Endless Thread - Snacktime: 'Last Seen' Edition

Episode Date: September 24, 2018

We’re popping into your feed to share a project we think you’ll love. It’s a new podcast called “Last Seen,” about the largest unsolved art heist in history -- the theft of 13 irreplaceable pieces of art from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Produced by the I-Lab at WBUR, Boston. Benjamin Brock Johnson. Amory Eustace Sievertson. That's not my middle name. Sorry, it just felt right somehow. Are you sure it's not your middle name? I am quite sure. Okay, I'm going to Google it later.

Why are we here dropping into the podcast feed on definitely not a Friday? Mysterious, right? Well, let's solve the mystery right now and say this isn't a regular episode. It's almost like a snack time. Remember snack time? Love snack time. Yeah. But we're not chewing anything into the microphone today except the fat.

It's gross. Today we're going to talk mysteries for a hot second. There are a lot of mysteries on Reddit. Shall we trade mysteries, Amory? Oh, we should definitely trade mysteries, Ben. Okay. You go first. Okay.

This one comes from the aptly named R-slash-unresolved mysteries subreddit. Okay. And it was posted by someone that goes by totally not Raymo, 96. Here's the title of the post. Victim's tattooed arm regurgitated by Tiger Shark solves a crime. There's so much information in that. There's a lot. There's a lot that we need to dig into here.

Fact number one, the title of this post is false because it did not technically solve the crime. And that's why it is in unresolved mysteries. Right, right. So I'll talk to Totally Not Raymoo 96 about that after this. Here's the main meat of the post. Ever heard of this one? How unlucky can a killer be? You throw the body parts in the ocean.

A shark eats an arm, gets captured, gets placed in an aquarium, regurgitates the arm, and turns out the arm has a tattoo representing two boxers in a fighting stance, so the victim is identified. The arm also had a string tied to it, and they could tell that the arm had been severed. Whoa. So they found out eventually from the tattoo that this was a guy named James Smith, who was himself, I think just an amateur boxer. Okay.

And he was last seen drinking with a friend who had rented a cottage, and the owner of that cottage had said afterwards that there was a mattress and a trunk missing. from the cottage after the time that they stayed there. Wow. So it turns out the body parts were stuffed into the trunk. The one arm wouldn't fit. So it was tied to the trunk, tossed in the ocean, and that's how the shark just got the arm. I don't know if the other body parts have ever been found.

But the guy who rented that cottage was arrested. However, they were never able to convict him because the only testimony that would have been able to convict him, the guy who gave that testimony, was caught up in some drug deals, and he ended up being found shot to death in his car. So, long story short, this is an unresolved mystery in the sense that they never convicted anyone for this crime, but they did identify the victim from a tattoo on an arm

that was eaten by a shark who regurgitated the arm. Wow. That is an amazing string of events. Okay, what do you got? You got a mystery for me? I got a mystery for you. It does not come from a mystery-focused subreddit. It comes from the subreddit called What Is This Thing? So this is from earlier this year.

It was insanely popular. This guy posts this photo. He says, I was repairing the air conditioning in a server room. And he posts this picture. It's between two server racks. And it looks like a missile is on the floor in this server. So he basically says, I think the post is titled, some kind of explosive lying on the floor of server room, question mark.

Oh, no. And it looks like an undettonated missile, just kind of like wrapped up in some internet cable. That's terrifying. It's super scary. People freak out. Immediately the moderators of this subreddit are like, hey, like they basically, they sticky a post that says,

like you need to get in touch with the authorities. Your post indicates you may possibly be in possession of an unexploded ordinance. If you're unsure, the first thing to do is leave it alone. Do not shake it, attempt to open it, or disturb it at all. So this like unleashes a crazy kind of like tornado of comments. There are people from the U.S. military weighing in. They think that it looks like an old Russian. anti-tank missile.

So people identify it and say, don't do anything called the authorities. The guy supposedly calls the authorities. A bomb squad comes. He keeps posting updates to this post. Bomb squad is on its way. We're ordered to evacuate the building and leave the premises. We'll update when they get here. So this happens.

And then people look at this guy's post history. And there's another photo of this missile in the post-histor. history of him basically talking about something that his grandfather owns. And so people are like, wait, is this BS? And essentially what comes out is that this guy was trying to get some karma and took this unexploded ordinance and put it in a server room and pretended like he was an IT person going in to repair this server room in the Czech Republic. Oh, man.

So it does get solved, and it says at the top of this post now, which is one of the most popular, what is this thing posts in history. I think it has 4,000 comments and a ton of upvotes. It says, update. O.P. has confirmed it was a bamboozle, which is, I guess, what they call these things on this subreddit, like a fake post. Okay. And as such, has been banned from the sub.

And it says, thank you guys for being part of the big. Reddit bamboozle of 2018. It was all just a made-up story to make your day a little more exciting. Both of those mysteries are pretty awesome, but they don't really hold a candle to this next mystery we're going to tell you about. It is the subject of WBUR's new podcast called Last Scene. Last Scene is about the largest unsolved art heist in history. It happened at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990. The reward for information leading to the return of the is $10 million. The art itself is worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

We're going to play a special excerpt of the first episode from the show, which just launched. You're going to hear from one of the guards on duty The Night of the Heist, who spoke to last scene for the first time on record. His name is Randy. Yep, you'll hear from Randy. And from the podcast's hosts Kelly Horan and Jack Rodolico. Take a listen. I'm wondering if they might just

come up behind my head with a gun with a silencer and just, you know, do it real quickly. It was a terrifying night, and all these years later, he'd still rather we not use his full name. His first name, though, is Randy. In 1990, Randy had a passion for symphonic music, the moody blues, and the trombone. He still plays, makes a living at it, mostly in house bands on cruise ships. But back then, Randy had recently earned a master's in performance from the New England Conservatory of Music. music. He was trying to land gigs and make ends meet. But I always had to have some kind of a day job kind of thing to supplement the income, make sure the bills get paid and so forth.

Randy knew a couple of people who worked at the Gardner, and that's how he landed his security job there. It wasn't something that required you to have any kind of special skills. I remember being trained to if any people were getting real close to a painting, and we were told to get them to stand back a little bit and don't get so close. A few months into his job, Randy began filling in on the overnight shift. The pay was better, $11 an hour versus $7 or $8 for the daytime shift. You know, at nighttime, when there are no visitors, when you're not doing around, you can bring stuff to read. I could bring my horn in practice. I was always happy to say yes to filling in. Randy doesn't recall any special training or specific instructions for the night shift,

beyond the requirement that he register his presence in each of the galleries on all the floors during his rounds. He did this by swiping a magnetic strip. He wasn't originally on the schedule to work the overnight after St. Patrick's Day. Randy was filling in for another guard who had reportedly called in sick. Abbott had told him about the carriage house alarm, but he hadn't thought much of it until he saw the two police officers talking to Abbott at the watch desk. It never occurred to me that they might be anything but Boston Police.

I immediately made that connection. Oh, this might have something to do with that alarm that went off. One of the uniformed men said he recognized Abbott and asked to see his ID. He said, yeah, I do know you. There's a warrant out for your arrest. And he told Rick to stand against the wall, put his arms up. He does the pat down. He puts the cuffs on.

And I'm just standing there with my jaw open going, wow, you know, what's going on? What did Rick do? Is he really into some kind of trouble? It still never occurred to me that they were anything but policemen. By stepping out and away from the desk, Rick Abbott also stepped away from the sole means of signaling trouble to the outside world, the museum's panic button.

No sooner was Abbottes against a wall and handcuffed than Randy was too. I kept asking him over and over, why are we being arrested? Why are we being arrested? and he wouldn't answer. So the cuffs are on. My hands are behind my back, and then duct tape starts going on around my eyes.

So about the time that he begins putting the duct tape on, he says, this is a robbery. And so then everything was finally crystal clear what was going on. It was just really strange. None of it made any sense, and then suddenly it made a lot of sense. I mean, it's scary enough to think you're being arrested

and not know why. What was going through your mind when suddenly duct tape is going around your head? It's very scary and I'm worried for my life, but they were immediately saying, I can remember both of them

saying, you know, follow instructions and you will not get hurt. So that gave me some relief and I just felt like, okay, don't try anything stupid, don't try anything stupid, go along with whatever.

There's nothing here in this museum that is worth my, life. The thieves wound duct tape around Randy and Abbott's heads from chin to scalp, across their eyes and across their mouths, with only a slit so they could breathe. Then, stare by stare, the robbers led the guards who couldn't see a thing down to the basement. One of the thieves used another pair of handcuffs to attach Randy to a drain pipe under a limestone sink near a boiler. Randy recalls that that thief was the calmer of the two, and weirdly courteous. The guy who cuffed me, he was making sure that they weren't too tight on my wrist.

And he adjusted it several times. And he said, you're going to be here for a long time, so I don't want these to be too tight. So he was real calm and real nice about it. And he also several times said, sorry to have to do this. Randy just wanted the guy to get away from him, to go do what he had come to do and to get out of there. Were you panicking? It was scary. and I remember feeling like I needed to prepare myself for death

if it ended up coming to that. What did that mean preparing yourself for death? I was running music through my head a lot, just feeling like I don't know what happens to us when we die. It's all a mystery, but I just felt like I needed to be mentally prepared. Was there a particular piece of music that you ran through your mind? Definitely I remember one of the piece. the Mozart Requiem, it didn't occur to me later that that has to do with dead people.

Randy spent the next eight hours shackled on the basement floor, terrified the entire time that the thieves would return to kill him. That's a little bit of WBUR and the Boston Globe's new podcast, Last Scene, about the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum art heist. You can subscribe and listen wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah, we hope you'll take a listen. It's pretty great. And mysterious. Mysterious indeed. Back to our regularly scheduled programming. See you Friday, fellow nerds. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing.

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