Thirty years ago today, a group of thieves raided the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and succeeded in pulling off the biggest art heist in U.S. history. Revisit reporter Tom Mashberg's story from the VFarchive
The F.B.I. was baffled by the costliest art theft in American history—more than $200 million in works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, and others taken from Boston's stuffily exclusive Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990.reporter TOM MASHBERG tells how, more than seven years later, he found himself at the center of attempts to recover the stolen treasures, dealing with a -descended master criminal, Myles J. Connor Jr.
Youngworth, known to the law mostly for passing bad checks and running a shabby antiques depot in nearby Randolph, said he would help get the art back in exchange for the $5 million reward posted by the museum and immunity from prosecution. Then he asked for one more thing— something that gave this former convict with a dozen aliases a much-needed aura of credibility. He asked for"the release from prison of my friend Myles Connor.
That was not Connor's first"art caper," as he likes to say, but it was a felony—a"jackpot with the Feds." Seeking to barter his way out of a likely 10-year sentence, he masterminded, nine months later, the daylight abduction of a Rembrandt,from Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, known as the M.F.A.
From the back wall, they removed two frames suspended by long wires. One held Rembrandt's only seascape,For reasons unknown, but probably having to do with how the canvases were fastened to their mounts, the thieves sliced these works from their frames. Stiffened by age and varnish, the paintings left behind a cascade of 360-year-old paint chips.
Ellis, a bullish man of 48 with a record of extortion and cocaine trafficking, was once a professional chef and married to the Boston aesthetician Elizabeth Grady. He is serving 25 years in federal prison for violating the Mann Actt—ransporting a minor across state lines with the intent of performing a sexual act. Ellis insists that he was framed by a former girlfriend.
For nearly five years Ellis had had no luck with his bartering, and by the time I met him he was frantic. Determined to be taken seriously, he blurted out that Connor had access to a valuable stolen artifact that would be used to bargain for Ellis's release once Connor left prison in 1999. The item was the royal beeswax seal that had been affixed to the Massachusetts Bay Colony charter by King Charles I of England upon the founding of the colony in 1629.
Connor also acknowledged casing the Gardner many times, with both Donatis, beginning in the early 1970s. The veteran burglars"couldn't help but notice" the museum's minimal security, he said. Once, he told me, the Donatis unlatched the simple lock on an unalarmed window on the museum's first floor. They returned often to find that the lock remained unsecured and apparently unnoticed.
When Connor was last jailed, in 1989, for transporting stolen property across state lines, Houghton took custody of many of his friend's belongings. These effects, scattered across Massachusetts, included many steamer trunks filled with valuable antiques and artifacts, in particular Oriental swords and sheaths collected by Connor over 30 years.
Youngworth says that in Walpole's 10-block he gravitated toward Connor as a father figure. His own father, William junior, had been seriously ill with a vascular disorder through most of the 1960s, and was often unable to find steady work in the sheet-metal trade. His mother, nee Audrey Sullivan, had died on Christmas Eve 1967 after bingeing on Seconal and sherry. She was 31, and her son was barely 8.
My sense is that Youngworth did consort for many years with felons. According to two credible sources, one of them a lawyer, he was present at a brutal Mob hit inside a van, but the Mafia killers allowed him to live. Driven by braggadocio, however, Youngworth also invents stories. He has even said he was with Connor at the M.F.A. heist—"a sad lie," according to Connor.
Connor was busted, and by early 1990 he was in a cell with Rocco Ellis at the federal prison in Lompoc, California. There he began reaching out to former associates to find a reputable caretaker for his treasured collection of swords and other goods. First it was Houghton. By mid-1992, at Connor's request, the big box trailer crammed with steamer trunks had been secured by Youngworth in a private lot behind Almost Antiques.
At one point that year, Youngworth lodged a $100,000 claim with his insurer, Fitchburg Mutual Insurance Co., asserting that he had been robbed of Oriental rugs at gunpoint in the basement of Almost Antiques. The insurers refused to pay, citing"compelling evidence" that no crime ever occurred. With his wife, and son in a panic, Youngworth needed a"get out of jail quick" card. And he had one: the seal from the Massachusetts Bay Colony charter.oungworth insists that his name was never supposed to surface in connection with the return of the seal. He says that he offered it to a Randolph detective named William Pace in exchange for his release from the police lockup, and that Pace agreed.
Later he gave me a tour of the Barn, and I saw that dozens of Connor's trunks lay about on the floor, open and empty, while others were still piled up neatly, strapped shut. The thought briefly entered my mind that the Gardner paintings might be in one of those musty containers. To Connor, crime is a cross between chess and guerrilla war. His first run-in with police came in 1965, when he was caught stealing Tiffany lamps from a property on the Maine coast near where his family vacationed. Henry"Hank" Hosking, the then 60-year-old local sheriff's deputy who moved in to arrest him, knew Myles by name and tried to talk him into giving himself up quietly.
On April 27, 1966, Connor was apprehended by a Boston police corporal, whom he shot in the testicles. Connor himself was shot four times, and after a gun battle in the Back Bay he was trailed by his blood drops to a Marlborough Street rooftop. "To most museums, I guess, my name is like Darth Vader. I'm quite capable of breaking into any museum, including the Gardner, and I've been in places—like the Smithsonian storage houses—where they would not be happy to know I've been. But I did not plan, nor did I consign, the Gardner break-in."
That precision included laying down machine-gun fire at the feet of the dozen museum guards who ran after the retreating thieves. The Rembrandt portrait was smallish, in an oval frame, and easy enough to hoist from its simple peg. Connor seems to have overseen the delicate task himself. One M.F.A. guard, a retired Boston cop, attempted to wrestle the prize from its robbers, but he was smacked across the head with the muzzle of a pistol.
"That was damn embarrassing, God rest her soul," Connor says."I make no bones about it: I'm an outlaw, and I'll always be an outlaw. . . . Not for a moment do I intend on painting myself as some misunderstood soul undeserving of condemnation and disapproval for my various criminal exploits. However, neither am I the unflattering character so deftly portrayed by some."
As the reporter who had seen the Rembrandt, I had access to all sides, and it soon became evident that they would not be able to make a deal. On the Gardner's board of trustees were two opposing camps, one that wanted to get to the bottom of Youngworth's offer, and another that put its faith in law enforcement's ability to crack the case. Meanwhile, the U.S. attorney for Boston, Donald K.
The next morning she was found dead, apparently from an overdose of prescription drugs. Her son tried to revive her with cold compresses before finally running for help. Judith Youngworth was 45.
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