On March 18, 1990, two thieves broke into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The robbers identified themselves as police officers and were given access to the museum.
Once inside, they stole valuable artwork worth an estimated $500 million. The heist was the largest private property theft in U.S. history and included works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Degas and Manet.
The Gardner Museum has been working diligently to investigate and recover the artwork since the theft occurred three decades ago. In the years since, the FBI has worked on over 100 leads with no success.
In 2005, a statute of limitations went into effect giving immunity to anyone who could provide information leading to the recovery of the artwork. While this has resulted in some promising leads, none of them have yielded any results thus far.
In 2013, museum officials announced an innovative new partnership with IBM to use Watson technologies such as natural language processing and analytics to search for new leads related to the stolen artwork. Watson is able to quickly analyze large amounts of data in an effort to uncover new clues that may have been overlooked in previous investigations. As of 2017, no significant progress had been made using Watson but museum officials remain hopeful that it will lead them one step closer to finding their missing masterpieces.
The Gardner Museum also offers a reward for information leading to the return of any or all of their stolen works: $5 million for information leading directly to their recovery; $1 million for information leading directly to criminal prosecution; and a guaranteed immunity from prosecution for anyone providing information about the stolen artworks or their location – regardless if they are involved in its theft or not.
Despite these efforts, none of these initiatives have yet yielded any success in recovering the stolen artworks from the Gardner Museum’s heist – one of modern art history’s greatest unsolved mysteries.
Conclusion: Was the Art Recovered From The Gardner Museum? Unfortunately not yet – despite numerous efforts by law enforcement agents, museum officials and innovative technology such as IBM’s Watson – it remains one of modern art history’s greatest unsolved mysteries still today.