No one did—at least not in any way that became public. The FBI did not make a follow-up announcement identifying who in Philadelphia had had the works or what had happened to them there. The geographic lead remained a data point without a conclusion.
The Philadelphia connection intersected with the FBI’s broader theory about a network of criminals with ties to both New England and the Philadelphia-area organized crime structure. The Patriarca organization’s reach extended south; the families and figures associated with Philadelphia’s organized crime world were part of the same national network. The movement of the art from Boston to Connecticut to Philadelphia, if accurate, followed a logical criminal geography.
What happened after Philadelphia—where the art went in the years after 2003 or 2004—is not established in the public record.
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## Rick Abath and the Question That Never Goes Away
Of all the people associated with the Gardner theft, the one whose role has been most persistently scrutinized is the man who buzzed the thieves in: Rick Abath.
Abath was twenty-three years old on March 18, 1990. He was a guard at the Gardner Museum, working a late-night shift. He let two men in police uniforms in through the employee entrance after they said they were responding to a disturbance. He did not verify their identities. He did not call a supervisor.
From one perspective, this is simply a young man making a bad decision under pressure. A uniformed police officer claiming to respond to a disturbance call is a plausible scenario. The protocol requiring verification existed precisely because the scenario was foreseeable, but a twenty-three-year-old who had never encountered a real emergency might instinctively comply rather than verify.