Our Favorite Museum Heists

0:28Hi, I'm Ryan Davis. like a handy AI bot that can transcribe this meeting, which is super useful. Oh, are you seeing a script? Well, I turned it off. I didn't need the AI bot. Kiernan, because you and I do this all just, it's all just magic. No, every single part of this is scripted, including this very line that I'm saying right now. Yeah. Folks don't know, but we're actually reading off of a teleprompter. now uh uh ryan how how are you i feel like uh at work now wherever you are are they celebrating halloween that's an important thing um they are kind of celebrating halloween here in bogota but but not not as much as like mexico right sure well is it halloween and day of the dead in mexico or do they save it all just for the day of the dead they do now they do both um okay all right halloween seems to really be going international it's well it's because of the internet you know the kids, the kids want to be cool and post like, you know, Instagram selfies.

1:27You know how this is. You, you, I believe you've had the same, um, uh, costume as a rabbit for 13 years. Yeah. But that's an Easter special. That's not for Halloween. I wore Easter ears and I had a sig and also you're being generous for 13 years. I think that was taken about 25 years ago, 20, 20, 20 years ago. Classic photo. Classic. I mean, and by the way, oh God, People in the reviews, those who just don't like that we actually like each other in chat, sometimes they're going to hate this question. But I have to ask you, any costume from growing up you particularly proud of or memorable? Absolutely.

2:04My favorite Halloween costume was when I was Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Wow. Yeah, I was bold. And for folks who don't know that, I was in drag, essentially. and I was like 16 and I think it sent a very clear message to all my friends. Wow, that really. And also still dressing up at 16. Did you trick or treat? No, I went to a party. I went to a party. Sure. Okay. Mine also is from a high school party. I went as John from Peter Pan. Top hat, great blue robe, had a little umbrella. It was very cute. Very different vibe you and I were going for. And the glasses, of course, the big glasses. Yeah. But very true to ourselves, I'd say.

2:49Absolutely. Always, always. Two musical theater picks. Oh, God. Talk about our listeners really hating this. For those that are new, you may not know that probably our least popular episode of all time was about how to get good price tickets to Broadway, which is so outdated at this point. There are no good price tickets to Broadway anymore. Oh, yeah, that's so true. Broadway is just too damn expensive, Kiernan. Very expensive. Now, you already revealed you're in Bogota, so I think we can go straight past the Judy alert about your current whereabouts, but do you have any travel that is impending?

3:28So, you know, I was planning to go to Thailand in December, and instead we have decided to do the Italian coast. so I'm working on the itinerary but it's going to be a very different sort of holiday we just couldn't make the timing work for Thailand you're getting less adventurous with age getting less adventurous with age we're going to go to some new places I've never been Seville, I've never been there it's going to be fun I don't know, Western Europe this is Rick Steves I'm turning into Rick Steves you're settling in I'm just trying to lean in if his son's not going to step up, they're going to need somebody to lead the empire.

4:10Andy, Andy Steves. Listen, trust me, I'm in touch with Rick about our need to inherit the empire. Good, good. I'm glad you're taking care of that. Kieran, we're talking about something really timely today that the whole world has been paying attention to. And what is that? Oh, it's going to be great. We're talking about great artwork heists. And I'd say, actually, I'm going to make it a little broader about heists in general, because I have something that they could be considered artwork, but one of my top three heists, it's both art and natural history. So I was desperate to find one natural history heist to cover.

4:47Yeah, no, I think this is going to be a fun mix. And obviously this is inspired by the Louvre Museum's recent robbery on October the 19th. So this is thrilling. Thrilling, absolutely. do you think we should put on our cat burglar mask and take off I would love to do that and Ryan so I'm just gonna here's the mask here put these gloves on make sure you do not take the gloves off yeah you gotta have gloves no DNA folks no DNA tell the cat I think it's time to take off let's sneak onto the plane flight attendants prepare for takeoff please so obviously uh you know we were inspired uh by this topic by the the october 19th um museum heist at the at the louvre and you know it's hard to keep up with what's happening because they're you know it's a fast-moving investigation but they have actually arrested um a couple of the guys that were involved and they stole all these crown jewels from Napoleon's...

6:02It's a lot of national treasures valued at$102 million US. And as of this recording, nothing's been recovered yet, Kieran. No, it's incredible. And Daylight, they used a ladder to ascend to the platform. We're not going to dive deep because what we know now as it might be outdated. Maybe it'll all be found. Maybe it'll all be discovered having been melted down by the time the episode goes. So we don't want to go super far into the details of the Paris heist, but it is enough to say that it inspired us to do a bunch of historical research. And we each found out heists that happened at museums that we love.

6:46Yeah, absolutely. So we're going to go through some of our favorite heist. I want to make sure our listeners know that we're not recommending uh that you rob a museum in fact we we oppose it um but it is a fascinating thing and it was funny to watch uh george clooney get interviewed at a at some movie premiere recently where he was just sort of like drolling over how impressed he was um at the louvre robbers um because he's working on the new oceans 14 apparently so now he's going to have to up the ante, he said on the script there. I agree with you. We're not pro-heist, but it would be hard to say that it wasn't exciting to follow this one.

7:28Yeah. It's just such an audacious thing to do, to rob any museum, but to rob some of the museums we're going to talk about today and to rob the Louvre. You think of the Louvre as pretty secure. and then to see these guys kind of pop up in the middle of the day and climb in through a window and get out on mopeds, just wild stuff. So I want to talk about my first pick, Kiernan, is the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. And this is something I had been loosely aware of, but I hadn't really dived in until we talked about this episode. So it happens in 1985. These two veterinarian students, they go into a museum on Christmas Eve and steal 124 of these pre-Columbian treasures, including this really gorgeous jade mask of one of these gods, Zapotec.

8:33And it was very daring and they get away and they make it for years. Until one of them is arrested and they find a lot of the treasures. And he ends up serving 10 years and then is killed after he's released from prison. And I couldn't figure out if that was somehow connected to the robbery or not. But it might have been because obviously this was something that really captivated Mexico's imagination. But the other guy, Ramon Sardina, he escaped and has never been caught and ran away with seven of these treasures and is still out there in the world. Wow. But a few years ago, apparently, he exchanged two artifacts for cocaine.

9:28So they think he's only down to four or five. um so he's still out there and still partying i guess um and uh comes up for air every once in a while to pick up some some powder and then goes back um but there's a really cool movie that actually came out a few years ago like right before the pandemic called museo which is a mexican film that is actually about this robbery and i just watched it this week and it's really really good um uh so i i suggest uh you know if you're interested in this case uh it's a really classy um heist film uh about this uh this robbery very cool and i like that it was at the museum of anthropology i think it's nice it's fun to start outside of the art world yes well that you know indigenous art kiernan sure but okay fair enough fair enough i have i apologize you're right that is not a good way to say it.

10:24But it's not a museum. It's not an art museum, openly. But it is really. You're right. You're right. Yeah. It's just not modern art, Kiernan. And by the way, I was unaware of that heist, but I've now learned a lot about it. I think it's amazing. I think that one should be better known because I'm going to start off with one. So we're each going to do three, I should say. So that's your first, my first. I'm going to do the big one that everyone's going to expect from me, which is the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist here in Boston. Every Bostonian knows about this. There's still$10 million reward for information on it.

10:59And it's one of the biggest art heists ever in the world. It was on March 18th, 1990, early hours of the morning, two thieves dressed as policemen say that they're responding to a disturbance at the museum. The guards take them for true police, allow them in. They bring the guards to the basement of the house museum, which is a glorious, beautiful house museum of an art collector, Isabella Stewart Gardner. And they handcuff them downstairs in the basement. So now the guards are taken care of. And there are motion detectors, and that's how they know their whereabouts. after this. So the motion detectors show that the robbers go in and they end up taking 13 works of art and they were really meticulous.

11:56They even cut them out of the frames. And some of them are just considered priceless. Rembrandt, it's his only seascape that existed, is gone. There's one of 36 Vermeers that are known, an artist named Flink that I wasn't aware of. They got a Flink? They got a Flink. Oh, man. They fled with a Flink. They fled with a Flink. An ancient Chinese beaker, five Degas paintings, a bronze eagle finial, which is like an ornament that you would put on a gable of a house on the roof. They fled with a finial? They fled with a finial. They got the flink. It was a total shenanigan. What a fiasco. And they took two trips out to their car.

12:48And by 2.45 a.m., they were gone, disappeared into the night. And now, so 25 years on, they are still at large. Nobody knows if these have been destroyed. Every few years, there's an update on this. Somebody from the FBI whose entire gig is looking for these, the head of security at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, who's still searching for these, will come with a new theory or an update. He kept his job? It's a new one. It's a new one. And if you go to the museum, then that's kind of interesting too, is the museums that choose to tell the stories of these heists. At the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, it's very interesting.

13:31If you Google them, the Google search results underneath, The first one is Isabella Stewart Gardner. And then like the sub page it'll bring you to is the theft. And then the next one is just called theft. And it's two different sub pages on the museum website about the theft. It's become world famous for it. And they actually have empty frames hung up on the wall, which is a really beautiful way to remember it and tell visitors, hey, if you've seen one of these around, you notice that stray Rembrandt self-portrait at your aunt's house, let us know. Yeah, check your addicts, Boston. A few years ago, Kiernan, in 2021, Netflix actually put out a really fun, well-produced documentary series called This is a Robbery, all about this heist.

14:16And so I encourage folks to check that out. And you can go into all the theories. And a lot of them involve the mafia. There's a lot of mafia. Yeah, I remember one was that these ended up encased in cement at the bottom of a pool, which is very interesting. And there's a great podcast series, too, that The Globe put out that I will link to in the show notes, also telling the full story. To the best that we know, because nobody knows. Nobody knows. It could be here right now in my Somerville home. Yeah. Built into the walls. Well, I want to jump to another one that's sort of local for me. And this is a robbery that happened in Bogota back in 2015 at the International Book Fair.

15:05So every year, Bogota has this huge book fair. It goes on for like a week and novelists come from all over the world to speak and rare booksellers come and they sell really valuable works. And one of those works someone was looking to sell was a first edition of the Colombian classic novel, 100 Years of Solitude. And it was stolen right from a locked case in the stall of the book fair. Wow. That's a great target. Yeah. It was signed to the gentleman at that point who owned it. and um so so you know they uh they actually end up finding this book uh it had been stolen by these one of the local booksellers who sells in like the market of of bogota and so the police actually found it um uh in in uh in his possession and he was arrested and then it's now the the book has been donated to the national library of columbia so uh i didn't know that so i'm excited to go next time I'm downtown and actually go see this book in person.

16:17Wow. That's a really good one. And that's one thing that's so interesting is people who are so creative about what they go after. That book, it was worth$60 ,000 US back in 2015. So if you're going to grab a book, that's a pretty good one to grab. I have a funny one for my next one because it's both a relatively low dollar, But it's also similar. This one, I think, kind of begs the question of why doesn't this happen more often? So this takes place in Hertfordshire, England, and there's a sculptor named Henry Moore. Are you familiar with Henry Moore? Sort of big, figural, amorphous. They kind of look human, but they're not quite bronze figures that are so large at such a scale that they're usually outdoors.

17:07Yeah, I'm familiar with his work. Of course, that's going to lend itself to... I mean, there's very few security measures you can take for public art that's going to be just kind of laying out. Yeah, and they're not all like Bolteros. And those are big, so they're very hard. Yeah, but this one is big. It weighed two tons. That's huge. Two tons of bronze. And in 2005, thieves spirited away. It was$18 million to create this figure. That's what it was valued at. And so they spirited it away. And for years, the police could not figure out what happened. They could never trace it, never found it. And then finally, the police were consulting with scrap metal buyers in the area.

17:58And they realized the thing that likely happened was that these thieves, how they move two tons. Nobody's quite sure, but they cut it up, they melted it down and they sold the bronze for scrap to the tune of 1 ,500 great British pounds. That just doesn't seem like much of an ROI. Well, if you don't value your time, you know, um, you know, that, that really sucks though. Cause in, in the best case scenario, what you imagine is more like a Thomas crown affair where, where someone steals it as like, can I get away with this? And then they sip whiskey and they look at it and then it eventually comes up for auction somewhere kind of random.

18:42And so you don't want to hear about it being melted down, which is probably what happened in the Louvre. They think that they've basically taken all the diamonds and then sold them individually. Maybe. Maybe. We have no doubt. Let's not speculate. Let's not speculate. No, I don't want to. God forbid we speculate here and out of office. We don't want to get in the way of an active investigation. No, we don't. So this one is quite exciting. I just learned about this. This happened in Stockholm back in 2000. Armed burglars stole$30 million worth of art by Renoir and Rembrandt. And to distract police before the robbery, they actually blew up two cars.

19:28So they created a distraction. Yeah, I know. And then they came in with like semi-automatic weapons and grabbed this in broad daylight and then escaped on a boat. And so... Man, this is sexy. Really wild. You do wonder whether anybody's like, because they're so inspired by fictional heists, like, how can we just up the slide? Make it a little more theatrical. Yeah, I mean, this was very theatrical. Well, then, you know, years pass and LA, the FBI in Los Angeles are investigating a Bulgarian crime syndicate for something completely unrelated when they hear talk of a young Parisian. And, you know, I would be like, oh, young Parisian.

20:17But they recognize that. You had me at young. They recognize it as one of the FBI agents, apparently a Renoir fan. so they were able to arrest this guy and find um the the rembrandt um in somewhere in denmark um and then they were able to find another uh one of them when they tried to sell the painting for a hundred thousand dollars and this is another one of those stories given where the painting itself was 42 million um but over the five six years they just couldn't find any way to fence it so they were willing to part with it for you know basically the cost these days of a of a luxury automobile um so yeah they've they've they've uh they found most of the art but uh still some of it remains remains at large and they've arrested you know for the folks so yeah you know that it's nice that it's nice you call them folks keep it folksy for them yeah um so so that that's that seems to me like that would be a terrifically fun uh movie with the explosions and the boat chase and everything.

21:22Oh yeah. It sounds great. So my final one takes place at our beloved American Museum of Natural History right there in New York City. I am shocked. I haven't heard of this. I'm shocked. This is a terrific one, but I also, I'm inspired. I think it connects very well to the Louvre heist because it's very smart to be targeting the jewelry, right? Because you can melt it down, you can get the precious stones out and you can likely sell those on the black market much, much easier than trying to sell the Mona Lisa. Yeah. I mean, the Mona Lisa or that, you know, Christ in the storm, the Rembrandt, like those are so recognizable, really tough to flip.

22:06Very, very hard. And so this takes place in 1964, October 29th. So we just passed an anniversary of it. And three young men from Miami who styled themselves Miami Beach Boys, one was in the getaway vehicle, two scaled a fence, went up a fire escape to the fourth floor, and they secured a rope on a pillar and they swung from the fire escape to the window into the J.P. Morgan Hall of Gems and Minerals. And what's very funny is when they were holding onto the rope, they had to use their feet to like open the window and push the top of the window so that they could sneak in. But they successfully did this.

22:50And this is the pre-alarm era. Exactly. So they swing in. Well, there were alarms. That's part of the story here. So they get in and they don't know, maybe they've set off a silent alarm, but they've using a glass cutter and duct tape and a squeegee. They gathered up 24 gems, including, Get ready for this. The world's biggest sapphire, which is called the Star of India, the world's most perfect ruby called the DeLong Star Ruby, and the largest black sapphire in the world called the Midnight Star. These were all in three cases in that room. And the value of those at the time was$410 ,000, about$3 million today.

23:37That's a pretty good heist. very good and so they um as it turns out the batteries on the display case security system had run out the uh the museum had gotten into the habit of leaving the window the top of the window open for ventilation so it had a two inch they didn't even have to like jerry-rig the lock or anything it was open they just had to push it um and uh at one time they used to put a security guard in the room and they had just abandoned that as well. And so there's kind of a thrilling story where they track these guys to Florida and they discover two of those most precious gems, along with seven others, to a bus terminal where they find them in these soaking wet suede bags, which makes them think that they were being hidden underwater.

24:34And then the DeLong Ruby, which is that extremely valuable Ruby, was still at large. And nobody but John D. MacArthur of the MacArthur Genius Awards, John D. MacArthur paid$25 ,000 in order to get it back and had it picked up from a Palm Beach telephone booth. His first Genius Grant. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, pretty good. Eventually, they were all caught. They all went on to further their lives of crimes. I think they each got about three years. That is quite the story. I never heard that one. So this weekend in Bogota, my friend Kevin was visiting. So I played tourist and I went down to the Boltero Museum.

25:24Not too many you could lift out of there. Those are big boys. Yeah, they're big boys. But what was interesting is as we went to leave they actually searched uh they were searching everyone's bags as they were leaving which is new and then at the gold museum they actually had um military personnel so it's like i think that you know museums all over the world are like yeah the copycat on the hatches sure the copycat like uh yeah it seems like it seems like people are like thinking about museum heist more than more than they were before um so i hope we didn't inspire any of our listeners with this today, but I think - It does beg the question, Ryan.

26:04Have you ever, if you really had to think of one to go after a piece of art or even a museum that you wanted, where do you think you'd go? You know, I'd probably go to like a smaller city, right? Like what's that museum we talked about in Connecticut that I love? That's like the mini-mat. Oh, the Athenaeum. Yeah, like that one. Like I feel like that would be a good one. That is good. I think I'd like to take something more in the Thomas Crown zone where something that I just want to sit on and enjoy. And so that makes me think Sagamore Hill, maybe go in and get one of Teddy Roosevelt's, maybe the trash can that's made out of like a rhinoceros foot or an elephant foot, an elephant foot, maybe the Rough Riders hat.

26:49Yeah, Teddy strikes me as somebody who would appreciate a good museum heist too. I agree. I think that would probably be my defense. well kiernan um with with those uh uh suggestions to the audience uh not suggestions just just musings musings uh i think it's time for the last stop the last stop ladies and gentlemen this is the last stop on this train everyone please leave the train well ryan welcome here to The Last Stop. This is the last segment of the show. That's why it's called The Last Stop. It's my favorite segment. It's your favorite segment. And it's popularly known as the people segment.

27:30And that's because it's very democratic. It's where we come together to share, particularly you and I each share. We each bring one thing. It could be anything. It could be a piece of gear. It could be a story. It could be a shanty. It could be a yearning. It could be an article from the New York Times. But regardless of whichever of those it is, it must meet one criterion. It must inspire the spirit of wanderlust within us, even during the workday week. And I'm not feeling very workday after all those inspiring theft stories. But Ryan, I got to ask you, as I ask you every episode, do you have a last stop this week?

28:05I do, Kiernan. It's a big coincidence, but there's a new movie out directed by Kelly Reichard called The Mastermind, which premiered at Cannes this year and just came out in theaters on october 17th in the in the u.s and i saw it um you know over the weekend and it's about um it's loosely based on the 1972 robbery of the roister art museum um and uh it stars uh this this actor josh o 'connor who was one of the tennis boys in challengers and it takes place in 1970 and it's absolutely gorgeous like the production design is amazing and uh you know the uh the costumes you really it really captures like the spirit in 1970 it's a you know uh the vietnam war and the protest are sort of part of the the uh the narrative and kind of you feel that and and it's it i really enjoyed it but it's one you know it's one of those films it's it's very slow it's a slow burn and um you know it's it's uh but it really gets you and and it's a lot of fun and i you know i i bet kelly is like i you know i'm so i'm so happy i directed this movie that is about the one topic people are obsessed with so um if you're looking for um you know more uh content around art heist uh check out the film the mastermind um you know starring joss o 'connor it's in theaters now did you bring a last stop kieran i did thank you so much for asking pregnant pause there i thought you might mention woistia i thought you might you know have a have have you been to that museum which one oyster the the wooster oh wooster yes yes of course i've been to that museum yes i was robbed in 72 why man it feels like is this just happening all the time around it i apparently happens more than we think yeah well it's funny you and i both uh continued on theme even into the last stop which is not always the case um Mine is an all things considered story that I'll link to in the show notes, but I thought it was very funny.

30:12NPR decided to have on the head of security at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum to basically lend his expertise and psychological analysis about what the thieves might be after. But what I find particularly funny is he's kind of like, let's not give them too much credit. They're after money. They're always after money. In the end, that's usually what this comes down to. But it's a funny listen. And to your point, he was, of course, not the person who was head of security at the time. But because the Gardner Museum is this like most famous of heists right here in the city of Boston, that's who NPR decided to have on.

30:53Whereas you think they might want to have somebody on from a museum that like hasn't been heisted. Yeah, that's like it's like it's like Trump. You know, I like museums that haven't been wrong. Exactly. And you know what? Some some of our listeners are going to really like that you decided to paraphrase Trump. Yeah. Well, you know, the new era. Well, Kiernan, until next time, I'm Ryan Davis. And I'm Kiernan Schmidt. And this has been Out of Office, a travel podcast. Is this painting taken?

31:23I feel like if I were doing a heist, I'd really want the like, you know, it feels like it needs that soundtrack. It does.