Two men in fake police uniforms talked their way into a Boston museum, tied up the guards, and vanished with $500 million in art that has never been seen again.
In the early hours of March 18, 1990, two men dressed as Boston police officers rang the buzzer at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, claiming they were responding to a disturbance call.
Against protocol, night guard Rick Abath let them in. The 'officers' quickly overpowered Abath and a second guard, duct-taped them to pipes in the basement, and had the run of the museum for 81 uninterrupted minutes.
The thieves stole 13 works of art, including Vermeer's The Concert (one of only 34 known Vermeers in existence), Rembrandt's only known seascape, The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, and five Degas sketches.
Oddly, the thieves ignored other masterpieces hanging nearby, including works by Titian and Michelangelo, and instead spent time trying and failing to pry a Napoleonic eagle finial off a flagstaff, eventually just wrenching the whole thing off.
The stolen art has never been recovered, and the empty frames still hang in their original spots on the museum walls today, per the terms of Gardner's will, as placeholders awaiting the paintings' return.
At an estimated value of $500 million, it remains the largest unsolved art theft and the single largest property crime in United States history.
The statute of limitations for prosecuting the actual theft expired in 1995, so even if the thieves were identified with certainty, they could no longer be charged for the robbery itself.
FBI investigators believe the heist was linked to organized crime figures connected to the Boston Mafia, and have pointed to a since-murdered gangster named Bobby Donati as a possible participant, but no one has ever been charged.
The Gardner Museum still offers a $10 million reward, the largest bounty ever offered by a private institution, for information leading to the artwork's safe recovery.