Dave Collins (Saskatchewan Leader-Post) reports that the seventy-six-year-old Robert Gentile, a reputed mobster, has failed a FBI polygraph test when asked if he knew the whereabouts of priceless paintings, including Vermeer’s mid-career Concert, which were stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990. According to the polygraph expert, there is a 99 per cent chance that Gentile knows something about the heist. Moreover, when Gentile’s house in Manchester, Conn. was searched last year, they found a handwritten list of the stolen paintings, their estimated worth and a newspaper article about the heist a day after it happened.
Frankly, it is hard to understand how happy we should be that the FBI is getting closer to a solution. While it does represent a chance that the painting could be finally recovered, the chances are just good that we will find out it was destroyed.
