The Art of the Heist

Prologue

By Jenny Siler

On March 18, 1990, shortly after 1:00 A.M., two men dressed in police uniforms and wearing false mustaches knocked on a side door of Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The night was typical of early spring in New England: foggy, with more than a bit of chill in the air. Around the city known for its Irish heart, St. Patrick’s Day festivities were just winding down-in fact, revelers who were leaving a nearby party would later recall having seen the two men sitting in an unmarked car near the museum’s side entrance. But for the pair waiting outside the Gardner Museum, the party was just beginning. After convincing one of the two night security guards to let them inside, the counterfeit cops quickly forced both guards down into the basement, where they duct-taped the men to support posts.

For the next hour the thieves roamed the museum unimpeded. Once in the galleries, they proceeded to unceremoniously slash priceless canvases from their frames. Though their methods were brutish, the men showed no small amount of expertise in their selection. Among the items they chose were “The Storm on the Sea of Galilee,” the only seascape Rembrandt is known to have painted; “The Concert,” a Vermeer masterpiece and one of only some thirty-five known paintings attributed to the Dutchman; Manet’s “Chez Tortoni”; and five Degas drawings. They also took a Shang Dynasty bronze beaker and, in a gesture that has never ceased to puzzle investigators, the bronze finial from a Napoleonic flagstaff.

By 3:00 A.M. the thieves were gone, but not before they had removed the videotape from the museum’s security cameras and ripped the computer printout from the motion detectors. The FBI, which soon took charge of the case, would call the heist the costliest of its kind in U.S. history. Estimates put the monetary value of the pieces taken that night at upward of $300 million. The cultural value of the masterworks, especially the one-of-a-kind Rembrandt seascape and the rare Vermeer, is, by all accounts, inestimable.

From the beginning the case proved dauntingly difficult to crack. The thieves may have been sloppy in their methods, but they left behind not a trace of evidence as to their identities. The theft of fine art differs from other crimes in that the passage of time can make these cases easier to solve rather than more difficult. Stolen artwork often surfaces years or even decades after the fact, as key players die, statutes of limitations expire, or pieces change hands. But after almost two decades, and despite a $5 million reward and global efforts to track down the missing Gardner Museum art, not a single item taken that night has been recovered.

In all that time, one name has surfaced again and again in connection with the robbery: Myles Connor.

A hometown art thief with a genius IQ and a flair for the dramatic, Connor was the man authorities immediately suspected when they were called to the Gardner Museum on the morning of March 18. When it came to museum robberies, Connor had a resume a mile long, including the 1975 theft of a Rembrandt from Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts nearby. Almost every aspect of the Gardner heist carried Connor’s fingerprints: the brazenness with which the theft had been carried out; the sophistication shown in the pieces chosen; even the police uniforms, which were a form of disguise Connor and his associates had used in the past.

There was only one problem with this theory: at the time of the Gardner heist, Connor was in federal custody in Illinois. Still, so strong was the FBI’s suspicion that Connor was somehow involved that one of the first actions they took was to place a call to the superintendent of the jail where Connor was being held, asking him to confirm that Connor, who had a history of daring prison escapes, was still in his cell. He was.

When questioned about his involvement in the theft, Connor’s reply was impudent. “You’d have known if it was me. I would have taken the Titian,” he said, referring to one of the centerpieces of the Gardner Museum’s collection, a large oil painting depicting the rape of Europa.

Despite his airtight alibi, Connor was and remains a prime suspect in the Gardner theft. The FBI and others claim he masterminded the heist from his prison cell, hoping to use some of the artwork as a bargaining chip to reduce his federal sentence. As with so much else in the murky world of art and antiquities theft, the truth about Connor’s involvement in the events of that March evening is much more complicated than anyone might have guessed.

This account will not neatly resolve this particular case. It will show how the son of an honest cop grew up to become the country’s most notorious art thief, one who is still a prime suspect in the Gardner theft. But there is more to Connor’s story than the unraveling of that particular mystery. Over the course of a long career in crime, Myles Connor’s passion for fine art slowly merged with his love of misadventure. He grew from a petty thief to a gun-and drug-runner, violent outlaw, and eventually art thief.

Like any true story, it is not always a pretty one. Yet Connor’s charm is evident. He is a rogue at heart, a man who inspires fierce loyalty and even love in those who know him well-not through intimidation, but through the sheer force of his personality.

As incredible as it may seem, this is a work of fact, not fiction. With the exception of a small handful of incidents, to which Myles himself is the only living witness, the events described in this book have been painstakingly researched and carefully corroborated using newspaper accounts, eyewitness testimony, court records, and various other original documents. For obvious reasons, most names have been changed to protect the innocent-or guilty, as that may be. Other than that, the account you are about to read is true.