Review by Elizabeth C. Bunce
Where are they now?
Most true crime TV tends toward the lurid, the sensational, the gory, the depraved. So Netflix’s new documentary series, This is a Robbery, comes as a breath of fresh air to the genre. Their cold case? A 1991 unsolved art heist at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
You may be familiar with the case—the night after St. Patrick’s Day, men wearing police uniforms hustled their way into one of Boston’s most beautiful museums and hustled their way out again 81 minutes later with thirteen irreplaceable (and uninsured) works of art, including Rembrandt’s only seascape, also a Vermeer, a Manet, five Degat works, and two other Rembrandts, worth a total estimated value of $500,000,000. Yes, five hundred million. The Gardner Museum made the gutsy decision to continue displaying the emptied frames in the gallery, where they still hang, 30 years later.
