Author of ‘Master Thieves’at April 19 booksigning

Posted 4/15/15

Barnes & Noble Warwick will host author Stephen Kurkjian on Sunday, April 19 at 1 p.m. for a reading and booksigning for his book Master Thieves: The Boston Gangsters Who Pulled Off the World’s …

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Author of ‘Master Thieves’at April 19 booksigning

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Barnes & Noble Warwick will host author Stephen Kurkjian on Sunday, April 19 at 1 p.m. for a reading and booksigning for his book Master Thieves: The Boston Gangsters Who Pulled Off the World’s Greatest Art Heist at 1350 Bald Hill Road, Warwick. 

Master Thieves is the definitive story of the greatest art theft in history. In a secret meeting in 1981, a low-level Boston thief gave career gangster Ralph Rossetti the tip of a lifetime: the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum was a big score waiting to happen. Though its collections included priceless artworks by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Degas and others, its security was cheap, mismanaged and out of date. And now, it seemed, the whole Boston criminal underworld knew it.

Nearly a decade passed before the museum was hit. But when it finally happened, the theft quickly became one of the most infamous art heists in history: 13 works of art valued at up to $500 million, by some of the most famous artists in the world, were taken. The Boston FBI took control of the investigation, but 25 years later the case is still unsolved and the artwork is still missing.

Kurkjian, one of the top investigative reporters in the country, has been working this case for over nearly 20 years. In Master Thieves, he sheds new light on some of Gardner’s most abiding mysteries. Why would someone steal these paintings, only to leave them hidden for 25 years? And why, if one of the top crime bosses in the city knew about this score in 1981, did the theft happen in 1990? What happened in those intervening years? And what might all this have to do with Boston’s notorious gang wars of the 1980s?

Kurkjian’s reporting is already responsible for some of the biggest breaks in this story, including a meticulous reconstruction of what happened at the museum that fateful night. Now Master Thieves will reveal the identities of those he believes plotted the heist, the motive for the crime, and the details that the FBI has refused to discuss. Taking you on a journey deep into the gangs of Boston, Kurkjian emerges with the most complete and compelling version of this story ever told.

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