LibGuides: Book Club is My Alibi: Discussion Guide: The Gardner Heist: The True Story of the World's Largest Unsolved Art Theft

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The Gardner Heist by Ulrich Boser
ISBN: 9780061451843
Publication Date: 2010-03-16
Shortly after midnight on March 18, 1990, two men broke into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and committed the largest art heist in history. They stole a dozen masterpieces, including one Vermeer, three Rembrandts, and five Degas. But after thousands of leads, hundreds of interviews, and a $5 million reward, not a single painting has been recovered. Worth as much as $500 million, the missing masterpieces have become the Holy Grail of the art world and their theft one of the nation’s most extraordinary unsolved mysteries.

Art detective Harold Smith worked the theft for years, and after his death, reporter Ulrich Boser decided to pick up where he left off. Traveling deep into the art underworld, Boser explores Smith’s unfinished leads and comes across a remarkable cast of characters, including a brilliant rock ‘n’ roll art thief and a golden-boy gangster who professes his innocence in rhyming verse. A tale of art and greed, of obsession and loss, The Gardner Heist is as compelling as the stolen masterpieces themselves.

This title is also available as an eBook on Hoopla.

About the Author

Ulrich Boser has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Smithsonian magazine, Slate, and many other publications. He has served as a contributing editor at U.S. News and World Report and is the founding editor of The Open Case, a crime magazine and web community. He lives in Washington, D.C. Source.

Discussion Questions

1. What possessed Boser to take up where Harold Smith left off?

2. Boser has said that art theft is more mundane, far less glamorous, than Hollywood portrayals. What does he mean? What is he referring to?

3. Talk about Isabella Stewart Gardner. What kind of person is she? How did she go about collecting her masterworks? What motivates someone like Gardner to spend such an immense fortune on original art?

4. Describe the underworld that Boser penetrates in his search for clues. Talk about those who inhabit that murky world— Whitey Bluger, Slab Murphy, and Myles Connor. Who are more distrubing—the criminals or the hardnosed, often corrupt, law enforcers who pursue them?

5. Detectives sometimes turn to psychics and paranormals to help with a case, especially when they've hit wall. Can those individuals offer genuine help in solving crimes?

6. What new evidence does Boser bring to light? And what are his ultimate conclusions about who perpetrated the robbery? Does he build a convincing case?

7. Were you frustrated by the dead ends...and ultimately by Boser's inability to crack the case and recover the paintings? Or do you find invigorating the fact that the theft remains unsolved—one of those intriguing mysteries of life?

8. Talk about what the loss of some of the world's artistic masterpieces means. Do you find a $500 million theft of valuable art a despicable crime...or an intriguing mystery? How do you value that loss in the overall scheme of the world around you? (Cool question.)

9. Nearly 20 years have passed since the art heist at the Gardner museum. Do you think the case will ever be solved? Will the paintings ever be found?

10. If the paintings cannot be shown in public, even 50 years after the heist, for what purpose would someone buy them?

Source.