Feds Release Grainy Video In Hopes Of Finding 25yo Museum Heist Loot

The newly released grainy video shows a car pulling up to the museum that matches the description of a vehicle spotted outside shortly before the heist.

The theft occurred when two men dressed as police officers were admitted by security guards to the museum in the early morning hours of March 18, 1990. They allegedly went on to overpower the guards who were found duct-taped to chairs in the museum's basement the next morning.


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The case was reopened in 2013, and a $5 million reward is being offered for any leads that result in the artwork being returned in good condition.


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The tape was collected just after the theft, but it is unclear whether it had ever been reviewed before 2013. United States Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz said in a telephone interview that the prosecutor who took over the case about two years ago, Robert Fisher, pulled it from the stacks of Gardner evidence at the F.B.I. and viewed it during a “complete re-examination of the case.”



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A former security guard has told investigators that he doesn’t remember letting a man into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum the night before it was robbed of $500 million worth of artwork in 1990 and can’t identify him from a video, according to several people familiar with the probe.

Federal investigators showed the former guard, Richard Abath, a surveillance video that depicts him letting an unidentified man into the museum at 12:49 a.m. on St. Patrick’s Day 1990 in an apparent violation of security protocol.


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The Hartford mobster who the FBI believes might be the last, best hope of recovering half a billion dollars in art stolen from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum says the tactics that authorities are using to force his cooperation amount to "outrageous government misconduct."

Robert "Bobby the Cook" Gentile, who the FBI believes once had two of the stolen paintings and might be able to help unravel the continuing mystery of the missing art, complains in a new court filing that the FBI has twice used informants to induce him to commit crimes only so that agents and prosecutors could use threats of imprisonment to persuade him to talk about the stolen art.


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Authorities have repeatedly said that on March 18, 1990, two white men dressed in Boston police uniforms gained entrance to the museum by telling the security guard at the watch desk that they were responding to a report of a disturbance.

Against museum policy, the guard allowed the men into the museum. The thieves handcuffed the museum’s two guards on duty and put them in separate areas of the museum’s basement.

No weapons were seen during the robbery and no panic button was activated. The video surveillance footage from the night of the robbery was taken by the thieves.


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