the times | Saturday December 4 2021 47
Wo r l d
Before sunrise on a chilly Boston morn-
ing, two men dressed as police officers
talked their way into the Isabella Stew-
art Gardner Museum, tied up two
guards and made off with art worth
$500 million.
Three decades later America’s big-
gest art heist remains unsolved. Now,
however, a retired jeweller and valuer
of fine art has come forward with a lead.
Paul Calantropo, 70, said that in the
spring of 1990 his childhood friend
Bobby Donati, a gangster with a long
criminal record including armed rob-
bery, brought him an eagle finial from
Napoleon’s Imperial Guard to value.
Calantropo immediately recognised
the bronze — purportedly designed to
sit atop a flagpole borne by the French
First Regiment of Grenadiers of Foot —
as one of the items stolen from the
museum a month earlier.
The world knew that the ornament
was stolen, making it effectively worth-
less, Calantropo told his friend, joking:
“Jesus, Bobby, why didn’t you steal the
Mona Lisa? ”
Months later Donati, 50, was mur-
dered outside his home in Revere, Mas-
was the most credible to date. The theft
is the subject of This is a Robbery: The
World’s Biggest Art Heist, a docu-
mentary series released on Netflix this
year. It frames the crime against the
backdrop of mob activity in Boston.
Although Donati was never publicly
identified as a suspect, some believe
that he buried the art and planned to
use it as leverage to spring a friend from
prison.
Myles Connor, a policeman’s son
who turned to crime, wrote in his auto-
biography that he evaluated the
museum with Donati years before the
raid. He said that his friend DavidHoughton later told him during a
prison visit that Donati was one of the
thieves and that they planned to secure
Connor’s release from prison by trading
the artwork. Houghton died of heart
disease in 1991.
The FBI has searched properties
linked to Donati but found nothing.
Neither the FBI nor the museum have
commented on Calantropo’s account.
Robert Fisher, a former assistant US
attorney who oversaw the heist investi-
gation from 2010 to 2016, told The
Boston Globe: “Until these things are
found, everyone’s thought process on
this is still a theory.”When astronauts first walked on the
moon in 1969, there was only grainy
and blurred video for the 650 million
people watching the historic episode
back on Earth.
Now Nasa is testing space laser tech-
nology to ensure that when crew return
to the lunar surface later this decade —
then venture further out to Mars — no
one will be left squinting at their
screens for a good view.
The agency’s laser communications
relay demonstration (LCRD) mission,
due to launch from Florida tomorrow,
will showcase a communications
system over the next two years that will
change how data and imagery are
beamed back from space.
Since the dawn of the space age in the
1950s, communication systems
between the ground and spacecraft
have relied on radio waves to transmit
cheese department, with the unofficial
motto “cheese pride”, has a strong queer
culture.
The soft and tangy Lesbian feta is one
of its top-three selling cheeses but in
June, when people from around the
world flock to the city for the pride festi-
val, sales of Lesbian feta soar. At $19.99
a pound, it is good business.
The Lesbian feta has been imported
since 2016 by Essex St Cheese, in New
York, from Agra, a village on Lesbos.
Soon after placing the order Rainbow
gave the cheese its distinctive name.
Lesbian sheep syndrome refers to a sit-
uation where two women are attracted
to each other but fail to act.
Mariah Sparks, a store worker, said
that the title of the cheese was obvious.
“It felt true,” she said. “Culturally, it just
felt right.”Nasa is testing new laser technology
for sending information back to earthtropo, who now lives in Florida, has
shared his story with the FBI and is
chasing the reward. He is part of
an investigative quartet along-
side a retired police of-
ficer, two former
convicts and Ste-
phen Kurkjian, the
Pulitzer prize-
winning journal-
ist who led the
reporting on the
case for the
Boston news-
paper. Kurkjian, 78, said
that Calantropo’s sightingNapoleon’s eagle
links mobster to
America’s biggest
fine art robbery
sachusetts. “I believe the secret of the
[artworks’] location died with Bobby,”
Calantropo, who has been too afraid to
disclose the conversation until now,
said in an interview with The Boston
Globe.
Rumours and theories have swirled
about who stole the 13 artworks and
where they might be. The loot
comprised three Rembrandt paintings
— including The Storm on the Sea of
Galilee, the Dutch master’s only sea-
scape — Vermeer’s The Concert, works
by Manet, Degas and Govert Flinck, an
ancient Chinese vase and the eaglefinial. There have been
several reported sightings
of the paintings, though
most of them are deemed
unreliable. The museum
has offered a $10 million re-
ward for information that leads to
the return of all 13 works. Calan-ALAMY; ISABELLA STEWART GARDNER MUSEUMUnited States
Charlie Mitchell
Rembrandt’s A Lady
and Gentleman in
Black was one of the
works by the Dutch
master stolen in
1990 from the
Isabella Stewart
Gardner Museum in
BostonBobby Donati was
seen with an eagle
finial from the
Napoleonic eraCheese from sapphic sheep
is even feta, claim lesbians
Charlie MitchellLasers the future of space communication
match the speed of the planet’s rota-
tion, and transmit test data at 1.2 gigab-
its per second — equivalent to down-
loading a feature film in less than one
minute.
The information will be beamed to
optical ground stations on Table
Mountain in California and on the Hal-
eakal volcano in Hawaii, both above
an altitude of 10,000ft, where there is
less chance of signals being disrupted
by atmospheric disturbances such as
cloud. The encoded light will then be
translated back into digital data that
can be read and analysed.
Nasa said: “Sending a high-resolu-
tion map of Mars would take around
nine years with a spacecraft’s current
onboard radio systems, but as little as
nine weeks with laser communica-
tions.”
It added: “That kind of data rate is
much more appealing for future human
exploration and science missions.”Jacqui Goddard Miami
Gracing the shelves of the Rainbow
Grocery Co-operative in San Francisco
is an unlikely gay treat — feta cheese
from Lesbos, made from the milk of
Lesbian sheep.
The store says the label — Greek
(Lesbian) feta — is more than a publici-
ty stunt. “We know where our feta’s
from. We’ve seen pictures of the sheep.
It’s a feta that’s rooted in place.”
Gordon Edgar, Rainbow’s cheese
buyer, told the San Francisco Chronicle:
“There’s two things about calling it Les-
bian feta. We’re not idiots. We know if
we call it that, people will go, ‘What do
you mean?’, which is a victory in itself.
Edgar said that simply calling it
Greek feta would lose that prestige.
The store is owned by its staff, and itsencoded data. By using lasers —
created from infrared light, which
occupies a higher frequency on the
electromagnetic spectrum — scientists
can pack up to 100 times more data into
each transmission.
That means that video, photographs
and scientific information gathered by
satellites, rovers and orbiting probes
can be sent back to Earth faster, more
efficiently and at higher quality.
LCRD will be sent 22,000 miles
above the Earth, where its orbit will