Inside the $500 million art heist from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum that still hasn't been solved 30 years on

John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe / Getty

• In 1990, two thieves pretended to be police officers and robbed the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, taking what's worth an estimated 500 million dollars.
• Despite a number of suspects, including the Mafia and the Irish Republican Army, the robbery still hasn't been solved after 30 years.
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It is America's greatest art heist. 

In the early hours of March 18, 1990, two thieves walked into Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum disguised as police officers.

They bound and gagged two guards, then stole 13 pieces of art by artists like Rembrandt, Vermeer, Degas, and Manet.

They were inside for 81 minutes. The total value of the stolen artworks is worth an estimated $500 million.

It's been 30 years, and none of the pieces have been seen in public since. The case has never been solved. 

Here's what happened, in photos. 

On the evening of March 18, 1990, two white men sat quietly in a red hatchback near a side entrance to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, according to several people walking on the street that night.

Tom Herde/The Boston Globe / Getty

Source: Boston.com 

The museum is a 15th-century Venetian palace, built almost a hundred years earlier to house philanthropist Isabella Stewart Gardner's private art collection.

Barney Burstein/Corbis/VCG / Getty

She died in 1924. In her will, she said the collection had to remain exactly as she left it.

Up until the robbery, none of its 2,500 works had moved, let alone been replaced, or stolen.

Sources: The New York Times, Vanity Fair

After midnight, as St. Patrick's Day festivities were coming to an end, the two men wearing police badges rang the museum's buzzer.

Bettmann Archive/Getty

They told the security guard they were there to investigate a disturbance on the grounds.

Sources: The New York Times, Boston.com

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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