Boston - Federal agents investigating a $500 million international art heist from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum are poised to bust a renegade ex-Mossad money laundering ring following a successful trip to Israel on the back of US Airforce One this week.
A secret deal with Netanyahu Administration whistleblowers is believed to have yielded vital intelligence about the 1990 Boston raid whose perpetrators have never been found.
The heist netted numerous multi-million dollar artworks including Rembrand't famous The Storm On The Sea Of Galilee, a work coveted by every bent Middle Eastern fixer capable of shelling out $5 million in contract raid fees to museum raid gangsters.
This weekend a cheekily worded FBI statement said the Bureau knew the gang members' identities behind the spectacular theft after studying, various Israeli documents including private tax returns of British non-doms and their US business partners.
Intelligence analysis has now led them to believe the Rembrandt picture, the artist's sole marine subject, was stolen to order by right wing Kabbalists involved in repatriation of looted Nazi artworks.
The stolen Rembrandt is believed to be hanging in a very shady Russian oligarch's ocean-going super-yacht, available for private viewings to a select few.
Now the fixers and middle men involved in the deal have come crawling out of the woodwork as a sophisticated network of backhander payments has come to light thanks to the cooperative Israeli tax man.
A promised FBI reward of $5 million may well be paid out in the next few weeks.
