Master Thieves (6 page)

“There are people out there who would love to support the museum and its treasures. All they need is to be asked,” Standley told the board. She said she estimated that the museum would be able to raise 30–40 percent of its budget through such a campaign. But the board rejected the initiative, fearing that such members would inevitably want to have a say in the museum operations, and that might lead to a conflict with the board itself, which under Mrs. Gardner's will had to maintain sole responsibility for the museum's direction.

The Gardner's board members served unlimited terms not because of their love of art or their fund-raising prowess but because they came from the right families. They dismissed Standley's pleas out of hand.

“I do know that [the trustees] . . . pretty much wanted to stay in their own little world, which would have been fine, except the outside world was changing and the museum had these space needs that badly needed to be addressed,” Standley said in an interview.

In 1987, out of frustration from trying to convince the trustees to approve a plan, Standley stepped down from her fund-raising advisory position. A year later, the museum's deputy director resigned, explaining in a letter to a board member, “I could not work effectively for the museum under the conditions of confusion, indecision, inadequate communication and a lack of defined and shared goals [among] trustees, advisory committee and staff.”

The next year, in 1989, Hadley submitted his resignation, stating in a final report that he asked the board to keep confidential until 1994 that the failure to establish a fund-raising campaign had doomed him. “The campaign was ended without consulting with the staff charged with fundraising, and good faith between trustees and staff was broken. . . . Until that faith is restored the museum cannot make plans,” he wrote that June. The museum was robbed less than a year later.

(Their reluctance to overspend on security did not prevent some of the trustees from trying to place blame on Grindle after the theft. At one board meeting, they pressed him on why a lock on one of the security doors the thieves had to pass through once granted access inside the museum was missing. Grindle pointed out that he had requested $500 to fix the broken lock as a prior budget request but it had never been granted.)

So in early 1990, as their tour of the Gardner building concluded, Grindle and McAuliffe shook hands and promised to keep discussing each other's security needs.

“Let's be sure to grab a drink in Chicago,” Grindle said, referring to the upcoming meeting of institutional security directors in the week leading up to St. Patrick's Day weekend, 1990.

______________________

“I've got a ticket
to the Dead in Hartford tomorrow night,” Rick Abath called out to his roommate as he left for work on March 17, 1990. “If I can score another ticket, I might stay for Monday's show, too.”

“What about work?” Abath's roommate called back to him.

Abath went on his way, as he had done countless times in the past, checking doors and the empty galleries.

“I've already given my notice. What more can they do to me?” Abath shot back.

It was the sort of smart-ass, know-it-all response Abath was known for around the Gardner Museum, where he was a night watchman. He stood out among the staff of thirty-five security guards, most of whom were college kids or retirees on Social Security, because of his sharp tongue. Abath was also smart and known among his colleagues for persistently questioning his superiors about the museum's need to spend more money on improving security equipment and paying guards more. But after working the midnight shift for nearly a year, Abath had tired of his night watchman's job. He was tolerating it only because the job suited his casual attitude and didn't interfere too much with his real aspirations: making it in the world of rock music.

Abath's band Ukiah, a Phish knockoff, was landing a sufficient number of gigs in a few of Boston's grungier nightspots, so Abath felt sure it was only a matter of time before he could make his way as both the band's guitarist and manager, not shining flashlights into darkened corners of a small, under-appreciated Boston museum.

Grindle, the museum's security director, had hired Abath and appreciated that he had someone he could depend on to work the midnight shift. But in the months leading up to the theft, he had gotten disenchanted with the young man, who never seemed to stop complaining about the most minor of lapses and who rumor had it was showing up for work looking either stoned or tipsy. In fact, Abath had begun to slack off considerably in those final months, and admits to often being under the influence of marijuana or liquor during the nights he would rush to the museum from a Ukiah gig at a nearby club.

Grindle definitely had no idea of the little party Abath had held for a few friends at the Gardner a few months before, on
New Year's Eve. Despite being strictly prohibited, Abath allowed several close friends, including two brothers who also worked at the museum, to usher in the new year with a low-key party. Abath supplied his favorite top-shelf Bombay gin.

“I figure if I have to work tonight, I'm not going to spend it without my friends,” he told them as they camped out among the Gardner's masterpieces.

The incident should have cost Abath his job. But the second night watchman on duty with him that New Year's Eve liked Abath and didn't report him. In fact, that same man, Joseph M. Mulvey, Abath's regular partner and an old-timer who had been working security at the museum since the mid-1980s, was scheduled to work the overnight shift with Abath on March 18. But when Abath arrived a half hour before the shift was scheduled to start, he found that Mulvey had called in sick.

There was a scramble until Randy Hestand agreed to work the shift. Four years older than Abath, Hestand had been hired as a gallery guard at the museum the year before. That night would be the first time Hestand worked as a night watchman, but he knew the shift had long periods of down time, and he brought his trombone along with him.

“We'll alternate patrolling the galleries,” Abath told Hestand, reiterating what he'd been told over the phone when he'd agreed to the shift. “It should take about an hour to complete. We document the rounds by turning our security keys in the alarm locks around the building.”

While one man was doing his patrols—unarmed but carrying a flashlight and walkie-talkie—the other would sit at the security desk, where he could watch a television screen that showed the closed circuit images from four cameras around the building's perimeter. Those images were captured on a videocassette recorder located inside the small office, where the duty commander customarily sat. The only other piece
of equipment, an IBM computer that registered the footsteps of anyone passing through any of the sixty motion-activated infrared sensors spread through the museum, sat close by. The security system had been installed about two years previously at a cost of about $100,000. It was turned on.

“I'll take the first patrol through the galleries,” Abath told Hestand, enjoying pulling a bit of seniority on the older man. “But you see that button?” he asked, pointing to a small round button molded within arm's reach on the right side of the security desk. “That's the panic alarm. Hit that if there's any emergency, and the police will be here in minutes.”

In fact, that button was the only alarm the museum had in place that could alert the outside world to a problem inside the building. While other museums had instituted a fail-safe system, which required the night watchmen to make hourly phone calls to convey that all was well, the panic button at the Gardner's front security desk was the only way to summon police to an emergency.

Abath went on his way, checking doors and the empty galleries. He was midway through his rounds when whatever hopes he had for a routine evening were shattered. Suddenly he heard the fire alarm box just a few feet away from the security desk going off loudly. While the box could pinpoint thirty places around the museum where a fire had started or a window had been broken, this time all the alarm stations throughout the building were blaring out their siren call.

“What the hell is going on down there?” Abath shouted into his two-way radio.

“You'd better get down here, Rick,” Hestand said, a slight panic in his voice. “The whole box is going off.”

Abath ran to the alarm box and shut it down. He reset it and then turned it on again. Once again, its bright lights lit up like a Christmas tree and the sirens wailed throughout the building.

“What the hell is wrong with it?” Hestand asked.

“I've got no idea,” Abath shot back. “I've never seen anything like it.”

Abath considered calling someone but decided instead to just shut down the box for the night and to make sure a repairman was summoned in the morning. Abath went back to his rounds, starting over from the beginning as his security manual required. He finally completed his tour around 1
a.m.
But before he relieved Hestand at the security desk, he made a sharp detour into the anteroom between the museum itself and the outside door. The door was of heavy oak and had been the side entrance to the museum since its construction in 1903. A metal latch that was still in place had been the original mechanism for locking the door, but it now locked and unlocked electronically, with a control switch at the security desk, or manually, as Abath was about to do. Without telling Hestand what he was doing or why, Abath opened the side door and shut it again.

Outside on the street, two men in a parked car would have seen Abath open and shut the door. They'd been sitting in their dark-colored hatchback on Palace Road, about one hundred feet away from the employee entrance to the museum, for a while, and they squinted through their windows, thick with condensation from their breath that cool night. In the half hour before, the quiet on the street had been suddenly broken when a group of youthful St. Patrick's Day revelers emerged from a nearby apartment building. There were about five in all, and they were tipsy from the late-night party they'd just left. The men in the hatchback, dressed in police uniforms and wearing police caps, made no move as a couple of the kids danced around them and then climbed one another's shoulders in the middle of Palace Road.

“Cops,” a girl who had climbed onto her boyfriend's shoulders for a brief wrestling match with another couple
stage-whispered as she spied the two men. Through the clouded windows she saw that both men were wearing police hats and that the driver had on a coat with a police patch on its arm.

One of the revelers, Tim Conway, saw them too. He noticed their uniforms and wondered what they were doing in an unmarked car. “They've got to be doing surveillance on someone,” he thought and tried to be nonchalant as he walked around to the back of the car to see if it had any medallions or a special license plate to designate it as a police vehicle. There were none.

For a second Conway considered knocking on the car's window to ask the two men what they were waiting for, but he also knew he was in no condition to be asking questions of the police. Conway had consumed much of the two six-packs of Irish beer he'd brought to the party and knew he was tipsy. To top it off he was only nineteen, well below the legal drinking age.

Conway and his friends quickly disappeared into the misty, cool night, leaving the hatchback and its two occupants alone.

A few minutes later, at 1:20 in the morning, the hatchback started up and drove slowly past the heavy oak door of the Gardner's employee entrance and parked. Inside the museum, Abath saw the car via the closed circuit television camera that hung over the door, then turned his attention elsewhere. When he looked up again, the two men, dressed in police uniforms, were at the door reaching for the buzzer.

“Police,” one of the two men said, turning to look at the closed circuit television that hung over the door. “We're here about the disturbance.”

Abath was unaware of any disturbance at the museum, or of any call made to 911 to report one. But he also knew that, this being St. Patrick's Day, anything might have happened on the grounds surrounding the museum and that the closed circuit televisions easily could have missed it. Perhaps someone had climbed over the iron fence and gotten into the grounds
in the back of the museum, he thought. Maybe someone in the security post at Simmons College across the street had seen it and called the police.

Abath pressed the buzzer on the console at his security desk, giving the men access into the museum. As they entered the “mantrap”—the locked foyer that separated the rear door from the actual museum—he could see them clearly. One was taller than the other, and they looked to be dressed in police uniforms, right down to the union pins fastened to their shirt collars.

“Is there anyone else here with you?” the shorter of the two asked Abath.

“Just one other,” Abath responded. “He's on his rounds.”

“Get him down here, immediately,” the short officer demanded.

Abath grabbed his walkie-talkie and called Hestand to come back to the security desk.

Just then Abath noticed that while both had mustaches, the one on the taller of the two seemed fake. In fact, it looked pasted to his face. But before he got to look more closely, the shortest of the pair leaned toward him.

“You look familiar,” he said accusingly to Abath, squinting his eyes. “I think we have a warrant out for your arrest. Come out from behind the desk and show us some identification.”

Abath had had no brushes with the law and knew he had no warrants, but his immediate concern was that if he didn't comply, he'd be arrested and have to spend the rest of the weekend in jail. If that happened, he knew he'd miss those Grateful Dead concerts in Hartford.

He stood up and stepped away from the security desk. It would be Abath's second grievous error in judgment. First he'd broken protocol by letting the officers into the museum. Now he was facing them, unarmed and outmanned.