#49: The Rock Star Who Stole a Rembrandt From the Boston MFA

Why a $500 Million Rembrandt Is Worth Exactly Zero Dollars: Surprising Lessons from the Gardner Heist

In the early hours of March 18, 1990, the palatial, Venetian-style halls of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum were violated by an act of crude, calculated brutality. While Boston wound down from St. Patrick’s Day celebrations, two men posing as police officers spent 81 minutes systematically looting the collection. They were not rushing; forensic reconstructions suggest they were "comfortable," moving through the galleries with a chilling leisure. They cut masterpieces directly from their frames with blades, leaving behind jagged remnants of canvas and a legacy of empty gilded wood.

Today, those frames still hang in the museum’s Dutch Room, serving as haunting "chalk outlines" for what was lost. Despite a $10 million reward and thirty-five years of global investigation, thirteen works—including pieces by Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Degas—remain missing. The heist is a cornerstone of modern criminal lore, yet it offers several counter-intuitive lessons that challenge our myths about high-stakes art crime.

1. The "Priceless vs. Worthless" Paradox

We often hear the word "priceless" attached to the Gardner works. The stolen Vermeer, The Concert, is estimated to be worth $250 million alone, and the total haul is now valued at between $500 million and $1 billion. However, in the reality of the criminal underworld, these paintings are effectively worth zero dollars.

Because these works are among the most recognizable on Earth, they are impossible to sell. No reputable dealer, auction house, or private collector can touch them without triggering an international manhunt. This creates an exquisite irony: the very fame that gives the art its value also renders it an "unsellable fugitive."

"I’ve been asked so many times about the Gardner work; the term that’s bandied about is 'priceless,' and that’s true. But I also like to say they’re worthless, because the pieces only have monetary value to one organization in the world, and that’s the Gardner. So, from an aesthetic standpoint, they’re priceless; from a monetary standpoint, they’re worthless." — Geoff Kelly, Former FBI Investigator

2. Forget Thomas Crown: Real Art Theft is Gritty and Local

Pop culture envisions art thieves as "Thomas Crown types"—sophisticated masterminds rappelling from ceilings to dodge infrared lasers. The reality is far more mundane. Real art theft is a local, often clumsy affair.

Consider Bobby Donati, a Boston mob associate long suspected of involvement. Years prior to the heist, Donati reportedly "cased" the Gardner with notorious thief Myles Connor Jr., specifically coveting the Napoleonic eagle finial as a personal "calling card." Donati didn't have a high-tech lair; he was a street-level hood who was eventually found stabbed to death in the trunk of a car in 1991.

The "gritty" reality of these crimes is reflected in where the art ends up:

• The "Pig Farm" Reality: Stolen Rembrandts have been discovered stashed in the mud of the Picillo Pig Farm in Coventry, R.I., or shoved under a friend’s mother-in-law’s bed.

• Inside Knowledge: Statistics show roughly 80% of heists involve internal players. Even at the Gardner, forensic mysteries linger—like the fact that motion detectors recorded no movement in the Blue Room on the night of the heist, yet Manet’s Chez Tortoni was somehow vanished from its walls.

3. Art as a "Get Out of Jail Free" Card

If a painting cannot be sold for cash, its value lies in its use as a "Masterpiece Bargain." The career of rock-and-roll outlaw Myles Connor Jr. proves this tactic. In 1975, Connor orchestrated the daytime theft of Rembrandt’s Portrait of Elsbeth van Rijn from Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (MFA).

Connor didn't steal for a payday; he stole for "freedom." Facing serious drug and art-related charges, he used the stolen Rembrandt as leverage. He met with an old friend of his father’s, Massachusetts State Police Major John Regan, to negotiate.

"It’s going to take a Rembrandt to get you out of this one." — Major John Regan to Myles Connor Jr.

Regan was right. Connor traded the Elsbeth van Rijn for a reduced sentence, a move that likely inspired the 1990 thieves to believe they could use the Gardner works to broker the release of associates like the imprisoned Bobby Donati.

4. The "Allegory of Faith" in Investigation

For Anthony Amore, the Gardner’s director of security, the hunt is a twenty-year psychological marathon. A devout Catholic, Amore finds a spiritual mirror in Rembrandt’s Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee, the museum’s only seascape and its most significant loss. To Amore, the painting is an "allegory for my work"—a test of faith in the face of a literal and metaphorical storm.

To recover beauty, an investigator must be willing to wade through the muck. Early in his career, Amore was mentored by legendary Scotland Yard detective Jurek “Rocky” Rokoszynski, who taught him a vital lesson: you must be willing to "speak to the devil." Amore has spent two decades doing exactly that—interviewing mobsters and career criminals, searching for the art among the "devils" of the underworld.

"It's like being a homicide detective and walking by a chalk outline every day for 20 years. 'The Storm on the Sea of Galilee' is a story about faith, and I think it's a perfect allegory for my work. I have to have faith that I can recover these paintings. If I lose faith that I could do it, I should leave the job." — Anthony Amore

5. The "Frozen in Time" Legacy

The museum remains frozen because of Isabella Stewart Gardner’s iron will. Her testament stipulated that if the arrangement of the collection were ever altered, the entire estate would be sold and the proceeds sent to Paris.

Consequently, the empty frames remain as "silent witnesses." They represent what Gardner’s biographer, Natalie Dykstra, describes as the collector's ability to "annihilate the thought and possibility of failure." Ironically, the thieves themselves "annihilated failure" by accident; in their rush, they left behind Titian’s The Rape of Europa, a work worth nearly $100 million. It is the ultimate proof that they were opportunistic criminals rather than connoisseurs.

The Enduring Mystery

The investigation remains a living thing. In 2013, the FBI announced they knew who the thieves were, and by 2015, they confirmed the perpetrators were likely dead. Focus has recently shifted to figures like Robert Gentile, a "withering gangster" from Connecticut who died in 2021 still denying knowledge of the works, despite the FBI finding a list of the stolen art and its black-market values in his home.

As decades pass, the art has become legendary through its absence. Until the "immutable laws of time and space" bring them home, the empty frames serve as a testament to the fragile intersection of human genius and criminal greed. We are left only with the hope that these "perfect fugitives" will one day emerge from the shadows and return to the light of the Dutch Room.

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