The Backstory: A Half Billion Dollar Art Heist and Fake Mustaches

When you picture an art heist, like the one last month at the Louvre in Paris, you picture really cool looking international thieves. The guys nabbed in Paris however, were just regular small time crooks. But let’s go back to the most valuable museum heist in world history. It happened in Boston 35 years ago and was carried out by two guys wearing fake mustaches.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Yeah, I know, multimillion dollar art heists or something we
usually see on TV or in the movies, But they
happened in real life too, as we saw last month
in the robbery at the Louver Museum in Paris. While
they rounded up the robbers in that case, up to now,
they haven't recovered this centuries old French royal jewels that
were stolen. But did you know there was a world

(00:22):
record art theft in Boston thirty five years ago with
paintings stolen that were worth more than the Louver's jewels.
I'm Patty Steele, a fake mustache, crummy security, and hundreds
of millions of dollars disappears into thin air. That's next
on the backstory. The backstory is back. We're all sort

(00:49):
of amazed that one of the most high profile art
museums in the world could have such crummy security. Last
month in Paris, the Louver Museum was robbed by some
pretty basic everyday criminals. One guy was last arrested after
ramming his car into an ATM to get some cash,
and another has a record involving mostly traffic tickets. So

(01:11):
how did these guys break into the museum that houses
the Mona Lisa Well. They had a small truck with
an extension ladder and backed it up to a balcony
outside the museum gallery that held the priceless jewels. They
smashed through the glass and then broke open the cases
holding the jewels and took off. Turns out the museum

(01:31):
had few outdoor cameras and none were pointed at the
window where the robbers broke in. Plus the ones they
did have were really really old, pretty crummy equipment. And
guess what this isn't all that unusual. The biggest art
heist in history happened thirty five years ago in Boston,
and the robbers got away with thirteen pieces of art,

(01:54):
today worth at least six hundred million dollars, the highest
value museum robbery in world history. Isabella Stewart Gardner was
born into a wealthy family in New York City in
eighteen forty. She fell in love with art as a
young teen and dreamed of opening her own museum one day.
When she was just twenty years old, she married her

(02:16):
very wealthy husband, John Lowell Gardner from Boston, and that's
where they lived. Sadly, they lost their only child when
he was less than two years old, so they immediately
began traveling and collecting art, spending a total of ten
years on the road collecting art from all over the world.
The pair raised John's brother's kids after their parents had died,

(02:38):
and they joined them on their collecting trips. At home
in Boston, Isabella was a noted socialite. She was well liked,
but she was considered a character. At one point, she
showed up for a Boston Symphony Orchestra concert, usually a
black tie occasion, wearing a big white headband with giant
red letters on it reading, oh you red socks. The

(03:02):
local press said it caused a panic in that very
stuffy audience. After her husband died in eighteen ninety eight,
Isabella began to build the museum the two had dreamed
of to house all their art, which included paintings by Rembrandt, Monnet, Vermier, Bocelli.
She had her building design to look like a palazzo
in Venice, her favorite destination. When it was done, she

(03:26):
moved into an apartment on the top floor and began
laying out her museum. In some cases, she had pieces
of her fabulous gowns cut off and displayed under some
of her priceless paintings to make the display more personal.
She wanted the public to come in and enjoy these
beautiful paintings. When the museum opened in nineteen o three,

(03:48):
she had the Boston Symphony there to entertain, and she
handed out glasses of champagne and doughnuts to the crowd.
She continued to live upstairs until her death in nineteen
twenty four, wandering through the galleries to move pieces around
when she was in the mood. But here's the thing.
In her will, she specified that no changes to the

(04:10):
museum should be made after her death. No paintings could
be sold, and none added to the collection. She didn't
want any additions done to the museum. She left millions
of dollars for upkeep, but by the nineteen eighties they
were running low on funds. The museum was not in
great shape, and it didn't even have decent insurance. In

(04:31):
nineteen eighty two, after a plot to rob the museum
was uncovered, they did add some infrared motion detectors and
a closed circuit TV system with just four cameras placed
around the outside of the building, but no cameras were
installed inside because of the expense they hired a few
more security guards who were paid about minimum wage, and

(04:53):
if there was a robbery, the guards could only reach
the cops via a single panic button at the security desk.
Now it's twelve thirty in the morning. On Sunday, March eighteenth,
nineteen ninety the area around the museum was busy with
folks celebrating Saint Patrick's Day. People saw two men in
police uniforms parked in a hatchback about one hundred feet

(05:15):
from the museum's side entrance. The two museum guards who
were on duty, had been told that one of them
should patrol the galleries with a walkie talkie and a
flashlight while the others sat at the security desk. During
the first patrol, fire alarms went off in several rooms,
but there was no fire or smoke. They assumed that

(05:36):
some type of malfunction had occurred and they just disabled
the panel. At one twenty am, the thieves walked to
the side door and rang the buzzer. They told the
guard at the security desk they were police officers looking
into a disturbance and needed to come inside. The guard
could see them on the closed circuit TV and saw
they were wearing police uniforms, so he just let them in.

(06:00):
They asked if anyone else was in the building, and
the other guard was called up to security. The officers
asked the tude to step away from the security desk
that cut them off from the panic button, and at
that moment one of the young guards realized that one
of the fake cops was wearing a fake mustache. They
forced the guards against a wall, spread their legs, and

(06:23):
handcuffed them. They wrapped their heads and eyes with duct
tape without even asking directions. They took the guards to
the basement and handcuffed them to a steam pipe and
a workbench. They told the young guards that if they
cooperated and didn't share much with cops, they'd receive a
reward in about a year. For the next hour and change,

(06:45):
the robbers removed paintings from their frames, smashing glass to
get at some of them. They left a large Rembrandt
behind because it had been painted on wood rather than canvas,
so it would be hard to move. In all, thirteen
priceless pieces of art were snatched. Interestingly, before the robbers left,
they went back to the basement and asked the guards

(07:06):
if they were comfortable then they grabbed the video cassettes
from the closed circuit TV and left the building. The
next guard shift got there later in the morning and
they couldn't get inside. The security director, who had keys,
was called in. He couldn't find the overnight guards anywhere
and called the police. After searching, they found the guards

(07:27):
still chained up in the basement. Art experts estimate the
value of the theft at up to six hundred million dollars,
making it the most valuable museum heist in world history.
So that was thirty five years ago. Has any of
the stolen work been found? How about the robbers? Nope
and nope. There was speculation the mob might have been involved,

(07:51):
but no one's been fingered for the heist, despite a
ten million dollar reward, And funny enough, the statute of
limitations in the case expired in nineteen ninety five, so
the thieves and anybody else involved can't even be prosecuted
if they are caught. The museum still has the empty
frames on display as a reminder of what happened that

(08:12):
night and the artwork vanished into thin air, but possibly
sitting in a hidden private collection, maybe in a mountaintop
castle or on a massive yacht where someone who wanted
the treasures, no questions asked is enjoying them. I hope
you're enjoying The Backstory with Patty Steele. Please leave a

(08:34):
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It's Patty Steele and on Instagram Real Patty Steele. I'm
Patty Steele. The Backstory is a production of iHeartMedia, Premiere Networks,

(08:57):
the Elvis Durand Group, and Steel Trapper Duductions. Our producer
is Doug Fraser. Our writer Jake Kushner. We have new
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at Real Patty Steele and on Facebook at Patty Steele.
Thanks for listening to the Backstory with Patty Steele. The

(09:18):
pieces of history you didn't know you needed to know.