THE REMBRANDT HEIST

Amore, co-author of Stealing Rembrandts (2011) and head of security at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, here describes the colorful life of Myles Connor, a rock musician who turned to a life of crime throughout New England in the 1960s and ’70s. The author details many of Connor’s early exploits, including impersonating an art expert, stealing works from museums, escaping from a jail cell in Maine (“using a fake gun he fashioned from a bar of soap and some shoeblack”), and exchanging gunfire with the police. The book is steeped in Greater Boston lore; Amore name-drops people and venues as well as bands managed by Connor’s best friend, Al Dotoli. The book vividly recounts Myles’ dramatic 1975 theft of Rembrandt’s Portrait of Elsbeth van Rijn from Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, a risky attempt to secure a reduced sentence, and the heist’s aftermath. Although the book offers much in the way of insider baseball as to how law enforcement, the FBI, and criminal gangs operated in the area at the time, Amore’s regard for Connor and Dotoli overshadows the seriousness of Connor’s crimes, as though Connor and his co-conspirators were merely juvenile delinquents pranking family friends. Amore writes: “Is there anything more complex than a man with a genius-level IQ whose love for Japanese swords would consume him to the point where there was no risk too great to keep him from consuming them? Someone gifted enough to impress art curators with doctorates about their shared passions only to entrust millions of dollars’ worth of his beloved objects to obvious scoundrels who would betray him. In my line of work, I can’t think of anything more complicated.”