Boston’s most infamous museum crime is being retold by one of the FBI agents who lived with it for decades.
Geoffrey Kelly, a longtime FBI investigator who worked the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum theft, has published a new book, “Thirteen Perfect Fugitives” (Post Hill Press, distributed by Simon & Schuster). The volume revisits the March 1990 heist in which two men, disguised as Boston Police officers, entered the museum, restrained two security guards, and spent 81 minutes removing 13 works that today are valued at more than $1 billion.
The stolen objects include Johannes Vermeer’s “The Concert” (1633–66); three works by Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), among them his only seascape and a self-portrait drawing; French painter Édouard Manet’s “Chez Tortoni” (ca. 1875); and five drawings by Edgar Degas. None of the works have been recovered.
Kelly’s book arrives with an unusual level of institutional clearance for an unresolved case. In an interview with ARTnews conducted over Zoom, Kelly said he began writing after retiring in 2024, following encouragement from Anthony Amore, the Gardner’s director of security. Kelly added that he initially doubted the FBI would permit a publication tied to an active investigation, but submitted a proposal anyway. According to Kelly, the bureau approved the project and later reviewed the completed manuscript, requesting only minor edits to ensure it would not compromise ongoing efforts.
In the interview, Kelly described the book as a personal account shaped by more than two decades of work on the case, and by years of public lecturing about the theft to universities, institutions, and law enforcement agencies. That repetition, he said, gave him an internal “framework” for organizing the sprawling record of leads, dead ends, and public fascination that has accumulated around the Gardner heist.
Kelly also offered a rationale for why the FBI would sign off: the investigation, he said, has long been treated less as a conventional prosecution and more as a recovery mission. He characterized his approach as a “fugitive case,” emphasizing the search for the missing objects over building a courtroom-ready narrative. That posture, he suggested, helps explain why the bureau has at times pursued unusually public-facing tactics, including billboard campaigns, social media outreach, and informational videos hosted on the FBI’s website.
The Gardner theft remains singular not only for its scale, but for the constraints it imposed on the museum itself. Isabella Stewart Gardner’s will stipulated that nothing in her home-museum be moved or deaccessioned, and that no new works be added after her death. Violating those terms would trigger liquidation of the collection and the sale of the building and land, with proceeds directed to Harvard. The result is a museum where absence is permanently visible: empty frames and gaps stand in for the missing works, and the institution’s ability to “solve” the loss through collecting is effectively foreclosed.
The FBI disclosed in 2013 that it had identified who was involved in the theft, though it released limited detail about how that conclusion was reached. Kelly’s book, as described in the ARTnews interview, revisits that moment and the bureau’s subsequent attempts to locate the missing works, which remain at large.
More than three decades after the night two impostors walked into the Gardner, the case continues to sit at the intersection of art history, security, and public memory. Kelly’s account underscores a reality that has defined the investigation from the start: the story is not only about who took the works, but whether the objects themselves can ever be brought back into view.
