It's to this day the world's largest known property theft—on Saint Patrick's Day in 1990, two men disguised as police offers entered the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts, and stole 13 works of art valued at an estimated $500 million, including pieces by Rembrandt, Degas and Vermeer. Exactly how the men managed to get away with the heist, plus the whereabouts of the missing artworks, has been a mystery for three decades, a true-crime conundrum that serves as the subject of this week's episode of the CNN Original Series How It Really Happened.
The primetime series "delves deeply into some of the most notorious crimes, mysteries, trials, and celebrity tragedies of our time" and has already taken on topics like the 1912 Titanic sinking, the post-9/11 anthrax attacks and the Oscar Pistorius murder case. And now the "Gardner Art Heist: Stealing Beauty" episode—airing tonight, May 19 at 9pm on CNN—delves into details of the infamous robbery and its repercussions not only on the Massachusetts-based museum but on the art world at large.
Along with never-before-seen security footage straight from the Gardner Museum on the evening of the robbery, tonight's How It Really Happened edition will include "an interview with the museum security guard on duty who details the events of that night and his experience being held captive by the intruders," per CNN. There will also be testimonies from FBI special agents, government officials and local journalists who covered the case, who "provide expert insight into the international undercover operation attempting to recover the missing art and the key players in organized crime who have been suspected of the heist."
To tune into tonight's hourlong special as it airs, you will need access to CNN. The cable news network is available on most traditional cable TV providers, as well as live TV streaming services like Hulu with Live TV, Sling TV and YouTube TV. "Gardner Art Heist: Stealing Beauty" will also be available on demand to pay-TV subscribers on CNN.com and CNN connected TV and mobile apps beginning Monday, May 20. Past episodes of How it Really Happened are available to stream on demand now with a Max subscription.
