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This Is A Robbery, a four-part documentary from Netflix, explores the mystery surrounding the art heist from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, a theft that is still unsolved after thirty years. Even decades later, questions swirl around the crime that rocked Boston and the art world in 1990. The art has never been recovered, and the museum has a $10 million reward in place for information leading to its safe return. The heist is considered the most successful art theft in the world, and the peculiar circumstances of the theft have baffled generations of crime-solvers.
The documentary walks through the facts of the case that led to the thieves making off with their highly valuable treasure. On St. Patrick’s Day in 1990, two men dressed as police officers claimed to be responding to a call at the Gardner Museum, so the museum security guard let them in through the locked doors. They called the security guard out from behind his desk, called the second security guard back from making his rounds, and proceeded to “arrest” both of them. After the guards were handcuffed, the thieves announced it was a robbery.
The two thieves spent a total of 81 minutes in the museum, during which they tied up the guards in the basement and stole 13 artworks from the museum. However, they left no strong physical evidence that could trace back to their identities, and the details of their theft were so strange that the FBI and their informants have made little headway in the investigation after three decades. The FBI believes the heist is tied to organized crime, likely the Boston Mafia, but no leads have panned out to bring the artwork back.
One of the biggest mysteries of the heist is the strange choice of artwork. The score is now valued at $500 million, but the bulk of that value lies in only two of the 13 missing pieces. The thieves passed over other works of art, such as Titian’s The Rape of Europa, which was considered one of the most valuable paintings in the collection. Instead, they took many lower-value pieces, like a stamp-size Rembrandt self-portrait, a finial from the corner of a Napoleonic Imperial Guard flag, and an antique Chinese beaker worth only a few thousand dollars. Law enforcement speculated that they must have had a hit list of these particular pieces, but the selections are puzzling, and that’s only one of many remaining questions about the theft.
The location of the art and who controls it, whether it’s in the hands of notorious crime families or the Irish Republican Army, is one of the world’s greatest unsolved mysteries. The Gardner art is likely still out there, and it could have remained in Boston or traveled to the other side of the world. Art thefts are often solved a long time after they happened, so there’s still hope that the Gardner heist will not forever remain a mystery. As This Is A Robbery explains, the fate of the Gardner artworks is the $10 million question.