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.
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."
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