Review: This is a Robbery: The World’s Biggest Art Heist, directed by Colin Barnicle.
After dreaming for many years of visiting Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, I was surprised by its dour presence when I finally arrived on its doorstep. The original building presented a rather austere face to the world, its stolid facade dwarfing an unobtrusive entrance. However, once inside, my every longed-for fantasy was realised.
The internal courtyard glowed with light sucked down from the glass ceiling. Palms and exotic ferns flourished in this hothouse environment. Visitors stood in awe it looked like a Venetian palace, rooted like a tropical orchid in a frost-bitten landscape. In every room, masterpieces softly glowed within their gilt frames; antique furniture filled each nook, vases, and objects d’art on every surface. It was magical.
Empty frames: the Isabella Steward Gardner Museum
Credit: Boston Globe
It’s the most costly St Patrick’s Day in art history. Around 1am on Sunday 18 March 1990, as revellers stumbled home from a hard day’s boozing and Boston’s police forces mustered for the downtown parade later that day, two men dressed as cops showed up outside the quiet back entrance to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
One of the two night watchmen on duty, a 23-year-old music school dropout called Rick Abath, buzzed them in. The men ordered Abath to call his partner down to the security desk. They told him he matched a suspect description and to step out from behind the desk – away from his panic button, his only connection to the outside world. They shoved both guards up against the wall and, according to Abath, announced themselves: “Gentleman, this is a robbery.”
Robert Bobby Donati.
Robert Bobby Donati was a small-time Revere businessman whose gambling debts led him to become a white-collar criminal and mob wannabe. His is a name often heard as one of the two thieves who pulled off the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist in 1990. He would have been around 50 years old at that time.
By 2013, the FBI asserted that the two men who were responsible for the theft were dead. But officials declined to identify the men or suggest what their motive might have been. The idea that Donati was one of those men began to gain credibility thanks to the word of former associates Myles Connor and Vincent Ferrara. This was in large part through two books: my book Master Thieves and Connor’s memoir The Art of The Heist. Both detail how getting Connor and Ferrara out of jail may have been the motive for the robbery.