Daring art heists are nothing new. But when robbers disguised as policemen entered Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum the morning after St. Patrick's Day in 1990 and walked out with blue-chip works, the nation was stunned at their bravado and, especially, at what they took.

The swag was 13 pieces, including Vermeer's The Concert, as well as paintings by Rembrandt (Storm on the Sea of Galilee, A Lady and Gentleman in Black) and Manet (Chez Tortoni). Columnists in the February Art + Auction recently termed it a $300 million haul, from an uninsured museum.

After all, there are only 35 Vermeers in the world. And Mrs. Gardner's beautiful Venetian-style palazzo was one of the handful of places in the United States with one on view.

The art is still missing, but not for lack of police agencies, private consultants and newspaper reporters trying to track it down and get it back.

The Gardner saga, with all the suspense and oddball characters of a classic whodunnit, is chronicled in the new documentary Stolen. Producer Rebecca Dreyfus returned to a museum she had visited long ago.

"My interest in this started before the robbery happened," Dreyfus said recently from New York. "I went to the museum when I was young and fell in love with it. As a young person, it struck me as somebody's creation. It had a big impression on me. That day I saw The Concert, and that also made a big impression on me. It's one of those days that stands out in your mind"

Several years later, Dreyfus again zeroed in on the Gardner. "I had moved to Europe, and did another film. But in 1998, with the publicity about the Tom Mashberg story, I started to think about it. I went to Boston and saw those empty frames." (The empty spaces - with labels - remain in the Gardner, since it is part of the Gardner bequest that no art be moved.)

The "Tom Mashberg story" exploded in the press: Mashberg, a reporter for the Boston Herald, had been contacted by someone claiming he knew the location of some of the haul. "I was driven to a warehouse," Mashberg says in the film. "I was shown a painting that appeared to be Storm on the Sea of Galilee. It was in bad condition. It had been rolled up."

Later, Mashberg says he received paint chips that his contact claimed were contemporary with the work of Vermeer. (Later proven not true.)

And the speculation began. So did a strange dance of information supplied by a motley cast of characters: the Boston-based art thief Myles Connor; the shady antiques dealer William Youngworth; a reformed art thief nicknamed Turbo; U.S. Attorney Michael Sullivan of Boston, and James J. Bulger, the "lord and master" of the Irish underworld. Was it the IRA? The Boston mob?

And then there was Harold Smith, the investigator who took on a huge role of tracking down the thieves, and who serves as a major force in Stolen.

"I wanted to do an interview with him, an expert interview," Dreyfus said of Smith. "But as soon as he realized we were going to make a film about the case, he wanted to be involved. It was a natural matchup. He had also thought about it a long time. We inadvertently opened the door for that. He was impassioned that we could get paintings back."

(Smith died in late 2005, and the film is dedicated to him.)

Stolen trails Smith and others on the scent of the artwork across the Atlantic, and recalls some of the unusual ploys suggested to get it back, such as having Sen. Edward Kennedy talk to a former IRA operative about its whereabouts.

Dreyfus also paints a rich picture of the museum, the life of art collector Gardner, and her quest, with dealer Bernard Berenson, to acquire works in the late 19th century.

Does Dreyfus have a theory on who stole the art? "The things we came across are in the film. I think there will be a second part . . . there will be a conclusion; those paintings are out there."

That's noncommittal because "I'd like people to watch the film. I don't want to talk about it."

Stolen

• What: A film about the unsolved robbery of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, part of PBS' Independent Lens series

• When: 10 p.m. Tuesday

• Where: KRMA-Channel 6

• Grade: B

Five other art thefts of note

• Picassos "liberated" in Paris

New on the police blotter is the theft, reported Feb. 28, of two paintings by Picasso worth more than $65 million, according to some experts. The works - Maya and the Doll and Portrait of Jacqueline - were taken from the home of the artist's granddaughter, Diana Widmaier-Picasso.The prolific Picasso has 549 pieces on the Art Loss Register, a list of stolen, missing and looted art worldwide.

• The Mona Lisa trail

Leonardo da Vinci's enigmatic portrait was the victim of a robbery that reads like a French farce. Vincenzo Perugia, a Louvre guard, walked out with the painting Aug. 20, 1911, supposedly because he believed a work by an Italian artist belonged in an Italian museum. It was two days before staff realized the painting was stolen. Rumors placed the young Picasso among the suspects, and police arrested a friend, poet Guillaume Apollinaire, but let him go after a week. On Dec. 10, 1913, Perugia offered to sell the Mona Lisa to an art dealer in Florence. The dealer, with his friend the director of the Uffizi Gallery, asked to take the painting to a museum for authentication. Big surprise: The police showed up for the thief.

• The Scream(s)

It seems as if Edvard Munch's famous angst-ridden, Expressionist The Scream has been stolen every few years. But that's because there are four versions, and the two most recent thefts were both solved to much fanfare. In August 2004, one Scream and Munch's Madonna were ripped off the wall of the Munch Museum of Oslo. The works were recovered two years later. The Scream held by Oslo's National Gallery was swiped in February 1994, but recovered three months later by police. Three thieves were arrested after trying to extort $1 million from the government.

• The Cellini Salt Cellar

The multitalented Benvenuto Cellini made a beautifully fashioned gold salt cellar - or Saliera - for French king Francois I in the 1540s. It is his only surviving sculpture in gold (with ivory and enamel). Along with small metaphorical objects, two figures adorn the piece: a female (earth) and a male (sea), along with a small cup to hold the actual salt. On May 11, 2003, the piece was taken from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna in a smash-and-grab robbery that set off alarms, but without reaction from the guards and no clue as to who had stolen it. It was recovered almost three years later from a box in a forest north of the city.

• Goya in the truck

On Nov. 8, 2006, a 1778 painting by Francisco de Goya - Children With a Cart - was stolen from an art transporter's truck parked outside a hotel in Stroudsburg, Pa. It was being transported from the Toledo Museum of Art to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

The painting was recovered Nov. 21 in New Jersey. An FBI agent on the case said that the thieves "probably thought it was a truck full of PlayStations."

Chandlerm@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2677.

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