Displaying items by tag: fbi

A pair of stolen N.C. Wyeth paintings worth up to $500,000 apiece have been recovered and will be displayed in Maine along with four other stolen paintings recouped nearly a year ago in California, officials said Thursday.

The two paintings were recovered last month when a third party surrendered them to a retired FBI agent in the Boston area, Harold Shaw, special agent in charge of the bureau's Boston field office, told reporters at the Portland Museum of Art, where the paintings were on display.

The FBI and Portland police on Tuesday announced a reward of up to $20,000 for information leading to the recovery of two paintings by N.C. Wyeth stolen from Portland developer and art collector Joseph Soley in May 2013.

Police Chief Michael Sauschuck traveled to the Boston FBI office to join Vincent B. Lisi, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Boston division, to make the announcement. It comes a month after a New Hampshire man was convicted of illegally transporting four other N.C. Wyeth paintings stolen from Soley at the same time. Two other men have been convicted of possessing those stolen works.

The two men suspected of masquerading as police officers to rob an art museum of $500 million worth of masterpieces in 1990 are dead, the FBI said.

Two years ago, investigators announced that they knew who stole 13 works — including paintings by Rembrandt and Vermeer — from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, but they refused to elaborate, saying only that the investigation was focused on recovering the artwork.

Never-before-seen video released Thursday shows a security guard admitting an unidentified man into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum the night before the infamous 1990 art heist, adding a stunning new clue to Boston’s most enduring mystery.

The video footage, taken by the museum’s surveillance cameras and recently examined by investigators, shows the night watchman open the museum’s side door and grant unauthorized access to the man at about 12:49 a.m. on March 17, 1990 — 24 hours before the museum was robbed by two men dressed as police officers who arrived at the same door.

It seems Robert “Bobby the Cook” Gentile can’t catch a break. The 79-year-old mobster, who has been touted as the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s best hope for finding out what happened to $500 million worth of stolen art, says the agency has twice entrapped him, sending informants to induce him to commit crimes so that they can offer leniency in exchange for information on the missing work.

The art theft, the largest in American history, went down in 1990 and involved a Rembrant, a Vermeer and more which were taken from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

A New Hampshire man who admitted transporting five stolen N.C. Wyeth oil paintings to California, where four of them were sold to a high-end pawn shop for $100,000, is scheduled to be sentenced Tuesday in U.S. District Court.

Lawrence Estrella, 65, of Manchester, New Hampshire, waived indictment and pleaded guilty to interstate transportation of stolen property in April. Estrella was arrested Nov. 23, 2014, in Los Angeles by FBI agents, according to court documents.

The thieves allegedly behind one of the most brazen art thefts in American history, perpetrated 25 years ago on Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, have been revealed as two members of a local organized crime syndicate. The controversial right-wing website Breitbart News first reported their names Sunday as George Reissfelder, then 49, and Lenny DiMuzio, then 42, citing sources within the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Breitbart story appears to follow-up on a segment produced by WCVB TV of Boston, which states that the FBI has known the suspects’ names for some time, but has not released them publicly.

Both suspects died within a year of their purported March 18, 1990 break-in at the museum, frustrating investigators who have searched in vain for the 13 works since — including drawings and paintings by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Degas, and others, worth some $500 million today.

An ancient statuette and an 18th-century painting that were stolen from Italy decades ago have been returned to its government after turning up in New York.

U.S. prosecutors and the FBI gave the artworks to an Italian official Tuesday.

The painting of “The Holy Trinity Appearing to Saint Clement” is attributed to the renowned Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, also called Giambattista Tiepolo. It disappeared from a Turin home in 1982.

A painting by Henri Matisse stolen more than a decade ago in Caracas and later recovered in an FBI sting is on display again in the Venezuelan capital.

The "Odalisque in Red Pants," worth around $3 million, was exhibited Tuesday for the first time in more than a decade at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

It had been replaced with a fake sometime between 1999 and 2002 and it was only in 2003 that Venezuelan authorities realized the original had been stolen.

A painting by Henri Matisse that was stolen more than a decade ago in Caracas and later recovered in an FBI sting was turned over Monday to Venezuelan authorities.

The "Odalisque in Red Pants" disappeared from the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Caracas after being replaced with a fake sometime between 1999 and 2002.