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## The Investigators Who Carried the Case
The Gardner investigation was not a single sustained effort by a continuous team. Over thirty-six years, the case passed through the hands of multiple FBI agents, multiple U.S. Attorneys, and multiple directors of museum security. The people who spent the most time on it are worth knowing, because their accounts of the investigation—and their differing assessments of what happened—illuminate how much remains genuinely uncertain.
Geoffrey Kelly joined the Gardner investigation in 2002 and became the FBI’s primary case agent. He remained in that role until his retirement in April 2024, a tenure of more than two decades—longer than any other single investigator. His sustained involvement gave him an unmatched familiarity with the case’s details, its dead ends, and its most promising threads.
Kelly’s approach to the investigation was methodical. He traced financial records, pursued informants, investigated the criminal networks in Dorchester and Connecticut, and followed the Philadelphia connection through the channels available to him. He describes, in his 2026 book, the frustration of an investigation in which the most important witnesses—Donati, Reissfelder, DiMuzio, Merlino—died before they could be questioned effectively, and in which the most concrete lead produced by a living witness—Elene Guarente’s account of her husband’s transfer of two paintings to Gentile—could not be confirmed by physical evidence.
Kelly’s public assessment of the theft’s organization is clear: Reissfelder and DiMuzio committed the robbery; Merlino organized it; Abath may have facilitated it; the art circulated through criminal networks in Connecticut and Philadelphia and may now be in the hands of people who inherited it without fully understanding what they have.