The Ghost of the Gallery

0:00 Speaker 1: The Ghost of the Gallery. The security log at the

0:03 Speaker 1: side entrance of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston

0:06 Speaker 1: from March eighteenth, nineteen ninety contains a final routine entry

0:10 Speaker 1: at one twenty four am. It notes that two Boston

0:14 Speaker 1: Police officers were admitted to the building. They claimed they

0:17 Speaker 1: were investigating a disturbance in the courtyard. Within eleven minutes,

0:22 Speaker 1: the two young night guards on duty were bound with

0:24 Speaker 1: duct tape, blindfolded, and chained to a steam pipe in

0:28 Speaker 1: the basement. The thieves didn't look like international art brokers.

0:33 Speaker 1: They looked like mid level street muscle wearing poorly fitting,

0:36 Speaker 1: oversized uniforms and cheap theatrical mustaches. Yet over the next

0:41 Speaker 1: eighty one minutes they would orchestrate the largest property theft

0:44 Speaker 1: in recorded history, systematically removing thirteen masterworks valued at over

0:49 Speaker 1: five hundred million dollars. But this wasn't just a heist

0:53 Speaker 1: about the money. It was a calculated strike against history,

0:57 Speaker 1: executed by ghosts who vanished into the Boston night and

1:00 Speaker 1: left behind empty hollow frames that still hang on the

1:03 Speaker 1: museum walls today as a haunting monument to what was lost.

1:07 Speaker 1: The Fortress of Whim to understand why the Gardner Museum

1:11 Speaker 1: was targeted, you have to understand the woman who built it.

1:14 Speaker 1: Isabella Stewart Gardner was an eccentric, fiercely independent Gilded Age

1:19 Speaker 1: millionaire who spent the late nineteenth century scouring Europe for

1:23 Speaker 1: priceless antiquities. When she built her Venetian style palazzo in

1:26 Speaker 1: Boston to house her collection, she left a radical, legally

1:30 Speaker 1: binding mandate in her will. If a single piece of

1:33 Speaker 1: art was permanently moved, rearranged, or altered from its original position,

1:37 Speaker 1: the entire museum and its fortune would be forfeited and

1:40 Speaker 1: shipped directly to Paris to be sold. Because of this

1:43 Speaker 1: strict mandate, the museum was frozen in amber. The security

1:47 Speaker 1: system in nineteen ninety was an archaic afterthought. There were

1:51 Speaker 1: no closed circuit television cameras recording the galleries, only infrared

1:55 Speaker 1: motion sensors that tracked which rooms were occupied. The museum's

1:59 Speaker 1: board trusted the heavy brick walls and the quiet sanctity

2:02 Speaker 1: of the neighborhood. They didn't realize that in the gritty

2:05 Speaker 1: underbelly of the New England mafia, a painting wasn't viewed

2:09 Speaker 1: as a sublime expression of human genius. It was viewed

2:13 Speaker 1: as the ultimate get out of jail free card eighty

2:16 Speaker 1: one minutes of vandalism. The thieves moved through the darkened

2:20 Speaker 1: galleries with a brutal, clumsy lack of reverence that horrified

2:24 Speaker 1: art historians for decades. In the Dutch Room, the motion

2:27 Speaker 1: sensors tracked their frantic pacing. They didn't use delicate tools

2:31 Speaker 1: to extract the artwork. They smashed the heavy glass protective

2:35 Speaker 1: cases against the floor. They pulled out a utility knife

2:39 Speaker 1: and brutally sliced Rembrandts The Storm on the Sea of Galilee,

2:42 Speaker 1: the master's only known seascape, directly from its wooden stretcher,

2:47 Speaker 1: leaving the jagged edges of canvas behind. They did the

2:50 Speaker 1: same to Vermires The Concert, one of only thirty four

2:53 Speaker 1: surviving works by the artist and a priceless artifact of

2:57 Speaker 1: human culture. They moved to the Short gallery, where they

3:01 Speaker 1: target five delicate drawings by Edgar de Gas. Oddly, they

3:05 Speaker 1: spent precious minutes attempting to unscrew a heavy Napoleonic silk

3:08 Speaker 1: flag finial from the wall, failing to do so, but

3:11 Speaker 1: leaving their fingerprints on the brass casing. Before they left.

3:15 Speaker 1: They walked into the security office and systematically removed the

3:19 Speaker 1: video cassette tapes from the empty recording deck and the

3:21 Speaker 1: digital print out sheets from the motion detector logs. They

3:24 Speaker 1: believed they had erased their digital footprint entirely, but they

3:28 Speaker 1: made a fatal error. They forgot that the internal hard

3:32 Speaker 1: drive of the security computer preserved the motion data. The

3:35 Speaker 1: logs revealed a chilling detail. The thieves never entered the

3:39 Speaker 1: room where a tiny, invaluable Rembrandt self portrait was hung,

3:44 Speaker 1: yet the painting was missing. Someone had removed it before

3:47 Speaker 1: the police officers ever buzzed the side door. The web

3:51 Speaker 1: of the mob. For thirty six years, the FBI, Scotland Yard,

3:56 Speaker 1: and private investigators have chased a labyrinth of dead ends,

4:00 Speaker 1: coded phone calls, and buried bodies. The primary theory focuses

4:04 Speaker 1: on the notorious Merlino faction of the Boston Mafia, led

4:08 Speaker 1: by a ruthless crew chief named Carmelo Merlino. Informants suggested

4:12 Speaker 1: that the paintings were stolen to be used as leverage

4:15 Speaker 1: a high value bargaining chip to trade with federal prosecutors

4:18 Speaker 1: if a high ranking mafia don was ever facing a

4:20 Speaker 1: life sentence in prison. The trail led to a nondescript

4:24 Speaker 1: repair shop in Dorchester, then to a safe house in Connecticut,

4:28 Speaker 1: and eventually to a mid level wise guy named Robert Gorrente.

4:31 Speaker 1: When Gorenta died of cancer, his widow told federal agents

4:35 Speaker 1: that her husband had passed two of the stolen paintings

4:38 Speaker 1: to a smooth, enigmatic mobster named Robert Gentile. Gentile's home

4:43 Speaker 1: was raided by swet teams. In his basement, hidden beneath

4:46 Speaker 1: a false floor under a plastic storage tub, agents found

4:50 Speaker 1: a handwritten list of the stolen Gardner artwork, along with

4:54 Speaker 1: their estimated black market values, but Gentile denied everything. Even

4:59 Speaker 1: on his deathbed, wrapped in federal immunity offers that would

5:02 Speaker 1: have made him a millionaire, he refused to talk. There

5:06 Speaker 1: are no paintings, he whispered. The empty frames. To day,

5:11 Speaker 1: if you walk into the Dutch room of the Isabella

5:13 Speaker 1: Stuart Gardner Museum, the sun still streams through the high

5:17 Speaker 1: arched windows, illuminating the rich fabric walls, But where Rembrandt

5:21 Speaker 1: and Vermire once hung, there are only dark wooden frames

5:26 Speaker 1: holding empty air. The museum has left them exactly as

5:29 Speaker 1: they were on the morning of March eighteenth, nineteen ninety,

5:33 Speaker 1: keeping a tragic promise to a long dead benefactor. They

5:36 Speaker 1: serve as a permanent reminder that some things, once taken,

5:40 Speaker 1: leave a void that half a billion dollars can never

5:43 Speaker 1: fill