In the hallways of the world’s most esteemed galleries, the threat of lawbreakers is ever present. The world of art crime – involving theft, forgery and fraud – is a shadowy place where beauty and betrayal collide, and decades-old mysteries remain unsolved.
One man working tirelessly in this space is Anthony Amore, the director of security and the chief investigator at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. He’s also the author of bestsellers such as “Stealing Rembrandts: The Untold Stories of Notorious Art Heists” and “The Art of the Con: The Most Notorious Fakes, Frauds, and Forgeries in the Art World”. Art crime is Amore’s world: he lives and breathes it and has even found friendship with former underworld figures. But make no mistake, he is driven by justice and a desire to uncover the truth. His ultimate aim is to restore stolen treasures to their rightful owners and preserve the integrity of the art world for generations to come.
Amore was appointed to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 2005, 15 years after the institution was rocked by a heist — one that is still the biggest property theft in modern history.
In the early hours of March 18, 1990, two men dressed as police officers walked into the museum, famed for its collection of Renaissance art. After tying up the guards, the pair announced, “Gentlemen, this is a robbery”, then made their way through the institution, stealing 13 artworks, now estimated to be worth at least half a billion dollars. Only the gilded frames remained where three Rembrandts, five Degas sketches, one Vermeer, a Manet and a landscape by Flinck once hung. A relatively valueless Chinese vessel and a French Imperial eagle finial were also stolen.
Amore and his partner in the investigation, Geoff Kelly of the FBI Art Crimes Task Force, believe they know who did it, but without recovering any of the art, the case remains unsolved.
Amore and I sit down to talk about the heist that has haunted him for years. He also sets the record straight when he reveals that the dashing billionaire Thomas Crown (played by Pierce Brosnan in the 1999 film “The Thomas Crown Affair”) is not an archetypal art thief. (Admittedly, I may have been swept up in the romanticised movie narrative, which depicts a stolen masterpiece being admired in exotic locales before its safe return.)
They say it takes a thief to catch a thief, so it makes sense that Amore is friends with the likes of Myles Connor Jr, said to be the world’s greatest art thief (he stole a Rembrandt from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1975, which he later returned, and claims to have been involved in about 30 other heists, many of which he says the authorities know little about); Florian “Al” Monday, the first person to steal a masterpiece at gunpoint when he took two Gauguins, one Rembrandt and a Picasso from the Worcester Art Museum in Boston in 1972; and Octave “Oky” Durham, who stole two Van Gogh paintings from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in 2002.
Amore isn’t one to shy away from the controversy that his unconventional friendships bring. “I took a little heat for it, but I don’t care — I mean, it’s part of the job,” he says. “If I have the opportunity to pick the brain of the greatest art thief in history, I’m certainly going to. We just happened to have formed an affection for each other.”
Of course, Amore has made friends on the other side of crime, too. His dear friend and mentor was the late former Scotland Yard detective sergeant Jurek “Rocky” Rokoszynski, who in 2002 recovered the Turners belonging to the Tate in London, which were stolen during a loan to a museum in Germany in 1994.
The 34-year mystery behind the theft at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum has experienced renewed interest of late, with the release of documentaries such as Netflix’s 2021 program “This Is a Robbery: The World’s Biggest Art Heist”.
“Pragmatically speaking, we know that these are going to be made with co-operation or not,” Amore says. “I’m happy whenever the images are shown to the public. Exposure of the items to the public can lead to a recovery.”
Amore works tirelessly to protect the existing collection at the museum while he continues the ongoing investigation. “One of the reasons that the museum was interested in me, I have this unique experience where I did security for large, busy facilities, but also investigations, which don’t always intersect in the federal government,” he says. “I just happened to do both. So the museum needed someone to secure the collection, which is my number-one priority — protecting what we have in place — and number two, work on this investigation.
“The first day after the robbery, one of our board members worked to get Christie’s and Sotheby’s to put up the money,” Amore continues, referring to the global fine art brokers. “So we had a $1 million [$AU3.6 million in today’s money] reward right from the get-go. The museum took over that reward in 1997 and raised it to $5 million. It became the biggest private reward ever offered. In 2017, we doubled it to $10 million.”
Amore consulted his crew of art thief friends, who told him $5 million was more than enough. “The reward is prorated based on the condition and value of the work we get back,” he says.
The investigator has delved deep into the psychology of art thieves by working with behavioural assessment specialists and building a heist database. “I have something like 1,500 heists in this database,” he says, “and you’ll find a good number of instances in history, especially in Europe, where a museum is robbed of very valuable paintings, and the thieves are quickly apprehended, convicted, serve their sentences and are released without the art being recovered.” He adds that in art theft, “knowing who stole paintings and knowing where the paintings are years later are two vastly different things. And that’s where we are in this investigation. The only thing we care about is putting paintings back in frames. That’s it.”
In the penultimate scene in “The Thomas Crown Affair”, the pulsing rhythm of Nina Simone’s classic song “Sinnerman” mirrors the cat-and-mouse game at the heart of the film. Similarly, Amore’s investigation reminds us that sometimes the greatest thrills in life lie in the shadows, waiting to be uncovered.