Saturday, March 23, 2013

somewhere in philly

Via boing boing, an epic infographic from Hilly "chatgirl" Sargeant on the 1990 500 million dollar Gardner Museum Heist.  (Go to the PDF version to read the fine print.)
rembrandt_selfportrait_etchIn the early morning hours of March 18, 1990, while virtually every other Bostonian lay drunk in gutters or passed out in their beds, two men dressed as Boston Police officers conned their way into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum by telling guards they were responding to some kind of disturbance.  The men spent a total of 81 minutes inside the museum, and made off with thirteen (13) works of art currently valued at over $500 million.  In 2013, on the 23rd anniversary of the heist, the FBI announced that they knew who committed the crime.  But they won't name names.  And the whereabouts of the artwork remains a mystery.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the FBI now believes some of the pieces, somewhere in Philly.  The mysterious heist is considered the largest property crime in U.S. history.  See the thirteen works of art here at Time NewsFeed.

More on lost (as well as stolen) art here, via the Tate's intriguing online exhibition, The Gallery Of Lost Art.


*Photo credit/Time NewsFeed/FBI photograph/"Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait," (1634), one of the 13 works of art from the mysterious 1990 Gardner heist.

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