Date/Time
Apr 19, 2015
1:00 pm - 2:30 pm
Location
Barnes & Noble Warwick
1350 Bald Hill Rd.
Warwick, RI
Visit Website
Tags
Educational-for-adults, Educational-for-kids, Intellectual, Spoken Word
Author Stephen Kurkjian to do a reading and booksigning for his book Master Thieves: The Boston
Gangsters Who Pulled Off the World’s Greatest Art Heist.
Master Thieves is 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Degas, and others, its security was cheap, mismanaged, and out of date.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.