Infamous America - BOSTON HEISTS Ep. 4 | Gardner Museum: “81 Minutes”

Episode Date: August 13, 2025

In the early morning hours of March 18, 1990, two thieves, disguised as Boston police officers, gain access to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. They tie up the two security guards and spend 81 minutes stealing 13 items. When the heist is discovered hours later, the FBI begins an investigation which features far more baffling mysteries than clues. Join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join   Apple users join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes, bingeable seasons and bonus episodes. Click the Black Barrel+ banner on Apple to get started with a 3-day free trial.   On YouTube, subscribe to INFAMOUS+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: hit “Join” on the Legends YouTube homepage.   For more details, please visit www.blackbarrelmedia.com. Our social media pages are: @blackbarrelmedia on Facebook and Instagram, and @bbarrelmedia on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Saturday night, March 17th, 1990, Rick Abbott reported for work at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in the Fenway neighborhood of Boston. He was a 23-year-old aspiring musician who had informed his bosses a few days earlier that he was quitting his job as a night guard at the museum. He wanted to focus more on music, and the job was getting in the way of playing with his band. That night, March 17th, Rick appeared every inch of the Free Spirit Music His long curly hair fell down below his shoulders. He wore a Stetson cowboy hat, a tie-dye t-shirt, red corduroy pants, and white high-top tennis shoes. And since it was 1990, he wore the obligatory multicolored fanny pack around his waist. Needless to say, it was not the standard apparel for a museum

security guard. He did wear his light blue short-sleeved security guard shirt over his tie-dye t-shirt but of course the security guard shirt was open and unbuttoned so as to show off the tie-dye t-shirt underneath. Part of the reason for the eclectic ensemble was that that was Rick's personality. And the other part was that nothing ever happened on the night shift. There was very little reason to take it as seriously as the bosses demanded, even when one of the bosses dropped by for a possible checkup. The previous night, Friday night, Larry O'Brien, the deputy director,

of security, dropped by the museum and chatted with Rick for a couple minutes just before 1 a.m. Right before O'Brien stopped by, Joe Mulvey stopped into the museum and talked to Rick. Joe was an older security guard, probably in his 60s, and he was supposed to work with Rick on Saturday night, but he called in sick. A younger guard named Randy took Joe's place on Saturday night. Randy had never worked the night shift, and he only had two hours warning that he would be working that night. He was a musician like Rick, and Randy brought his trombone to the museum with the assumption that he would spend most of a long, boring night practicing the instrument. The night was long, that's for sure, and it started in its normal, boring fashion, but it certainly

didn't end that way. At midnight, Randy sat at the security desk near a side entrance to the museum, and Rick started his rounds. Throughout the night, the guards were expected to walk through the museum to make sure everything was okay. As they moved from room to room on each of the four floors, motion sensors near pieces of artwork tracked their progress. Each time a sensor detected motion, it transmitted the information to a computer. The computer stored the information and also fed it to a printer at the guard desk, which recorded each instance line by line over the course of the night. For the next hour, sensors throughout the building registered Rick's movements.

At about 1245 a.m., a fire alarm blared in a part of the museum complex called the carriage house. At about the same time, outside the building on Palace Road, two high school kids were walking to a party. It was the night of St. Patrick's Day. The drinking and merriment had gone on all day and would continue most of the night, and start up again the next day when Boston held its annual St. Patrick's Day parade. With most of the havoc and attention focused on parts of the city east of the Gardner Museum, it was the perfect night for a robbery.

The two high school kids, Justin, who was a senior, and Nancy, who was a junior, passed a small, crappy-looking car which sat next to the curb on Palace Road, just down the street from the Gardner Museum. On the Palace Road side of the museum, there was a small, was a nondescript door to the building. Inside that door was the security desk where Rick and Randy took turns, monitoring the feed from the camera above the door and waiting for nothing to happen. On Palace Road, as Justin and Nancy passed the small car, they saw two men sitting in the front

seats wearing Boston police uniforms. The kids figured the cops were about to break up the party to which they were headed, so the high schoolers aborted mission and headed home. As far as anyone knows, Justin and Nancy were two of only four people who saw the would-be police officers that night. At 101 a.m., 15 minutes after Justin and Nancy passed the cops in the car, security guard Rick Abbath opened the Palace Road door to the museum and immediately closed it. One of the many enduring mysteries in the saga of St. Patrick's Day weekend, 1990, is why.

There will never be a good answer as to why he opened the the door. It wasn't standard protocol, but Rick claimed he regularly opened the door as a part of his night shift routine, though it's proven impossible to corroborate that claim. About 20 minutes later, the men dressed as police officers exited the small car and walked up Palace Road to the door to the Gardner Museum. Inside at the security desk, Rick Abbott saw grainy black and white images of two men appear on a monitor at his desk. Below the security camera on the outside wall of the building, there was an intercom. At the desk, Rick pressed a button and spoke through the intercom. He asked the officers what they

wanted. They said they had a report of an incident at the museum, and they were there to check it out. In Rick's mind, the incident could have been the fire alarm that went off half an hour earlier, or it could have been something else entirely. Either way, instead of asking for their names and badge numbers and making a phone call to verify their purpose at the museum, Rick extended a finger and pressed a button on the desk which unlocked the outer door and allowed the two men to enter. That simple action came with a price tag of $500 million. From Black Barrel Media, this is Infamous America. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer. In this season, we're telling the stories of two of the most infamous heists in American history, both of which

happened in Boston, the Great Brinks robbery of 1950, and the historic art heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990. This is episode four, The Gardner Heist Part 2, 81 Minutes. The two men who portrayed themselves as Boston police officers entered the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum at 1.24 a.m. on Sunday, March 18, 1990. When they stepped through the outer door, they were in a small corridor nicknamed a man-trap. The outer door closed behind them, and there was a second door in front of them that led into the museum proper.

They couldn't open either door, so they were essentially trapped in the small corridor. In that man-trap corridor was the security desk and Rick Abbott. To Rick, the two men genuinely appeared to be police officers, and there's every chance that their uniforms were real Boston police uniforms. Rick hit a button and unlocked the inner door to the museum. The two men were out of the man-trap and in the museum proper. According to Rick, the cops asked if there was anyone else in the building.

Rick said there was a second guard on duty, and the cops told Rick to call the guard and get him down there. Rick called Randy on a two-way radio, and Randy arrived at the Palace Road entrance a few moments later. At that point, the officers told Rick to step away from the security. desk. Rick did as he was told, and in stepping away from the desk, he stepped away from the one and only alarm to the outside world. There was a silent alarm button at the desk, and it was the only way to call for help without the officers knowing. Though, of course, at that moment, Rick didn't

know that he needed to call for help. He would learn a few seconds later. One of the officers said he recognized Rick, and they had a warrant for Rick's arrest. They grabbed Rick, spun him around and shoved him up against the wall. They slapped handcuffs on him while Randy stared in disbelief. Then the cops grabbed Randy. They handcuffed him as well and then announced, this is a robbery. The cops, who were now robbers, wrapped duct tape around Rick and Randy's eyes and from their chins up to the tops of their heads. With the guards secured, the robbers led the two terrified young men down to the basement. The robbers sat Rick down on a concrete ledge with his back against a metal pole.

They secured his hands to the pole with duct tape and possibly the handcuffs. The robbers sat Randy down next to an old sink and secured his hands to a post using handcuffs. The time was between 1.30 and 145 a.m. And Rick and Randy would spend the next seven hours locked in those positions. With the guards immobilized, the robbers went to work. The robbers climbed two flights of stairs. On the second floor, they walked to a large gallery called the Dutch Room. At 1.48 a.m., motion sensors in the Dutch room recorded both robbers as they began the

heist in earnest. They went after two prominent paintings on a wall across from the entrance to the gallery. Both were painted by Rembrandt. One was called A Lady and Gentleman in Black, painted in 1633, and the other, was one of the two most prominent works stolen in the heist. It was called Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee, also painted in 1633. After just three minutes in the Dutch room,

one of the robbers exited the gallery, walked to the other side of the second floor, and entered the early Italian room. The early Italian room was the first of four connected galleries on the opposite side of the museum from the Dutch room. The thief walked through the early Italian room and the Raphael Room, and then into the short gallery. The museum censors suggested he spent just three minutes in the short gallery

before returning to the Dutch Room. It was 154 a.m. The thieves had been in the building for exactly 30 minutes. In the Dutch room, the ransacking was underway, and the tally of mysteries was rising. In the Dutch room, the thieves grabbed Rembrandt's A Lady and Gentleman in Black and Christ in the storm on the Sea of Galilee. and brutally cut the paintings out of their gold frames.

They left the frames on the floor and moved on to four other items in the room. They grabbed a painting called Landscape with an Oblisk by Hovert Flink, painted in 1638, and they grabbed one of the most valuable pieces of art in the building, and the most valuable of the stolen items. It was a Jan Vermeer painting from the 1630s called The Concert. It was one of Isabella Stewart Gardner's prize possessions. It was her first major purchase, and she outbid the Louvre Museum for it in 1892. It was in her collection for nearly 100 years, until that night.

That painting alone has been valued at around $200 million. Likely, the four paintings were out of their frames when the thieves made two of the strangest decisions of the heist. A couple feet away from Christ in the storm on the Sea of Galilee, there was a 19th century wooden table. The table was covered with a cloth, and on top of the cloth sat an ancient Chinese object called a coup. It's a drinking vessel, which looks like an ancient wine glass. It was about 3,000 years old, which made it one of the oldest objects in the museum. But it was also one of the least valuable, at least on the black market if a thief wanted to sell it. At first glance, it looked like the coup was just sitting on the table.

It looked like a thief could simply walk up to it, grab it, and walk away. But that wasn't the case. The coup was attached to a flat panel that was sitting on top of the table. If a thief tried to snatch up the coup and take it, he would have instantly realized that it was fastened to a heavy panel. At that point, most thieves would have scrapped the idea of taking the item. But one of the gardener thieves spent valuable, time prying the coup loose so he could steal it, an object of very little value on the black market.

Strange decision number two involved a tiny self-portrait etching by Rembrandt. It had been stolen 20 years earlier in November 1970, presumably by college student John Calderwood and an accomplice. The police believed Calderwood provided a distraction while his accomplice broke the frame of the artwork and removed the etching. The etching was small, a little. about half the size of a post-it note. It could easily be hidden and smuggled out of the museum in dozens of different ways. For the thieves in 1990,

given the large paintings they were going to take with them, they could easily have taken the etching and its frame with no extra trouble. Or they had already proven they had no problem slicing paintings worth millions of dollars out of their frames. They could have just broken the frame like Calderwood's accomplice did. Instead, one of the thieves took the time

to unscrew the back of the frame and completely disassemble it so that the small etching could be removed unharmed. A very similar Rembrandt's self-portrait etching was stolen from the Boston Public Library in 2015. It was returned the next day, but it was valued at $20,000 to $30,000.

If the etching from the Gardner Museum had the same value, then it would have only been worth a couple thousand dollars on the black market. In terms of money, it was hardly worth the effort, especially when the Dutch room had a painting by Anthony Van Dyke called Woman with a Rose, which was likely worth millions. But for reasons which still aren't understood, the thieves ignored far more valuable pieces in favor of spending time and effort on the Chinese

coup and the Rembrandt etching. And the thieves used a similar, mysterious logic in the short gallery on the other side of the building. A little after 2 a.m., one of the thieves retrans his steps to conduct the second half of the robbery. At 208 a.m., a thief walked into the short gallery and headed straight for a cabinet in the corner of the room. The tall wooden cabinet was designed by Isabella Stewart Gardner to hold her collection of small prints and drawings by various artists, including Michelangelo, Raffael, Whistler, and Edgar Degas. The thief took five small drawings by Degas off the cabinet, and then he made another curious choice.

Right next to the cabinet was a display of a flag of Napoleon Bonaparte's first regiment of grenadiers of foot of the Imperial Guard. Above the flag set a bronze finial of an eagle, which would have topped the flag's standard. The thief unscrewed some of the screws of the frame around the flag, but then he stopped. He quickly pried the finial off the display and left the framed flag in place. He took the finial and the five drawings and exited the short gallery. The finial had almost no value on the black market. An investigator suspected the thief cut short his effort to take the flag

and just grabbed the finial as a consolation prize because he was starting to feel the pressure that it was time to leave. 20 minutes later, at 2.27 a.m. in the Dutch room, one of the robbers tripped a motion sensor. More than likely, that was when the robbers made their full. final attempt to steal one last work of art. Rembrandt painted a self-portrait in 1629 when he was 23 years old. One of the thieves took the oil painting off the wall, but then he abandoned it. He set the painting on the floor, still in its frame, and made no further attempt to steal it.

By that time, the thieves had been in the museum for more than an hour. They likely decided it was time to go, and they didn't want to spend any more time on the Rembrandt's self-portrait. Based on the sensors in the building, the thieves spent the next 12 minutes gathering their hall. There were no sensor alarms from 228 a.m. to 240 a.m. Maybe during that 12-minute span, one of the robbers went all the way back down to the basement to check on the guards. Randy, the security guard, said one of the thieves checked on the guards at least once during the robbery to make sure they were okay. Apparently one of the thieves was curiously polite and concerned about the hostages, and that odd phenomenon added to the collection of mysteries

about the Gardner Heist. Another in the growing list of mysteries was the revelation of a hidden door behind a wall panel in the Dutch room. Rembrandt's painting Christ in the storm on the sea of Galilee hung on the south wall of the Dutch room. The wallpaper and fabric behind the painting covered a panel which concealed a door that led to a room called the conservator's lab. When the robbers were finished in the Dutch room, they left the wall panel open so that the hidden door to the conservator's room was plainly visible. Why did they leave the wall panel open? No one knows. What did they do back there? No one knows. Or at least the authorities have never said anything publicly. By 2.30 a.m., the robbery was nearly complete. The third of the three, the

Thieves went into the small security office and took the videotape of the footage of them entering the building. They tore a long printout off of the printer at the security desk near the Palace Road door, which had recorded all the activity from the motion sensors throughout the night. The final two recorded activities were the Palace Road door opening at 2.41 a.m. and then opening again at 2.45 a.m. as the thieves shuttled 13 stolen items out to their car. When the Palace Road door swung closed at 2.45 a.m., the robbers were gone. They drove away in their small, crappy-looking car and into the record books. Five hours after two thieves finished the biggest art heist in history,

the day-shift security guards arrived at the museum. Two guards arrived at around 7.30 a.m. They waited for the night guards to buzz them into the building, but nothing happened. The new arrivals used the interiors. calm to try to get in touch with the night guards, but there was no response. After a couple minutes of confusion, the day shift guards called the director of security, Lyle Grindel, and explained the situation. Grindle hurried to the museum and unlocked a side door. Grindle and the two young guards cautiously entered the building and started to look around. The night guards, Rick and Randy,

were nowhere to be found. In the small security office, the door had been busted open. The videotape of security camera footage was gone, and a gold frame from a painting sat on a chair. Those were all very bad signs. On the second floor, the visuals confirmed Lyle Grindel's growing fears. The Dutch room looked like carnage, and the short gallery had been pilfered. Lyle Grindel called the police. Then he called Anne Holly, the museum's director, and gave her the worst news of her career. Around 8 a.m. on Sunday, March 18, 1990, Anne Holly learned the Gardner Museum had been robbed.

By the time she arrived at the building, it was swarming with police officers and FBI agents. In the basement of the museum, security guards Rick and Randy experienced a long period of silence. How long, they didn't know. Eventually, they heard sounds and voices above them. They stayed quiet because they had no way of knowing who was upstairs. and it was safer to do nothing. Probably around 9 a.m., Boston police officers found Rick and Randy. The police photographed the two young men and then freed them from their bindings. Rick and Randy had been in the basement for more than seven hours,

and their long night would be followed by a long day of answering questions. Around 8.30 a.m., Anne Hawley arrived to find total chaos at the museum. A methodical search of the building was in progress, but some of the destruction was obvious. Before long, she would have a full account of the losses. From the Dutch room on the second floor, the thieves stole four paintings, the ancient Chinese coup, and the tiny Rembrandt etching. From the short gallery on the second floor, the thieves stole five Daggaud drawings and the Napoleonic finil.

And from the blue room on the first floor, a small painting by Edouard Menei, called Shea Tortoni was stolen. No other stolen item would cause more confusion, speculation, and puzzlement than the Shea Tortoni. But the mystery of the Shea Tortoni would only begin hours later as investigators tried to understand the heist and build a timeline of the events. In the moment on Sunday morning, while the rest of Boston was preparing for the big St. Patrick's Day parade, the decision makers at the museum took the first steps toward getting the art back. One of the museum's trustees called a contact at the famous auction house Sotheby's and helped organize the first reward for the stolen items.

Sotheby's, possibly along with the other famous auction house Christie's, agreed to offer $1 million as a reward for the return of the artwork. At that point, in the minds of the leaders of the museum, the avalanche of second-guessing must have started. When Anne Holly had been hired six months earlier, she had a massive to-do list. Virtually every system in the museum needed to be upgraded, but she had to prioritize the list. She fixed structural problems and added a badly needed climate control system, but she did not have the money to address issues with security or insurance. In many respects, the overall security system was old and limited.

Security Director Lyle Grindle called the system, quote, prehistoric. In terms of insurance, the artwork with the work with the system, The artwork was insured for everything except theft. And when news of the heist broke that morning, the first reported estimate of the value of the stolen items was $200 million. In a museum conference room, Rick and Randy had a lot of explaining to do. Rick and Randy's initial statements were fairly sparse, as they had spent most of the nights stuck in the basement.

Their interactions with the robbers, before they were handcuffed and duct taped, were brief. but they tried to describe the robbers to the authorities. Law enforcement quickly released sketches of the robbers to the public, though the accuracy of the sketches has always been in doubt. The other two people who saw the robbers that night, high school students Nancy and Justin, agreed with some aspects of the descriptions, but not others. In the weeks that followed, with no solid leads on the thieves,

the investigation focused more heavily on Rick. He was the guard who let the robbers in. and some of his actions that night were curious and maybe full-on suspicious. Suspicion rose because the more the investigators learned about each aspect of the heist, the more they believed the robbers had to have had knowledge of the building beyond what could be learned by the average visitor. But as Rick said in interviews in the years following the heist, having inside information is not the same thing as having an inside man.

Rick was very candid about the idea that he could have, have said the wrong thing to the wrong person during his employment and inadvertently given away valuable information. The heart of the problem is the Shay Tortony, which was stolen from the blue room on the first floor. But there are other connections to Rick which have kept investigators baffled and conspiracy theorists fueled for 35 years. For those who wanted to believe that Rick was working with the thieves, Curious Action Number One was when Rick opened and closed the Palace Road door at 101 a.m. Rick said it was a part of his regular routine as a night guard. It shouldn't have been, but it was. Unfortunately, with only six security tapes available and a limited amount of

computer data from the sensors, there's no way to know if Rick regularly opened and closed the Palace Road door to check its alarm. Number two, Rick buzzed the robbers into the building without verifying that they were real cops, which led some to believe that Rick was working with them. That might have been the case. It's impossible to completely rule out Rick as an inside man. But the idea that the only reason the robbers felt confident that they would gain access to the building

was because they had Rick on their side. That can easily be dismissed. For the sake of comparison, Anthony Pino spent a year planning the Great Brinks robbery of 1950. With a fraction of that time, a dedicated thief could have learned the identities of the night guards at the museum, learned their personalities and their habits, and figured out that Rick Abbott was not the most vigilant guard on the force. If the thieves had watched the museum for just three months at the beginning of 1990, they

would have seen multiple people enter the building through the Palace Road door after hours. If they had watched the museum for just one night, if they had been on Palace Road just 24 hours before the heist, they would have seen security guard Joe Mulvey and Deputy Director of Security Larry O'Brien enter and exit the building through the Palace Road door between 1230 and 1 a.m. It would not have taken a genius level IQ to guess that if two men showed up wearing police uniforms, they could talk their way into the building pretty easily. So, was Rick Abbott in on it? Maybe. Could the robbers have felt confident that they could do it without his active participation? Absolutely. Then what about the two rooms, the security office, and the

conservators lab, which was hidden behind the wall in the Dutch room? Sure, if Rick was part of the robbery crew, he could have told them the locations of both rooms. But the conservators' room had little to no practical value during the robbery. It was not vital to the success of the heist. It's just a curiosity, that's all. The robbers could have learned about those rooms in any one of a dozen other ways. Or they could have discovered the rooms during the heist. The robbers were in the building for 81 minutes, but for 48 of those minutes, their movements are unknown. They didn't trip motion sensors for more than half of the time they were in the building. Now, some of that time was when they first arrived and took the guards down to the basement.

But the knowledge of a couple rooms which were off limits to the general public didn't make Rick an inside man. What might have was the Shaytor Tony. To quote another artistic master, William Shakespeare, there's the rub. Many people believe Rick Abbott was the only person who could have taken the Shaytor Tony from the blue room on the first floor. If he did, it was highly likely he was working with the thieves. But if he did, no one has been able to explain how he did it. Next time on Infamous America, investigators try to figure out. how the Shay Tortony vanished from the blue room without setting off a single alarm.

They struggle with the dilemma of Rick Abbott. And they examine the Irish connection, notorious gangster Whitey Bulger, notorious art thief Miles Conner, and Connor's mysterious friend, Billy Youngworth, who may have actually had the paintings. The authorities come close to solving the crime next week on Infamous America. Members of our Black Barrel Plus program don't have to wait week to week for new episodes. They receive the entire season to binge all at once with no commercials, and they also receive exclusive bonus episodes. Sign up now through the link in the show notes or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com. This episode was researched and written by me, Chris Wimmer, who was produced by Joe Garrow, original music by Rob Valier. Thanks for listening.