THE GREAT ART CAPER

There's the former rock-'n'-roll star and art collector turned con who tells the truth about many things, including the fact that he is an art thief and a con. He says he knows who did it.

There's the workaholic, by-the-book FBI agent who moved 3,000 miles from the scene of the crime and after seven years still can't get this one out of his head.

There's the relentless but camera-shy investigative reporter who took a dangerous risk that won him instant respect and even quicker scorn.

And there's the defiant silence of the victims, caretakers of a musty but prestigious museum, who fear that any utterance, no matter how benign, might sabotage their highest hopes in years.

The biggest and most confounding art heist in American history is 7 1/2 years old and juicier than ever. Organized crime, politics, greed, international intrigue and an execution-style hit all lie at the margins of the story. This one has everything but sex, and maybe even that--after all, the story is still unraveling. Each week brings private powwows among the players, new hopes, old frustrations and the same beating refrain:

What a caper!

At 1:24 a.m. on March 18, 1990, two men dressed as Boston police officers talked their way into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, handcuffed and bound with duct tape two feeble guards, disarmed the even feebler alarm system and spent the next 81 minutes looting the place. They left with a Vermeer, three works by Rembrandt, five by Degas--altogether, pieces valued at $300 million.

Literally thousands of leads later, in a case that once had 30 FBI agents assigned to it, not a piece has been recovered and not a person has been arrested. Certain elements of the caper--the brutish way in which some paintings were cut from frames, the valuable pieces left behind, the code of silence that has kept a lid on the mystery--add to the intrigue.

But several sources have told TIME that there is an ongoing and secret grand jury investigation into the affairs of two incarcerated career criminals who say they can return the stolen art in return for certain favors--including the $5 million reward. And one of those two cons, New England's most notorious art thief, who in 1974 brokered the return of a stolen Rembrandt, has told TIME that he once cased the Gardner with a man who, years later, arranged the heist without him.

"I know emphatically and beyond any doubt" who stole the art, says Myles Connor, 54, a Milton, Mass., native who is in federal prison for interstate transportation of two paintings stolen in 1975 from the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College. Connor, who appears to have escaped from a Damon Runyon story, says he and a gangster named Bobby Donati, a longtime pal and partner in crime, checked out the Gardner around 1974. "Did I case it?" asks the 5-ft. 7-in., bushy-bearded Connor, who looks more like a visiting professor than a guy who has run with a crew of gangsters for 30 years. "I took a walk through the place and saw what was there." He saw enough to tell him that knocking off the place would be child's play. It looked like such an easy mark, he says, that he and Donati browsed like window shoppers, chatting about what pieces they'd grab.