Robert V. Gentile, a Connecticut gangster who died last week, had been suspected for years of concealing clues to the world’s richest art heist.
The 85-year-old Gentile, who died Sept. 17 in a Hartford hospital, may have been the last person alive with knowledge of what happened to the paintings, drawings and sculptures valued at $500 million that were stolen from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in March 1990.
The 13 works — including Vermeer’s “The Concert” and Rembrandt’s “Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee” — were nabbed by two hoodlums who disguised themselves as police officers to gain entry to the museum.
Gentile acknowledged associating with gangsters thought by the FBI to have had possession of some of the art. But he stubbornly denied accounts that he possessed two of the pieces, at least briefly.
His possible involvement was featured prominently in the recent Netflix documentary series “This is a Robbery.”
Gentile refused to cooperate with investigators, even when assured he wouldn’t be charged. He said in interviews that he didn’t trust the FBI and that he didn’t think he would be given the millions of dollars in reward money. Over the last decade, he kept silent as agents arrested and imprisoned him repeatedly in the futile efforts to persuade him to open up.
Investigators all but disassembled Gentile’s modest, ranch home in Manchester during repeated searches. They found cash, drugs, what a judge called a virtual armory of guns, and a list of the stolen Gardner art with estimated black market values — but no art.
A statement issued after the death by his lawyer, A. Ryan McGuigan, said: “For the past 11 years I represented Robert Gentile, allegedly the last known person to possess the stolen paintings. I had once been told by the Government that he was a dangerous man. A bad man. And he deserved what was done to him. I never agreed. I only saw an elderly man that was being kicked while he was down. He was a friend. I am proud to have known him and proud to have defended him.”
There is hope among investigators that the death could trigger a new development that could produce new clues to the fate of the art.
For years, Gentile was known to but mostly ignored by FBI and state police investigators, who wrote him off as a nickel-and-dime hoodlum. But then he threw in with a mafia group in Boston that authorities came to suspect had obtained possession of some of the art from the men who stole it.
Gentile’s initial contact with the Boston group was with notorious gangster Robert Guarente, a well-connected bank robber and drug dealer. It was through Guarente that Gentile moved to the center of the Gardner investigation in 2010.
That year, Gardner investigators went to Maine to search a farmhouse that had been owned by Guarente, who had been dead for six years.
They found nothing at the house. But when they returned the keys to his widow, Elene Guarente — who had denied even being aware of the Gardner museum — she blurted out, inexplicably and entirely unexpectedly, “My Bobby had two of the paintings.”
In ensuing interviews, she said that her husband kept the paintings in Maine and, after his release from prison for the last time, decided to pass them to an associate: Robert Gentile. She said the handoff had been done after the two men and their wives had dinner at a shoreside restaurant in Portland, Maine.
Elene Guarente’s outburst put Gentile in the FBI’s cross-hairs, and he became one of the most investigated men in the country. He submitted to a polygraph examination, during which he denied having advance knowledge of the Gardner heist, ever possessing a Gardner painting or knowing the location of any of the stolen paintings. The result showed a likelihood of greater than 99.9% that he was lying, according to a government filing in federal court.
The Gardner museum, an Italianate palazzo in Boston’s Fenway, was robbed early in the morning of March 18, 1990, as St. Patrick’s Day celebrations wound down across Boston. The thieves wearing police uniforms bluffed their way in, bound the guards, battered and slashed some of the world’s most recognizable art from walls and frames, and disappeared.
They took 13 pieces. The art was uninsured under the terms of the bequest that created the museum, and empty frames now hang where art was displayed.
In spite of the reward and promises of no-questions-asked immunity for anyone returning the art, the investigation has run down repeated dead ends, in many cases because promising targets are dying off among the aging circle of New England mobsters.
Gentile may have been the last.