FBI Blows Up Rembrandt to Solve Boston’s $500 Million Art Heist
March 18, 2010, 12:37 AM EDTBy Tom Moroney
March 18 (Bloomberg) -- Art lovers who didn’t catch Rembrandt’s “The Storm on the Sea of Galilee” at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum before 1990 can see it on electronic billboards outside Boston -- courtesy of the FBI.
Twenty years ago today, the Dutch master’s only seascape and a dozen other artworks disappeared from the museum. Two billboards began flashing the Rembrandt painting this week, along with the phone number for a tip line and information about a $5 million reward.
“Maybe somebody will be driving along and say, ‘Hey, I’ve seen that painting before!’” said Rocky Sisson, executive vice president of Phoenix-based Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings Inc., which donated use of the billboards on Interstate 93 and Interstate 495.
The $500 million theft ranks as history’s biggest art heist, said Geoffrey Kelly, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation agent in charge of the case for the past eight years.
The thieves also took two other Rembrandt works; one painting each by Vermeer, Manet and Flinck; five sketches by Degas; a Chinese beaker from the Shang Dynasty; and an eagle finial from the top of a Napoleonic flag, according to the museum’s Web site.
FBI agents have traveled to Paris, Japan and other destinations to track hundreds of leads in the past two decades, Kelly said.
Local Job
“My guess is that it was probably local guys,” Kelly said. The thieves may have planned to use the art as bargaining chips to barter for reduced punishment for future crimes, rather than intending to sell it, he said.
“There’s a very strong possibility that these guys went in to do a simple robbery and unwittingly committed the heist of the century,” he said.
The crime began at 1:24 a.m. when two thieves disguised as police officers were admitted to the museum by a security guard. The pair bound and gagged both guards on duty with handcuffs and duct tape, then spent 81 minutes choosing their loot, the FBI said.
The Boston billboards aren’t the first for the FBI. Billboards have helped the agency solve 35 crimes in the past two years, including robbery, missing persons and other cases, said Chris Allen, a spokesman.
The FBI’s Boston office hasn’t received any tips since the electronic billboards went active with Rembrandt’s work three days ago, Gail Marcinkiewicz, a spokeswoman, said yesterday.
Museum officials are confident that the paintings will be returned some day, said Katherine Armstrong, a spokeswoman for the Gardner, in Boston’s Fenway neighborhood. It keeps vacant spaces where the four largest of the stolen paintings had been displayed.
“What keeps me up at night? Going into the museum and seeing those empty spaces,” Kelly said.
--Editors: Brenda Batten, Kevin Miller
To contact the reporter on this story: Tom Moroney in Boston at tmorrone@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Brenda Batten at batten@bloomberg.net
