Newly released surveillance video may be the key to breaking open a 25-year-old museum heist, the largest and most expensive art theft in U.S. history. Federal officials this week released a tape from the day before $500 million in art was stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and it raises new questions about the role of a young security guard on duty at the time.
Richard Abath, who was 23 at the time of the 1990 heist, is shown on the video letting a man into the museum through the same entrance the thieves allegedly used early the next morning to make off with 13 works, including a Vermeer, a few Rembrandts, and several Degases.
Here’s the Justice Department statement, released with the video, that describes what you’re looking at here:
The video footage released today, captured by Museum security cameras 24 hours before the Gardner heist, shows an automobile pull up next to a rear entrance of the Museum. The car matches the general description of a vehicle that was reported to have been parked outside the Museum moments prior to the theft on March 18, 1990.
The video also shows an unidentified man exiting the automobile and then being allowed inside the Museum, against Museum policy, by a security guard. That event occurred at 12:49 a.m. on March 17, 1990, almost exactly 24 hours before the thieves entered the museum through the same door.
While the images of both the vehicle and the unidentified man are low resolution, law enforcement officials hope that releasing the footage will assist with identifying the man or the vehicle in the video.
Authorities have apparently had the tape since the beginning of the investigation, but it’s not clear whether they viewed it before 2013, when the case was assigned to a new prosecutor, Robert Fisher, for a “complete re-examination,” the New York Times reports.
It’s not clear whether Abath, now 49, is being investigated again. He’s the same guard who eventually let in the thieves, posing as police officers investigating a disturbance. When the real Boston PD showed up, they found Abath and his partner bound and blindfolded in a basement.
Authorities didn’t mention Abath’s name in connection with the just-released video, and the New York Times reports they’ve generally accepted that he wasn’t involved:
Investigators have kept an eye on him and his bank accounts for the simple reason that, according to F.B.I. statistics, most art heists involve someone on the inside. But by and large, they have taken him at his word.
Mr. Abath has spoken to F.B.I. agents throughout the years, without a lawyer. In 2013, when he sought to write a book about the case, he said he had passed two lie-detector tests after the theft and had cooperated fully with investigators and sketch artists.
The museum is offering a $5 million reward for info that leads to the return of the works in good condition.
[h/t NYT]