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ghosttruck

Level 57 Taco Wizard
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An 82-year-old gangster’s imminent release from prison is reigniting interest in the world’s biggest unsolved art heist.

Federal officials believe Robert “The Cook” Gentile has information about the $500 million heist in 1990 from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, but the almost-free wiseguy insists he knows nothing. He has been described as the last surviving person of interest in the case.

Gentile is scheduled to be sprung March 17 at the conclusion of a federal prison sentence for an unrelated weapons possession charge, according to the Associated Press.

On March 18, 1990, thieves posing as cops cuffed two security guards and made off with 13 valuable works of art by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Manet and Degas worth more than half a billion dollars.

The paintings, which included Rembrandt’s only known seascape -- Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee -- and Vermeer’s The Concert have never been found.

In 2013, the feds searched Gentile’s home in Connecticut in 2012 and found a handwritten list of the stolen works and their estimated worth on the black market.

Prosecutors said a polygraph showed Gentile was almost certainly lying when he denied knowing where the paintings were.

Two years ago an independent art investigator told Fox News he was convinced the stolen artwork was in the possession of associates with the Irish Republican Army somewhere in Ireland.

 
Robert “Bobby” Gentile, one of the last surviving named suspects in the infamous heist of 13 artworks valued at $500 million from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, died on Friday. He was 85 years old and had suffered a stroke, according to his lawyer, A. Ryan McGuigan.

“He denied having the paintings till his death,” McGuigan told the Boston Globe. “They say he was a bad guy, but he became a friend. He was the last of his kind.”
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