Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Katie Mamber and I'm Sarah Dowdy, and our story is going to start with the highest value art heist in history. So that's a pretty good place, right It's also a story about mustaches, and from there it's going to take us all the way back to turn of the century Boston with a socialite art collector who loves boxing in the House of Worth and baseball, and she ends up building one of the most beautiful art collections in the country. So we have a lot to talk about, something for everyone today. So we're going to set our scene, which is the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. It's this quiet, tucked away Venetian palace on the Fenway in Boston, and it's March eighteenth, as St. Patrick's Day. Revelers are coming back on their way home, and at one a m the museum's buzzer sounds. The guards look out to see what looks like two Boston policemen outside wearing almost comically large mustaches. Uh, we kind of thought of the hot cops here from arrested Development, but the policemen say they need to check out a reported disturbance, so the guards let them in, but minutes later they're cuffed bound in duct tape, and after shutting off the video cameras, the thieves head up to the museum's Dutch room and their first target is an early self portrait by Rembrandt, but it's a heavy panel in this heavy gilt frame and it won't come out, so they just leave that one on the floor. The canvas Rembrands are a little easier to deal with, though the thieves slash them out of their frames, which it's almost worse than the book of Kel's being written in I think, and run off with Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee and a Lady and Gentleman in Black, two rem Brands there Gone now, And next is Vermier's The Concert, which they take from an easel, and then a govert Flink, and then they move on with these big works, and they take another Rembrandt, a little tiny etching about the size of a postage stamp, and a bronze Chinese beaker, before passing by all these other amazing works about a Celia raphael A Frangelico, before taking five drawings by Digga, and all of this happens under the John Singer Sergeant portrait of the museum's founder, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and Sarah said, in a movie, you would have to film it with her eyes and the portrait she's watching the whole thing, and then her ghost would come and haunt them or something. Um they try to take a flag of Napoleon's Imperial Guard, but they can't get it either, so they end up just taking the little bronze finial of an eagle at the top. And the final thing they take is a min A oil, which is kind of awesome, by the way, if you look it up. It's a guy writing in this enormous top hat. And they don't touch Titian's Europa, even though it's the most valuable thing in the museum. So they spend ninety minutes inside this whole time, and they tell the guards, you'll be hearing from us in about a year. But now it's twenty years later. There've been offers of immunity, a five million dollar reward, and all of this art, which is valued at two hundred million to five hundred million dollars, is just gone So how did so much priceless art, these old Masters, high Renaissance paintings, famous American works, a really extensive Asian collection, How did they all end up in this beautiful, tiny Venetian mansion with a lush enclosed courtyard, fountains and statue are You should look it up online. It's really gorgeous. That's because for nearly forty years Boston had a really great collector, the socialite Isabella Stewart Gardner. And Isabella's Stewart was born in eighteen forty in New York City, and her father was a wealthy merchant, and her family even claimed descent from the oil Storks, but that's kind of a dubious claim. That's just one of those things that people say. Who wouldn't like to be related to American Scots? Right? She was educated in private schools in New York and Paris, and she befriended Julia Gardner abroad. She eventually married her friend's older brother, John L. Gardner, known as Jack, in eighteen sixty and they moved to Beacon Street in Boston together. But her entry into the art world was partly brought on by a personal tragedy. Uh their son, John Gardner, the third known as Jackie, died when he was two years old of pneumonia, and she falls into a deep depression and she gets really sick, and her doctor recommends that jack take her traveling, and so they go to Scandinavia and Russia and Vienna and Paris, and by the time she comes back, she's feeling a lot better. And they've also started to pick up little, you know, pretty things along the course of their travels and bringing them back to their Beacon Hill home. And they don't have any more children, although they do raise their three or and nephews, and they travel even more extensively after that, the Middle East, Central Europe, Asia, all around the United States, although perhaps unsurprisingly considering the museum's design, their favorite spot was Venice, where they stayed at the Palazzo Barbara. And Isabella is a very social woman too, so don't think of just her and her husband off on these private travels all the time. The museum's archives actually have seven thousand letters from one thousand correspondents, so she's a busy lady. She's really social, but that doesn't mean she's necessarily popular with the Boston Brahmin's she's different. She's got all this traveling. She's mingling with American ex pats like Henry James, Singer Sargeant, James McNeil, Whistler, and she's generally very extravagant, spending thousands of dollars on these paintings, Charles Worth clothing and jewels. So she's an outsider. Yeah, she's never totally accepted by that society, but she's so amazing and she cuts her own profile in it. You know, who wouldn't want to hang out with her? I know, she's really great, but one critic wrote that she was the most dashing of fashion's local signis shirts. Who can order the whole symphony orchestra to her house for a private musical, So there you do. And her tastes were really broad. It wasn't just that she was interested in art. She was also really into the Red Sox and boxing and hockey, Harvard football, and horse races. So she had But it doesn't take long for her to get up, you know, beyond picking up pretty little souvenirs on her travels, and get into really serious art collecting. And she does this by the mid eighteen nineties and starts hanging up all her paintings at her Beacon Hill house, leading the extras on chair. So I can imagine, just like, oh gosh, where am I going to even put this Rembrandt? I just thought. She has an advisor to Bernard Brenson, who does a lot of her buying, and she has also befriended some influence people in the Eastern art world, like Oka Cora Cucuzo, who's famous for writing the Book of Tea and helping to preserve Japanese artistic styles. Today there's a copy of the book at the museum. Yeah. Her first major old Master purchase comes in eighteen ninety two, and it's of Vermeer the Concert. It's eventually stolen in the heist, and it costs her just over six thousand dollars. And this is kind of weird to think of now you I don't know, I guess you imagine old Masters paintings always being expensive and in high demand, but that's not really the case. In eighteen nine two, this was a pretty progressive purchase, and she heads off a trend a few years later. American buyers think American industrialists with lots of money or snatching up all the Old Master paintings they can, right. And you you told me something cool from a book you were reading about grain and painting. Yeah, it was a book by Cynthia Saltzman called Old Master's New World. I think I kind of want to read it now. But she said that a lot of this rush on European art, and specifically Old Masters works that were being held in England came because the English started importing American grain, and consequently their prices fell and their land value fell. And you have all these old lords who aren't making rent anymore, the pinch. Yeah. And meanwhile their inheritance taxes are going up, their property taxes are going up, and they're more willing to sell off the old Rembrandt they have in the manner. And meanwhile, of course we have our American tycoons getting fabulously rich but also wanting to cultivate culture. It might remind you of our Hearst podcast very much. Hearst. And because Americans are building all these new big museums, they need art to fill them up with. And this in turn influences generations of American artists who are able to go and see these great works from old Masters from the Italian Renaissance and not have to go all the way to Europe to to see a painting gardeners not just about the old masters, though. She's not your your average art collector. She wrote to Barns in a nineteen hundred you know, or rather you don't know that I adore Giotto and really don't adore Rembrandt. I only like him, And he wrote back, I am not anxious to have you own braces of Rembrandt's like any vulgar millionaire. And Sarah's a big Giotto fan. A This is another point in Isabella's favor um. Her love for Italian Renaissance art makes her by Botticelli's Death of Lucretia for fifteen thousand dollars, and that's actually the first uh Botcelli to come to the United States. And she likes contemporary art. We've already mentioned. She's friends with Singer Sergeant and whistler um. And she sees herself not just as a woman decorating her home and kind of fitting into that um Victorian standard of I don't know Victorian real for women, but more like a Renaissance patron of the arts, kind of like Lauren. Yeah, it was more specifically Isabella Dusty, who we mentioned in our Catherine Medici podcast recently, and in eighteen eighty six, her friend Henry James takes her to Singer Sergeant's London studio to see Madam X, which is of course a very famous and very lovely painting, and he does a head on, full body painting of her in front of a Venetian brocade, which James describes as a Byzantine madonna with a halo, and Sergeant displays it as a woman and enigma. It really does look like a halo. The brocade's pattern is directly behind her head. It's pretty cool. But after Gardner's husband died in eighteen ninety eight, her collecting took a different turn and she started to build a museum and she wanted to make her private space, you know, her Beacon Hill home with paintings leaning on chairs, into a public space where everybody could come and appreciate her works of art, and she helps with the design, with the construction. She takes a very active role in the building at this museum and it kind of reminded us of the Hearst Castle because it has this mix of styles. You walk into one room that's decorated in a certain way, and then into another that's completely different. And all of this faces in on a gorgeous courtyard with windows and balconies that honestly look like they'd be in a capulate. Juliet's going to lean out one of the balconies at any second. And the museum opens to the public in nineteen o three, and she has a phoenix above the door along with a coat of arms, and I guess her own personal motto, which is simul plesier, which I don't know. I like that. It's a pretty bold statement to make at the at the gate of your museums. And she slows down on the collecting later in her life to try to leave the museum with a nice endowment. When she died in nineteen four, after a series of jokes, she'd saved up a million dollars for the museum, with enough left over for charitable donations for the prevention of cruelty to children and to animals. And the museum is given to Boston as a public institution with a catch. Nothing can be changed, rearranged, added, or removed, although in two thousand nine a Massachusetts court did decide that there could be an addition made by Renzo Piano, who did the High Museum addition here in Atlanta. So the short story is, if you go to the Gardener Museum today, it's going to look exactly like Isabella Stuart Gardener intended it to look. It's it's her house, it's her museum, except that, of course the nineteen nine thieves weren't so kind as to follow her wishes. So when you enter the Dutch room there are gaping frames where masterpieces should be. So that brings us back to our heist and the question where our gardeners missing masterpieces and there's a good chance that they've actually been destroyed by now. When Sarah was explaining this to me, she said that sometimes art was too hot to unload, which I love because apparently she has a secret life. Makes me sound like a hot I don't know about um, but they're probably part of the dark, shadowy art black market, where art is often used as collateral instead of cash for drugs and guns, which I had no idea that art would be collateral. But according to Alexander Smith, who worked with the Art Loss Register, it keeps this huge, long record of all the hundreds of thousands of artworks that are missing stolen um. She She says that with tighter banking regulations, it has become difficult for people to put big chunks of money in financial institutions without getting noticed. So now thieves go out and steal a painting. So it's easy cash, I guess. But we want to make it clear that most thefts aren't as glamorous as say the two thousand two fist in Paraguay where thieves dug an eighty foot tunnel, or our gardener heist with the false mustaches now the Thomas Crown affair. According to a Smithsonian article by Robert Pool, it's usually just someone with inside access who lifts a stored work and walks off, because of course most museums don't have their whole collection out. A lot of stories. Imagine a print that's in a museum spacement and nobody thinks anyone will notice. Since the gardener heist is ostensibly the highest profile job in the world, there have been tons of leads, tips, and bizarro theories, some of which will tell you. One is that the i ra A staged it to use as a bargaining chip for jailed members. And this is another thing. If you think of of UM artworks being used as cash, they can also sometimes be used as get out of jail free cards because there's the immunity. Yeah, because authorities will want to get the artworks back so desperately. There they'll offer in unity to anybody involved. Another idea is that it was planned out by a musician who had performed with Roy Orbison before he was nabbed for another stuff. Another is that the artworks are hidden in Ireland's West Country, which is a theory. This is very strange. It's a theory developed in part because so many of the stolen goods were kind of horsey in theme, like the dig oust gushes are all equestrian subjects, and since the Irish love horses so much, maybe maybe there's a connection UM. Some also have said that it was taken as security by Boston crime boss James Whitey Boulger with the help of compromised FBI agents. But Sarah, you know a little bit more about that one than I do. Well, Boulger in the local FBI office did work together. They worked together to brain down an Italian crime family, which consequently was also Bulger's main competitor in Boston, but it leads to him buying off some of his BI handlers and an FBI supervisor, John Connolly, and Boulger is actually still one of the FBI's ten most wanted fugitives, and he's been charged with racketeering, conspiracy, narcotics distribution, and nineteen counts of murder. So people think he's the only guy in Boston at the time who would have been able to get those paintings out of the country since he had this FBI connection. And our latest word comes from April two thousand ten and the Boston Globe, and that's that the FBI was hot on the trail of the art, which this time was being held by a Corsican gang. Um, But that bureaucratic infighting and an inability for the FBI to work with their French counterparts blew the whole thing up. So in conclusion, the art is still missing. Um. We hope that it's being well cared for and that someday it will find its way back to its lovely home in Boston. Meanwhile, there's plenty of neat stuff to see at the museum and now carries much better theft insurance and UH a much more intense security system than it used to. And another side note, if your name is Isabella, you can go to the museum for free. We might need to change our names and go visit. And we have a quote, our final quote from Barrenson on Gardner, which I will let you read, Sarah, since you love her so much, and that is she lives at a rate in intensity and with a reality that makes other lives seem pale, thin and shadowy. And that's the final word on Isabella Stewart Gardner. And that brings us to listener mail. This is a special edition of real mail, this time from Jill in Minneapolis, and she sent us a pretty funny postcard that just says hello everyone on the front. But she sent it in honor of National Card and Letter Writing Month and suggested we do a podcast on the Pony Express or the USPS. So what do y'all think? Do you like those ideas? You should let us know at History podcast at how stuff works dot com. And we also have an unorthodox listener mail. I got a text from my old boss from my bartending days, Chris, who said that he and his little son Finn were big fans of the podcast, so a shout out to Chris and Finn, and if you'd like to follow us on Twitter, you can find us at mist in History. We also have a Facebook fan page that we update fairly frequently, and we have an article recommendation for you today, five impressive artists, which you can find if you search on our homepage at www dot house stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com and be sure to check out the stuff you missed in History glass blocked on the how stuff works dot com home page

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Katie Mamber and I'm Sarah Dowdy, and our story is going to start with the highest value art heist in history. So that's a pretty good place, right It's also a story about mustaches, and from there it's going to take us all the way back to turn of the century Boston with a socialite art collector who loves boxing in the House of Worth and baseball, and she ends up building one of the most beautiful art collections in the country. So we have a lot to talk about, something for everyone today. So we're going to set our scene, which is the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. It's this quiet, tucked away Venetian palace on the Fenway in Boston, and it's March eighteenth, as St. Patrick's Day. Revelers are coming back on their way home, and at one a m the museum's buzzer sounds. The guards look out to see what looks like two Boston policemen outside wearing almost comically large mustaches. Uh, we kind of thought of the hot cops here from arrested Development, but the policemen say they need to check out a reported disturbance, so the guards let them in, but minutes later they're cuffed bound in duct tape, and after shutting off the video cameras, the thieves head up to the museum's Dutch room and their first target is an early self portrait by Rembrandt, but it's a heavy panel in this heavy gilt frame and it won't come out, so they just leave that one on the floor. The canvas Rembrands are a little easier to deal with, though the thieves slash them out of their frames, which it's almost worse than the book of Kel's being written in I think, and run off with Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee and a Lady and Gentleman in Black, two rem Brands there Gone now, And next is Vermier's The Concert, which they take from an easel, and then a govert Flink, and then they move on with these big works, and they take another Rembrandt, a little tiny etching about the size of a postage stamp, and a bronze Chinese beaker, before passing by all these other amazing works about a Celia raphael A Frangelico, before taking five drawings by Digga, and all of this happens under the John Singer Sergeant portrait of the museum's founder, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and Sarah said, in a movie, you would have to film it with her eyes and the portrait she's watching the whole thing, and then her ghost would come and haunt them or something. Um they try to take a flag of Napoleon's Imperial Guard, but they can't get it either, so they end up just taking the little bronze finial of an eagle at the top. And the final thing they take is a min A oil, which is kind of awesome, by the way, if you look it up. It's a guy writing in this enormous top hat. And they don't touch Titian's Europa, even though it's the most valuable thing in the museum. So they spend ninety minutes inside this whole time, and they tell the guards, you'll be hearing from us in about a year. But now it's twenty years later. There've been offers of immunity, a five million dollar reward, and all of this art, which is valued at two hundred million to five hundred million dollars, is just gone So how did so much priceless art, these old Masters, high Renaissance paintings, famous American works, a really extensive Asian collection, How did they all end up in this beautiful, tiny Venetian mansion with a lush enclosed courtyard, fountains and statue are You should look it up online. It's really gorgeous. That's because for nearly forty years Boston had a really great collector, the socialite Isabella Stewart Gardner. And Isabella's Stewart was born in eighteen forty in New York City, and her father was a wealthy merchant, and her family even claimed descent from the oil Storks, but that's kind of a dubious claim. That's just one of those things that people say. Who wouldn't like to be related to American Scots? Right? She was educated in private schools in New York and Paris, and she befriended Julia Gardner abroad. She eventually married her friend's older brother, John L. Gardner, known as Jack, in eighteen sixty and they moved to Beacon Street in Boston together. But her entry into the art world was partly brought on by a personal tragedy. Uh their son, John Gardner, the third known as Jackie, died when he was two years old of pneumonia, and she falls into a deep depression and she gets really sick, and her doctor recommends that jack take her traveling, and so they go to Scandinavia and Russia and Vienna and Paris, and by the time she comes back, she's feeling a lot better. And they've also started to pick up little, you know, pretty things along the course of their travels and bringing them back to their Beacon Hill home. And they don't have any more children, although they do raise their three or and nephews, and they travel even more extensively after that, the Middle East, Central Europe, Asia, all around the United States, although perhaps unsurprisingly considering the museum's design, their favorite spot was Venice, where they stayed at the Palazzo Barbara. And Isabella is a very social woman too, so don't think of just her and her husband off on these private travels all the time. The museum's archives actually have seven thousand letters from one thousand correspondents, so she's a busy lady. She's really social, but that doesn't mean she's necessarily popular with the Boston Brahmin's she's different. She's got all this traveling. She's mingling with American ex pats like Henry James, Singer Sargeant, James McNeil, Whistler, and she's generally very extravagant, spending thousands of dollars on these paintings, Charles Worth clothing and jewels. So she's an outsider. Yeah, she's never totally accepted by that society, but she's so amazing and she cuts her own profile in it. You know, who wouldn't want to hang out with her? I know, she's really great, but one critic wrote that she was the most dashing of fashion's local signis shirts. Who can order the whole symphony orchestra to her house for a private musical, So there you do. And her tastes were really broad. It wasn't just that she was interested in art. She was also really into the Red Sox and boxing and hockey, Harvard football, and horse races. So she had But it doesn't take long for her to get up, you know, beyond picking up pretty little souvenirs on her travels, and get into really serious art collecting. And she does this by the mid eighteen nineties and starts hanging up all her paintings at her Beacon Hill house, leading the extras on chair. So I can imagine, just like, oh gosh, where am I going to even put this Rembrandt? I just thought. She has an advisor to Bernard Brenson, who does a lot of her buying, and she has also befriended some influence people in the Eastern art world, like Oka Cora Cucuzo, who's famous for writing the Book of Tea and helping to preserve Japanese artistic styles. Today there's a copy of the book at the museum. Yeah. Her first major old Master purchase comes in eighteen ninety two, and it's of Vermeer the Concert. It's eventually stolen in the heist, and it costs her just over six thousand dollars. And this is kind of weird to think of now you I don't know, I guess you imagine old Masters paintings always being expensive and in high demand, but that's not really the case. In eighteen nine two, this was a pretty progressive purchase, and she heads off a trend a few years later. American buyers think American industrialists with lots of money or snatching up all the Old Master paintings they can, right. And you you told me something cool from a book you were reading about grain and painting. Yeah, it was a book by Cynthia Saltzman called Old Master's New World. I think I kind of want to read it now. But she said that a lot of this rush on European art, and specifically Old Masters works that were being held in England came because the English started importing American grain, and consequently their prices fell and their land value fell. And you have all these old lords who aren't making rent anymore, the pinch. Yeah. And meanwhile their inheritance taxes are going up, their property taxes are going up, and they're more willing to sell off the old Rembrandt they have in the manner. And meanwhile, of course we have our American tycoons getting fabulously rich but also wanting to cultivate culture. It might remind you of our Hearst podcast very much. Hearst. And because Americans are building all these new big museums, they need art to fill them up with. And this in turn influences generations of American artists who are able to go and see these great works from old Masters from the Italian Renaissance and not have to go all the way to Europe to to see a painting gardeners not just about the old masters, though. She's not your your average art collector. She wrote to Barns in a nineteen hundred you know, or rather you don't know that I adore Giotto and really don't adore Rembrandt. I only like him, And he wrote back, I am not anxious to have you own braces of Rembrandt's like any vulgar millionaire. And Sarah's a big Giotto fan. A This is another point in Isabella's favor um. Her love for Italian Renaissance art makes her by Botticelli's Death of Lucretia for fifteen thousand dollars, and that's actually the first uh Botcelli to come to the United States. And she likes contemporary art. We've already mentioned. She's friends with Singer Sergeant and whistler um. And she sees herself not just as a woman decorating her home and kind of fitting into that um Victorian standard of I don't know Victorian real for women, but more like a Renaissance patron of the arts, kind of like Lauren. Yeah, it was more specifically Isabella Dusty, who we mentioned in our Catherine Medici podcast recently, and in eighteen eighty six, her friend Henry James takes her to Singer Sergeant's London studio to see Madam X, which is of course a very famous and very lovely painting, and he does a head on, full body painting of her in front of a Venetian brocade, which James describes as a Byzantine madonna with a halo, and Sergeant displays it as a woman and enigma. It really does look like a halo. The brocade's pattern is directly behind her head. It's pretty cool. But after Gardner's husband died in eighteen ninety eight, her collecting took a different turn and she started to build a museum and she wanted to make her private space, you know, her Beacon Hill home with paintings leaning on chairs, into a public space where everybody could come and appreciate her works of art, and she helps with the design, with the construction. She takes a very active role in the building at this museum and it kind of reminded us of the Hearst Castle because it has this mix of styles. You walk into one room that's decorated in a certain way, and then into another that's completely different. And all of this faces in on a gorgeous courtyard with windows and balconies that honestly look like they'd be in a capulate. Juliet's going to lean out one of the balconies at any second. And the museum opens to the public in nineteen o three, and she has a phoenix above the door along with a coat of arms, and I guess her own personal motto, which is simul plesier, which I don't know. I like that. It's a pretty bold statement to make at the at the gate of your museums. And she slows down on the collecting later in her life to try to leave the museum with a nice endowment. When she died in nineteen four, after a series of jokes, she'd saved up a million dollars for the museum, with enough left over for charitable donations for the prevention of cruelty to children and to animals. And the museum is given to Boston as a public institution with a catch. Nothing can be changed, rearranged, added, or removed, although in two thousand nine a Massachusetts court did decide that there could be an addition made by Renzo Piano, who did the High Museum addition here in Atlanta. So the short story is, if you go to the Gardener Museum today, it's going to look exactly like Isabella Stuart Gardener intended it to look. It's it's her house, it's her museum, except that, of course the nineteen nine thieves weren't so kind as to follow her wishes. So when you enter the Dutch room there are gaping frames where masterpieces should be. So that brings us back to our heist and the question where our gardeners missing masterpieces and there's a good chance that they've actually been destroyed by now. When Sarah was explaining this to me, she said that sometimes art was too hot to unload, which I love because apparently she has a secret life. Makes me sound like a hot I don't know about um, but they're probably part of the dark, shadowy art black market, where art is often used as collateral instead of cash for drugs and guns, which I had no idea that art would be collateral. But according to Alexander Smith, who worked with the Art Loss Register, it keeps this huge, long record of all the hundreds of thousands of artworks that are missing stolen um. She She says that with tighter banking regulations, it has become difficult for people to put big chunks of money in financial institutions without getting noticed. So now thieves go out and steal a painting. So it's easy cash, I guess. But we want to make it clear that most thefts aren't as glamorous as say the two thousand two fist in Paraguay where thieves dug an eighty foot tunnel, or our gardener heist with the false mustaches now the Thomas Crown affair. According to a Smithsonian article by Robert Pool, it's usually just someone with inside access who lifts a stored work and walks off, because of course most museums don't have their whole collection out. A lot of stories. Imagine a print that's in a museum spacement and nobody thinks anyone will notice. Since the gardener heist is ostensibly the highest profile job in the world, there have been tons of leads, tips, and bizarro theories, some of which will tell you. One is that the i ra A staged it to use as a bargaining chip for jailed members. And this is another thing. If you think of of UM artworks being used as cash, they can also sometimes be used as get out of jail free cards because there's the immunity. Yeah, because authorities will want to get the artworks back so desperately. There they'll offer in unity to anybody involved. Another idea is that it was planned out by a musician who had performed with Roy Orbison before he was nabbed for another stuff. Another is that the artworks are hidden in Ireland's West Country, which is a theory. This is very strange. It's a theory developed in part because so many of the stolen goods were kind of horsey in theme, like the dig oust gushes are all equestrian subjects, and since the Irish love horses so much, maybe maybe there's a connection UM. Some also have said that it was taken as security by Boston crime boss James Whitey Boulger with the help of compromised FBI agents. But Sarah, you know a little bit more about that one than I do. Well, Boulger in the local FBI office did work together. They worked together to brain down an Italian crime family, which consequently was also Bulger's main competitor in Boston, but it leads to him buying off some of his BI handlers and an FBI supervisor, John Connolly, and Boulger is actually still one of the FBI's ten most wanted fugitives, and he's been charged with racketeering, conspiracy, narcotics distribution, and nineteen counts of murder. So people think he's the only guy in Boston at the time who would have been able to get those paintings out of the country since he had this FBI connection. And our latest word comes from April two thousand ten and the Boston Globe, and that's that the FBI was hot on the trail of the art, which this time was being held by a Corsican gang. Um, But that bureaucratic infighting and an inability for the FBI to work with their French counterparts blew the whole thing up. So in conclusion, the art is still missing. Um. We hope that it's being well cared for and that someday it will find its way back to its lovely home in Boston. Meanwhile, there's plenty of neat stuff to see at the museum and now carries much better theft insurance and UH a much more intense security system than it used to. And another side note, if your name is Isabella, you can go to the museum for free. We might need to change our names and go visit. And we have a quote, our final quote from Barrenson on Gardner, which I will let you read, Sarah, since you love her so much, and that is she lives at a rate in intensity and with a reality that makes other lives seem pale, thin and shadowy. And that's the final word on Isabella Stewart Gardner. And that brings us to listener mail. This is a special edition of real mail, this time from Jill in Minneapolis, and she sent us a pretty funny postcard that just says hello everyone on the front. But she sent it in honor of National Card and Letter Writing Month and suggested we do a podcast on the Pony Express or the USPS. So what do y'all think? Do you like those ideas? You should let us know at History podcast at how stuff works dot com. And we also have an unorthodox listener mail. I got a text from my old boss from my bartending days, Chris, who said that he and his little son Finn were big fans of the podcast, so a shout out to Chris and Finn, and if you'd like to follow us on Twitter, you can find us at mist in History. We also have a Facebook fan page that we update fairly frequently, and we have an article recommendation for you today, five impressive artists, which you can find if you search on our homepage at www dot house stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com and be sure to check out the stuff you missed in History glass blocked on the how stuff works dot com home page