BooksBarbecue
Back The Midnight Ride
Chapters (48)
  1. Cover
  2. Title
  3. Copyright
  4. Dedication
  5. Prologue
  6. Chapter One
  7. Chapter Two
  8. Chapter Three
  9. Chapter Four
  10. Chapter Five
  11. Chapter Six
  12. Chapter Seven
  13. Chapter Eight
  14. Chapter Nine
  15. Chapter Ten
  16. Chapter Eleven
  17. Chapter Twelve
  18. Chapter Thirteen
  19. Chapter Fourteen
  20. Chapter Fifteen
  21. Chapter Sixteen
  22. Chapter Seventeen
  23. Chapter Eighteen
  24. Chapter Nineteen
  25. Chapter Twenty
  26. Chapter Twenty-One
  27. Chapter Twenty-Two
  28. Chapter Twenty-Three
  29. Chapter Twenty-Four
  30. Chapter Twenty-Five
  31. Chapter Twenty-Six
  32. Chapter Twenty-Seven
  33. Chapter Twenty-Eight
  34. Chapter Twenty-Nine
  35. Chapter Thirty
  36. Chapter Thirty-One
  37. Chapter Thirty-Two
  38. Chapter Thirty-Three
  39. Chapter Thirty-Four
  40. Chapter Thirty-Five
  41. Chapter Thirty-Six
  42. Chapter Thirty-Seven
  43. Epilogue
  44. Acknowledgments
  45. Discover More
  46. About the Author
  47. Praise forThe Midnight Ride​
  48. Also by Ben Mezrich

“That’s a serious number. What kind of candlestick is worth ten million dollars?”

“Not a candlestick,” Zack said. “Paintings. Eleven of them. And two other items. Stolen more than thirty years ago. March 18, 1990—”

“Don’t tell me,” Marsh said.

“Yep. The Gardner paintings.”

Chapter Nine

Chapter Nine

Detective Marsh laughed out loud.

“The Gardner theft. It’s like herpes. Flares up every couple of years. You feds get some hot tip from a phone line, or some drug dealer gets pinched and tries to talk his way into a lighter sentence by throwing up a bunch of bull about this guy he knows, who knows a guy, who knows a guy—when the hell are you going to give up on that pipe dream already?”

The truth was, Marsh wasn’t wrong. The Gardner Museum theft remained the most famous unsolved art heist in history, the subject of countless theories, tips, investigations, and dead ends: On March 18, 1990, shortly after one in the morning, two men posing as police officers had talked their way into the small museum outside of Boston, tied up the two guards, and made off with eleven paintings—including The Concert by Vermeer, one of only thirty-four existing paintings by the Dutch Baroque master, and now perhaps the most valuable missing painting on earth. None of them had been recovered. On top of the Vermeer, the thieves took a number of Rembrandts, including The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, and others including works of Degas and Manet. In a strange twist, along with the eleven valuable works of art, the fake cops had also stolen two objects that seemed decidedly random: an ancient Chinese “gu,” a vessel or vase used for liquids such as wine, and a bronze finial in the shape of an eagle that had once sat atop one of Napoleon Bonaparte’s flags. Neither of these two items were particularly valuable, which made their addition to the looted works more mysterious. But the paintings themselves were worth hundreds of millions, if not more; recent assessments had put the value of the theft at over half a billion dollars, making it the biggest unsolved heist ever.