But what could have set it off? There is no sign of any smoke, no indication whatsoever that there is actually a fire within museum walls. Consequently, the guards turn off the fire alarm. The first guard briefly opens and closes the Palace Road entrance to check that nothing is amiss, before continuing his patrol. The guards then swap duties.
Shortly after this, the doorbell of the Gardner Museum suddenly sounds. But who could be wanting to be admitted at one o’clock in the morning? The guard at the front desk relaxes when he sees it is just two police officers. They must have turned up to investigate the disturbance of the fire alarms going off and, indeed, when they enter the museum they confirm that is exactly why they have come.
The rest of the night passes, the streets of Boston emptying of revellers until the city falls silent. However, in the morning, when the next pair of guards show up for their day shift, there is nobody at the door to buzz them in.
When they finally gain entrance, they are shocked by the scene that greets them. The museum is in a state of utter disarray. The floor is carpeted with splintered glass, glass that had, only hours before, been protecting priceless works of art. And the day guards then realise, with complete horror, that many of the museum’s best known pieces are no longer there.
Rembrandt’s Storm on the Sea of Galilee, one of the treasures of the collection, is gone, having been slashed from its frame, as well as another Rembrandt painting and a small Rembrandt etching. A Vermeer work, The Concert, one of only 34 known pieces by the artist, is gone, too having also been cut from its frame. A 12th century Chinese beaker, a Manet painting, a Flinck painting, five Degas sketches and a French Imperial eagle finial are missing as well.
Yet, astonishingly, a number of these pieces have been deliberately unscrewed before being taken when there was no need to do so, something that would have taken the thieves considerable time. And plenty more equally as valuable pieces of art remain untouched in the museum and still in position. Why could the thieves have targeted such a strange collection of things, and how? And, crucially, where could those precious items now be? It seems like they have simply… vanished into thin air.
The Method
A pair of thieves have spotted a weakness in Boston’s celebrated Gardner Museum, and decided to carry off one of the boldest art heists ever undertaken, resulting in thirteen invaluable pieces vanishing into thin air.
But who were those two guards, the men solely responsible for ensuring the safety of such a renowned museum, full to the gunwales of priceless, world-famous art?
Rather than being highly trained, experienced security personnel, the museum guards were instead… two students, both still in their early twenties. The first was Rick Abath, a Berkely music school dropout. The second, Randy Hestand, was a music school student.
But this pair of guards were not the two men responsible for pulling off this audacious robbery. The two men responsible were, in fact, those two police officers who rang the front door bell of the museum. They were, of course, not police officers at all, but thieves dressed in stolen uniforms. They had completed their disguises by attempting to obscure their faces with fake, stick-on moustaches. But, given the museum policy was not to let anyone in after closing, not even law enforcement, just how did they get in?
Policy at the Gardner Museum was strict. If someone rang the doorbell during the night, the guard at the front desk was not to admit them into the building, and was instead to immediately call the police. But night guard Rick Abath, at this point installed behind that front desk, disregards this policy. As soon as he sees the police uniforms, he opens the double doors into the museum anyway, deciding the men must be trustworthy. He was, as his friends called him, quote: ‘a very innocent and trusting person.’ Or might Rick Abath have actually been in on the heist himself, as some have since speculated? Either way, in pressing the buttons to release the museum’s doors, he unleashed the greatest art heist in history.
Once inside, the fake police officers ask who else is in the museum, and Rick tells them about Randy. They instruct Rick to use his radio to summon Randy downstairs. They then inform Rick there is a warrant out for his arrest and to step away from the front desk. Rick, stunned by what is happening and vehemently denying the charges against him, does as the fake officers say, and in doing so moves away from the only security alarm button that would have summoned the real police.
The fake police officers proceed by cuffing Rick, and when Randy appears they cuff him too. By the time they are taping up Rick and Randy’s mouths and eyes, the two security guards know the policemen are not who they appear to be, not policemen at all. Rick and Randy are next led down into the bowels of the Gardner Museum basement, and left there.
Free now to do exactly as they please, the thieves head up to the galleries, where they begin to wreak havoc, cutting priceless works of art violently from their frames. A number of other pieces the thieves target are unscrewed from their mountings, a job that would have required the thieves to come equipped with a special kind of tool. Indeed, the entire robbery takes a considerable length of time, a total of eighty-one minutes.
When the thieves finish amassing the pieces of art they have come for, they make their way back to the ground floor to take two final items. The CCTV video tapes, and the print out created by the various sensors installed across the museum, indicating the thieves’ movements as the heist was in progress. Added to the fact they knew exactly the best place to stow the two guards Rick and Randy while they carried out their work, it seemed like the thieves were strangely familiar with the finer details of how the Gardner Museum operated. But how?
The Aftermath
Early in the morning of Sunday 18th March 1990, the chaos at the Gardner Museum in Boston is discovered and the police are called. It is estimated that up to a billion dollars worth of artwork has been taken.
The first thing the authorities do is try to create photofits of the suspects, using the eyewitness descriptions from the two guards, Rick Abath and Randy Hestand. Rick and Randy both describe the thieves as average height, with one a little skinnier and the other stockier. One wore glasses but both, they say, had dark eyes, dark hair and an olive skin tone. And, as we heard, the robbers seemed to know a lot about the Gardner Museum. So could this have actually been an inside job?
It’s the theory the FBI investigates first, and their attention falls on Rick Abath. Why did he open that door onto Palace Road? He said it was to check nothing was amiss, but the door had a window, surely he could simply have looked through that instead? Furthermore, one of the paintings was taken from the Blue Room, a part of the gallery the sensors hadn’t picked the thieves up in. Was it actually Rick who had taken this piece? Despite these lingering questions, no conclusive evidence of Rick Abath being a part of the heist was ever found.
A year after the robbery, Massachusetts state police come into an intriguing piece of intelligence. That is that there is a suspicious car workshop operating in the city called TRC Auto, which is owned by Carmello Merlino, a well-known Italian mobster linked to a plethora of crimes from drug dealing to robberies. When law enforcement starts to dig a little deeper into Merlino’s associates, two men stand out to them, rising to the top of the list of suspects who might have been responsible for the Gardner heist.
These men are George Reissfelder and Lenny DiMuzio. Reissfelder, in particular, seems to fit the police photofit well, and both men match the physical description of the robbers. Reissfelder’s brother even claims to have seen the stolen Manet painting hanging in Reissfelder’s flat. But before police get the chance to question either of these men, they are found dead. Reissfelder is discovered with a needle in his arm, apparently after a heroin overdose that looks suspiciously set up, especially given he was known to have been scared of needles. DiMuzio, by contrast, suddenly goes missing, eventually turning up in the boot of his own car, having been shot multiple times. Was their boss Merlino behind these deaths, broadcasting some sort of message as to what would happen to his other men if they talked too much?
Bobby Donati was another suspect in the robbery with close ties to both TRC Auto and Boston’s most notorious art thief. In addition, it was well-known that Donati also loved horse racing. Could he have been in on the Gardner art heist? Had he taken a fancy to the Degas sketches after seeing them in the museum, two of which showed horse racing scenes? Could this have been why they were taken above many other more valuable works?
Just like Reissfelder and DiMuzio there is no chance to get to the bottom of Donati’s potential involvement in the robbery, as one day he is snatched from the porch of his house. His body is found with his throat severely slashed, so deeply the act has almost decapitated him. The body count of suspected art thieves is now building up, but with still no definitive leads as to where the missing pieces might be, the Gardner Museum ups its reward.
With no concrete evidence, the FBI tries a new tactic. They plant an informant at TRC Auto, and as a result turn their attention to a frequent visitor there. He is Bobby Guarente, a man with vast contacts in the criminal underworld, perhaps one of the only men with enough of these contacts to successfully sell on the stolen works of art. Unfortunately, before police can piece together his involvement, he too dies, a death that is this time the result of natural causes. But it is not a total dead end. Police get a tip-off about a home Guarente owned in Maine, one large enough to conceal sizable items inside. When they search this house, police find nothing. However, Guarente’s widow provides some intriguing information. She says, quote: ‘I’ve seen those paintings, my Bobby had them’. She then goes on to mention a Connecticut mobster and friend of her husband’s called Bobby Gentile. She is certain that her husband was in possession of the paintings, before passing them on to Gentile.
In 2012, twenty-two years after the robbery, the FBI find themselves in a leafy suburb of Connecticut at the home of Bobby Gentile, who is, by this time, in his 70s. Law enforcement, dogs teams and equipment descend on Gentile’s property, and it is searched extensively. When a strange void is located beneath his garden shed, the FBI thinks it has hit the jackpot. But when it is excavated, the cavity is found to be completely empty.
Their efforts are not totally in vain, however, as the FBI finds other potential incriminating evidence. Hidden at Gentile’s house is a Boston Herald article from the day after the theft, listing the stolen items and their value on the black market. Accompanying this are two Boston police uniforms as well as guns. Lots of guns.
This discovery provides strong circumstantial evidence that Gentile did indeed have something to do with the Gardner heist and, when arrested, Gentile fails every question on his polygraph. He is subsequently sent to prison on drugs charges. But, during a severe health scare shortly afterwards, and thinking he is on his deathbed, Gentile swears to his lawyer that he really doesn’t know anything about the stolen paintings.
To date, the FBI still believes their strongest suspects for the Gardner heist are George Reissfelder and Lenny DiMuzio. Perhaps the stolen artwork passed through the hands of a series of members of organised crime. Perhaps one of these people hid the items somewhere, dying before they could reveal what they had done or where they had stashed them. Perhaps the world-famous pieces languish in that hiding place to this day.
Until they are discovered, it really does seem like - on that St Patrick’s Day in Boston thirty-five years ago - the precious items vanished into thin air. The reward for information leading to their return now stands at $10m.
© 2025, Lora Jones. All rights reserved. Reproduction prohibited without written permission.
