Federal investigators came to believe during the past decade that the key to the world’s biggest art heist the still-unsolved 1990 theft of $500 million in paintings and other works from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum might be found just outside Hartford. The feds thought the paintings might have been in or under the home of an old, convicted gangster, Robert “The Cook” Gentile, in Manchester where they dug up his yard and tore out walls looking for two Rembrandts and other treasures created by the likes of Vermeer, Degas and Manet.Gentile denies any involvement and the paintings have never been found, despite the museum’s $10 million reward offer that still stands. But the enduring mystery has found its way onto TV screens in a popular new, four-part Netflix documentary series called “This Is a Robbery: The World’s Biggest Art Heist.” Most of the action plays out in Boston, naturally, but the final Netflix installment dwells heavily on Connecticut and Gen
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A photo in the new Netflix documentary “This Is a Robbery” shows convicted art thief, rock ’n’ roll singer and Milton native Myles Connor Jr. holding a baby leopard in his lap while a parrot perches on his fingers. In voiceover, Connor’s lawyer, Martin Leppo, of Stoughton, recalls first meeting Connor in Mattapan Square, where his client had a “baby cougar or mountain lion on a leash.”
“Myles was the man,” Leppo says.
That’s one anecdote director Colin Barnicle uses to illustrate Connor’s larger-than-life persona in the four-part documentary that chronicles the infamous – and still unsolved – March 18, 1990, heist at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.