Gentlemen, this is a robbery. I'm Jason Horton. I'm Rebecca Leib. And this is Ghost Town.

Our St. Patrick's Day episode is a subject I've been wanting to cover for a very long time.

It's not about beer or sham rocks, but it is iconically Bostonian, which feels very

part of the St. Patrick's Day ethos, a criminal tale that happened in the early morning

after St. Patrick's Day. Today, we're talking about the biggest art heist in history, the robbery

of the Isabella Gardner Art Museum in 1990. But first, we have to go back to the mid 1800s,

because of course we do. Isabella Stewart Gardner was born on April 14, 1840 to wealthy New York

linen merchants. Gardner married the brother of a former girl school classmate named John Gardner,

who was at the time one of Boston's most eligible bachelors. While it was a situation everyone

was pleased with, the new Gardner couple's life didn't go as planned. In 1863, their only son died

at two years old, and after a miscarriage Gardner was told she couldn't have any more children.

Her best friend and sister-in-law died around the same time, and dealing with it all, Gardner became

extremely depressed. In 1867 on the advice of her doctors, Gardner and her husband decided to take

a lavish trip to Europe, that her life might depend on it. To give you context, at this point,

Isabella was so depressed that she had to be taken aboard the ship on a stretcher.

The two spent almost a year traveling which truly revived Gardner. Her European vacation began her

lifelong habit of obsessive scrapbooking, art appreciation, as a note she was friends with all

of the hot artists of the day, John Singer Sargent, James McNeil Whistler, Henry James, and more,

and the fashionable high-profile socialite returned to East Coast Society renewed. Gardner lived a

good life traveling, amassing things from her journeys and ultimately creating a whole museum

from all of the beautiful artifacts she purchased during her travels. Gardner died in 1924, not super

notably, except for one very famous and very controversial appearance in 1912, at the very formal

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