In "The Gardner Heist," author Ulrich Boser offers a tantalizing whodunit as he embarks on an exhaustive search for the stolen masterpieces that takes him from the back alleys of Boston to the cliffs of England and picturesque villages overlooking Galway Bay in Ireland.
Boser, who has written for The New York Times and The Washington Post, does not crack the case. But he provides a fascinating look into the theft through colorful interviews with criminals, con men, lawyers, FBI agents, detectives, art experts, and middlemen who claim they can produce the stolen artwork.
His journey begins in early 2005, when he travels to New York City to interview Harold Smith, a renowned art detective who has retrieved an impressive number of pilfered paintings worldwide and is determined to solve the Gardner theft. When the ailing detective dies weeks after the interview, Boser is handed his hefty Gardner file and is immediately consumed by it.
The list of suspects scrutinized by Boser seems endless and includes some of Boston's most notorious crime figures: fugitive gangster James "Whitey" Bulger, charged with 19 murders and one of the FBI's 10 Most Wanted; David A. Turner, once dubbed the South Shore's Teflon gangster and now serving a 38-year prison term for the 1999 attempted robbery of an armored car company vault; and Joseph Murray, a Charlestown drug smuggler and Irish Republican Army sympathizer shot to death by his wife in 1992.
One of the most startling revelations - which puts the artwork squarely in Bulger's hands - is disclosed for the first time by Boser, then later discounted as myth. Boser reveals that a reformed art fence he interviewed in an English seaside resort claimed that his business partner was working at an antiques fair in Coconut Grove, Fla., in the early 1990s when Bulger offered to sell him the Gardner loot for $10 million. But the business partner was willing to pay only $1 million and Bulger rejected that deal, according to the art fence.
