The Empty Frames
How two men dressed as police officers stole half a billion dollars in art — and got away with it
At 1:24 a.m. on March 18, 1990, two men knocked on the side door of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. They wore police uniforms. One of them told the security guard there had been a disturbance in the area and they needed to come inside.
The guard, a 23-year-old named Rick Abath, buzzed them in. It was the last decision that mattered, and it took less than a second.
Within minutes, both guards had been handcuffed to pipes in the basement. The men wrapped their heads in duct tape. Then the two thieves spent the next 81 minutes walking through one of America's great private art collections, taking whatever they wanted.
What they took
They were not random in their choices — but their selection has puzzled experts ever since. From the Dutch Room alone they cut Rembrandt's Storm on the Sea of Galilee, his only known seascape, from its frame. They took his small self-portrait, A Lady and Gentleman in Black, and a Vermeer — The Concert — which is today considered the most valuable unrecovered stolen painting in the world.
They took five drawings by Degas. They took a Manet. They took a Napoleonic bronze eagle finial from atop a flagpole — an object worth, by any estimate, almost nothing.
They did not take the Raphael hanging in the same room. They walked past a Michelangelo sketch. The logic of their choices, if there was logic, has never been explained.
In total: 13 objects. Estimated value today exceeds $500 million. The FBI has called it the largest private property theft in history.
The thieves cut the canvases from their frames with a knife. The frames stayed on the walls. The security videotapes were taken. By 2:45 a.m. they were gone.
The investigation
Boston police and the FBI were on the scene within hours. What they found was a crime scene that had been, in several important ways, deliberately cleaned. The tapes were gone. The guards had seen little. There were no fingerprints of value.
The FBI's investigation ran for years, then decades. Investigators pursued leads in Boston's criminal underworld, where art theft in that era was sometimes used as collateral in drug deals or a bargaining chip with law enforcement. The theory that the theft was connected to organized crime — specifically to Boston's Irish mob, active in the late 1980s — has been the dominant working hypothesis for much of the investigation's history.
In 2013, the FBI announced it had identified the thieves with confidence. The bureau said they were associated with a criminal organization based in the Mid-Atlantic states and New England. No arrests were made. No names were given publicly. The bureau said it believed the art had been transported to Philadelphia and Connecticut in the years after the theft — and that it had changed hands at least once since then.
That remains, as of today, the most specific public statement the FBI has ever made about the case.
The suspects
The name most consistently attached to the theft in investigative journalism and law enforcement leaks is that of Brian McDevitt — later Myles Connor Jr., a Boston criminal and self-described art thief who has given interviews about the case over the years. Connor has claimed knowledge of the theft while denying direct involvement. The FBI has investigated him and others in his orbit.
Robert Gentile, a Connecticut mobster, was investigated repeatedly in his final years, with the FBI conducting multiple searches of his property. He died in 2014 without being charged in connection with the Gardner theft.
No one has ever been charged. The statute of limitations on the theft itself expired years ago. Any prosecution today would have to rely on charges related to the current possession or transport of the stolen works.
The reward
The Gardner Museum has maintained an active reward offer since the theft. It currently stands at $10 million for information leading to the recovery of all 13 works in good condition, with proportional amounts available for partial recovery.
The reward has never been claimed.
The museum has also maintained something else since 1990: the empty frames in the Dutch Room. By institutional decision, the frames were left on the walls where the paintings once hung. Visitors to the museum today can stand in front of a gilded frame surrounding nothing — a deliberate, permanent reminder of what is absent.
It is, depending on your perspective, either a gesture of hope or one of the most striking acts of institutional grief in the history of American museums.
Thirty-six years later
The Gardner heist has attracted more sustained journalistic and investigative attention than almost any unsolved art theft in history. It has been the subject of books, documentaries, podcast series, and academic papers. The FBI's Art Crime Team treats it as an open active investigation.
The paintings have not been seen publicly since the night they were taken. No credible sighting has been confirmed. Vermeer's The Concert — one of only 34 authenticated Vermeers known to exist — has been missing for more than three decades.
The men who took them knew exactly what they were doing when they knocked on that side door at 1:24 in the morning. What they did with the art afterward — and where it is now — remains one of the great unsolved questions in the history of crime.
The frames are still on the walls. The reward is still unclaimed.
This story is covered in full on The Vault, Episode 1. Listen now — the embedded player is at the top of the episode page.
