At 1.24 in the morning on 18 March 1990, as Boston slept off its St Patrick's Day celebrations, two men in police uniforms pressed the buzzer at a side entrance of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and announced they were responding to a report of a disturbance. The night guard at the desk, a 23-year-old music-school dropout named Rick Abath, broke protocol and let them in. Within minutes the "officers" had lured him away from the building's only alarm button by claiming there was a warrant out for his arrest, summoned the second guard, and handcuffed them both. One of the intruders, the guards later recalled, announced: "Gentlemen, this is a robbery." The pair spent the rest of the night duct-taped to pipes in the basement.
The thieves had the museum to themselves for 81 minutes — an eternity by burglary standards — while motion detectors quietly logged their movements. In the Dutch Room they pulled Rembrandt's The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, the artist's only known seascape, and his A Lady and Gentleman in Black from the wall and cut both canvases out of their frames. They took Vermeer's The Concert, one of only about 34 paintings by the artist known to survive; Govert Flinck's Landscape with an Obelisk, long attributed to Rembrandt himself; a postage-stamp-sized Rembrandt self-portrait etching; and an ancient Chinese bronze drinking vessel, a gu, from the Shang dynasty. Elsewhere they gathered five Degas works on paper and Manet's Chez Tortoni, and unscrewed the bronze eagle finial from the staff of a Napoleonic regimental flag. Thirteen works in all, valued today at around $500 million — by value, the largest art theft in history.
What they took, and what they left
The selection has puzzled experts ever since. The thieves walked straight past Titian's Europa, widely regarded as the most valuable painting in the building, and ignored works by Botticelli and Michelangelo, yet spent precious minutes wrestling an eagle off a flagpole. They made two trips to their car and drove away at about 2.45 am. Before leaving they removed the videotape from the security system and the printout from the motion detectors — not realising the underlying data survived on the museum's computer, preserving a minute-by-minute map of the crime. That record contains its own riddle: the sensors registered no intruder footsteps in the room housing the Manet, only the guard's earlier rounds.
Isabella Stewart Gardner, the formidable collector who built the Venetian-style palazzo and died in 1924, left a will stipulating that her arrangement of the collection must never be altered — nothing added, nothing sold, nothing rehung. The museum honours it literally. The empty frames of the stolen Rembrandts still hang in the Dutch Room: part memorial, part placeholder, part public promise that the pictures are expected home.
The longest treasure hunt in America
The investigation has run through most of Boston's underworld. The statute of limitations on the theft expired in 1995, meaning the thieves themselves could no longer be prosecuted for it; prosecutors have dangled immunity for information ever since. In 2013 the FBI announced that it believed it knew who the robbers were — associates of a local criminal organisation, both since dead — and that some of the art had moved through Connecticut and Philadelphia in the early 2000s before the trail went cold. Names long linked to the case include the mobsters Bobby Donati and Robert Gentile, whose Connecticut property was searched repeatedly before his death in 2021. Nothing was found. Tips have poured in from around the world for three and a half decades — informants, deathbed confessions, sightings in Ireland and Japan — and every one of them has led to the same empty rooms. The museum's reward for information leading to the recovery of the works in good condition was doubled to $10 million in 2017. Not one of the thirteen objects has surfaced.
As for Rick Abath, who buzzed the thieves in — and who had briefly opened the same side door earlier that night, for reasons he said were routine — he was interviewed for decades and never charged. He died in 2024, still insisting he had been nothing worse than naive.
In the Dutch Room today, the afternoon light falls on four gilded rectangles framing bare wall: the most valuable empty spaces in the world, still waiting.
Quiz nuggets
- The Gardner heist took place in the early hours of 18 March 1990, just after Boston's St Patrick's Day celebrations.
- The two thieves, disguised as police officers, spent 81 minutes inside and stole 13 works valued at around $500 million.
- Vermeer's The Concert, one of only about 34 surviving Vermeers, is often called the most valuable stolen painting in the world.
- Rembrandt's The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, cut from its frame in the raid, is the artist's only known seascape.
- The museum's reward was doubled to $10 million in 2017, and the empty frames still hang under the terms of Gardner's will.