About this item
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included priceless artworks by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Degas, and others, its security was cheap, mismanaged, and out of date.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 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.
About the Author
Stephen Kurkjian was born and raised in Boston, and a product of the Boston public schools, including The Boston Latin School. He graduated from Boston University with a degree in English Literature and Suffolk University Law School. His father Anooshavan Kurkjian, a survivor of the Armenian Genocide, was a commercial artist, and mother, Rosella Gureghian Kurkjian, was a newspaper librarian. After a two-year stint at the State House News Service, he joined the Boston Globe where he broke in covering local news, especially the Vietnam War protest movement. In the summer of 1969, he covered Senator Kennedy's fatal accident on Martha's Vineyard Chappaquiddick Island and the Woodstock rock festival which solidified his decision to remain a reporter for his career rather than the law. He spent the next 40 years as a reporter and editor at The Globe, working for the most part as an investigative reporter. He was a founding member of The Globe's investigative Spotlight Team and later became its editor. As a team member he shared in three Pulitzer Prizes, and was its chief in 1981 when it was awarded the prize for local investigative reporting for a series on the region's public transportation authority, the Mass. Bay Transportation Authority. In 1986, he was appointed chief of The Globe's Washington Bureau where he oversaw the reporting of the paper's ten reporters and himself covered the Justice Department, Supreme Court and the first Bush White House. Returning to The Globe in 1991, he became its first projects editor, overseeing investigative reporting in the newsroom. Among the topics he covered was a fire at a Rhode Island rock club in which 100 people were killed; inadequate mental health services for Massachusetts prisoners; conflicts of interest in the granting of financial services contract for municipal finance business in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts; questionable activities by the Massachusetts Speaker of the House which led to his indictment and conviction for influencing a state software contract and the most definitive article on the 1990 theft from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Following his retirement from The Globe in 2007, Kurkjian researched and wrote Master Thieves: The Boston Gangsters Who Pulled Off the World's Greatest Art Heist, and has written extensively about the Armenian Genocide of 1915, a horrific massacre by the Ottoman Turkish empire which killed more than a million Armenians, including his grandfather, and drove countless others from their ancestral home in eastern Turkey. Kurkjian lives in Boston, and is the father of two children - Erica Kurkjian Parrell, a public school teacher, and Adam, a sports reporter for The Boston Herald - as well as grandfather to three, Theodore, Jillian and Emily Parrell.
