The Gardner Museum heist, Boston, 1990

Early on 18 March 1990, two men in police uniforms rang the buzzer at the employee entrance of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 25 Evans Way, Boston. They said they were answering a disturbance. The Museum says the night guard broke protocol and let them in.

The men asked the guard to leave the watch desk. They handcuffed him and a second guard and tied them up in the basement. The Museum says the thieves stayed 81 minutes and left at 2:45 am, after two trips to their car. The guards stayed bound until police came at 8:15 am. AP and the Globe report that the thieves also took the security records.

They took 13 objects. From the Dutch Room they took Johannes Vermeer’s The Concert, painted in the 1660s. They also took three works by Rembrandt van Rijn: the oil paintings Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee, his only seascape, and A Lady and Gentleman in Black, and a small self-portrait etching. A fifth work from that room was Govaert Flinck’s Landscape with an Obelisk, long thought to be by Rembrandt. A Chinese bronze beaker, called a gu, was also taken. From the Blue Room they took Edouard Manet’s Chez Tortoni. From the Short Gallery they took five works on paper by Edgar Degas and a bronze eagle from the top of a flagpole for a Napoleonic flag.

The FBI puts the total value at least 500 million dollars. The Museum calls it the largest property theft in the world. The Museum offered a reward of 1 million dollars, raised it to 5 million in 1997 and doubled it to 10 million on 23 May 2017. In January 2018 it removed the end date. The Museum says the reward can be shared for the return of any single work or group of works, and it offers 100,000 dollars separately for the eagle.

On 18 March 2013, Richard DesLauriers, then head of the FBI in Boston, said the FBI had identified the thieves. He called them members of a criminal organization based in the mid-Atlantic states and New England, without naming them. He said the art went to Connecticut and the Philadelphia region, and that it was offered for sale in Philadelphia about ten years earlier. After that, he said, the FBI did not know where it went. ABC News reported that the statute of limitations on the theft had run out.

The FBI has never named the thieves in public. Geoffrey Kelly, an FBI agent who led the case from 2002 to April 2024, has given his own theory, as reported by The Boston Globe in March 2025 and in his 2026 book, Thirteen Perfect Fugitives. He names two men as the thieves: George Reissfelder, a petty thief who died of an overdose in March 1991, and Leonard DiMuzio, whose body was found in June 1991. He names Carmello Merlino, a mob associate, as the organiser. Merlino was convicted in 1999 of attempting an armored-car depot robbery and died in prison in 2005. This is Kelly’s theory. None of the three was ever charged with the theft.

As of March 2026, no one has been charged and no work has been recovered. In 2025 Jodi Cohen, who then led the FBI in Boston, said the investigation “continues to be very active”. Kelly says there have been credible sightings of the Vermeer, the Storm, the small self-portrait, the Manet and the eagle. The Museum is restoring the Dutch Room, with a target of early 2027, and keeps the empty frames.