In the summer of 1965, a soon to be world famous thief ripped off a grandfather clock from a dead woman's home on the Tunk Pond Road/Route 183 in Sullivan.  Twenty five years later, he would be the first person that the cops went to following the biggest art robbery in history.

Any fan of historic artwork is familiar with what happened in Boston on March 21st, 1990.  It was early that morning that two local gangsters dressed as Boston policeman tricked their way into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and made off with $500 million worth of stolen art.

Myles Connor Jr. was in jail at the time, but authorities immediately went to him. The Massachusetts rock and roll singer was also a well known thief by that time, and had many friends within the Boston mob, some of which he had previously talked to about ripping off the Museum.

The stolen art has never been found, the FBI believes that the thieves are dead, and Myles Connor Jr. has long been out of jail. You may have watched the 4-part documentary titled "This is a Robbery" on Netflix, that chronicles the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist.

But our story here in Maine begins back in the '60s when Connor would spend summers with his maternal grandmother in a little house just to the right of the Tunk Pond Road on Route 1 in Sullivan. When he got wind that the old woman who lived on the Tunk Pond Road had died, he broke into her empty house and stole the grandfather clock.  On the way out he ran into a Deputy with the Hancock County Sheriff's Office, and the two got into a knock down drag out fight, in which Connor would point a machine gun to the ground and fire it, scaring the Deputy off into the woods.  Connor would later be picked up on Route 1 by the Maine State Police.

So, there's a reason why this guy is famous.

During his free time in the Hancock County Jail, he fashioned a bar of soap that he had colored black with shoe polish into what looked like a handgun, and spoofed his way out of the building.  For two days cops scoured the area, before finally finding him hiding in the attic of the Ellsworth Public Library.

A photo of the bar of soap shaped like a gun is below.  It still resides at the old Hancock County jail.

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The Netflix movie mentions how authorities thought that some of the stolen artwork may have made its way into Maine when one of the Italian mobsters involved stayed with his girlfriend in Madison.  But that those paintings may have eventually made their way to Philadelphia or anywhere else in the world for that matter.  Maybe.

But with the resourceful Myles Connor Jr. knowing his way around the Sullivan area, one has to wonder, could some of the stolen artwork be stashed in downeast Maine?

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