Netflix doc spotlights infamous Gardner Museum heist
It was — and remains — a shocking and baffling crime.
In an infamous March 18, 1990, heist, 13 irreplaceable works were stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Today those pieces are worth $2 billion. There was a $5 million reward for information leading to their return, which the museum trustees extended to $10 million in 2018.
But where there was once an expectation that the stolen art would be returned, there is now, after 31 years, a sense that against all reason this valuable trove may never be found.
This Thursday Netflix presents “This is a Robbery: The World’s Greatest Art Heist,” Colin Barnicle’s four-part documentary covering the ins, outs, theories and reflections of a case that stubbornly remains unsolved.
Why, he was asked, start a documentary when you don’t have an upbeat ending? Or any ending?
“My brother Nick and I are from Massachusetts and had heard about the case — generally everyone knows about the case! Around 2015 we started to look into it and in 2016 started filming.
“Anyone who dives into this case,” Barnicle, 35, said, “becomes obsessive about it. It’s the obsessive nature of an unsolved mystery. It wasn’t that we were driven by anything in the news. We just couldn’t stop talking about it.”
Curiously the case was never as celebrated back then as it is today. “It receded from the front pages almost immediately,” Barnicle discovered. “Between 1991 and ’97, there are no write-ups on the case in major newspapers.”
That changed when Boston Herald reporter Tom Mashberg started making headlines about the heist in the summer of 1997.
“He’s one of the reasons we’re talking about it today,” Barnicle said. “Until that point it wasn’t a lively saturated case. Mashberg that summer and fall became one of the main players, bringing it back to public attention.”
Barnicle carefully chronicles each step of the case, suspect by suspect, revelation by revelation, with close-ups and clips of the security guards, the few witnesses, mob figures, investigators and multiple homicides.
“You’re like an investigator going through it in real time. We want to make people understand the ups and downs of the case. Where you’re an inch away from figuring it out — and then it collapses and you go back down another rabbit hole or investigative thread.”
Barnicle still reckons the art is not lost for good. “You hope.
“I think one of the reasons Netflix responded to a project like this is because you’re blasting out this artwork to half a billion users via Netflix. In every country in the world outside of China. It has an extremely long, saturated reach.
“If you get people talking about and looking at it, someone will come forward.”
from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/39GSTr5
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