Welcome to Mysteries to Die For.
I am TG Wolff and am here with Jack, my piano player and producer. This is a podcast where we combine storytelling with original music to put you in the heart of a mystery. All stories are structured to challenge you to beat the detective to the solution. Jack and I perform these live, front to back, no breaks, no fakes, no retakes.
The rules for law and order create the boundaries for civil co-existence and, ideally, the backdrops for individuals, families, and companies to grow and thrive. Breaking these rules puts civil order at risk. And while murder is the Big Daddy of crimes, codified ordinances across municipal divisions, counties, states, and countries show the nearly endless ways there are to create mayhem. This season, we put our detective skills to the test. This is Season 8, Anything but Murder.
This is Episode 17, art theft is the featured crime. This is Was It a Vermeer? by Erica Obey
DELIBERATION
Maggie Fletcher has thieves to the left of her, nuns to the right, and she needs our help to clear this holy rolling path. Who is the thief known as Dismas? Here are the suspects in the order we met them:
- Dr. Thomas, a canon lawyer who can take on—and take down—any real estate lawyer out there.
- Mr. Barry Wolf, owner of The Wolf Group, art appraisers and Maggie’s boss.
- Sr. Scholastica, caretaker of the Phelps treasury and seemingly the only member of the mysterious Sodality of St. Dismas.
- Fr. Hugh Sinclair, investigator for the Vatican Museum—or is he?
- Mr. Alexi Rublev, main investor in the Wolf group and a real estate developer with his eye on the property owned by Phelps Hall.
Here are the facts the way Maggie understands them:
- When Alexei Rublev cannot reach Barry Wolf, who is returning from an overseas trip, he calls Maggie and orders her to appraise an icon of St. Dismas that was stolen from Phelps Hall, as well as demanding that she send him all the Wolf Group’s records about insurance claims involving the Vatican Museum.
- Rublev justifies his demands by saying if Barry won’t pull the trigger, Rublev will pull it for him.
- Unsure of what Rublev meant by that, Maggie does what Rublev asks, emailing him the records and going to Phelps Hall to conduct the appraisal.
- When she arrives at Phelps Hall, she finds what seems to be a far more valuable painting than the icon, which no-one knows anything about. For the first time, it occurs to her how odd it is to be asked to appraise an item that isn’t there.
- When Wolf arrives from overseas, he is unfairly furious with Maggie.
- Wolf gets even more furious when Rublev shows up with a state trooper, claiming that the stolen icon is evidence that Phelps Hall is nothing but a money laundering operation for the Vatican Bank, and demanding that Phelps Hall be shut down.
- Rublev is accused by Thomas of looking for an excuse to shut down Phelps Hall, so he can buy their land. Maggie remembers Rublev’s comment about pulling the trigger and wonders whether he and Barry were colluding in manufacturing evidence, so he can seize Phelps Hall.
- But there is also a great deal of evidence that in obeying Rublev’s order, she has stumbled across a massive money laundering scheme run by a master thief named Dismas, and it may be connected to Phelps Hall.
- Certainly, no-one at Phelps Hall is exactly what they seem.
Who is the thief known as Dismas?
ABOUT Art Theft True Crime
From Deep Sentinel, a security service company, come the stories of a few famous art thefts. We’ll start with Vermeer, since we just got acquainted with him.
In March 1990, two thieves posed as police supposedly responding to a disturbance were given entry into museum into Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, a private home turned museum with an extensive art collection. The...
