Everything you need to cover the story, book a guest, or write a review.
For interview requests: thepracticerun@gmail.com
On St. Patrick's Day, 1990, two thieves posing as police officers stole 13 masterworks from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum — the largest art theft in history, valued at over $500 million. The case has never been solved. The Practice Run argues that this heist may have been rehearsed a decade earlier: in 1980, the same method was attempted at The Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, New York — a small museum modeled directly after the Gardner. The would-be mastermind, Brian McDevitt of Swampscott, Massachusetts, spent two months befriending the museum's director before the attempt was foiled. That director was Frederick J. Fisher — the author of this book. What follows is the only firsthand account of how a con man may have planned and executed the greatest art robbery in history.
Frederick J. Fisher served as the director of The Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, New York during the spring of 1980, when Brian McDevitt arrived posing as a wealthy Vanderbilt heir and freelance writer. McDevitt spent two months cultivating Fisher's trust, extracting information about the museum's security, layout, and schedule. When the attempted robbery was foiled, McDevitt was arrested — but the blueprint he had drafted survived him.
Decades later, when Fisher recognized the unmistakable parallels between the 1980 Hyde attempt and the 1990 Gardner heist — same method, same disguise tactic, same type of underfunded sister museum — he wrote the account that became The Practice Run. Fisher is not a theorist. He is a witness.
Frederick Fisher is available for podcast and radio interviews. Suggested guest booking language:
"Frederick J. Fisher was the museum director who was personally conned by the man he believes planned the Gardner Museum heist — a decade before it happened. He's the only living eyewitness to the 1980 practice run at The Hyde Collection, and he's spent years tracing the life of Brian McDevitt: the con man who posed as a Vanderbilt heir, served jail time, reinvented himself as a Hollywood screenwriter, fled to South America, and died under circumstances that have never been explained. His book, The Practice Run, raises a question the FBI has never answered: was the world's largest art theft planned by one man — and did the FBI let him disappear?"