Retired FBI Agents Geoffrey Kelly Details His 22-Year Investigation into the Gardner Museum Heist in New Book

Editor’s Note: This story is part of Newsmakers, an ARTnews series featuring conversations with the figures shaping how the art world is changing right now.

Next week, the world’s greatest art heist turns 36. To mark the anniversary of the 1990 theft of 13 artworks from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston is a new book titled Thirteen Perfect Fugitives: The True Story of the Mob, Murder, and the World’s Largest Art Heist, out March 10. The author of the book is Geoffrey Kelly, who was the lead investigator into the theft at the FBI for 22 years. Kelly retired in 2024 and soon after began working on the book that mixes a retelling of the case, from the FBI’s point of view, with some diaristic anecdotes about his own career development within the bureau.

Thirteen Perfect Fugitives is the latest take on the Gardner heist, which occurred in the early hours of March 18, 1990, while Boston was still reveling in St. Patrick’s Day celebrations. (Recent investigations into this include WBUR’s Last Seen podcast, the Netflix documentary This Is a Robbery, and even an FBI podcast episode.)

Two men entered the museum dressed as Boston Police officers and detained the two security guards. In the course of 81 minutes, they got away with 13 works, now valued at over a billion dollars. Among the stolen items are Vermeer’s The Concert (1633–66); three Rembrandts, including his only seascape and a self-portrait drawing; Manet’s Chez Tortoni (ca. 1875); and five Degas drawings. Because of the will of the museum’s founder, Isabella Stewart Gardner, no works inside her home-museum were ever to be moved around or deaccessioned, and no new works were to be placed into the building after her death, otherwise the collection would be liquidated and the building and land sold, with all proceeds going to Harvard.

The FBI revealed in 2013 that they had solved the case of who was involved in the theft, though provided limited details on how that part of the case was solved. Kelly details that as well as the FBI’s attempt to locate several of the missing works, all of which still remain at large.

To learn more about the book, ARTnews spoke with Kelly by Zoom.  

This interview has been edited and condensed for concision and clarity.

ARTnews: In the acknowledgements, you say that you wrote Thirteen Perfect Fugitives at the suggestion of Anthony Amore, the director of security at the Gardner. How did you approach the writing process?

Geoffrey Kelly: I started the writing process after I retired [in 2024]. Anthony, who’s a close friend of mine now because we worked together for so long, said he thought my experience working the case would make such a great book. To be honest with you, I didn’t think that the FBI would allow me to write a book about a pending case, but I sent them the proposal because Anthony convinced me to at least consider it. I was very surprised; they came back and said, “Yeah, go ahead.” Of course, after I wrote the book, I had to send it to the FBI to review it to make sure that nothing in there would jeopardize the investigation. They came back with some very minor edits.

The book is basically my reflections on more than two decades of working this one case. I had a benefit in the writing process of having lectured so frequently about this case. There have been many institutions, universities, and other law enforcement agencies that I’ve spoken with and provided this lecture that has stayed with me. I pretty much have the whole case memorized because I’ve talked about it so many times and I’ve been interviewed so often about it. That definitely provided me with the framework and the outline that eventually became Thirteen Perfect Fugitives.

Why do you think the FBI signed off on the book?

I believe the reason is because of the unique nature of this case. That comes back to the whole title of the book, Thirteen Perfect Fugitives: I was working this investigation as a fugitive case. My investigation was less a question of prosecuting somebody and more a question of a recovery effort. Because of that technique that I employed throughout the two decades I had the case, the FBI was very accommodating in this regard. In fact, we did billboard campaigns and put out a lot of social media posts. There are videos you can watch on the FBI website on the heist. Things that typically you would never see in a standard FBI investigation. This investigation really was a unique investigation. I think the FBI understood the fact that much of what I was saying—almost everything that I said in this book—has been out there, at one point or another, in court proceedings, newspaper articles, or books. I wasn’t reinventing the wheel. I’m just taking all of this disparate information out there and then adding my recollections and my reflections, putting it together in one central location.

Throughout the book, you provide such vivid character descriptions of various people whose lives have intersected with the case. Is that part of the muscle memory of knowing the case backward and forward?

That’s a skill I developed to try and discern character traits. Physical descriptions—that’s the easy part. A lot of these individuals have been depicted in the media so many times that the physical attributes are the easy part. But a lot of times, I had almost a visceral reaction to the character traits, the quirks, and the mannerisms. They’ve stayed with me because some of the situations I described in the book were so important [to the development of the case]. It’s kind of like a “Where were you when Kennedy was shot”–type thing, you know? It stays with you. For example, when Anthony and I spoke with Bobby Guarente’s widow, I remember that event so vividly because it was such a seminal period in the solution toward this case. It would be almost impossible to forget.

How did you decide to structure the book? It includes different anecdotes from your own career, beyond just the Gardner investigation, as well as an epigraph at the beginning of each chapter.

I love epigraphs. They’re all written by people much more talented than I am. What an easy way to get some beautiful writing into the book. I love to read, and over the years, whenever I would find a quote or a passage from a book that I just thought was especially meaningful or resonated with me as something similar to what I was doing on a case, I would always file it away. So, I had this list of great quotes and passages to choose from when I started getting into the nuts and bolts of this book.

It was the first time I’ve ever written a book, and it was a lot of trial and error, taking chapters and moving them around and trying to come up with a flow. I wanted it to be not a memoir, but not just an A-to-Z recitation of the case. I wanted it to also be a little bit about what it’s like to work a case for 20-plus years. For 30 years as an FBI agent, I wrote reports. They were extremely pedantic and linear. They presented the facts, but they didn’t have any personality in them, obviously—and no sense of humor. When I would try to sometimes put a little bit of humor, a little bit of sarcasm or irony, in our internal memos, my supervisor would kick it back and say why don’t we try that again without the sarcasm. But there was a voice that I wanted to speak in. When I started writing this book, I had this conversation with my wife, Sonia, because I was torn. It’s a serious topic, and I didn’t want it to be taken in a light-hearted manner. But I had a story I wanted to tell, and I wanted to tell it in my voice, so there’s going to be a little humor—hopefully, some good humor. She said, “You have to do it that way. Otherwise, it’s not your book.”

In the book, you say that you believe continued publicity will lead to the recovery of the 13 stolen works. Can you expand on that?

If we’re going to use the metaphor of a fugitive investigation, that’s how fugitives get caught— because somebody recognizes the fugitive. That’s really what I’ve tried to do through this entire process. That’s how lost artwork is recovered oftentimes because somebody recognizes something. The last recovery I made as an art crime team agent, the week I retired from the FBI, were these 22 artifacts that had been looted from Okinawa at the end of World War II. A World War II veteran died, his family was going through his possessions, and they came upon these beautiful items of Asian cultural patrimony that they thought, There’s no way my dad would have collected this stuff. How did he get them? They did a little digging, and then called the FBI. That’s a perfect example that 80 years after they were stolen, somebody just had the good sense to run these objects through a database. That’s definitely how the Gardner paintings are going to get recovered. I’m very confident in that. Art theft recoveries occur usually right after a theft occurs, shortly after the theft, or it’s going to be generational: somebody’s going to be going through an attic, somebody’s going to be cleaning out a basement. History proves that. It’s a thread that runs through art theft. The paintings that are lost are one day going to be recovered.

You mention in the book that cases are routinely offloaded by senior agents, and that’s how you got the Gardner case. Did you want the case initially? How familiar were you with it when you took it on?

I was so excited to get the case. I went to Boston University and graduated the year before the heist occurred. I remember when it happened that I was at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and I overheard these two women talking about this art heist, guys dressed up as cops who got their way into the museum. I remember reading about it subsequent to that, and I was fascinated by it. The case checks all the boxes if you like mysteries or riddles. When I got it, it literally was dumped on me—nobody wanted it. I thought this was just like a fascinating case, and I couldn’t believe the scope of it. Be careful what you wish for. But it had every aspect you’d want to have in a great mystery—all encapsulated in this one case.

Were you ever tempted to offload it on another agent? Did you think you’d be working on it through your retirement?

[Laughs.] If you told me back in 2002 that I when I retired 22 years later, [I’d still be working it], I probably would have gone screaming through the front door. But I never considered getting rid of it. It just became—I hate to use the term “my baby”—but it really was. I knew so much about this investigation and about the players. I can’t stress to you enough how meaningful those empty frames at the museum are. I was probably at the museum at least a few times a month. I would go over there to meet with Anthony and we’d talk about new leads that had come in. Every time I’d take a stroll through the Dutch Room. When you see these empty frames on the wall, it’s a visual that just inspires an investigator to work harder. It’s a tangible representation of the loss. For me, it was an inspiration to keep working at it, keep plugging away at it. Then, of course, there’s also the aspect that if I gave the case away, the next day, they’d be recovered. [Laughs.]

When you first got the case, you describe going through the mountain of case files that there is for the Gardner heist. What was your initial impression of the case once you had read through it all?

The [heist] is in 1990, and the FBI went to a computerized case file system in the mid-’90s. The first five years of the Gardner case was all just paper files. As I’m going through these files, it was months and months into my review, when all of a sudden, chronologically, I get to 1997. I’m reading all these source documents where Carmello “Mello” Merlino, this mobster in the Dorchester section of Boston, is talking about having the paintings. It was almost a weird kind of synchronicity. I was on the SWAT team for a number of years, and when I was brand new on the team, about six months into it [in 1997], we had this arrest of these guys who were going to do a violent armored robbery of an armored car at a depot. [At the time,] I didn’t know any of these guys. It turns out these were Gardner guys. In fact, their defense when they went to trial on this attempted Hobbs Act violation—since it would have been a robbery that affects interstate commerce—was that they had been entrapped to get them to cooperate on the Gardner case.

That was my initial introduction to this crew. My predecessor [on the case] met with him and offered him an immunity letter signed by the United States Attorney’s Office. I couldn’t believe that this much effort was made, and then it just kind of tailed away. A day after this arrest, it was all but forgotten. One reason for it, unfortunately, is my predecessor was tragically killed in a car accident.

There’s a purity to FBI case files, and the purity rests in they are completely factual. There is no supposition or opinion in an FBI case file. That’s great for the integrity of the investigation, because you’re just collecting facts, but you need to know what your predecessor was thinking about, especially in a cold case. You’d want to go out for a cup of coffee [with them] and say, “Hey, I know it’s in the file, but what do you think? What’s your gut tell you? What were you going to do tomorrow on the case? What do you see happening six months from now?” Without having the benefit of doing that, I had to just organically come upon this information, like I’m reading a mystery novel. When I came upon this information [about the involvement of Mello’s crew in the heist], it was very compelling. I didn’t create this theory. It was a theory that had been developed by my predecessors and had really been very well researched. I think they had already showed some very compelling evidence that linked the heist to this crew.

Then I picked it up from there, and I continued to do the investigation. I got some very fortunate breaks on it. I had a conversation with Christina, the niece of Bobby Guarente, one of the subjects. Christina really opened up like a whole new avenue of investigation with her phone call. That’s how the case transitioned from a cold case to one that would become very active.

I’m glad you bring up the Christina call. Was that the turning point that led to the 2013 press conference in which the FBI said the case had been solved in regards to who committed the heist in 1990?

I’d say there were two parts to it. The first part came when an inmate came forward and spoke to Anthony and me about his relationship with George Reissfelder, another one of the subjects. He gives this very tantalizing bit of information, telling us that George told him that the paintings were stashed in the wall of a house up in Maine. The other information from him is he said that George admitted to him that he committed the robbery. That caused me to take a hard look at George Reissfelder, whose name had been in the files. I had seen the name before, but that spurred me on to take a hard look at him. When I did that, I ran his criminal history again and saw that he’d been arrested for operating under the influence four months before the robbery occurred. He was arrested in November 1989. I had a detective on our task force pull the old Boston police report and found that he was driving the identical vehicle that witnesses saw the robbers sitting in a few minutes before the robbery. That was the first thing that really gave me some tangible evidence that we were on the right track with this. The odds of that being coincidental are just too difficult to calculate.

That’s all great for historical information, but the real key—the second part—was, of course, Christina’s phone call. That that not only confirmed suspicions and bolstered the theory, but it now it gave us a place to go [locate the paintings now]. George Reissfelder and his vehicle were a dead end because George had been dead for nearly 20 years when this happened. Christina gave me information that we could immediately act upon, and that brought us up to Maine, and it brought us then down to Connecticut, and then it brought us down to Philadelphia. That was the critical turning point for it.

For some reason, I had always assumed that all 13 artworks would be kind of recovered together. But you make it clear in the book, that certain objects have traveled to Maine, to Connecticut, to Philadelphia. In terms of the recovery, is it safe to assume that not all 13 works will be recovered together?

No, I don’t think they will be because there’s been this recurring theme. Christina, for example, said that there were three or four paintings up in Maine. Guarente’s widow said that she saw two or three pieces in the trunk of her husband’s car when they were turned over to Bobby Gentile. And Bobby Gentile is on a recording with FBI sources, saying that if you only had two or three of them, the FBI is still going to put the heat on you. There’s this thread that we’re talking about two, three, or four pieces. We’ve had some very credible sightings of some of these pieces over the years. But I will tell you, nobody’s ever told me that they saw Rembrandt’s A Lady and Gentleman in Black [1633], the Chinese gu, or Landscape with Obelisk [1638] by Govaert Flinck. I’ve never spoken to anybody—whether it’s corroborated information or not—who’s even told me they saw A Lady and Gentleman in Black at any point past March 18, 1990. I think they’re out there.

I also think the fact that three, probably four, people who were associated with this robbery were violently murdered within a year and a half after the heist occurred, I think not only does that have a chilling effect on anybody who might have considered cooperating, I think it also it’s possible that the paintings were hidden somewhere by any of these individuals and they took the secret with them to the grave. Bobby Donati, one of the guys who was part of that Dorchester crew, was brutally murdered on his front porch—nearly decapitated—in September ’91. One of the responding police officers said they saw that the house had been broken into and ransacked when they got there. I think it’s quite likely whoever killed him was looking for something, and very likely did not find it.

So, you are still optimistic that the works that haven’t had credible sightings are still in existence or have not been destroyed or damaged beyond restoration?

Absolutely. And it’s not some baseless optimism. I’m one of the original members of the FBI’s Art Crime Team. As an art theft investigator for more than two decades, you have to look to history, you know, to gauge how successful you’re going to be in the future. It’s very rare that when an art theft occurs, the subjects destroy what is potentially their get out of jail free card, right? The last thing they want to do is destroy the art. If you look historically, there’s Stéphane Breitwieser, who was a prolific art thief, and his mother claims that she destroyed some of the works to protect him. Whether that’s true or not, that’s what she said. That may very well be true, but that’s really an outlier. Look at the Dresden Green Vault robbery in 2019, when these guys were arrested in 2022, all but one piece was recovered. It’s a rarity to see somebody actually going and destroying that artwork that they desperately need. If the FBI comes knocking on their door—perhaps one could argue that that they might have done it as a rash decision.

I am very confident that [the thieves] didn’t know that they were going to commit the heist of the century, the greatest art theft of all time. You could argue that maybe in the in the hours or days following this, they would have panicked and destroyed it. It’s unlikely, but it’s possible. But the fact that we have credible sightings of the paintings and subjects talking about trying to negotiate these paintings and sell these paintings years after the heist makes me confident that if Rembrandt’s Christ In The Storm On The Sea Of Galilee [1633] was still around in 2000, it’s not going to be destroyed subsequent to that. That gives me a level of comfort that they are still out there.

Look, as the lead investigator on this case, I always fantasized that every time I went up into an attic or crawled into a basement, I was going to see all 13 items lined up. We could grab them all and close the case—that would be great. But I never seriously envisioned that all the pieces would be recovered in one place. I think that they’ve gone to the wind, but I think they’re all still out there.

Do you think the formation of that FBI’s Art Crime Team helped advance the Gardner case to where it is today?

When we started in 2004, it was really bare bones. It has progressed over the years, and it became much more sophisticated. By the time I left the team, it had more than doubled in size, and our training had become very well structured and we received so much instruction in the nuanced world of art. I never became an art expert in anything by any means, but we learned how to process art and store it and we have contacts throughout the art community. It made me a better investigator. It also opened up the whole idea of using undercovers to advance our investigations.

Just to go back to the “get out of jail free card,” in the book, you focus on the history of art theft being a bargaining chip in relation to other crimes that the thief or one of their associates might have committed.

Massachusetts is a unique beast when you’re looking at art theft. It doesn’t follow the typical conventions of mobsters and art theft. The first armed robbery of a museum occurred in 1972 when some guys led by an art thief named Florian “Al” Monday robbed the Worcester Art Museum of four pieces at gunpoint. One of the four pieces they stole was Rembrandt’s Saint Bartholomew. Contrary to [depictions of art theft] in The Thomas Crown Affair or Dr. No, the paintings were hidden on a pig farm just over the state line in Rhode Island. When a Connecticut safe cracker named Chucky Carlo heard about the theft and he figured out that Al Monday was behind it, he simply kidnapped Monday at gunpoint, stuck a gun in his ribs and said, Give me the paintings, or I’ll kill you. So, Monday gave him the paintings. Carlo returned them, and he got a very generous break on a pending prison sentence. There’s no honor among thieves.  

If you fast forward three years to 1975 you have Myles Connor, who graciously allowed me to interview him for my book. He is probably one of the best art thieves ever: very prolific and very knowledgeable about art. He committed a burglary at the Woolworth estate in ’74. He stole five Wyeths, and then attempted to sell them down on Cape Cod. He ended up selling them to an undercover FBI agent. He was arrested and looking at at 12 years in prison for the theft. He was out on bail, and he asked a family friend who was a state trooper, “How can I get out of this one?” And the trooper, whose statement was really meant to be hyperbolic, said, “Myles, it’s going to take a Rembrandt to get you out of this one.” Myles went out and stole a Rembrandt in a daytime smash and grab at the Museum of Fine Arts [Boston] and stole Rembrandt’s Young Girl in a Gold-Trimmed Cloak. He ended up returning it, and instead of getting the 12 years in prison he was looking at, he ended up doing, I think, 28 months.

So, in Massachusetts, these criminals are taking note of the fact that stolen Rembrandts can be a viable get out of jail free card if you get if you get jammed up on something. Myles told me that he and Bobby Donati cased the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum back in the ’70s. They noticed what they considered minimal security, and he’s confident that Mello’s crew went and pulled the heist off without him, because Myles was locked up at the time. When you put it in that context, it’s a very credible theory that these guys stole the paintings. Myles said his plan was to steal them and hold on to it for a year. I think it’s quite possible that’s exactly what happened, that these guys stole the paintings they were going to use them as a bargaining chip, and they may not have counted on the amount of attention that it would draw from not only the FBI, but from the worldwide art community.

Zooming in on the actual heist, what would you say is the most damning clue, for you as an investigator, from the night of the robbery?

The night of the robbery has been studied so much, and there’s so much information out there. You can go online and see a minute-by-minute breakdown, but a lot of times I feel like that the forest is missed for the trees. People talk about the fact that the guard Rick Abath let the subjects into the museum as an admission of his complicity in it. That’s true, but I do think it’s a little bit more nuanced. I think, the fact that that they even rang the bell in the first place points to Rick Abath. Take it a step back: these subjects had done their homework. They spent 81 minutes inside the museum, which is unheard of in the annals of art theft worldwide. There’s never been anything like it. They had a real comfort level. They knew that those proximity sensors by the pieces only alarmed locally. They knew there were no alarms that would activate if they removed the pieces from the wall. There were no dead man switches that the guards would have to check during a certain period of time. They knew where the surveillance videos were kept. They had a real level of inside knowledge about the security protocols at the museum.

I’ve spoken to Rick Abbott, his supervisor, and the security director at the time. It was very well known back then that if police officers showed up at the museum during the overnight shift, there was a very clear-cut policy in place that the night guard was supposed to get their names and badge numbers and call the local Boston police district, the phone number of which was at the watch desk on a laminated piece of paper. If their plan is to show up at the museum dressed as cops, I’m quite confident they would have researched, well, what is the protocol? After hearing what the protocol is, I think they would have picked another crime—or at least picked another way to rob the museum. The fact that they went through with it, despite knowing that it was a protocol, to me, makes it clear that they were confident that they were going to get led into that museum.

In the book, one thing I found most surprising was you said that the Gardner’s security system, for that time, was “sufficient, and certainly on par with comparable museums at the time.”

As I started going through those initial reports, the Gardner Museum’s security at the time for 1990 was on par with other museums. They had security cameras. They had locks on all the doors. They had bars on the window. The hardware was sufficient. The problem with the museum security system was that it was not redundant. It was not layered. Whenever I talk about museum security systems, or really any security system, you want to have a layered approach. If one part of the security protocol fails, you want to be able to have redundant backup systems to protect you. Unfortunately, the Gardner museum’s protocols were arranged more like a chain, and if one link in that chain breaks, then the entire system falls down—and that’s what happened. The weakest link of any security plan is always going to be the door in and out, and there have to be redundant policies in place that that doesn’t happen. That’s really what it comes down to. It’s not like they broke a window and climbed in or something. Had the guard said, “Stand by, while I go call the police.” There would never have been a Gardner Museum robbery.

As you’ve mentioned, a lot has been written about this case over the years. Journalists have done very expansive reporting in Boston, both for the Boston Globe to WBUR, the NPR affiliate. There’s that Netflix documentary, This Is a Robbery, that came out in 2021. There’s a lot online, and a lot of online sleuths who’ve posited their own theories. How closely did you follow all of this wealth of outside material. Did you think they might reveal anything the FBI had missed?

The greatest asset you can have as an investigator is humility, the ability to realize that you don’t know everything. Whenever there’d be a news article or a book, a podcast or a documentary, I would read, watch, or listen to it, because, yeah, I may have missed something. I’m not going to just assume that I’ve got it all figured out because I don’t. But, some of the problems in these articles, books, and documentaries that the theories they sometimes posited were specious because they’re operating off of false information because there is so much out there. One of the reasons why I felt it was important to write this book is because these are the facts. This is what really happened. This person said this. This person said that. This evidence was recovered here, and this evidence was recovered there. This is how the robbery went down. I’m not even getting into theories. You can buy into this theory—or you can dismiss it—but what’s written in the book is factual. You can say they’re mistaken or they’re a liar, and that’s fine. If you want to formulate your own opinions or your own theories, that’s great, but at least you’re going to be operating under a set of concrete facts about what happened.

At some point during the internet investigation into the Gardner Museum heist, somehow it came out there that the subjects were wearing security guard uniforms. I don’t know where it came from, but it’s false. Because of that, amateur investigators are now starting to look into the whole idea of where could somebody get security guard uniforms, or was this guy a security guard somewhere? That’s false information. Your entire theory is formulated on a false foundation. The witnesses outside the museum and the guards inside the museum all uniformly described the subjects as wearing Boston Police uniforms, right down to the patches on their shoulder that said Boston Police.

Would you say your audience for the book are those obsessed with the case?

I tried to make this have a wide-ranging appeal. If you follow the Gardner Museum closely, then this book would be something you’d enjoy reading, I think. It provides a lot of details which have never been made public before. It provides what the FBI has been theorizing and what the FBI has been saying about this investigation for more than three decades. I’d also like to think that it has appeal for anybody who’s interested in what it’s like to be in law enforcement, what goes on kind of behind the scenes, how the FBI works investigations into the mob. There’s quite a bit about organized crime in Philadelphia and up in Boston. I tried to make it read more like a thriller. I love the author Erik Larson. When I was reading The Devil in the White City, I kept having to turn to the back cover to confirm it was nonfiction. That’s the sign of what a wonderful writer. I certainly wouldn’t put myself in that category, but that’s what I was striving for to tell a completely factual story, and make it entertaining to turn the pages.

The second half so of the book shows you chasing down multiple leads, trying to locate the paintings. Which of those moments did you find the most nerve wracking personally, with the hindsight of 20/20?

It was without a doubt when my undercover [agent] was alone with Bobby Gentile, the mobster from Connecticut. I was never afraid of fearful. We have a responsibility—morally, ethically, by policy—to keep our confidential sources safe, and the idea of them getting burned in a situation is remote, contrary to the cop TV shows. The technology has advanced so much so that they’re never going to get made by somebody seeing a recording device. Nobody from the FBI was divulging their cooperation, so I wasn’t concerned that they would get made, so to speak. But I was concerned for my undercover because his life was really in the hands of two convicted felons. I don’t say that to be deprecating. They did an outstanding job, and they never betrayed that confidence, but at the end of the day, you always have to be fearful that they might slip and say something shouldn’t.

It gets back to what I said earlier about humility as an investigator. I made a terrible mistake. It was a very poor use of my judgment in letting my undercover go have lunch alone with Bob Gentile. We all get that tunnel vision because we’re excited, and this was going to be a very important meeting. As I said in my book, we lost our air assets for the day. It’s very difficult to follow [by car] somebody like Bobby Gentile. I should have canceled the meeting, but I didn’t, because I wanted it to go down. Fortunately, I ducked a bullet on that one, and they ended up having a very productive and uneventful lunch. But for myself and my partner, Jamie Lawton, as we were sitting there in that McDonald’s having lost all contact with the undercover, it’s very nerve wracking and your mind starts going to these really dark places about him being okay. That’s when you realize that despite the fact that Bobby Gentile was an old man, he was still a very dangerous person. I tried to recreate the tension and drama to the best of my ability.

Is there anything that was previously withheld, from the public, that’s now being revealed for the first time?

I’ll answer that in two parts. There are some things that I could not talk about in the book. Rather than say, “There’s this great thing—sorry I can’t tell you,” I chose just to omit them entirely. That’s for various reasons, whether it was grand jury material, was ordered by a judge, or because it might jeopardize a pending investigation. The most important aspect of this book that had never been made public before was my conversation with Christina, Guarente’s niece. We’ve [previously] talked about how the investigation led us up to Maine, and how we found the hide-away in the second floor of Guarente’s house. This missing chunk of how did we get there was Christina. In the past, I’ve said we received a tip or whatnot. The fact that the tip was actually the niece of one of the subjects and she saw those paintings in that hide on the second floor, and was present when there were conversations between her uncle and Bobby Gentile talking about trying to barter back some of the stolen paintings to get [associates] out of prison. It’s a very profound recollection from Christina and very credible. It bolsters the whole theory that that I discuss.

Have you been keeping up with art theft since you’re retirement? There’s been a number of them in the past couple years, the biggest being the Louvre heist.

It’s a fascinating world. Because, first off, whenever an art heist occurs, everybody almost immediately accepts the Hollywood paradigm that it’s some reclusive art collector filling his private art gallery with all the illicit treasures of the world. Time and time again, we see that art thieves are actually just run-of-the-mill criminals. They’re crimes of opportunity. I think we saw that with the Louvre. Artwork gets stolen all the time, but that’s the easy part. Once you steal it, now you have to try and monetize it, and that’s extremely difficult, especially now when everybody’s phone is basically a stolen-art tracking device. There’s virtually no market for valuable, stolen, identifiable artwork. I guess there has been a bit of a sea change. We see this with the Louvre and the Green Vault robbery, where jewels are easier to monetize than a recognizable piece of artwork. That’s probably going to be the future. The irony of museums is they’re storing hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars’ worth of priceless treasures that are displayed [to the public] in a matter that’s in keeping with their educational and aesthetic directives. They can’t be in a vault, or nobody’s going to want to visit it. So because you have valuable, expensive items that are able to be stolen. they will continue to be stolen. And as soon as they are, they will find themselves in that category of thieves holding on to very valuable artwork that you can’t move.

One final question, where does the Gardner investigation go from here?

There were two discrete investigations when I worked the case. The whodunit for March 18, 1990 and then where the paintings are. I’m confident that we figured out the whodunit. Now, the question is, where are the paintings? Operating under the theory that some of these paintings may have been hidden by people who tragically met their demise within a year or so after the robbery, the FBI continues to check locations where these paintings might have been stored, and continues to run down viable leads. That, again, comes back working it like a fugitive investigation and trying to see if somebody might recognize a piece the way that somebody might recognize a missing fugitive.