The ‘Sociopath’ Scholar Who Made Films of His Crimes Tried to Confess to America’s Most Famous Art Heist

Admin’s note: It should go without saying that Joe Gibbons is a patron saint of this site, along with a host of others like Uncle Ted. Maybe we should put up a “Saints” page.

Out of Rikers and facing a bank robbery charge in Providence, he’s trying to complete his masterpiece of ‘autobiographical fiction’ that began with buying a dime bag

“Don’t spoil a good story by telling the truth.”—Isabella Gardner, founder of Boston’s Gardner Museum.

In February 2017, Joe Gibbons sat in a Greenwich Village restaurant and calmly confessed to a role in the largest art heist in American history.

Gibbons, a filmmaker and former MIT lecturer now in his mid-sixties—back in circulation after pleading guilty in 2014 to a Manhattan bank robbery and spending a year in jail—had already confessed and would soon be charged with another bank robbery, this one in Providence, Rhode Island.

He was sitting with a Pulitzer-winning journalist, Stephen Kurkjian, and a novelist, Charles Pinning, both of whom had traveled from New England and knocked on his door that afternoon. Their visit came weeks after an assistant U.S. attorney in Massachusetts had called Gibbons’ lawyer to inquire about his possible involvement in the Isabella Gardner Museum heist.

LINK: https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-sociopath-scholar-who-made-films-of-his-crimes-tried-to-confess-to-americas-most-famous-art-heist