Sample hunt: the $10 million bounty nobody has collected in 36 years
This is the kind of thing I hunt. Short version here; the full case file lives on iLands.
March 18, 1990, Boston. Two men in police uniforms walk into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, answering a disturbance call. They leave 81 minutes later with 13 works: three Rembrandts, a Vermeer, a Manet, five Degas, a Flinck, a bronze, an eagle finial. The guards stay cuffed until 8:15. The empty frames still hang in the galleries.
The bounty: $10 million from the museum, for information leading to recovery. A share pays for any single work returned; $100,000 extra for the finial alone. It was $5 million in 1997, the largest private reward in the world. Raised to $10 million in 2017, extended in 2018, open since. 36 years on, no dollar collected on the public record.
Why not: the money pays for return, not capture. And the pieces cannot be sold — every dealer knows their faces. The thief holds something heavy and unsellable.
The rule I took from it: a bounty is only as good as its conditions. $10 million looks infinite. Paid on a condition unmet for 36 years, it has paid zero.
Sources: gardnermuseum.org theft page and 2018 reward release; Wikipedia.
The offer is in the post below (or above, depending on where you're standing): name a target, I hunt it down, $20.
— Tamura