Once Again On The Great Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Art Heist-With Plenty of Speculation And of With No Apologies

By Sam Lowell

If you have been on the planet for more than a few minutes now you know two things-one, I am through the vehicle of commemorating Rembrandt’s 350^th birthday linking that event up to speculation about the “who and how did they do it” of the famous Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist which hauled away some of Rembrandt’s works still allegedly missing.  (Maybe “infamous” is a better word but I will stick with famous for my purposes since I admire such works of imaginative con artistry and pluck by parties unknown and who in my youth I would have idolized like we did Pretty James Preston, the single-handed legendary motorcycle bank robber who captured the attention of a bunch of desperately poor working class kids for his bravado acts until the day they laid him low, maybe kept our attention after he fell down as well.)    

I have shared my speculations with the likes of Seth Garth whose addiction to private eye film noir and books is loaded up with speculations and inside jobs waiting to be uncovered by stealthy investigators who usually get their “man,” usually solve whatever got then a hundred a day plus expenses. I have also shared my ideas, and this is important here, with fellow writer and amateur art critic Laura Perkins (she insists on the “amateur” part since she is in a running battle with a professional art critic Clarence Dewar from Art Today who has made it clear that he loathes what he calls “citizen critics,” apparently a sub-species not worthy of  listening to) since she too has been fascinated by the scope of the heist and its remaining unsolved after all these years.

(On my speculation that it was the well-known late Whitey Bulger or one of his kindred as will be noted below she was totally fixated to the extent of having something of a “crush” on him. Strangely some well-brought up gentile women, maybe men too, are attracted to the dangerous types, at least from afar. I will never forget the day one of my high school friends was sitting with Minnie Murphy, who by everybody’s account was the prettiest girl in our school and the legendary Pretty James Preston came by, nodded for her to get on the back of his motorcycle and off they went without a murmur. We never saw nor heard of Minnie again except a rumor that she was on the opposite corner, assumed to be a look-out, the day Pretty James tried to single-handedly knock over the Granite National Bank and through some rent-a-cop fuck up wound up face down with a few public copper slugs in him for his last efforts.)           

Of course, Laura’s interests have been somewhat, no, very divided over the past few months, what she has called “gone dark” on the Gardner business, the Rembrandt commemoration business either since she does not as a rule like the 16^th and 17^th century Dutch and Flemish art epitomized by that master with sour-faced if prosperous bourgeois printed forever on our poor brains along with their forlorn wives and broods. She, as she has explained in a recent article on the amazing “discovery” of 26 presumed lost or destroyed works by the pioneer German Abstract Impressionist Raybolt Drexel, had a small research part in that adventure. And now has some contractual arrangement with the now former Abstract Impressionist curator at the Met to do a book on the long-winding road to finding these treasures brought to American soil clandestinely rather than having been burned at the stake during the “night of the long knives” against so-called “degenerate art” when the Nazis ran the show in Germany in the 1930s and later most of Europe.       

The reason I am referencing that article is that in that piece she pointedly made references to the various theories that she claimed I had concerning the Gardner heist. Called my speculations –

“Sam Lowell’s on-going battle, shadow boxing really, about the fate of the masterpieces that were stolen in the heist of the century (20^th) at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston some thirty years ago. Sam’s main beef, no, point, no, admiration, having been nothing but a charter member corner boy in his desperately poor youth so always on the lookout for the easy score and always just a little East of Eden on the legality question, was how easy the heist had been.

“Certainly to his eyes and ears with plenty of inside help and he didn’t mean the silly rent-a-cops who were supposed to protect the crown jewels but probably some well-positioned curators and volunteer tour guides. You know the cubby hole knowledge of some exotic artist for which some well-placed curators have written a seamless 66-page essay on as part of some exhibition and the suburban matrons who thrill to jabber their six-sentence knowledge of say, well, Rembrandt. Or as likely among those “volunteer” art students from the Museum School and Mass Art who facing the prospect of garret life for the next few decades decided to find a benefactor like the old artists, like Rembrandt if I am not mistaken, did in the courts and chanceries of Europe back in the day. If the reader will recall at least one curator, a Holbein the Younger expert and a couple of art students (not sure from which school) left the staff shortly after the theft never to be heard from again after a light FBI grilling…

“More importantly than who qualified as prime suspects for the job on the inside for the actual thefts though, the thirty-year question really, was how the various agencies investigating the whereabouts of the stuff have come up mainly with egg on their faces. Sam, even today has a certain amount of glee when he describes the lightweight work done by the FBI and Boston Police  to recover the masterpieces even with the so-called big rewards available (although really chump change compared to the value of the art today at half a billion maybe more today so you know that missing curator and those so-called art students are not giving up squat, Sam’s word, not playing ball with the law, also Sam’s, else find themselves in stir. What a laugh.)    

“Frankly, Sam, and through Sam, me have had a few so-called theories about the fate of the works, where they are, who had them and who has them now. It did not take old Seth Garth long to figure out where such stuff would be in the Greater Boston area once he and Sam put their heads together. So it was no surprise, made perfect sense to me to have known that the works had been stored in the Edward McCormick Bathhouse, or really the shed where they keep the tools and trucks,  over on Carson Beach for years so Whitey Bulger, complete with pink wig and paper bag beer sitting on the adjacent seawall or the seats around the bocce courts could eye them at his pleasure while he was on the run. “The key link was one guy, a career criminal mostly but with a François Villon poetic heart, who claimed to be the President of Rock and Roll, Myles Connors, who did the detail work (and also did as far as we know some very good preservation and protective work to keep the “Big 13” from the elements coming off of Dorchester Bay).

Probably had things worked out Whitey’s way the artworks would still be over in the bathhouse, still be a one-man museum exhibition. But all of that art for art’s sake that a painter named James McNeil Abbot Whistler laid on an unsuspecting world back in the 19^th century with his moody color schemes passing off as art  went in the trash barrel because once Whitey needed dough for his defense in a fistful of murder and mayhem charges he sold all the good stuff, sold everything I believe except those hazy sketches nobody would really want today except museum curators desperate to fill up their artist retrospectives with enough material to not leave any empty spaces. Probably that old clunky Chinese urn or whatever the damn thing was or that silly Eagle from some regiment that Napoleon led to defeat around 1814.

Sold the lot minus the above-mentioned loss-leaders to a guy, I think his name is Tom Steyers, something like that, not the guy running for President I don’t think but who knows, a hedge fund guy who has some social consciousness,  who has the good stuff locked up somewhere in order to peep at them on occasion but mainly to leave his kids with some start-up dough if they too wanted to be socially conscious billionaires. The second-rate stuff for all I know may still be in the bathhouse garage but don’t quote me on that or I’d be thrown in Dorchester Bay if the heat was on.” 

I thought I was going to go crazy, I hear Seth was after Laura’s head as well, when she published that material as an off-hand way to blow off my so-called major insights into that old art news Gardner heist against her “very real” part in the discovery of  the missing Raybolt Drexel masterworks which she claims has added to our current sense of human culture and not some Dutch soiled dark bourgeois noise about a guy who had no real colors in his palette even if he could draw like crazy. Here is the blow-off exactly-    

“Frankly though, especially now that Whitey has taken the fall, has gone to sleep with the fishes, that is all old news, speculation and macho guy talk like Sam and Seth get into when they need some hot air-time and not worthy of my time. Not worthy of my time as an acknowledged and proud amateur art critic…”

That may be but what has me crazed out in how wrong she has gotten a lot of what I have discussed, discussed many times with her and others about the truly logical way to look at the art heist of the 20^th century done right in the backyard so to speak. She has balled it up so badly that I think somebody, the public coppers and the FBI might think I had some inside information on the case. Believe me if I had that solid information then I would be down on the Fenway this minute picking up that juicy check for a few million that those wayward, volunteer guides, and broke art students turned their noises up at for much more filthy lucre. I would figure out some way to get by with such funds, no question. What has me exercised though is to get the story strange to tidy up the loose ends and maybe the reader will understand why I was pissed off at Laura not for balling the whole thing up but for not getting what the real story was.

No question the late Whitey Bulger’s fingerprints are all over this heist as was everything that moved, legally or illegally, in Boston when he was king of the hill back in the day, so-called on the run or not. Don’t ask me why he wanted the culture stuff, why he wanted some artwork (as opposed to a few tons of cocaine or heroin to move like clockwork) that is up to him, and now his maker. The mix of materials clipped against what could have been grabbed makes it obvious that whoever pulled the caper was doing it as an amateur art theft and not some systematic looting. Except maybe that loss-leader Napoleonic regimental standard that might have struck Whitey’s oversized fancy. The idea, if it came from him, or if somebody was looking for Rembrandts and he used the junky stuff to throw the authorities off as a cover in any case I remember as a kid that the rumor around the neighborhood, around the Acre was that Whitey had sent a couple of his boyos in dressed in cop uniforms but in a civilian car to waste some malcontents. Bingo the same idea for the heist-low visibility, low attention around the be-bop Fenway.

Here’s the beauty though-the stuff where I shine in all my speculations. This is where the classic inside job comes in, where the missing and long gone curator (since identified as Holbein the Younger scholar Ethel Blaine), that head volunteer guide for the Rembrandts (since identified as Lois Devine) and the two art student volunteers (one since identified as Adam Ball, the other still not identified so perhaps not an art student after all) come in. All four after short and incomplete interviews with the BPD and FBI “vanished.” It is possible Whitey left no traces but probably the big pay-out to his accomplices was left to do its work. In any case that night the deed was done, the works squirreled away-someplace.

This is where I really am speculating although not by as much as I had thought when I first figured out that Whitey was not on the so-called run but daily sitting by the Edward McCormack Bathhouse (named after the famous 1960s Speaker of the House John McCormack’s nephew who was connected with Whitey’s brother Billy I believe) wearing some disguise. (I have described it in humor as wearing a pink wig and carrying a brown bag for his beer but that is only a joke, okay.) So it figured the goods were nearby, especially since most of the guys who worked the adjacent garage, the public works area were Billy’s boys. The clincher, for me, although the coppers say no, for their own reasons, was that sometime in the mid-1990s a big section of the garage was turned over to a secured box area. Hum!           

      

That idea had all the hallmarks of one Myles Connor who was probably the overall architect of the plan, of the heist and of what to do about storing such material since he had been something of a budding artist in his time before he decided to cover himself as President of Rock and Roll and do felonies for a living. Myles would have known how to preserve the goods against those god-awful winds that came off the bay periodically. Would have known that no guys with peeking eyes were going to bother the operation once they knew the deadly Whitey interest (knowing the short road to the granite quarries in Quincy, the graveyard for old automobiles and loose bodies). Knowing that at some point Whitey was probably going to have to bail out, to get fresh cash for some deal and at least sell some of the works.

This really is where the rubber meets the road though. I do not believe that Whitey thought he would be caught, captured really out in California and thus in need of a

ton of money to dig himself out of a very big hole. This is where things can get tricky. Probably did. I mentioned, casually, to Laura that I thought Whitey probably sold off the whole lot except the obvious loss-leaders at one time. Now I am not so sure. I still believe that the loss-leaders, that urn, those sickly sketches, that silly Eagle, are over in Southie, probably still in that garage but that Whitey only sold what he needed to sell and something that would bring a quick return. Nobody should be foolish enough to believe that guys and dames with serious money and a serious arts jones wouldn’t move heaven and hell to get their hands on a Rembrandt, a Gardner one to boot.

The gloomy black market in such materials is legendary. The question is how much to pay and not where to store the damn thing from prying eyes in those cases. My guess is you can kiss off at least one Rembrandt for several generations, maybe more.

   

That is the basis of my notion, a more solid one than how many items have been sold off as of today, that Whitey did a quick sale to some hedge-fund guy named Steyers, something like that although I am informed that it is not the guy running forlornly at this point for POTUS to raise the needed cash. Beyond that we are a still seekers, still would like to know for example whether the inside jobbers were paid off with works of art and not hard cash at the time. That would lead to a whole new road of inquiry-and a major hunt for the whereabouts of those four so-called bad boys and girls. More later, from me or Seth but Laura has promised to keep hands off -and her eyes on the Drexels.