The Practice Run: How a Failed Art Heist Provided a Blueprint for the World's Largest Art Robbery

On Saint Patrick's Day, 1990, one of the largest art thefts in the world took place—the heist of Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, in which thirteen works of art, worth over half a billion dollars, were stolen by two thieves posing as policemen. Had there been a prior practice run for this theft? Ten years earlier, two thieves posing as delivery men were thwarted in their attempt of a nearly identical robbery at The Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, New York—an art museum modeled afte...