Original subtitles

A Boston museum with over a billion dollars

in priceless paintings:

the site of one of the largest art thefts in history.

The Vermeer is one of the most valuable

paintings in the world.

Despite security precautions,

the thieves walk right in.

This could have been Fort Knox.

But you let the people in,

then it really doesn't matter how much security you have.

The brazen theft is only the start of the story.

Soon, there are multiple suspects

and a trail of dead bodies.

His throat was slashed so deep

that he was nearly decapitated.

Now that's a message.

And above all, one burning question:

will the invaluable paintings ever be found?

The paintings could be here, the paintings could be there.

What happened to the paintings?

♪ ♪

The masterminds behind every great heist

see what most people don't...

♪ ♪

Risking everything to pull off the score of a lifetime.

It takes a bold plan...

♪ ♪

The right team...

and the skill to stay one step ahead of the law.

♪ ♪

♪ ♪

♪ ♪

It's the 1980s,

and as art prices skyrocket,

professional thieves turned from robbing banks

to robbing museums.

Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

is one-of-a-kind.

A gem of a target, thanks to its peerless collection

of old masters.

When it opens in 1903, the Gardner boasts

the largest private collection of art in America.

♪ ♪

Isabella Stewart Gardner is a force of nature.

She's five feet tall, shock of red hair.

She was someone who used her wealth

to create something to leave to the city of Boston.

♪ ♪

She built, in my opinion,

one of the most beautiful museums

that this world has ever seen.

Nothing can prepare you, really,

for the experience of walking into the Gardener.

It is a riot, a visual feast.

♪ ♪

That museum is jam-packed with very expensive artwork,

priceless artwork.

♪ ♪

She had the Vermeer, which is one of

what, 31 or 32 in the world?

Vermeer's "Concert." What an amazing painting.

♪ ♪

You have various Rembrandts.

"Christ on the Sea of Galilee."

A museum like no other.

You'd find something new every time.

♪ ♪

When Isabella Stewart Gardner dies in 1923,

her will establishes an endowment

to keep the museum open exactly how she left it.

The will stipulates that no paintings

should be taken away, and nothing added either.

She was not going to lose this museum

to some future generation that had terrible taste

or a bad vision or didn't share her love for it,

so she wrote a will that stipulates that

nothing can be removed or even moved.

Unfortunately,

Gardner's will also prevents the museum

from making necessary upgrades to its security systems.

But without her leadership it began to fray,

and I think security was one of the things

that was fraying badly.

By 1981, the museum security is so outmoded

that one East Boston mob crew can't resist an easy score.

The museum had classical music concerts twice a week.

They were going to set off smoke bombs at the recital...

Cause all sorts of havoc,

and then steal what they wanted to steal.

♪ ♪

Well, they got caught by the FBI.

But now the idea of the museum was vulnerable,

that gets known.

After this close call, the museum decides

to finally make several security improvements.

One of them was a motion detector system.

They put sensors in the doorways

of each of the galleries.

And there is a dot matrix printout

of all of their movements

that's being fed through a printer in the guard station.

High-tech solutions are only as good

as the people who use them,

so the board establishes new security protocols

for the guards.

There would be two night shift guards on duty.

One would be walking through the museum

going floor to floor, checking the rooms

to make sure there were no issues or disturbances.

The other guard would be at the guard desk,

and monitoring the systems by the Palace Road door.

Now under the desk, there's a button

that he could push and alert to the police.

The Palace Road door leads directly

into a last line of defense for the guards.

There's a man trap.

When you have those visitors,

you can let them in the first door.

And then when that door shuts,

they're kind of locked in there, right?

They can leave, but they can't get in the museum.

Despite the new systems,

a new pair of professional thieves spot a weakness.

They picked the perfect date for a fresh heist attempt...

March 17, 1990.

March 17 is a holy holiday in Boston.

St. Patrick's Day.

♪ ♪

It's a boozy riot across the city.

♪ ♪

The first few hours of the St. Patrick's night shift

start like any other.

The two guards take turns patrolling the museum.

It's these two young men in their early 20s

who are guarding the museum.

Rick Abath, a Berklee College of Music school dropout,

with long ringlet rockstar hair,

and Randy Heston, who is also a music student.

He likes the night shift, he says,

because it gives him a chance to practice his trombone.

So Randy takes the desk.

His job is to sit at the desk, monitor cameras.

Rick does his first rounds.

♪ ♪

All the lights were out in the museum during third shift,

and you would walk around with a flashlight.

♪ ♪

During the second rounds that Rick does,

a fire alarm goes off.

No smoke condition, nothing that indicates a fire.

They turn it off.

What we understand is that

Rick Abath goes to the Palace Road door

and opens it and closes it

and comes back into the museum.

♪ ♪

So we're talking about March 18, 1990.

Early morning hours of the... past midnight, 1:00.

♪ ♪

It's a little bit rainy, misty.

Not too cold.

And that's when two individuals

walk up to the Palace Road door...

♪ ♪

Ring the doorbell.

The two thieves have a clear, detailed plan.

They start by approaching the museum

wearing stolen police uniforms.

The only question is will their disguises work?

So there they are, outside the door.

There's a closed circuit TV camera

shining right down on them.

Inside the museum less than 30 feet away

and Rick sees these two men

announcing themselves police officers.

"We're here to investigate a disturbance."

"What disturbance? There's no disturbance here."

The policy at the Gardner Museum is

nobody gets in the museum after it's closed.

Even if it's Boston Police or law enforcement,

what you're supposed to do is call Boston Police.

Rick Abath is familiar with the protocol,

but he chooses not to follow it.

He lets the two men inside the first door.

Thanks to the man trap,

he has one more chance to look them over.

Rick, he was very trusting

and a good-hearted person.

He decided it'd be OK to let them in.

♪ ♪

And unfortunately, it went totally wrong.

Instead of following protocol,

Rick buzzes them in and the heist is on.

This could have been Fort Knox.

But you let the people in,

then it really doesn't matter how much security you have.

By letting those two men into the museum,

Rick Abath unleashed the greatest art heist in history.

♪ ♪

♪ ♪

March 18, 1:24 a.m.

Two thieves posing as policemen

make it through the first security door

at the Gardner Museum.

He saw the uniforms and just assumed

that they were telling the truth.

Guard Rick Abath has one last opportunity

to stop them getting any farther.

Instead, he buzzes them in.

Then Rick says to them, "There's nothing going on."

They ask, "Who else is in the museum?"

"There's one other guard." "Call him down."

And Rick has a two-way radio. He calls down Randy.

As that second guard comes to the guard desk,

the individuals claiming to be Boston police officers

tell the guard at the desk, "Can I see your ID?

And at that point, the alleged officers say,

"There's a warrant out for your arrest."

And Rick says, "Mo, no, no, no, no, no.

I'm not wanted for anything."

By stepping away, he is going to be out of reach

from hitting the alarm bell.

The one security alarm bell the museum has

to the outside world.

And at that point,

they place handcuffs on the first guard.

The other guard who came down to the first floor,

they tell him to get up against the wall.

And Randy's going, "Oh, my God.

What is going on? What did Rick do?"

But then no sooner is he wondering this,

then he's being handcuffed.

That's when the one bad guy declared,

"Gentlemen, this is a robbery."

The fake police take control of the real guards

and tell them what will happen

if they tell the cops anything about the robbery,

and it's not pretty.

Tells them, "We now know who you are and where you live.

"Keep quiet, cooperate, and don't ever say anything

or we're going to come hunt you down."

They proceed to tape their eyes

so they can't see where they're going and then they're moved.

Both led down to the basement.

♪ ♪

At that moment, those guards didn't know

if they were going to live or die.

With the guards under control,

the men now have free reign of the entire museum.

But their movements are still being tracked

by the motion detectors throughout the building.

The dot matrix printer that is tracking movement

through the galleries shows exactly where they went,

for how long, and what they did there.

It's the closest thing, I think,

to sort of peeking through a keyhole

and watching the whole thing unfold.

The two thieves head to the second floor

filled with masterpieces of the Dutch Golden Age.

They start with a painting

worth an estimated $100 million,

Rembrandt's "Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee."

It's an enormous painting on which we see Christ

and the Apostles at sea in a storm.

♪ ♪

And the apostles look like

they're staring death in the face

and Christ alone is just serene among them.

And if you look very closely, there's Rembrandt.

He's painted himself in it.

So it's a remarkable painting.

It's full of movement and fury and it's his only seascape,

so it is one of a kind.

♪ ♪

The way they take it is brutal.

They slash it from its rosewood stretcher.

They slash it right out of the frame.

They did the same butcher job

to the prize of the room, Vermeer's "Concert."

So they're really wreaking havoc inside the room.

♪ ♪

What they did to priceless art was violent.

There's broken glass and splinters everywhere.

They take a Rembrandt etching.

It's about the size of postage stamp,

but it's in a very elaborate frame.

And we know that they spend the time

unscrewing every screw on that frame.

Requires a special tool.

If you're stealing millions of dollars' worth of paintings,

you would imagine time would be of the essence.

That you wouldn't be spending time unscrewing this item

and taking it out of the frame when frankly,

you probably could have put it in your pocket.

And they took one more thing from the Dutch room,

which doesn't fit with the theme of that room.

A 12th century Chinese gu, or beaker.

It's an ancient Chinese vase that they decided to take.

You'd think you could just grab that off the table,

but that was actually screwed to the table.

So somebody wasted significant time

getting that gu, which, again,

is not close to being in the top 300 items of value

in that museum.

♪ ♪

There seems to be no pattern to the items they're taking.

They aren't the most valuable, nor the easiest to carry.

The violent way the thieves

cut the paintings from the frames...

Suggest they don't understand the true value of the art.

In the Short Gallery,

they take five equestrian sketches by Degas.

Not his usual fare.

It just seemed like, "Oh, those look like nice drawings.

Let's take those, too."

♪ ♪

And they also tried to take a silk Napoleonic flag.

But they couldn't get that banner out of its frame.

But they take the finial...

the eagle-shaped finial at the top of the flagpole.

They take the final painting of the heist

from an entirely different part of the museum.

There's a painting taken from the Blue Room,

which is on the first floor.

And that is Manet's "Chez Tortoni."

It's a portrait of a man wearing a top hat.

He has brown eyes and he's kind of looking at you

in this beguiling way.

And what's interesting is that

there's no motion detected

in that room during the robbery.

While they may not know a lot about the art

they're stealing, they do seem to know a lot

about the museum's security setup.

The bad guys, when they left,

they saw the motion detector transcript

was being printed out at the guard's desk

and they ripped that out to steal the transcript

of where they had been, how they had done it.

Now what they didn't realize

is that the computer hard drive kept a record

of what was on that printout.

So while they took the paper,

we were able to determine after,

by using the hard drive of the computer,

where they had been.

Then the thieves go into the security office

and take the videotape from that evening.

So obviously, we couldn't see

what the security cameras showed during the robbery.

♪ ♪

One leaves first, and a few minutes later,

the second leave, and that's it.

They get in the car, presumably, drive away.

And those paintings or individuals

are never seen or heard from again.

What we know is that the thieves were in the museum

for 81 minutes, which is an astonishing length

of time for a heist.

Most heists are smash-and-grab.

You know, three minutes tops.

It makes me wonder...

Why didn't they take more?

In those 81 minutes,

the thieves take 13 priceless pieces of art

and vanish into thin air.

The museum sits quiet for the next five hours.

♪ ♪

So it's the morning of Sunday, March 18.

The guards for the next shift show up.

♪ ♪

The day shift comes and realize there's a problem.

The guards aren't here.

♪ ♪

We've reached a new frontier here

in the annals of art crime.

♪ ♪

I mean, this is brazen. This is big.

♪ ♪

At 7:45 Sunday morning,

the day shift arrives at the Gardner Museum.

Normally, the night guards buzz them in.

Not today.

♪ ♪

As soon as they step inside, they know something's wrong.

After they enter the Dutch room,

they call the police.

Boston police come. They sweep the museum.

They find a scene of destruction.

It's very clear that this has been a very brazen

and very violent robbery.

Investigators are alarmed by the destruction they see

and the art they don't.

They took all of the Rembrandts off the walls.

It's a half a billion up to a billion dollars' worth

of paintings.

One of them, mercifully, was not stolen.

It's a large self-portrait of Rembrandt at the age of 23

that was off the wall and turned away from the doorway.

It was worth many, many times more than the etching.

It seems like they took it off the wall

and then forgot about it.

Ten minutes after they arrive,

the police locate the missing guards.

They find the two guards

gagged and bound in the basement of the museum.

Each is handcuffed about 50 feet away from each other,

and their heads are duct taped.

They're duct taped this way,

they're duct taped around their eyes.

So of course, that was traumatic for them.

Relieved that both guards were alive,

authorities immediately work with them

to build a description of the suspects.

What these thieves looked like

depended on the memory of the two men who had seen them.

They believe they had Boston Police uniforms.

One was, I think, shorter and stocky.

Dark eyes, dark hair, olive skin.

One was thinner, wiry. One had glasses on.

The other has kind of a bowl cut and dark eyes.

Both of them had mustaches,

but they kept on pressing the mustache down,

so it gives a belief that they were false.

That's about all.

Even more important than what they looked like

is how well they seemed to know the museum's

new security features.

They had gotten the guards away from the panic button.

And they knew where the cellar door was.

They know where to get the videotape

in the security director's office,

and they know to take the printout.

In this case, it could be an inside job.

As news of the robbery shocks the art world

and tips start coming in,

the FBI focuses on the most obvious possibility.

This was an inside job.

♪ ♪

The FBI takes particular interest

in the security guard

who made one too many mistakes that night,

Rick Abath.

Rick Abath is a 23-year-old music school dropout

who loves the Grateful Dead

and jamming with his band, Ukiah.

He was just a cool, mellow guy.

Nothing about Rick said to me that he was subversive

or he was up to no good.

I think that a lot of the speculation in this case

about Rick Abath's motives and guilt

revolve around that one act of opening the door

and closing the door

and coming back inside before the heist.

That's a weird thing to do.

Why are you checking the outside door?

Because you can see it. There's a window right there.

You can just look and see if it's ajar.

Is he just making sure the door is locked,

or is he signaling bad guys that it's safe to come in?

There's one more thing that makes Rick a prime suspect.

One of the masterpieces, the Manet,

is stolen from that first floor Blue Room.

Based on the printout from security,

the thieves footsteps are never found downstairs

in the Blue Room where the "Chez Tortoni" is taken,

and the empty frame is left on the security director's chair,

which seems like a little bit of a...you know.

It's a little bit of a slap, maybe.

Despite the lingering questions,

the FBI'S investigation can't find any evidence

tying Rick Abath to the crime.

I worked the case for six years.

There was never enough evidence to charge anybody.

Whether a guard, an insider,

never enough to pull the trigger on an indictment.

Rick Abath is now a dead-end for investigators,

the first of many.

Over the next several months,

the FBI looks into every clue they unearth,

including a tip that the art thieves have ties to the mob.

More than a year after the heist,

they get a fresh lead

from the Massachusetts State Police who've been monitoring

a crooked car shop called TRC Auto.

TRC Auto is owned by Carmello Merlino...

♪ ♪

An Italian mob guy who has a crew of criminals.

They're heavy hitters, these guys.

You need a criminal?

You go there, you can get yourself a criminal

to steal anything you want.

The Massachusetts State Police

have been keeping eyes on these guys for quite some time

for, amongst other things, drugs, stolen items,

as well as the heist itself.

At the time, there were informants

who claimed that Carmello Merlino

had some hand either in the actual heist

or knew where the artwork was.

Law enforcement starts to get ins on the TRC gang

because very quickly, they know that this is the gang

that is most likely the source of the heist.

The FBI takes a closer look at drug dealers, thieves,

and enforcers surrounding Merlino.

Two men quickly rise to the top

of a possible suspects list...

George Reissfelder and Lenny DiMuzio.

Some people thought they matched the sketches

that both guards cooperated in.

Reissfelder in particular does more than

just fit the description.

There are whispers that he may have one of the paintings.

The thing for Reissfelder

that elevated him to the top of the list

is the fact that his own brother

claimed to have seen Manet's "Chez Tortoni"

hanging over George's bed at his apartment in Quincy.

Authorities are eager to talk to Reissfelder

and discuss his personal art collection.

They don't get chance.

In March of 1991,

he's found dead under suspicious circumstances.

And the Manet he supposedly held?

Nowhere to be found.

You have a guy who is not an injector found dead.

The needle was still in his arm.

And those who knew him said he didn't inject drugs.

He was afraid of needles, actually,

so it's a little suspicious.

What's interesting about it is that Carmello Merlino

was there at the house.

He went into his apartment before the police arrived.

And if the "Chez Tortoni" really was over George's bed,

then Carmello could have gone in there

and moved it beforehand.

♪ ♪

With Reissfelder permanently out of the picture,

investigators turn to his alleged partner

in the crime, Lenny DiMuzio.

But just like the Gardener paintings,

DiMuzio is missing.

Lenny DiMuzio visits his sister,

disappears on that visit.

A year after the Gardner Museum heist,

and one of the possible suspects is already dead.

Another, Lenny DiMuzio, is missing.

Three months after Reissfelder's body is found,

DiMuzio resurfaces, dead.

Lenny DiMuzio is found over in East Boston

in the trunk of a car...

and he's been shot multiple times.

Another dead-end.

Could this be Carmello Merlino cleaning up loose ends

or something else?

A message to other crew members

who may have ties to the heist?

♪ ♪

With their best leads stymied, law enforcement gets creative.

Some say it takes a thief to catch one,

so they turn to New England's most notorious art thief,

Myles Connor.

If Myles hadn't been in prison at the time,

people would have figured, "Case solved. It's Myles."

But there was some speculation that perhaps,

he knew who did it.

When authorities interview him in jail,

Connor tells them quite a tale.

While Myles Connor is sitting in federal prison

in California, he receives a visitor,

a friend who said, "We did this thing.

We did it for you. We're going to get you out."

And by we, he means Bobby Donati and him.

And it makes total sense to Myles.

Connor's connection with Bobby Donati runs deep.

They've stolen paintings before.

In the 1970s,

he and Bobby Donati cased the Gardner.

They were walking through the Short Gallery,

and Bobby Donati looked at the top of a silk Napoleonic flag.

He looked up at the bronze eagle finial and said,

"I like that."

I mean, you can kind of picture it soldered

onto the hood of a Cadillac.

♪ ♪

Investigators soon uncover something

even more interesting.

Donati has close ties to TRC Auto and its boss.

Bobby Donati is drawn to this TRC gang.

I think he finds in Carmello Merlino

a father figure, a patriarch that they could please,

that they could do things for.

And there's a further tie to the heist.

He's a race fan. Donati loves the horses.

And it has been suggested

that he just liked these Degas horse sketches.

He just liked them.

Just took them.

Police scour the streets of Boston looking for Donati.

Unfortunately, someone else finds Bobby first.

Donati is ambushed outside his home.

They surprise him at night. They grab him.

It's obvious there's been a struggle.

You know, blood on the porch.

And then he's found days later in the trunk of a car.

Bobby Donati was stabbed multiple times,

and his throat was slashed so deep

that he was reportedly nearly decapitated.

Now that's a message.

Not only are the leads drying up,

but the bodies are piling up.

The issue with so many of these theories and suspects

is that almost all of the prime suspects are dead.

In 1997, seven years after the heist,

a desperate Gardener Museum ups the reward money

to a whopping $5 million.

It works.

A few months later,

an antiques dealer comes forward

with some bold claims and some bold demands.

Bill Youngworth had a store in Brighton.

♪ ♪

He claims that

he can broker the return of the artwork.

♪ ♪

And he has demands.

He wants the $5 million reward

and he has some criminal charges pending against him

which he wants to get dismissed.

And he wanted Myles Connor,

the notorious New England art thief,

released from prison.

♪ ♪

Billy Youngworth is willing to prove

he really has the goods, but he doesn't trust the FBI.

Instead, he makes a tantalizing offer

to a "Boston Herald" journalist.

Youngworth will show the journalist

one of the masterworks stolen from the Gardner

if he agrees to write about it.

The journalist gets into a car

with people he doesn't know

and doesn't know what's going to happen on the other end.

He was blindfolded and driven to someplace

outside of New York and taken to a warehouse.

You can imagine the anxiety.

He enters a warehouse,

which is completely dark inside.

There, he's walked in and shown by flashlight

some tubes in the corner.

And the reporter recounts this canvas being unfurled,

and what...he's only allowed to see it for a glimpse.

Seven years after it went missing,

a Boston journalist catches a glimpse

of one of Rembrandt's masterpieces

in a dingy warehouse in Brooklyn.

He sees "The Storm on the Sea of Galilee."

They roll it back up and said, "There it is."

And they take him back.

The next day, he starts writing his article.

Big headlines:

"We've seen it!"

Front cover, "Boston Herald,"

with a picture of "The Storm of Galilee" on the front.

And it makes a noise throughout the world.

I mean, everyone was like, "oh, my God.

Is this the first credible sighting of this painting?

♪ ♪

After seven long years, the museum is eager

to make a deal with Billy Youngworth,

but the FBI is, well, less trusting.

They have some demands of their own

if Youngworth wants the money:

more solid proof than one man's word.

The "Herald" also asked for some other proof,

and was provided some paint chips

that Youngworth claimed came from the Rembrandt.

A few months later, the FBI analyzes the sample

and says, "This is not from that Rembrandt."

They're ruled out

as being from "Storm on the Sea of Galilee."

The FBI thinks the painting is fake

and Youngworth is a con artist.

They refuse to make a trade.

When I was interviewing conservators about

how likely it would be

that "Storm on the Sea of Galilee"

could have been rolled and then unfurled.

They say the painting would have been destroyed

because there's so much lacquer on it.

There was no follow-up

from the U.S. Attorney's office in Boston about it

because they believed that

he was peddling in fake paintings.

♪ ♪

Although interest in the missing artwork

is at an all-time high since the heist,

the investigation is at an all-time low.

With no new leads,

the FBI circles back to the nagging suspicion

that the TRC gang is responsible...

so they plant someone on the inside.

It was around the time that this informant

started working at TRC.

Well, he reports back to his FBI agent

that they're talking about the Gardener there.

With all eyes back on the garage,

investigators turn their gaze to someone new...

a frequent visitor there, Bobby Guarente.

If you make a Venn diagram of all the bad guys,

and I did do this...

Everybody kind of crosses paths with everybody,

and Bobby Guarente is in the middle of it.

Guarente is an interesting character.

He's sort of a jack-of-all-trades,

and he is able to move fluidly

through a lot of different areas

and amongst different groups.

A lot of people used Guarente

because he was trusted by most people in this industry

that they're in as much as people can be trusted.

My sense is Donati reached out to him.

The only person I know who had the network

that could fence it was Guarente.

If Bobby Guarente had a hand in moving the artwork,

the FBI is unable to get any answers from him.

He dies in 2004.

Surprisingly, from natural causes.

But this time,

Guarente's death is not a total dead-end.

The FBI and the museum get tips about a home

that Bobby Guarente owned in Maine,

reported to have a spot big enough

to hide a very big painting like "Storm in the Sea."

And they find a hiding spot

that fits exactly this description.

When they return the key to Bobby Guarente's widow Elene,

she said, "I've seen those paintings.

My Bobby had some of those paintings."

Although the prize paintings

are no longer in their hiding place,

the FBI believes they were there.

More importantly, they think they know where they went.

Elene Guarente tells a story about being in Portland, Maine

with her husband, Bobby Guarente,

and another fellow, Bobby Gentile,

this Connecticut mobster.

Everyone has a best friend here.

Bobby Gentile is a small-timer

out of Manchester, Connecticut,

right outside of Hartford.

Guarente and Gentile have dinner with their wives

at this seafood restaurant.

At one point during that meal, they got up

and went to the parking lot and went back inside.

And then on the way home, Guarente said,

"You don't have to worry about those pictures anymore."

He passed them to Bobby Gentile.

It's now May, 2012,

22 years since the Gardner Museum heist,

and the FBI has chased leads

from Boston to Brooklyn to Maine.

Their hunt now turns to Connecticut

and a small-time crook named Bobby Gentile.

So here's Bobby Gentile in his 70s,

living on a leafy street in Manchester, Connecticut,

when he's served with a warrant by the FBI

to search his property.

They don't find what they're looking for in the house.

They leave, they come back

with a warrant for the garden shed.

There were probably ten, 15 vehicles.

They had beagles and golden retrievers

and video cameras, guys in lab coats.

I mean, this was the production.

They used side scan sonar

to see if there was anything buried in the yard.

And there was a void under the shed.

And that's where they hit pay dirt.

More than two decades after the hunt began,

the FBI is searching mobster Bobby Gentile's home,

and they find a secret compartment

under a backyard shed.

I'm sitting outside of the shed,

and they're cutting into the floorboards.

The excitement was palpable.

And then they pull the floorboard up,

and everybody's looking over the top.

And then it's just...

defeat.

It's empty.

Despite their disappointment,

the FBI finds evidence

that's both intriguing and incriminating.

In the basement, they have the "Boston Herald"

from the day after the theft.

Inside is a sheet of paper,

and it has all 13 pieces that were stolen

with what the piece would buy on the black market.

And unfortunately for my client,

they found a lot of guns

and a few police uniforms, uh, which was, uh,

tough to explain.

It all looks really bad for Bobby Gentile.

The circumstantial evidence is strong

that he had something to do with the heist.

Looking at serious prison time

for the illegal weapons,

Bobby Gentile agrees to tell the FBI

everything he knows about the stolen art.

The only way that they're going

to be able to verify that information is on a polygraph.

And he says, "I'll tell them anything they want."

So they put up a whole bunch of pictures on the wall,

of all of the objects that were taken.

And they say, "Have you ever seen this one?"

He says, "No." "Have you ever seen this one?"

He says, "No." "Have you ever seen this one?"

Fails it. Every question they ask him.

Like most aspects of this case,

the interrogation of Bobby Gentile

creates more questions than answers.

Gentile is sent to prison for the rest of his life,

which may not be very long.

I was called by the U.S. Marshals office

and they said, "Your client is dying."

I drive to the hospital.

He was very upset and he kept saying over and over again,

I can't die here, I can't die here.

So I said to him,

"Bob, there has to be something that you know.

"There has to be, because there's all this smoke

"around this case, and it's all over you.

You have to know where this fire started."

And I said, "And if you just give that to me,

you can die at home in your bed with your wife."

And he looked at me desperately,

and tears were coming down both of his eyes.

And he just said,

"There ain't no paintings, kid.

There ain't no paintings."

Bobby Gentile survives that health scare,

but dies in September, 2021,

and the location of a $1/2 billion in stolen art

may have died with him.

Authorities believe that Gentile, at one point,

knew where that artwork was.

You know, maybe they were in the ditch.

They were ruined in a flood that took place

in the back yard of the Gentiles' house.

Though the FBI is still trying to recover the artwork,

they now believe they know

who committed the original robbery:

suspects George Reissfelder and Lenny DiMuzio.

The fate of the art is not as clear.

The FBI holds a press conference

that says, basically,

"We know who did it and we know where the artwork went.

We just don't know where it is right now."

They believe that the thieves were dead.

They had very good information that the artwork changed hands,

that it went through organized crime circles

from Boston to Connecticut to Philadelphia.

One theory is somebody had them all together in one place

and died or was murdered

and they're buried and we can never find them.

But it's hard to imagine that they're all in one place.

It's been over 30 years.

I have a hard time believing, if they were broken up

amongst multiple groups of people,

that nothing would have come forward after this much time,

particularly with a huge reward.

Today, the whereabouts of the 13 pieces of artwork

remains a mystery,

and finding them is still as urgent as it was

on March 18, 1990, the day of the heist.

I do think the key for this investigation

is for more people to know about it.

If they're still around,

somebody will come across one of them,

and they need to understand the significance of it.

These don't belong in some crawlspace

in an attic somewhere.

These belong back on the walls.

We'll work to get them back. And who wins?

Our grandchildren win.

Until the artwork is returned,

the frames hang empty in the museum.

The reward for any information leading to the recovery

now stands at 10 million bucks.

The Gardner robbery remains

the largest art theft in world history,

and one of history's greatest heists.

♪ ♪