Word: gardners
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...they can return the stolen art in return for certain favors--including the $5 million reward. And one of those two cons, New England's most notorious art thief, who in 1974 brokered the return of a stolen Rembrandt, has told TIME that he once cased the Gardner with a man who, years later, arranged the heist without...
...federal prison for interstate transportation of two paintings stolen in 1975 from the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College. Connor, who appears to have escaped from a Damon Runyon story, says he and a gangster named Bobby Donati, a longtime pal and partner in crime, checked out the Gardner around 1974. "Did I case it?" asks the 5-ft. 7-in., bushy-bearded Connor, who looks more like a visiting professor than a guy who has run with a crew of gangsters for 30 years. "I took a walk through the place and saw what was there." He saw enough...
Connor devours art publications, even in jail--especially in jail--and has a scholarly manner that impresses crooks and confounds cops. And he doesn't mind saying that on his little tour of the Gardner, he didn't think much of Donati's taste. Among other things, the philistine had his eye on an eagle that topped a battle flag from Napoleon's Imperial Guard. In any event, Connor says he never acted on the urge to rob the Gardner. That's because he walked across the street in Boston's Fenway area and saw a score he liked better...
...There's no comparison relative to one place having half a dozen of what could be called real masterpieces and the other one maybe 50 to as many as 100," Connor says. He also knew that the Gardner had no theft insurance--the last thing a thief needs; no insurance company to sell a stolen painting back to. And he "had inside information" about an insured Rembrandt hanging on loan in the Museum of Fine Arts, an institution with serious "political clout" that would send up "a huge hue and cry" and therefore was "the much, much more desirable place...
...talking hobby here. We're talking a love of art, a contempt for law enforcement and the thrill of the score. As for the Gardner heist: "You can believe I didn't plan the thing, or The Rape of Europa would have been the first to go." The Titian work was the most valuable piece in the museum but was passed over for lesser goods, Connor says with disgust...