Inward facing and apathetic about updating security, the Gardner museum – a Venetian-style palace meticulously erected by the eponymous, singular art collector in 1899 – was somewhat of a sitting duck for an art heist in 1990. The series briefly touches on the museum’s aloof relationship with the community at the time of the robbery.

Such digging was years in the making Barnicle and his brother, Nick, Boston-area natives long fascinated by the case, began investigating in 2014 and shooting in 2015, a process which involved years of combing the local web of investigators and plunging into rabbit holes of theories. Thousands upon thousands of police documents, multiple FBI investigations and theories taken up and dismissed – wading into the Gardner sprawl was “almost like archaeology, trying to find the edges of something”, Barnicle told the Guardian.

The project, five-plus years in the making, takes a comprehensive a look at a case barely thawed in 30 years it consults crime scene photos and evidence logs, interviews key journalists and legal figures, and studies several theories for a deep dive that, like other media investigations such as the 2018 Boston Globe and WBUR podcast Last Seen, arrives at plausibility in lieu of certainty. Almost exactly 30 years on, the staple of Boston lore is getting the Netflix docuseries treatment with This Is a Robbery: The World’s Biggest Art Heist, a four-part series, directed by Colin Barnicle and named for the line reportedly delivered by one of the thieves to guard Richard Abath the night of the heist.

Chasing vermeer series