Couple weeks later, the evening of Saint Paddy’s, just happened we was in a bar near the museum after stumbling out of Southie at some point in the revelries.
“This is the last beer,” Jim said. “My wife’s already gonna kill me.”
Heading out the door, we saw a bunch of police jackets and hats hanging by the door so we each put one on, just joking around, even found handcuffs—no guns, not that we woulda took’em. We walked out as cops. We was a little lost, then turned the corner and there it was: the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
“Let’s mess with these rich pricks,” Jim said.
I wanted my money back for the towing as bad as anyone, but what the hell could we do at one in the morning after Saint Paddy’s? Jim must’ve already thought about this, at least since becoming a cop five minutes earlier. He walked right up to the service door and rang the bell. We told the guard we was cops and he buzzed us in. The rest is history, as they say.
We cuffed both guards and wandered around inside for a bit, still deciding what to do. I woulda been happy finding the cash to pay the towing, but Jim said we might as well grab some art while’s in a art museum. Made sense.
“We need to teach them a valuable lesson: never mess with a man’s vehicle.”
We took our sweet time, grabbing some things we thought looked cool, like the dudes in the boat in a storm cuz we both fished and had our share of rough seas.
After getting what we wanted, Jim pulled his car around. We loaded it all up and vamoosed, then stowed the loot in his garage. We was still drunk when we got home, but we both been a lot drunker on this holiday. Not much of a hangover when I got up later that afternoon but another kind of hangover hit hard when I read the headline in The Boston Globe that evening.
“$200m Gardner Museum art theft” was the headline in the Globe. About shit myself. Jim called me not long after I read it.
“Meet me in my garage,” was all he said.
Even back then, we knowed not to say nothing on the phone.
“It doesn’t look like the cops have any idea who did it,” Jim said first thing when I got there. “They suspect it’s ‘organized crime.’ Got a laugh out of that.”
I suggested we dump everything, let someone find it.
“Screw that.” Jim said, vetoing my suggestion. “You forgetting they towed the van?”
I didn’t, so we decided just to sit on the paintings, sell them when the heat died down and everyone forgot about it.
“That couldn’t take too long, right?”
“A few months,” I said. “But I’m putting the boat painting up in my bedroom, gift for the wife, least till we sell it.”
“Then I got dibs on the Vermeer, The Concert, like the paper calls it.”
We measured both and went out the next day and bought frames. We shoulda waited, but cops probably wasn’t looking for someone stupid enough to buy frames for $200 million in stolen paintings the next day, right? Hiding in plain sight, or reverse psychology, or whatever you call it.
We got fourteen artworks in Jim’s garage with the other two hanging in our bedrooms. She can’t tell no one, but the wife likes the idea of a Rembrandt in her house. Consider the towing charge as rent on the paintings.
Twenty-six years later, the heat ain’t died down none, and we got a $5m reward on our heads.
Still, heist of the century? My ass.
Afterword:
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum art theft occurred on March 18, 1990, when
two men disguised as police officers entered the museum, subdued the security
guards, and stole artworks valued at hundreds of millions of dollars. The
stolen works included pieces by artists such as Rembrandt van Rijn, Johannes
Vermeer, and Edgar Degas, making it the largest unsolved art theft in history
by estimated value. Despite three and a half decades of investigation and a
substantial reward, none of the stolen pieces have been recovered.
