This Is a Robbery: The incredible true story behind Netflix’s new art heist documentary

It was the biggest art heist in history and 21 years later, the robbers are yet to be identified

On 18 March 1990, two men posing as police officers entered the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and – as a night watchman would later recount – announced: “Gentlemen, this is a robbery.”

The men proceeded to commit what has been dubbed the biggest art heist in history. That night, they stole works by such revered artists as Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Manet, for a total value of half a billion dollars.

Twenty-one years later, the robbers have yet to be identified.

The story of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum theft is the subject of a new Netflix documentary, This Is a Robbery, released on Wednesday (7 April). The four-part series, directed by Colin Barnicle, “covers the leads, dead ends, lucky breaks and speculations that characterised the investigation of this still unsolved mystery”.

Rick Abath, the night watchman at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on the night of the robbery, told NPR in 2015: “You know, most of the guards were either older or they were college students. Nobody there was capable of dealing with actual criminals.

“But that night two cops rang the doorbell. They had hats, badges, they looked like cops, and I let them in. They said, ‘Are you here alone?’ And I said, ‘I have a partner that's out on a round.’ They said, ‘Call him down.’ And they said, ‘Gentlemen this is a robbery.’”

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Abath told the radio station that the robbers duct-taped his and his fellow guard’s eyes and chin, and “handcuffed [him] to the electrical box for seven hours”.

That night, the two unidentified thieves stole 13 works of art, the names and photos of which are available in a section of the museum’s website dedicated to the heist. According to the museum, the robbery itself lasted 81 minutes.

Among the stolen works are Rembrandt’s Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee and A Lady and Gentleman in Black (both of which were cut from their frames, according to the museum), as well as Vermeer’s The Concert, Flinck’s Landscape with an Obelisk, Manet’s Chez Tortoni, and five drawings by Degas.

“The thieves departed at 2:45am, after making two separate trips to their car with the artwork,” the museum states. “The guards remained handcuffed until police arrived at 8:15am.”

FBI photograph of the crime scene after the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum robbery in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1990 (Courtesy of Netflix © 2021)

The robbery is memorialised in the museum by empty frames, which remain hanging “as a placeholder for the missing works and as symbols of hope awaiting their return”.

At the time of the robbery, the “two frontrunners” in terms of suspects were “the Italian mob or the Irish mob”, according to Dick Ellis, a former head of the Art and Antique Squad at Scotland Yard, who participated in the Netflix documentary.

As the crime has remained unsolved, “the return of the Gardner’s works remains a top priority,” the museum writes on its website, adding that itself, along with the FBI and the US Attorney’s office, “are still seeking viable leads that could result in safe return of the art”.

The museum has put up a $10m reward in exchange for information leading directly to the safe return of the stolen works. A share of the reward would be given “in exchange for information leading to the restitution of any portion of the works”, the museum specifies.

The museum asks that anyone with information about the stolen artworks contact its director of security Anthony Amore at +1 617 278 5114, or email reward@gardnermuseum.org.