The stolen art market in 1990 was estimated by some analysts at between one and two billion dollars per year. This was a market that absorbed everything from small-scale opportunistic theft to organized professional heists. But the Gardner pieces sat at the extreme end of the visibility scale. Rembrandt’s only seascape and the most valuable stolen painting in the world are not objects that flow easily through an underground market.
Anthony Amore, the Gardner Museum’s longtime director of security and investigations, has said it is impossible to determine whether the pieces are still together or have been separated. If they were broken up and distributed—some with one person, some with another—the investigative challenge becomes exponentially harder. Each piece becomes a separate thread rather than a single bundle.
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## The Connecticut Trail: Robert Guarente and Robert Gentile
The most concrete lead in the Gardner investigation’s later years involved two men in Connecticut and Maine: Robert Guarente and Robert “The Cook” Gentile.
Robert Guarente was a New England mob figure who died in 2004. His widow, Elene Guarente, made a significant claim to investigators: before his death, her husband had told her that he had given two of the Gardner paintings to Robert Gentile, a mob-connected figure in Manchester, Connecticut.
Gentile was thus a man who, according to the widow of another suspect, had received two stolen paintings worth tens of millions of dollars. The FBI began investigating him.
In 2012, investigators executed a search warrant at Gentile’s home in Manchester. What they found was striking—but not the paintings. They found law enforcement paraphernalia: police hats and badges. They found $20,000 in cash. They found weapons. And they found a handwritten list of the stolen Gardner works with estimated black market values beside each piece.