Word: museum
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...Connor accepted the challenge. On April 14, 1975, he bought a ticket to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and walked in as a visitor. He was armed, disguised as a chaffeur and accompanied by one friend—although six more were in on the plan. With a getaway car waiting, Connor snatched a million-dollar Rembrandt portrait off the walls and ran out of the building. Having eluded capture, Connor then negotiated the return of the portrait for a lightening of a previous sentence...
...Moreover, Connor says that his museum heists were not malicious. “Anytime I took something major from the museum it was with the intent of giving it back,” he says—albeit at a profit to himself. Still, he does admit to keeping and selling many of the pieces that he stole...
...With such vast experience in art robbery, Connor has become well-versed in museum security. For example, he is keenly aware of the psychological importance of disguise. “People pay attention to outfits,” he says. “If you have a suit and a tie and you look like a professor, they treat you like a professor...
...Connor also finds that American museums in particular lack important security measures. In various foreign countries, like Turkey, he claims that protection is better. “You have armed guards and then you have state-of-the-art alarms, and it would be very difficult to take down a museum like that,” he says. “They don’t have that...
...Without such measures, Connor avows that very few U.S. museums are safe from grab-and-run heists like his own at the MFA. “The only way they could prevent something like that from happening is if they had a security system—if you hit a button and the door would lock. Short of that, almost any museum in the country could be taken down in that fashion, as long as the stuff was accessible to the road.” He cites the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as one such vulnerable place...