After 31 Years, Gardner Art Heist Still Captivates Boston: Review

The following is a review of the Netflix series "This Is A Robbery." The opinions expressed are those of the author.

Every five years or so, Boston collectively revisits the Gardner Museum art heist. The renewed interest is usually tied to a new piece of evidence in what is known as the world's biggest art theft or when the reward for recovering the 13 artifacts gets raised from $1 million to $5 million to the current $10 million.

This go around, however, we have help from Netflix in reigniting the city's favorite debate.

The streaming television service released "This Is A Robbery," a four-part documentary series, on April 7 to mostly positive reviews. While the series doesn't break any new ground, it collects most of the key pieces of the 31-year saga in one package and concludes with a convincing case of who most likely committed the heist.

Spoiler alert: it's not notorious Boston art thief Myles J. Connor, who sat for a rare, extended interview with the filmmakers.

The series also offers a fun look at a bygone Boston, even if it does reinforce some unflattering local stereotypes along the way. It takes us back to a time when Whitey Bulger was more likely than Robert Kraft to be on the front pages of the city's two daily newspapers and reminds us that it wasn't all that long ago cocaine, not gentrification, was "everywhere in South Boston."

For readers just coming out of a 31-year coma: Early on the morning of March 18, 1990, when most of the city's police force was patrolling post-St. Patrick's Day Parade revelry on the other side of town, two men dressed as Boston police officers made their way into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The robbers bound the two guards with duct tape and spent 81 minutes in the museum. They stole 13 works of art with an estimated value of $500 million. Despite 31 years of investigation and widespread speculation, as well as a $10 million reward, the world's largest art heist remains unsolved.

Meet The Barnicle Brothers

Brothers Colin and Nick Barnicle are the executive producers, and Colin Barnicle directed the series. If the surname sounds familiar, it's because they're the sons of ex-Boston Globe metro columnist and current MSNBC talking head Mike Barnicle.

The brothers don't include their father, who resigned from the Globe in 1998 after being accused of plagiarism, in the series. But they make use of his former Globe colleagues, icluding Shelley Murphy, who has covered the organized crime extensively for the Globe and offers local color in a thick Boston accent, and Kevin Cullen, who eventually took over the Globe column space reserved for a curmudgeonly, middle-aged white guy after the elder Barnicle left.

After using the first episode to establish the timeline of the night of the robbery, the Barnicle brothers build the second episode on a narrative arc pitting the FBI against the museum. Were the paintings stolen because museum officials put off updating its alarm system to fix the climate control system? Did the museum fail to take a 1981 tip that thieves were casing the museum seriously? Or do we blame the FBI for not recovering the paintings, in large part because the agency didn't know how to investigate art thefts in 1990? (Boston Police, who did not collect forensic evidence in the early hours of the investigation, get a free pass from the filmmakers).

The producers also flirt with a thesis that the FBI didn't start taking the case seriously until they started to look for links between the heist and organized crime. Cullen, sitting for his interviews in one of what could be any of dozens of Irish pubs in greater Boston, explains in the second episode that FBI agents and U.S. Attorneys assigned to Boston in the 1980s and 1990s made their bones by building an organized crime case, not by solving a hoity-toity art heist.

That plays a big part in the appeal of the heist and the series for locals that may be overlooked by people outside of Suffolk County: "This Is A Robbery" is one of the better Hollywood efforts at showing the clashes between the tough-talking, sports-loving, hard-drinking Boston portrayed in pop culture with the city known for its elite class tied to its leading hospitals, top-rated universities and world-class cultural institutions.

Which Mob Did It?

In much the same way the second episode of "This Is A Robbery" pits the museum against the FBI, the third episode starts by looking at the theories pinning the thefts on the Italian mafia and the Irish mob. But before the third episode's opening credits finish, the documentary veers to the North End, quickly explaining away the theory that Whitey Bulger and friends used the paintings to get weapons for the IRA in Ireland.

Indeed, the series spends more time on the mostly discredited theory that Richard Abath, one of two security guards working that night, was in on the job than it spends on Bulger et al. Colin Barnicle told Vanity Fair that while it seems Abath "did something odd," he does not believe the security guard had a role in the robbery. Abath declined to be interviewed on camera for the series but provided written answers to questions.

The filmmakers' best guess at whodunit is tied together in the fourth episode and is largely based on "Master Thieves: The Boston Gangsters Who Pulled Off the World's Greatest Art Heist," the book by retired Globe reporter Stephen Kurkjian. It's also the theory, Colin Barnicle told Vanity Fair, that the FBI thinks is most plausible.

Barnicle also believes the artwork is still in New England.

"I would be pretty shocked if this stuff has left the greater New England network of criminals," he said. "I think they’re probably stashed somewhere in somebody’s basement, or even hanging up on somebody’s wall in their hallway. And they just don’t know what it is because it’s a Degas drawing."

Dave Copeland is Patch's regional editor for Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island and can be reached at dave.copeland@patch.com or by calling 617-433-7851. Follow him on Twitter (@CopeWrites) and Facebook (/copewrites).