Antique

The empty frame from which thieves cut Rembrandt's The Storm on the Sea of Galilee remains on display at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The painting was one of 13 works stolen from the museum in 1990.

Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum houses a world-class art collection. But in the last two decades it's been better known for the art that isn't there — half a billion dollars' worth of masterpieces that disappeared from its walls 25 years ago.

That robbery — which included the loss of three Rembrandts, a Vermeer, a Manet and sketches by Degas — has haunted Boston, law enforcement and the art world ever since. Boston Globe reporter Stephen Kurkjian has spent the last two decades investigating the heist. He's the author of the book Master Thieves: The Boston Gangsters Who Pulled Off the World's Greatest Art Heist. He tells NPR's Renee Montagne how it happened:

"Two men dressed in police uniforms rang the bell to the employees' entrance of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum," he says. "They showed up on the monitor screen of one of the two night watchmen who were on duty that night. ... They said, 'We're here to investigate a disturbance,' so he buzzed them in."

Rick Abath was the security guard who buzzed the "policemen" in. At the time of the robbery, he had just dropped out of Berklee College of Music. "I was playing in a band and working night shift at the museum," Abath told our colleagues at StoryCorps. "I was just this hippie guy who wasn't hurting anything, wasn't on anybody's radar, and the next day I was on everybody's radar for the largest art heist in history."

Kurkjian talks with Montagne about how the heist happened, and why thieves would want to steal art so priceless it can't even be resold.


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