THE CAPER HAS LENT TO GRITTY CRIME FICTION AND PLUCKY HEROINES
THE 1990 HEIST of artworks from the Isabella Steward Gardner
Museum in Boston remains a black hole in the history of crime. None of the
thirteen items—from a Rembrandt to a Vermeer—has been recovered, and theories
abound on who did the deed.
Crime
novelist David Hosp is not the only writer who has wrapped the Gardner heist itno
fiction. But his novel, Among Thieves
(2010) presents as gritty a tale as the noir approach to art crime could
possible do. And he offers a fictional theory that ties up all the loose ends
of the actual heist—and offers hope that the paintings soon will be returned.
Hosp write
a crime series featuring Boston criminal defense lawyer Scott Finn, an Irish
“southie” (south Boston). Finn left behind a foster-home misfortune and his
juvenile delinquency to become a powerhouse lawyer. He’s forty-four when we
catch up with him in Among Thieves,
and he is defending a small-time Irish thief named Devon Malley, who used to
work for famous the Irish-American gang boss “Whitey” Bulger.
Now begins
the fiction. It was Devon, we find out, who pulled off the Gardner heist with
an imported Irish gangster, “the Irishman.” Bulger had ordered the heist at the
behest of the IRA, which had been using stolen art for financing. However, by
the time the Gardner heist was done, the publicity made the art works
impossible to sell. A few years after the hiest, Bulger summoned Devon. They picked
up the hidden paintings and put them in a storage unit. Soon after, Bulger was
on the run, having been indicted in Boston for gang murders.
We begin
the story of Among Thieves twenty
years later. A group of IRA radicals has split from the main organization,
which has signed a truce in Ireland. The radical wing wants the paintings to
finance their continued struggle. They have sent a killer to Boston torture Devon
and two others to find out where the paintings are.
Finn, the
lawyer, is working with Devon on a minor theft charge when the other two are tortured
and killed. Devon knows he is next, so he works with Finn for a way out.
Unbeknownst to Finn, Devon had already floated the idea of selling the
paintings. The FBI is working covertly to manage the exchange. After the first
murder, two Boston police detectives begin to follow Finn and the FBI,
suspicious of the lawyer and the feds, who are always there, but won’t tell
them anything.
In the end,
the Irish killer takes Devon’s daughter hostage. The killer thinks he’s gotten
the crate with the paintings, but amid a car crash—the Boston cops with the
fleeing killer—it is revealed that the crate is empty. Devon is also surprised.
The solution is the “third person,” that is, a third individual who had a key
to the storage unit and must have taken them.
Says lawyer
Finn, “The question is, who was the third?”
Finn
figures this out in the end—the third person is an elderly caretaker at the
museum, now retired. He grew up in Bulger’s neighborhood. Back in the day, Bulger
came to him and said if he didn’t help with a heist, they’d burn down the Gardner
Museum. Thus, the caretaker helped pull an inside job to save the art
institution he loved.
How then does
author Hosp reconcile his novel’s plot with the still-missing paintings in the
real world? Easy. The caretaker says that their location will be revealed when
he dies, which won’t be long, given his brittle age.
In all,
Hosp sticks to the facts as the FBI knows them. The real thieves took some
oddities, such as a decorative finial at the top of a flag pole and some Degas sketches.
In the novel, this is explained as Devon just doing some treasure hunting as
“the Irishman” went after the valuable paintings, cutting each from its frame. The
caretaker, moreover, had supplied all the security, layout, and art
information. For fiction, it’s about as close as we can get to what really
happened.
Before the
Gardner heist, the popular mystery writer Jane Langton gave us Murder at the Gardner (1988), part of
the Bostonian who-done-it Homer Kelly detective series, its major strength
being a full description of the Gardner interior and collection. After the
heist, at least two other art novels besides Hosp’s Among Thieves touch on the event, if tangentially:
■ Hollywood actor and
comedian Steve Martin’s An Object of
Beauty (2010) follows the career of a hip young woman, Lacey Yaeger, in New
York City. She’s an art dealer riding the art market rollercoaster. Her story
stretches from the go-go eighties to the market crash of 2008.
Along the
way, the reader thinks that the plot will turn on Lacey discovering that her boss
is laundering two of the stolen Gardner paintings, a Rembrandt and a Vermeer.
The suspicion rises, but recedes quickly. Lacey learns that he is working with the
FBI. The Vermeer she found is only a copy, a decoy for an FBI sting. After
that, the novel loses any suggestion of a crime plot. Lacey’s misjudgments—her sleeping
around and her small step into market fraud—catch up with her. She ends broke. Her
gallery closes. She returns home to her mother in Atlanta, Georgia.
■ B.A. Shapiro’s The Art Forger (2012) presents young
heroine Claire Roth, a professional painter-copier of old masters (for buyers
who legally want a copy). Claire has a humble studio in Boston. She is brought
a “copy” of a Degas stolen in the Gardner heist; the novel invents a painting
called After the Bath. Claire
accepts the job, thinking she is doing a copy of a copy.
The novel
also interjects the story of the Gilded Age founder of the museum, Isabella
Stewart Gardner, known intimately as “Belle.” Novelist Shapiro does this by
inventing romantic letters between Belle and Degas. The sexual plot thickens, since
After the Bath is a naked painting of
Belle, who in her day was a powerful and wealthy Bostonian socialite.
In the
present, Belle’s niece Sandra has all her aunt’s papers. Claire meets Sandra
researching the Gardner case and the Degas. Sandra is in her eighties, the last
Gardner heir. And Sandra has an untold secret: years before the Gardner heist, she
had stolen After the Bath from the
museum and had a professional forger make a copy to replace it. So, whoever did
the Gardner heist, had stolen a mere copy.
By the end
of the story, the FBI and Claire figure this out. But it is only the brilliant
Claire who solves the mystery: she goes to Sandra’s brownstone, confronts her, breaches
a secret room, and finds the true Degas painting, After the Bath. The room is like a shrine, for it only contains the
painting and a chair facing it.
The Art Forger has been called “chic
lit,” and its arc does focus on the lusty womanhood of Belle and the triumphs
of the female artist Claire against two heterosexual male nemeses (though, as
might be expected, Claire does have a hip gay ally).
Novelist
Hosp’s Among Thieves follows more
closely some of the actual theories about the Gardner heist. Much of the bona
fide speculation does look to the IRA and Bulger as complicit. Among Thieves also recreates the internecine
struggle in Boston between cops, the FBI, the IRA, and the Bulger legacy.
Take your
pick, but clearly it’s Among Thieves
that gets us closer to full-blown reality.