The Rembrandt Heist: The Story of a Criminal Genius, a Stolen Masterpiece, and an Enigmatic Friendship

Amore (The Woman Who Stole Vermeer), director of security at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, delivers a dramatic and colorful recounting of the 1975 theft of Rembrandt’s Portrait of Elsbeth van Rijn from Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. In 1974, art thief Myles Connor was detained by the FBI for stealing paintings from the Woolworth estate in Maine. When he offered to return other stolen works in exchange for a lighter sentence, an officer told him “Nothing short of a Rembrandt could get you out of this.” The comment “planted a seed” in Connor’s mind, leading to an audacious daytime heist in which he—while out of jail on bail—and an associate donned wigs, entered the museum as visitors, snatched the painting, and ran to a getaway car, bludgeoning a guard in the process. After Connor was caught and jailed, he got his childhood friend Al Dotoli to hand the painting over to the cops; Connor ended up serving four years of a 15-year sentence. Amore constructs an impressively detailed play-by-play of the theft, drawing on his own investigations into the thefts of artworks and his access to Connor and Dotoli, both of whom he’d befriended, and sources in law enforcement and the art world. This captivates. (Nov.)