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The True Story Of The World's Largest Unsolved Art Theft
Collins
March 2009
On Sale: March 1, 2009
272 pages ISBN: 0061451835 EAN: 9780061451836 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
One museum, two thieves, and the Boston underworld—the story
behind the lost Gardner masterpieces and the art detective
who swore to get them back Shortly after midnight on March 18, 1990, two men broke into
the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and committed
the largest art heist in history. They stole a dozen
masterpieces, including one Vermeer, three Rembrandts, and
five Degas. But after thousands of leads, hundreds of
interviews, and a $5-million reward, not a single painting
has been recovered. Worth a total of $500 million, the
missing masterpieces have become the Holy Grail of the art
world and one of the nation's most extraordinary unsolved
mysteries. Art detective Harold Smith worked on the theft
for years, and after his death, reporter Ulrich Boser
inherited his case files. Traveling deep into the art
underworld, Boser explores Smith's unfinished leads and
comes across a remarkable cast of characters, including the
brilliant rock 'n' roll art thief; the golden-boy gangster
who professes his innocence in rhyming verse; the deadly
mobster James "Whitey" Bulger; and the Boston heiress
Isabella Stewart Gardner, who stipulated in her will that
nothing should ever be changed in her museum, a provision
followed so closely that the empty frames of the stolen
works still hang on the walls. Boser eventually cracks one of the biggest mysteries of the
case and uncovers the identities of the men who robbed the
museum nearly two decades ago. A tale of art and greed, of
obsession and loss, The Gardner Heist is as compelling as
the stolen masterpieces themselves.
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