01x02 - Vipers in the Grass

[bunniefuu]

[eerie music playing]

[raindrops pattering]

[Fisher] If we could go back

to the scene of the crime now,

with DNA and forensic investigations,

it'd be a much different crime scene.

It's 1990.

You had Boston Police first on scene.

By the time the FBI gets there,

the scene's been disturbed.

So, I was very interested in

where's the evidence,

what's the evidence,

and I'd like to review it

to understand what happened.

We knew that the thieves

took the VHS tape

the night of the robbery,

but I wanted to know

if we had the prior VHS tapes.

That's what I went to.

I got the tape, went to the night before.

I wanted to see, "How does opening

the outside door work?"

You can see a car pull up.

You can't really tell

what kind of car it is.

You can see an individual get out.

I couldn't tell what they were wearing.

They could've been in a police uniform.

There should be no way

they're getting in.

That's a locked door.

There's a guard there.

And the protocol is nobody gets in.

Rick was working that night.

The person was just buzzed right in.

Right through both doors.

The night of the robbery,

it happened the same way.

That struck me as odd.

[atmospheric music playing]

Was it organized crime?

Was it a crime of opportunity?

Was it an inside job?

[foreboding music plays]

[man] They said, "Boston Police."

And I buzzed them in.

[intense string music plays]

Boston, a quiet museum,

a daring robbery.

[Abath] I'm the guy who opened the door.

They're looking at me.

[reporter]

The biggest art heist in history.

The 13 art treasures stolen

are worth a half a billion dollars.

Take a look at these composite drawings.

[Murphy]

There's no shortage of possible suspects.

[reporter 2] Gardner Museum

doubling its reward up to $10 million.

[Murphy] How do you eliminate people?

[Green] Why not k*ll these people?

[Hawley]

I had no idea what I was going into.

It was just horrifying.

[reporter 3] The empty frames

are all that remain on the museum walls.

[atmospheric music playing]

[Fannin] After the robbery,

I think it was a couple of weeks.

I'm sure I heard through the grapevine

that Rick was the guy.

And then he just showed up one day

in Harvard Square.

I could tell that it was You know.

It was rough for him.

He just seemed defeated.

He told me about what happened.

I think I asked him,

I said, "Did you get fired?"

And he said, "No, I quit,

but the FBI wants me to hang around."

[Murphy] 16 Farrington was the house

where Rick Abath lived.

[crowd clamoring]

[band playing rock music]

[Murphy] It was sort of a frat house

kind of atmosphere in Allston.

Sort of a college section of the city.

And he was in a band.

A number of the band members lived there

and other friends lived there.

And it was a bit of a party house.

They used to put on shows.

[Fannin] They're just like cool guys.

You know, all long hair, hippie guys.

They're the type of hippies

that like, were good at chess.

They hung out and they went

in the basement and, you know

smoke weed, drink beer,

and they'd rock out.

The band was called Ukiah.

People found good roommates

and friends and it was just good.

I was like 19 years old.

Good times. [chuckles]

At one point we were over there,

it was like 11:30 or whatever,

and he was like,

"I gotta get a car to go to work."

And I'm like, "You're kidding.

You gotta go to work now?"

Rick Abath acknowledged

that he would show up high to work.

He says he was sober that night,

but we know he's not someone

that always plays by the rules.

[rock music cl*max]

[tense string music playing]

[Abath] Come in

uh clock in

There would be two guards.

Sit around, walk around, basically.

[Murphy] Abath's on duty that night.

The second guard, he calls in sick.

When you hear that, you're like,

a guy called in sick that night

It was St. Patrick's Day.

Mulvey was an older guy.

I had heard that he would

frequently call in sick.

[Fannin] Joe Mulvey liked the job,

but he didn't need the job.

If it had rained a lot and it was

treacherous to get out to his car,

he would call off.

But I don't know if Joe

would've opened the door.

Joe was that type of guy

that would have just been like,

"Mmm, no." [chuckles]

"You can wait there."

If he had come in,

maybe the museum

wouldn't have been robbed.

And then you could say, "Okay,

what about the guy who covered for him?"

Right?

The second guard on duty

had never worked that shift before.

Randy, I think, took that shift.

[scoffs] I think he went that night

thinking he was gonna practice trombone,

and just do a shift

and hang out in the museum.

The guy who covered had a couple hours'

notice that he was working that night.

So, yeah, again,

but that was investigated.

What is unusual is the fact

they actually got in.

That's where I get back to the man-trap.

There's two doors, both locked.

You get buzzed in the first door.

The second door cannot open.

The problem is you could be stuck there

impersonating Boston Police.

[Abath] I could see 'em

on the outside camera,

walking down the street.

They stopped, buzzed the buzzer,

and I just leaned over

to the intercom and said, "Yeah?"

And I buzzed them into the museum.

The fact that this worked as planned

by those two individuals

is hard for me to believe

if they didn't have some knowledge

that they were getting in.

Jesus Christ.

Look at this. b*stards.

My name is Steve Kurkjian.

I am a retired newspaper reporter

with the Boston Globe.

I was a founding member

of the Spotlight Team,

started in 1972.

We find out stuff, we reveal stuff,

and we do it for the public good.

There's our boy.

Two or three months before the theft,

he had let people into the museum

at midnight,

January 1.

A New Year's Eve party.

He is stoned and drugged out of his mind.

He was in a psychedelic fog.

What? It's mind-blowing.

That the security of this palace

with all the majesties of art,

was left in the hands of a guy

who was that negligent.

Uh, it's it's shocking.

[on radio] Down to Magic.

Celtics 5 and 0 this season,

when Bird scores 40 or more

[tense music playing]

[Fisher] Maybe it was two random thieves

decided to hit the Gardner that night,

and, by a stroke of luck,

they were let in.

I have a hard time believing that.

It's then hard for me to believe

they would have known about

the conservator's room.

Know where the VHS tape is.

Spend 81 minutes in the museum.

It seemed to me they knew

the police were not coming.

[Murphy] Richard Abath opened the door,

minutes prior to letting them in.

He says that was his practice.

That's what he always did.

[Fisher] To date, I've never seen

what a guard opening the outside door

looked like on video.

I was never able to find it

on the previous six days.

If there's two guards inside and you have

security cameras and everything's alarmed,

why are you opening that outside door

even for a couple of seconds?

[Kurkjian] No one else I talked to

who did the night shift

ever opened those back doors.

Rick said he did it all the time.

I haven't been able to confirm he did.

If he's an accomplice,

he's telling bad guys

who are waiting outside,

"I'm taking over the desk."

Now this would make Rick

a true accomplice.

Another peculiar thing is the Chez Tortoni

was taken from the first floor,

and also its frame was left on the chair

of the head of security,

and that was viewed as a little bit of a

[chuckles]

to the head of security.

A little bit of a snub.

There was some question

about whether that was personal.

[Kurkjian] Rick did not have a great

relationship with the security director.

People did say Rick

was a pain in the a*s.

He acknowledges.

He said, "I was talking all the time

about the security system sucks.

We're in danger here."

The theft was Sunday morning.

Rick had put in his papers to move on

just a few days before.

Could Rick have snatched the painting

and hid it when he went back to the desk?

[tense string music playing]

In 2013, I went to his house.

Knocked, announced myself saying,

"I want to talk about the museum."

And he agreed.

We drove downtown to one of the two places

in the town that allowed smoking still.

Rick was a heavy smoker.

I had an interview with him.

[Abath] New technology.

[Kurkjian] I know. Let's hope it works.

All right, so

Here we are.

Rick

- [Abath] Yes, we are.

- Here we are.

[Kurkjian] We talked,

I think probably by 7:30,

eight o'clock at night,

until closing time, until midnight.

And he told me

as much as he could tell me.

[Kurkjian] Okay, so the thing goes down.

You had already given your notice?

- [Abath] Yes.

- Why give your notice?

[Abath] It was getting in the way

of playing with the band.

[Kurkjian] How long do you stay in town?

What happens afterwards?

[Abath] After the robbery,

I was planning on

calling in sick that next night,

because I had tickets

to the Grateful Dead shows in Hartford.

So I left town and went down to Hartford

to see the shows.

And I had a great time,

drinking and smoking reefer.

Did a bunch of acid the first night,

mushrooms the second night.

Then I came back to Boston.

[Kurkjian] Do you have any idea

how the people who broke in

knew about the museum security?

[Abath] No.

[Kurkjian] You've been

recently questioned by the authorities

about the Blue Room and your

Let's go through all that.

[Fisher] According to motion sensors,

the guard that let the robbers in

had been the last person in that room.

The system had been reviewed by

security experts right after the robbery,

experts that are still around today

in the industry and are well-respected,

and claimed it was working

as it should have, night of the robbery.

[dramatic music plays]

[man 1] Freeze!

[man 2] It could happen like this,

capturing a thief,

saving an irreplaceable treasure,

but it probably won't.

Incidents like these can happen

any time or any place in a museum.

Your job is to spot 'em

and to know what to do.

This film deals with security,

museum security.

Museum security is different

[Keller] I'm Steve Keller,

and I'm president of a company

called Steve Keller Associates.

And we're museum security consultants.

I did a risk assessment

at the Gardner Museum

in the year prior to the theft.

After the Gardner Museum theft,

the museum asked if I would be able

to come to Boston to test the alarms.

I had done some walk tests of the system

while I was at that visit.

I tried everything,

and all of those detectors

detected me each time.

How did that happen?

[interviewer] How long after the theft

were you there doing a walk-through?

Uh, it was a it was a couple of weeks.

This is a printout of the alarm activity

that occurred on that night.

When it comes to the alarm information,

that's the main stuff right here.

This is the important thing,

this printout.

[interviewer] Have you seen this before?

No, I haven't.

I haven't seen the printout at all.

I wish I had.

I wish they would have

shared things with me, but, uh

you know

I understand how it is with the FBI.

It appears that the investigators

made notes along the columns.

[pages rustling]

At 12:27 a.m

an alarm went off for a motion detector

at the exit corridor,

and then, within the minute,

an alarm went off on the entrance corridor

on the other side of the Blue Room.

There's no motion detectors

in the Blue Room itself.

So it appears Rick

passed through the Blue Room

and exited within the same minute.

At 1:24 a.m.,

the outside door to the museum

on Palace Road opened.

And that appears to be

when the thieves entered the museum.,

and then the next alarms occur

at 1:48 a.m.,

which was 24 minutes later.

Which is an awful long time

to linger in one location.

[printer whirring]

- [alarm beeping]

- So at 1:48,

we start to get a series of alarms

on the second floor.

The alarms occurred

in the Dutch Room until 1:51,

and then you start to see

other alarms occurring.

An alarm in the Italian Room,

then it went to the Little Salon.

And then there were

a long series of alarms.

[alarms continue beeping]

There's an alarm in the Dutch Room again,

and then an alarm

in the second floor hallway,

and then there were no further alarms

for four minutes.

But then there's an alarm

in the Little Salon again.

That just was curious to me.

There seems to be a gap in the alarms

from 2:15 to 2:23.

It's a period of eight minutes.

At 2:28 a.m.,

there's another 12 minute gap

until 2:40 a.m.

It appears that there were no alarms

triggered on the first floor

while the thieves were inside the museum.

According to this printout,

the thieves are inside the museum

for 81 minutes,

and they didn't trigger any alarms

for 48 of those minutes.

In those days,

you didn't saturate the museum,

so there might have been hallways

that didn't have motion detection.

I know they had difficulties

running wires in that building.

They also had a fire alarm

that occurred that night.

So it's very possible

that they had a power glitch.

I wish that I would have been

asked about this early on,

because it does change your understanding

of what actually happened.

[Fannin] Some days you'd go into a room

just to see if the motion sensor

would catch you.

You know, they worked, but

they weren't 100% reliable.

[Abath] Well, apparently,

me on my round

is the last time there's any alarm

in the Blue Room.

They wanted to know

how it would be possible

for the thieves to get that painting

out of that room.

- [Kurkjian] How they stole the Manet?

- Right.

Which is a perfectly reasonable question.

And my answer is, I have no idea.

[Kurkjian] Okay.

But the likelihood of your sitting down,

having a few beers, smoking a little dope

and saying something,

- is that about

- [Abath] That's pretty likely.

We were all bitching about

the security in that place.

For Rick to take that painting?

No way.

What's he gonna do with it?

Those guys cut the other ones

out of the frames

and Rick gets to get away with that one?

Please.

I don't wanna put anything

on Rick's shoulders.

I know Rick, he knows me.

Um

If we could've charged somebody,

we would've.

So, I think that speaks for itself.

We never made it to the point

where we could charge somebody.

["I Shall Be Released"

by The Band playing]

[Abath] I was completely panicking.

And then I started singing,

"I Shall Be Released."

I see my light ♪

Come shining ♪

From the west down to the east ♪

[Abath] What happened, happened.

For some reason,

I seem to be the only person

involved in this thing

who's not trying to figure it out.

And that mainly comes down to

I'm glad to be alive.

I shall be released ♪

[Kurkjian]

I think if there is a secret within him,

he said the wrong thing unintentionally

to the wrong person.

Did the bad guys know that there was

only one alarm to the outside world?

It was known by every guard

and every night watchman.

It didn't have to be Rick

who gave them that secret.

[moody, suspenseful music plays]

[Heidorn] It was mid-September 1981.

I was acting chief of security

at the time.

I forget what day it was,

but it was during the day.

Well-dressed fellow

with a briefcase came in.

It was Detective Clark from the FBI.

He showed his credentials.

And when I saw the badge

and the FBI thing

It gets your attention.

He said, "I just thought

you would like to know that

somebody is casing you."

He told me the whole story

about this guy by the name of Royce.

How this guy was an area lowlife.

Royce is gonna throw a smoke b*mb

in the courtyard,

and in the ensuing confusion

pull the Whistler and the Matisse

and, I think, the Sargent out.

And they arrested him.

The FBI guy, Mr. Clark,

he said this fellow

had way too much information.

You either have someone

who's willingly giving out information

or you have a tapped resource.

You could've had an insider

friendly with organized crime,

or owed a debt to organized crime,

or a debt to a gambler

or a drug dealer.

And this was sort of payment.

We'll let you in the museum

or give you information.

It could've been that.

Boston's a small town.

Everybody's related, didn't you know that?

Of course there were people

in the museum that had mob ties.

Who didn't, right?

I think that a lot of people

had access to that place.

[Kurkjian] Louis Royce

was an active member of the Rossetti g*ng.

And they were always looking for scores.

Banks, armored cars.

That tells me that the Rossetti g*ng

knew through Louis

that this museum

was vulnerable to a theft.

[inquisitive music playing]

[Kurkjian]

In '81, the museum's made aware

that vipers are in the grass

and moving towards you.

So, that would seem to me to have been

clear indications

that it's time to get up to speed.

It was a real eye opener

as to how vulnerable we really were.

We sat down and talked with the director,

who was Rollin Hadley at the time,

and a couple of other people,

and sat down and saying,

"Here's the reality. What we gonna do?"

I was a little taken aback that

Mr. Hadley didn't take it as serious.

His attitude was more or less,

"They caught the guy, right?"

I go, "Well, it didn't happen,

but something very similar can happen."

[Kurkjian] It's inattention.

One museum trustee, Arnold Hiatt,

had been recently elevated

to a trustee in the museum,

and he said,

"We have to get a new director

who really cares about

Who's on his or her toes."

That's what they hired in Anne Hawley.

I took over in September of 1989,

but it was practically 1990.

It's such a beautiful environment

that you almost pinch yourself

to be there every day.

This was being in nature and art.

The collection, at the time,

was insured for everything but theft.

But there were lots of initiatives

that I was trying to push forward.

The museum had yet to install

a climate control system.

That was the priority

that I think we all saw.

I'll never forget, it was raining

and there was actually a cloud that formed

in the Spanish Cloister

in front of the El Jaleo,

because the moisture outside

was as high as the moisture inside.

There was a sewer pipe

that broke in one of the galleries.

The cast iron gave way

and sewage started coming down

in the middle of a gallery

with paintings and things like this,

and it's

And that's not good for a museum.

And of course

this just blindsided us completely.

[Hiatt] Anne Hawley,

she was so despondent.

She called me,

she said tearfully,

"You never told me this would happen."

And I said,

"I never knew it would happen."

[interviewer]

Were you ever warned,

"Hey, watch out, you could get robbed,"

or anything like that?

Yeah. No.

When an organization or a person

becomes a victim,

there's just a pile-on that happens.

Calls would come in

from people in prisons

around the country,

that wouldn't talk to the FBI,

they wanted to talk to me

or the security director,

because they said they had information

that they wanted to trade.

But I certainly didn't have the skill set

to be strategizing the investigation.

I want to refer all security questions

to the FBI.

[Hawley] And then, on top of that,

the museum got several b*mb threats

and threats on people's lives.

So, there was a whole dark side going on.

[reporter]

Crime is suddenly the dark obsession

of the opulent world of art.

The black tie business

of champagne and culture

and price tags big as the Ritz

has made art burglary

a booming industry.

A shadow enterprise stripped of romance

that experts claim is increasingly

tied to the drug trade.

2,950,000.

We've come this far.

[Smith] It doesn't take

a person with a bad mind

long to start feeling maybe there's

an opportunity here to make money.

In the old days, a cat burglar

pried open the skylight,

came down on the rope

and took the pictures out and so on.

Now people walk into museums

and say, "Stick 'em up!"

The clandestine activity

in the traffic of stolen art, worldwide,

is probably about three quarters

of a billion dollars.

- [interviewer] Billion?

- Yes.

In the 1980s,

the crime of art theft increased,

but it made sense,

because the value of art was rising.

If we're talking iconic works of art

from museums and galleries here,

the sort of things that can't be resold

through the legal art market,

then this is used by the criminals

as collateral.

That's how it works.

[upbeat disco music plays]

[Ellis] If you are the owner of a house

and you decide that you need

some investment money,

you go to the bank

and they will advance you money

against your house.

That's exactly how the black market works.

[Connor] Back then,

cocaine was a pretty big business.

There was a number of people involved

in that business making a buck from it.

I lived in South Boston

in the 1980s and the 1990s.

There was more cocaine in South Boston

than any neighborhood in the city.

It was everywhere.

I mean,

I literally saw people do it on bar tops.

These were not nice establishments.

Did not bring my wife

to these establishments.

But it happened.

[Connor] Say, for instance,

you have a large cocaine shipment,

say, 20 kilos of cocaine,

but you don't have anything more

than 20,000 bucks cash to put down.

But you have several million dollars'

worth of stolen art.

So you give that art as security.

And they hold the art

until they're reimbursed

for whatever the value of the cocaine is.

That's how that goes.

[Ellis] They take

that recorded legitimate value

and they run with anywhere

between three and ten percent of that

as being what it's worth

on the black market to the criminals.

Why do people steal artwork?

Well, there's a number of reasons.

You get it because you wanna

continue to look at it.

You want the reward.

You want the insurance money.

You wanna save yourself from jail,

you wanna get somebody out of jail.

So it's a good bartering piece.

You know, there's a good example

of Myles Connor in Boston

stealing the Rembrandt

from the Museum of Fine Art.

Uh, his intention was, all along,

to use that as a bargaining chip

over his next sentence.

So you gotta look

at the motive behind the theft.

[Leppo] That's all Myles.

Myles did a lot of jail time.

State prison time, federal time.

[inquisitive orchestral music plays]

[Leppo] It's the mid-'70s,

and Myles had a parole violation

with the Feds.

Then he was picked up in Mashpee

with some stolen paintings.

I made a deal that they would reduce

his million-dollar bail down to $100.

Believe it or not,

Myles, he's on the street now.

I got the idea from an FBI agent

that said, "it'll take a Rembrandt

to get you out of this, Connor."

I said, "Okay."

And so, I knew there was

a Rembrandt on loan,

and it was uninsured.

And I knew that it could be taken.

[Leppo] Myles went in,

joined a tour that was going on.

Had somebody with him,

removed the painting from the wall,

went to walk out.

The guards

These guards were not musicians

like at the Isabella Stewart Gardner.

These guys were all retired cops.

[Connor] There was a phalanx of guards.

A friend of mine was down there

with a machine g*n.

Not to sh**t anybody,

but to sh**t at the feet of anybody.

And sure enough, they came down.

He let go of the machine g*n.

[rapid g*nf*re]

When that thing goes off,

it was like a vacuum.

[whooshes] Took 'em all back.

Except for one

that was a retired Polish cop.

And he was convinced that

"I am not letting this kid

take this f*cking painting on my watch."

So, he ran down,

he latched onto the painting.

And in the back of the van,

I've got another friend,

with another machine g*n.

He aims the machine g*n at the guy.

I said, "Do not sh**t the guy."

He hits the guy in the head

wh with his g*n.

And finally the guy lets go.

[Leppo]

It later surfaced under a lady's bed

to be returned to Mass State Police.

So the Rembrandt was not used

for any monetary value.

[Kurkjian] He got two four-year sentences

combined into one four-year sentence.

Out of that comes this myth

within the bad-guy world,

that having a stolen painting,

a masterpiece,

is a get-out-of-jail-free card.

"The Feds will deal with you.

They'll let you out of jail.

Look what they did to Myles."

[mellow instrumental music plays]

[Connor] Anybody who was a thief,

an art thief,

knew about the Gardner.

You had to.

I've talked with guys and said,

"I've scoped that place out."

I'm not gonna tell you who,

but I've scoped that place out.

It was an easy, easy score,

as they say on the street.

[Murphy] We now know

that a lot of local wise guys

were scoping out the museum.

They were casing it.

But at that time,

the focus was on all these other events.

[Cullen] Put it this way, back in 1990,

if you're an FBI agent,

the way you get a promotion,

the way you get a raise,

do a big Mafia case.

The culture hadn't changed.

That was how you got

your name in the paper,

how you got your people on the news.

Solving an art theft

versus a Mafia prosecution in 1990,

what do you think

is gonna get more attention?

[woman] There was a theft here last night.

Two Rembrandts and a Vermeer.

- Is that why it's closed?

- [woman] Yes, that's why.

[man] The gates at the Gardner Museum

will stay locked

while authorities search for clues

in the daring weekend heist.

[Cullen] When the FBI gets in,

they kinda shut stuff down.

They assert complete dominance

or control of an investigation.

Not only not telling us what's going on,

they're not telling the locals,

not the Staties.

[Brekke] Much like a kidnapping case,

we wanted to be in it from the outset.

When you're at the FBI academy,

you learn about collecting evidence.

It's somewhat rudimentary.

Dusting for fingerprints,

doing tire impressions,

those type of things.

We had low-level training back then.

If the Gardner was robbed today,

it would be different.

There were a lot of things

that weren't taken

that we would have taken today.

In 1990, that wasn't part of the protocol.

And I remember going into

the conservator's room.

That particular door was ajar.

So I dunno who opened that.

I didn't know if the police opened it.

Did the robbers open that door?

I'm not sure.

That's another thing

with crime scenes now.

We know everybody that entered

the crime scene,

where they came from,

when they left.

There's a person at the door

that does all of that.

Back then, yeah, there wasn't.

We figured if we had any luck at all

of obtaining any type

of fingerprint, ridge detail,

it would've been off the duct tape.

The way we had the tape at the time,

it was removed by BPD.

It was all balled up.

That tape then would've been taken in.

Liquid nitrogen would be applied to it.

It would release the bonding properties.

You'd be able to stretch the duct tape out

so that it's straight.

So we were hoping to do that,

but then the tape went missing.

It's gone. It's vanished.

They don't have it. They can't test it.

[Green]

To the best of my knowledge,

the tape was never examined

for fingerprints.

Back then you'd sign it out.

I'd say, "I'm giving this

to the State Police to test."

And off it would go.

So I don't think there was any of that

exchange of paper and whatnot.

It went missing. I think to this day,

they probably don't have any idea

where it's at.

You know,

to this day, that sticks in my craw.

Because of all the things

we probably would have found from that.

They weren't thinking about DNA in 1990,

but you would think that evidence

would be preserved.

They've said, "Chances of finding anything

on duct tape from 29 years ago,

what are the chances?"

You don't know you don't have it,

if you don't look.

There's never been forensic evidence,

DNA, fingerprints,

hair, anything like that

that says, "These are the thieves."

I remember I was sitting in the kitchen,

I'm reading the Boston Globe,

and seeing something about

the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Reading what happened,

that it was two men

dressed as police officers

that robbed the museum,

it was just like the coin drop.

Like, "Oh my God!"

[suspenseful music playing]

For uniformed policemen to be in

what I recalled as a Dodge Daytona,

this little hatchback.

That seems odd.

When we went to make a statement

to the police in Dudley Square,

I pointed out the patch

that was on a uniform jacket

hanging in the room.

Said, "It was just like that.

It was exactly that."

Then he took it away,

'cause he didn't want me

to presumably have my memory be informed

by the things in the room

while taking a statement.

It looks like these are the notes

that detectives would have taken

when we were interviewed

at the police station.

[Stratman] Interesting.

I didn't recall giving such an explicit

description of the person.

White male, dark hair.

[Clougherty]

Black hair, a mustache.

Medium to dark complexion.

Early 30s, wide eyes,

hair below the ears.

Average height or a little taller.

And I also remember seeing the sketches.

And I thought,

"Neither of these look like the guys

that I got a really good look at."

[Stratman] To my knowledge,

the folks I spoke with at the station

were members of the Boston police force.

I have no recollection

of ever talking to the FBI.

None of the FBI folks

reached out to me later on.

If it was the Boston Police,

was that information shared with the FBI?

I don't know.

But someone who was responsible

for the investigation

never followed through

and contacted me again,

and I was an eye witness.

[Kurkjian] There were 45 agents

working the case right at the outset.

Well, that ended soon after,

within a month,

and those agents went on to other things.

It then evolved down to one agent,

who was 26 years old.

[Cullen] Is that how old

the FBI agent was? He was 26?

That tells you something right there.

You would think, if this was the movies,

they'd make a call.

"Hello, Mr. Desmond."

Some guy picks up the phone

on a beach somewhere.

"Your services are needed."

They'd bring in some real high-powered guy

who had done something like this

somewhere before.

It doesn't sound like that happened.

[Fisher] By the time I get involved,

it's 20 years later.

I spent a lot of time focused on,

"What evidence do we have?"

[interviewer] Was there any identification

you guys could have made

from who had entered the museum

the night previous?

Um, we tried to figure out who that was.

We made the determination

it would be best to release the video

to the public,

and the Globe, New York Times,

and other outlets picked it up.

The car drives up,

you see some light in it.

[reporter] I sat down with FBI assistant

special agent in charge Peter Kowenhoven,

who took me through the 25-year-old video

released publicly for the very first time.

He shows me the guy

he wants your help in identifying.

That's the individual of interest.

He just came in.

You see the corner of his head

as it bounces back and forth.

[interviewer] Begs the question,

had nobody seen that tape?

I don't know.

I had never seen it. I don't

I have never spoken to anybody

that has seen the tape.

A cold case, you don't think of that.

The stuff's been in storage for 25 years.

You don't think of getting it out,

showing it to the public.

You think everyone's seen it

like you have, and they haven't.

[interviewer] What did you think

when that police tape comes out in 2015?

I laughed.

You mean to say

it took all that time to see it?

[dramatic music playing]

The FBI has concluded they know who it is,

and it was potentially

one of the employees.

[Kurkjian] The FBI, they get a call

from a couple of ex-guards,

one of whom says,

"That's nothing suspicious.

That's not a mystery."

She says, "That's Larry O'Brien,

the deputy director."

Why are we learning about this in 2015?

Why 25 years after the theft?

[Hiatt] We didn't have

much confidence in the FBI.

It didn't seem to be the high priority.

We didn't think we were getting,

really, their full attention.

[pulsing, moody music plays]

[Hiatt] They seemed distracted.

I didn't know why at the time.

[Murphy] After the heist,

the largest art heist in the world,

that same week there were

these blockbuster indictments

where 21 members

of the New England Mafia

were charged with racketeering

and loan sharking and murders.

I can tell you, the conversation

wasn't about the museum.

[reporter]

It should lay to rest once and for all

any doubts that La Cosa Nostra

is a figment of law enforcement's

imagination.

How you doin'?

- [man] Good. How's it going?

- Good, good.

[Murphy] But it does seem like

within the criminal world here,

these paintings were

a get-out-of-jail-free card.

This had been done before.

This isn't just conjecture.

Who did it,

why did they do it,

and whom were they connected with

that it would allow them

to get away with this art?

[intense string music playing]