Friday, August 13, 2021
This website is a gate to information concerning the art stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on March 18, 1990.
I will post articles weekly on topics such as the psychology and background of the thieves, tracking techniques, ongoing investigations by police departments, suspects described in the news media, and more. I will also provide links to serious websites devoted to the robbery.
Over time, I hope to expand this blog into a membership forum to raise revenue for a universal and anonymous tip line to screen information.
The stolen art has been missing for over three decades and there are people who know its location. I don't believe that the art is hidden in a warehouse. I think it is in the possession of wealthy individuals who might provide information if it could be done safely. A heavy-handed approach by law enforcement would have the opposite effect.
The point is the safe return of the art, nothing else.
Breadcrumbs
“Once upon a time" is how most fairy tales begin, at least they did before Hollywood softened the storylines.
The classic Hansel and Gretel tale has been re-written so it won't frighten the 5-year old you are trying to calm at bedtime. Reading the original versions of Grimm's fairy tales to them would have the opposite effect.
This story is about two children abandoned in the deep woods by their personality-challenged stepmother while Dad was away. Their Step-Mama had told them that they cost too much to feed, and when she got the chance, she dumped them in the woods. In the early versions of the story, both parents led the children into the woods with Dad later regretting it and Mom ending up dead. This was too much for kids to handle so it was modified placing most of the blame on the step-mom. Right or wrong, many people can get behind that.
Hansel was a clever boy who happened to keep a pile of smooth white stones or a crust of bread in his pocket depending on what version of the story you are reading. In any version, it seems that he was a paranoid child and rightfully so, just in case a situation arose where he might need such items he stuffed his pockets with survival items. Suspecting what was happening as they were led into the forest to be abandoned he dropped breadcrumbs so that they might find their way back home. He figured that he and Gretel could follow them back to their home and then tell their passive-aggressive father that Step-Mommy had flipped her biscuit and needed to go to the big white building on the hill.
On the surface, it was a good plan but Hansel had traded away the smooth white stones he had kept in his pocket for a peek at Jimmy Goldblum's Penthouse magazine stash, so he used breadcrumbs instead. The grateful and furry little critters of the forest ate all of them before the siblings could use them to guide themselves home. I forget how the story ends, but there were breadcrumbs in it.
There is little to do at 3:00 A.M. that won’t disturb the rest of the household, but the internet patiently sits there, waiting for you. Come on big boy, sign on. While surfing the net, I ran into a Yankee Magazine article about the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist. I had partially read the article, in a Doctor’s office, a decade before.
While I was quietly reading the article about the Gardner robbery written by Evan McLeod Wylie in the Doctor’s waiting room, l was rudely interrupted by a nurse, telling me that it was my turn to enter the always sanitized and ridiculously expensive, back room. I had intended to finish reading the article when my annual examination was completed, but that never happened. Having someone, stick a finger up my ass distracts me. I quickly left the office after my exam, trying to maintain what was left of my dignity.
Now, sitting in a comfortable chair, in the wee hours of the morning, I finished reading the article. What caught my interest was an opinion of a now-deceased Boston private detective named Charles Moore, who contrary to popular opinion, believed that the perpetrators of the Gardner robbery were not from Boston.
This opinion struck a chord. The more I read about the Gardner robbery, the more I agreed. Authorities were quick to credit the local mobsters for the theft, and this theory persists. If local mobsters were involved, information would have quickly surfaced.
Boston was rife with police informants during the early 1990s. Boston's Irish mobster, Whitey Bulger, had become the dominant organized crime boss in the city. He accomplished this by informing the FBI on the operations of his competitors in town. If anyone had any solid information concerning the stolen art, it would have turned up in a plea deal.
Several Boston-based wise guys had bragged in bars that they had inside information concerning the heist. They did not, and several of them ended up dead because of their braggadocio. Mobsters being the way they are information is passed around from bar patron to bar patron very quickly. Secrets do not remain secret very long in an environment like that.
I was now hooked, along with countless others searching for my Gardner fix. As the saying goes, I had no skin in the game, no supervisor to answer to, and no news deadline to make. I did not have to worry about who I pissed off, or how foolish my reasoning might look. I came to believe that the Gardner Museum was robbed by individuals who had nothing to do with organized crime in the City of Boston. I requested and read every book on art theft and the Gardner robbery that I could from my local library, and purchased the rest.
During my investigation, an interesting piece of information became known. The Great State of Massachusetts had granted a sentence reduction to a flamboyant criminal named Miles J. Connor Jr. in 1975 because he agreed to facilitate the return of a stolen painting. In this case, a Rembrandt was stolen from Boston’s Museum of Fine Art. Other plea deals concerning art thefts had been made as well. Career criminals in the Boston area referred to this as plea deal insurance.
The American criminal justice system is largely based on precedent, and I believe these plea deals were the logical reason for the theft. Someone was facing serious jail time, for a crime, or crimes, and needed leverage to negotiate a reduction to their prison sentence. This motive made much more sense to me than a couple of dimwits sitting in a basement room, drinking grappa, staring at the art and, telling each other how rich they are going to be when Uncle Vito finds a buyer for this stuff when he makes parole.
With this in mind, I started to search the internet for breadcrumbs. I was looking for criminals who were under indictment or investigation at the time of the Gardner robbery. I set up a simple search algorithm and slowly expanded my search for possible suspects.
One night when looking at my accumulated results, my eyes froze upon the computer screen.
"You must be kidding!" I thought.
I discarded the idea and looked elsewhere.
Later, as I dug further, I slowly came to realize that Boston mobsters did not rob the Gardner of half a billion dollars worth of art, two central Connecticut Baby Boomers did.
Kevin Ferguson
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