The Art of the Heist
The Art of the Heist

Author: Myles J. Connor

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2009-04-10

Total Pages: 374

ISBN-13: 0061872717

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“One of the most beguiling criminal memoirs ever written….A rare gem of a book.” — T. J. English, New York Times bestselling author of Havana Nocturne How did the son of a decorated policeman grow up to be one of Boston’s most notorious criminals? How did he survive a decades-long feud with the FBI? How did he escape one jail sentence with a fake gun carved out of soap? How did he trade the return of a famous Rembrandt for early release from another sentence? The Art of the Heist is a roller-coaster ride of a life, the memoir of America’s most infamous art thief Myles Connor. Once a promising young rock musician, the son of a respected policeman, Myles Connor became one of Boston’s most infamous criminals—a legendary art thief with irresistible charm and a genius IQ whose approach to his chosen profession mixed brilliant tactical planning with stunning bravado, brazen disguises, audaciously elaborate con jobs, and even the broad-daylight grab-and-dash. New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, Boston’s Museum of Fine Art . . . no museum was off-limits. The fact that he was in jail at the time of the largest art theft in American history—the still-unsolved robbery of the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum—has not stopped the FBI from considering him a prime suspect. The Art of the Heist is Connor’s story—part confession, part thrill ride, and impossible to put down.

Stealing Rembrandts
Stealing Rembrandts

Author: Anthony M. Amore

Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Published: 2011-07-05

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0230337422

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Anthony M. Amore and Tom Mashberg's Stealing Rembrandts is a spellbinding journey into the high-stakes world of art theft Today, art theft is one of the most profitable criminal enterprises in the world, exceeding $6 billion in losses to galleries and art collectors annually. And the masterpieces of Rembrandt van Rijn are some of the most frequently targeted. In Stealing Rembrandts, art security expert Anthony M. Amore and award-winning investigative reporter Tom Mashberg reveal the actors behind the major Rembrandt heists in the last century. Through thefts around the world - from Stockholm to Boston, Worcester to Ohio - the authors track daring entries and escapes from the world's most renowned museums. There are robbers who coolly walk off with multimillion dollar paintings; self-styled art experts who fall in love with the Dutch master and desire to own his art at all costs; and international criminal masterminds who don't hesitate to resort to violence. They also show how museums are thwarted in their ability to pursue the thieves - even going so far as to conduct investigations on their own, far away from the maddening crowd of police intervention, sparing no expense to save the priceless masterpieces. Stealing Rembrandts is an exhilarating, one-of-a-kind look at the black market of art theft, and how it compromises some of the greatest treasures the world has ever known.

Master Thieves
Master Thieves

Author: Stephen Kurkjian

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Published: 2015-03-10

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1610394240

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The definitive story of the greatest art theft in history. In a secret meeting in 1981, a low-level Boston thief gave career gangster Ralph Rossetti the tip of a lifetime: the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum was a big score waiting to happen. Though its collections included priceless artworks by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Degas, and others, its security was cheap, mismanaged, and out of date. And now, it seemed, the whole Boston criminal underworld knew it. Nearly a decade passed before the Museum was finally hit. But when it finally happened, the theft quickly became one of the most infamous art heists in history: thirteen works of art valued at up to 500 million, by some of the most famous artists in the world, were taken. The Boston FBI took control of the investigation, but twenty-five years later the case is still unsolved and the artwork is still missing. Stephen Kurkjian, one of the top investigative reporters in the country, has been working this case for over nearly twenty years. In Master Thieves, he sheds new light on some of the Gardner's most abiding mysteries. Why would someone steal these paintings, only to leave them hidden for twenty-five years? And why, if one of the top crime bosses in the city knew about this score in 1981, did the theft happen in 1990? What happened in those intervening years? And what might all this have to do with Boston's notorious gang wars of the 1980s? Kurkjian's reporting is already responsible for some of the biggest breaks in this story, including a meticulous reconstruction of what happened at the Museum that fateful night. Now Master Thieves will reveal the identities of those he believes plotted the heist, the motive for the crime, and the details that the FBI has refused to discuss. Taking you on a journey deep into the gangs of Boston, Kurkjian emerges with the most complete and compelling version of this story ever told.

The Art Thief
The Art Thief

Author: Michael Finkel

Publisher: Knopf Canada

Published: 2023-06-27

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 0735278962

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NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • One of the most remarkable true-crime narratives of the twenty-first century: the story of the world’s most prolific art thief, Stéphane Breitwieser. • “The Art Thief, like its title character, has confidence, élan, and a great sense of timing."—The New Yorker "Enthralling." —The Wall Street Journal In this spellbinding portrait of obsession and flawed genius, the best-selling author of The Stranger in the Woods brings us into Breitwieser’s strange world—unlike most thieves, he never stole for money, keeping all his treasures in a single room where he could admire them. For centuries, works of art have been stolen in countless ways from all over the world, but no one has been quite as successful at it as the master thief Stéphane Breitwieser. Carrying out more than two hundred heists over nearly eight years—in museums and cathedrals all over Europe—Breitwieser, along with his girlfriend who worked as his lookout, stole more than three hundred objects, until it all fell apart in spectacular fashion. In The Art Thief, Michael Finkel brings us into Breitwieser’s strange and fascinating world. Unlike most thieves, Breitwieser never stole for money. Instead, he displayed all his treasures in a pair of secret rooms where he could admire them to his heart’s content. Possessed of a remarkable athleticism and an innate ability to circumvent practically any security system, Breitwieser managed to pull off a breathtaking number of audacious thefts. Yet these strange talents bred a growing disregard for risk and an addict’s need to score, leading Breitwieser to ignore his girlfriend’s pleas to stop—until one final act of hubris brought everything crashing down. This is a riveting story of art, crime, love, and an insatiable hunger to possess beauty at any cost.

The Heist Film
The Heist Film

Author: Daryl Lee

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2014-03-14

Total Pages: 145

ISBN-13: 0231850581

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A concise introduction to the genre about that one last big score, The Heist Film: Stealing With Style traces this crime thriller's development as both a dramatic and comic vehicle growing out of film noir (Criss Cross, The Killers, The Asphalt Jungle), mutating into sleek capers in the 1960s (Ocean's Eleven, Gambit, How to Steal a Million) and splashing across screens in the 2000s in remake after remake (The Thomas Crown Affair, The Italian Job, The Good Thief). Built around a series of case studies (Rififi, Bob le Flambeur, The Killing, The Lavender Hill Mob, The Getaway, the Ocean's trilogy), this volume explores why directors of such varied backgrounds, from studio regulars (Siodmak, Crichton, Siegel, Walsh and Wise) to independents (Anderson, Fuller, Kubrick, Ritchie and Soderbergh), are so drawn to this popular genre.

The Rockwell Heist
The Rockwell Heist

Author: Bruce Rubenstein

Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society

Published: 2013-03-15

Total Pages: 127

ISBN-13: 0873518969

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In 1979 seven Norman Rockwell paintings and a supposed Renoir, later discovered to be a forgery, were stolen from Elayne's Gallery in Edina. It is still the biggest theft in Minnesota history, and no one was ever convicted for the crime. This is the story of the theft, the investigation, and the twenty-year quest to return the art to its rightful owners

The Woman Who Stole Vermeer
The Woman Who Stole Vermeer

Author: Anthony M. Amore

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2020-11-10

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1643135309

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The extraordinary life and crimes of heiress-turned-revolutionary Rose Dugdale, who in 1974 became the only woman to pull off a major art heist. In the world of crime, there exists an unusual commonality between those who steal art and those who repeatedly kill: they are almost exclusively male. But, as with all things, there is always an outlier—someone who bucks the trend, defying the reliable profiles and leaving investigators and researchers scratching their heads. In the history of major art heists, that outlier is Rose Dugdale. Dugdale’s life is singularly notorious. Born into extreme wealth, she abandoned her life as an Oxford-trained PhD and heiress to join the cause of Irish Republicanism. While on the surface she appears to be the British version of Patricia Hearst, she is anything but. Dugdale ran head-first towards the action, spearheading the first aerial terrorist attack in British history and pulling off the biggest art theft of her time. In 1974, she led a gang into the opulent Russborough House in Ireland and made off with millions in prized paintings, including works by Goya, Gainsborough, and Rubens, as well as Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid by the mysterious master Johannes Vermeer. Dugdale thus became—to this day—the only woman to pull off a major art heist. And as Anthony Amore explores in The Woman Who Stole Vermeer, it’s likely that this was not her only such heist. The Woman Who Stole Vermeer is Rose Dugdale’s story, from her idyllic upbringing in Devonshire and her presentation to Elizabeth II as a debutante to her university years and her eventual radical lifestyle. Her life of crime and activism is at turns unbelievable and awe-inspiring, and sure to engross readers.

The Art of the Con
The Art of the Con

Author: Anthony M. Amore

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2015-07-14

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 1466879114

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Art scams are today so numerous that the specter of a lawsuit arising from a mistaken attribution has scared a number of experts away from the business of authentication and forgery, and with good reason. Art scams are increasingly convincing and involve incredible sums of money. The cons perpetrated by unscrupulous art dealers and their accomplices are proportionately elaborate. Anthony M. Amore's The Art of the Con tells the stories of some of history's most notorious yet untold cons. They involve stolen art hidden for decades; elaborate ruses that involve the Nazis and allegedly plundered art; the theft of a conceptual prototype from a well-known artist by his assistant to be used later to create copies; the use of online and television auction sites to scam buyers out of millions; and other confidence scams incredible not only for their boldness but more so because they actually worked. Using interviews and newly released court documents, The Art of the Con will also take the reader into the investigations that led to the capture of the con men, who oftentimes return back to the world of crime. For some, it's an irresistible urge because their innocent dupes all share something in common: they want to believe.

The Heist
The Heist

Author: Daniel Silva

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2014-08-01

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 1460702565

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Gabriel Allon, art restorer and occasional spy, searches for a stolen masterpiece by Caravaggio in #1 New York Times bestselling author Daniel Silva's latest action-packed tale of high stakes international intrigue. Sometimes the best way to find a stolen masterpiece is to steal another one... Legendary spy and art restorer Gabriel Allon is in Venice repairing an altarpiece when he receives an urgent summons from the Italian police. the art dealer Julian Isherwood has stumbled upon a murder scene in Lake Como, and is being held as a suspect. to save his friend, Gabriel must perform one simple task: find the most famous missing painting in the world. the dead man is a fallen spy with a secret: he's been trafficking in stolen artworks and selling them to a mysterious collector. Among those paintings is the world's most iconic missing work of art: Caravaggio's Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence. Gabriel embarks on a daring gambit to recover the Caravaggio that will take him on an exhilarating hunt-from Marseilles and Corsica, to Paris and Geneva, and, finally, to a small private bank in Austria, where a dangerous man stands guard over the ill-gotten wealth of one of the world's most brutal dictators... 'Daniel Silva has few rivals in the realm of the big blockbuster spy story.' the Age

The Crown Heist
The Crown Heist

Author: Deron R. Hicks

Publisher: HMH Books For Young Readers

Published: 2021-11-16

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0358396069

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In another "suspenseful mystery romp with art appreciation" (Kirkus Reviews, starred review), Art and Camille head to London to find her estranged father, and soon find themselves embroiled in a heist involving a long-dead monarch. Packed with fascinating facts about real places and pieces of art, this fast-paced thriller is perfect for fans of the Spy School and Mr. Limoncello's Library series and Dan Brown. No matter how dangerous his adventures have been, Art has always been able to count on his best friend, Camille. Now that Camille is meeting her estranged father, Art wants to be there for her--which means going to London. But Camille's history professor father, renowned for expertise in British legend, is missing. When they visit his apartment, Art and Camille find a long-missing object that suggests the professor could be in trouble and solving a mystery related to London's history. Follow Art and Camille as they visit the Tower of London, National Portrait Gallery, and ride the "tube" in hopes of uncovering the truth before it's too late.