In the past two weeks, the FBI has been going down a list of crimes to pin on the Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bulger, who was apprehended on June 22 after a 16-year manhunt. On Wednesday in federal court, Bulger pleaded “not guilty” to a 32-count indictment that included 19 murders. Though it did not come up in court, one other item may also be on the FBI’s list: solving the largest art theft in the world.
In spring of 1990, when Bulger and his Irish-American mafia reigned supreme among the rackets in Boston, two men posing as Boston policemen entered the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and made off with 19 paintings, valued today at $500 million. The cache included a Vermeer, three Rembrandts, a Manet, and five drawings by Degas.
As art theft cases go, this one did not lend to the routine tracking of leads and following-up on tips for the $5 million reward. The case became a great maze of dead ends and a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma: the Gardner Museum theft not only holds the record for stolen goods, it also has become the world’s largest unsolved case.
When the leads dried up, the theory arose that the paintings were stolen by hoodlums working for the Irish Republican Army, which in 1974 had pulled off a major art theft near Dublin. They used the paintings in an attempt to bargain for the release of four IRA members in prison. In Boston, the IRA theory pointed to Bulger, who was central to the army’s transactions in New England. Just about that time also, as federal agents prepared to arrest Bulger on murder charges, he disappeared.
Now that Bulger, 81, is in custody, the theories about his ability to help solve the Gardner Museum theft have taken a few directions. The most direct scenario is that Bulger was behind the theft. He may simply have the paintings stashed away as his own bargaining chip.
On the other extreme, analysts who have followed Bulger’s career say that art theft was not his style. His forte was extortion: collecting “protection” money from every other crime operation that worked around Boston.
A third option is that, while Bulger may not have engineered the theft, there was little he did not know about in Boston’s crime life. He might know who took the paintings. This last outcome seems the best the FBI can hope for, since a good deal of skepticism surrounds the IRA theory. On the announcement of Bulger’s arrest in Santa Monica, Calif., where he had been living incognito with his mistress, the Gardner Museum had no comment except: “Until a recovery is made, our work continues.”
According to Robert K. Wittman, the FBI agent who founded the agency’s Art Crime Team, some of the paintings—the Rembrandts in particular—were nearly recovered in a 2006 sting operation targeting French-Corsican mobsters in Florida. The case was botched, as Wittman’s 2010 bestseller, Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World’s Stolen Treasures, recounts in disheartening detail.
Wittman’s recollections of the early days of the Gardner Museum case may be replayed as the capture of Bulger stirs new interest: “Hundreds of FBI agents and police officers investigated the Gardner theft, and as the years passed, the mystique and mystery of the heist only grew. Investigators navigated a growing thicket of speculation, one fueled by a cast of characters featuring con men, private detectives, investigative journalists, and wiseguys.”
The Gardner theft was an object lesson for museums as well. On the day it happened in 1990, the Gardner Museum was a somewhat casual affair. A security review was still underway and the few security guards on after-hours duty were quickly overcome. In hindsight it almost reminds us of the story, in 1911, when a Belgian crook walked into the Louvre in Paris and walked out with the Mona Lisa under his coat.
If there is a Bulger connection, the case may still be more complicated than art lovers can imagine, given the tortuous local history of Boston. In his early career, Bulger was an informant for the FBI as the feds took down the Italian Cosa Nostra. That left Bulger, head of the Winter Hill Gang in south Boston, as the top crime boss. He also ended up having a few police and federal agents (who later saw jail time) on his payroll. Depending on whom you asked, Bulger was either an Irish-American Robin Hood for the downtrodden of Boston or just another brutal mafia don.
Either way, convicting Bulger of crimes and recovering the masterpieces—and maintaining the FBI’s reputation—will be a complex task. Ulrich Boser, who has written the best book on the topic, The Gardner Heist (2009), may be prophetic for several more years in his account's subtitle: “the World’s Largest Unsolved Art Theft.”
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