The Job: The World’s Greatest Heists

In the early morning hours of March 18, 1990, two men dressed as Boston police officers talked their way into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and carried out one of the most valuable art thefts in history. Over the next 81 minutes, they restrained the guards and removed 13 works, including masterpieces by Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Degas. The stolen collection is now commonly valued at hundreds of millions of dollars, yet not a single work has officially been recovered. More than three decades later, empty frames still hang inside the museum where some of the paintings once stood. This is the story of a remarkably simple robbery that became one of the art world’s greatest unsolved mysteries.

2005, thieves in Fortaleza, Brazil, pulled off a bank robbery that seemed more like the plot of a movie than an actual crime. Instead of storming through the front door, they spent months quietly working toward the bank from an unexpected direction: underground. By the time employees discovered what had happened, roughly 156 million Brazilian reais had vanished.

They became associated with spectacular jewelry robberies carried out across multiple countries and involving millions of dollars in diamonds and luxury watches. The thieves dubbed the Pink Panthers weren’t one conventional gang so much as a transnational criminal network associated with fast, carefully prepared robberies. Their operations demonstrated how preparation, disguise, speed and psychological surprise could compress a major crime into minutes. But international police cooperation gradually made anonymity increasingly difficult to maintain.

Beneath Antwerp’s diamond district sat a vault protected by layers of sophisticated security and believed to be extraordinarily difficult to penetrate. In February 2003, thieves got inside and emptied more than 100 safe-deposit boxes without the security systems stopping them. But the most remarkable part of the crime may not have been the night of the robbery at all. It was the patience that came before it and the remarkably ordinary mistake that followed.