The Peculiar Truth about the Art Thief Rocker

• Milton, MA, 1963: The Forbes House Museum was home to rare antiques including Japanese swords. The gallery didn’t take security seriously.

• Then someone made off with several expensive Asian artworks including rare Japanese swords. The police had no suspects.

• With that, an 18-year-old local man named Myles Connor began a life of crime as a notorious art thief… while also being the frontman for a New England rock and roll band.

• As a teenager in the late 50s and early 60s, Myles learned to play guitar. Elvis, Chuck Berry, and Johnny Cash were his favorites. He formed a band called the Wild Ones.

• They performed at dances and barrooms all around Boston, from Nantucket Beach to Revere. Myles earned decent money as a guitarist, sometimes more per night than his father.

• But a few hundred bucks per gig was chump change compared to the thousands he could get from stealing artwork. With the urging of Boston’s underworld, he began a more lucrative life of crime.

• Connor learned to appreciate art as a boy. Influenced by his grandfather’s trips to Japan, he developed a fascination with Japanese samurai swords. His art and antique thefts eventually became a means to pay for his sword collecting hobby.

• During the early 60s, Connor and the Wild Ones became fixtures on the greater Boston music scene. They supposedly opened for several well-known rockers of the era including The Beach Boys, Roy Orbison, and the Dave Clark Five. (However, those claims are unverified.)

• In 1965 at age 20, Connor was arrested for robbing $116,000 from a bank in his hometown of Milton. No one suspected at the time that he was the Forbes House thief. But many people knew he was a rock and roll guitarist.

• Connor then escaped from the county jail in an almost comical, cliche manner; he fashioned a bar of soap and some shoe polish into a gun and forced his jailers to let him out. He was caught again within the week.

• Connor spent the next decade in Walpole Prison. There he met other criminals, learned more about stealing art, and entertained his fellow inmates.

• He was released on parole in 1974. Shortly thereafter he went back to performing rock and roll, often as a headliner at New England bars. Connor would ride a motorcycle onstage before launching into his set. Other times, he would pop out of a coffin.

• The rock shows were just a cover, though. He also returned to robbing museums. That’s where the money was. And the thrills.

• Memorial Day, 1974: With accomplices, Connor went to Monmouth, Maine to steal five Andrew Wyeth paintings from the Woolworth Estate. They got away with it.

• In April 1975, Connor committed his most audacious crime. He robbed Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts of a Rembrandt titled Portrait of Elsbeth van Rijn. He took it in broad daylight.

• He later took credit for robbing numerous other New England museums throughout the rest of the 1970s. He did so by posing as a graduate student, gaining the trust of museum personnel, accessing private storage spaces, and nabbing artworks.

• In total, Connor claimed to have pulled off 30 heists, making him one of the most prolific art thieves in history.

• When he was eventually arrested for trying to fence the Wyeth paintings he stole from the Woolworth Estate, he bargained with prosecutors. He would give them the location of the Rembrandt in exchange for a reduced sentence.

• When Boston’s infamous Gardner Museum heist occurred in 1990, Connor was a prime suspect. He had an alibi, though. He was still in state prison.

• However, he claimed to authorities that he was involved in casing the museum on behalf of the actual thieves and that he could assist in retrieving the stolen art in return for a reduced sentence. No one took that deal, and the crime has not yet been solved.

• In recent decades, Myles Connor has written about his life, lectured, and appeared in documentaries. He also was arrested for shoplifting, drug possession, and even for stealing a bale of hay.

• Now a senior citizen in his 80s, the rock and roll art thief no longer rocks or robs.