Federal officials might be one step closer to cracking the biggest art heist in history

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published 7 August 2015

Federal officials shed new light on the 1990 Gardner Museum art heist on Thursday with the release of a six-minute surveillance video excerpt from the day before thieves took off with $500 million worth of art, including including three Rembrandts and a Vermeer. The video shows security guard Richard Abath, a 23-year-old hippie and guitarist who let the two thieves posing as police officers into the museum, allowing a man in a "waist-length coat and upturned collar" to enter through the same side doors that the art thieves went through just a day later, The New York Times reports.

The statement released with the video says that allowing people to enter through the side doors is "against museum policy," and the museum's former security director has said that it was also against museum rules to bring guests into the museum after 11:30 p.m., when Abath's shift began. Abath had never disclosed this visit in his multiple interviews with authorities.

While The New York Times reports that Abath's decision to allow the two men into the museum has "largely been treated as the hapless act of a rookie watchman who fell for a bluff," The Times notes that, although the report "carefully avoided suggesting what the release of the video seems to imply," it seems that Abath's actions are "again being scrutinized as part of the investigation into a case that has bewildered the authorities for a quarter-century."