Netflix’s four-part documentary series ‚This Is a Robbery‘ explores the largest art heist in the world, which still presents a mystery.
Streaming The largest art heist in the world, as detailed in This Is a Robbery, still presents a mystery. Let’s start at the end: Almost exactly 31 years later, no one can say for certain what happened to the 13 priceless pieces of art stolen from the Isabella Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts, on March 18, 1990. As detailed in This Is a Robbery, the new Netflix miniseries that focuses on the largely fruitless quest to track down information related to the theft, what little we do know paints a dire picture, with a lot of hunches about what exactly happened during the largest museum heist. Despite offering $10 million — the largest bounty ever offered by a private institution — not even the museum has been able to uncover evidence of where the paintings could’ve ended up. But that’s not to say there aren’t some theories. Almost three decades into the case, law enforcement have some guesses about the “who” if not the “where.” Here’s a rundown of the facts as they stand of the Gardner Museum heist: The thieves were first witnessed around 12:30 a.m. by several people straggling home from Boston St. Patrick’s Day celebrations. They were dressed in police uniforms and sitting in a hatchback car close to one of the side doors of the museum. Around 1:20 a.m. they made their move, pretending they were responding to a disturbance and buzzing Richard Abath, one of the two guards on duty, to let them in. Abath let the men in (although he hadn’t seen anything, it was St. Patrick’s Day in Boston), and they asked him to step out from the security desk to provide identification, which he did.
