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How thieves pulled off the Louvre jewel heist in minutes
00:18:03
Thieves stole thousands of gems from the Louvre museum in a matter of minutes. Today, how it happened and what might become of the jewels.
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On Sunday morning, the first visitors entered the Louvre in Paris. They were taking in the museum's thousands of masterpieces like the Mona Lisa in one gallery, home to exquisite crown jewels. Some people looked like they were there maybe to do some maintenance.
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B
They're wearing these yellow vests. Perhaps they're delivery people, perhaps they're construction workers. They're sort of anonymous, in plain sight. It's the sort of thing that you wouldn't notice until suddenly everything is going really wrong.
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These were not museum employees. They were thieves pulling off a heist. Within minutes, they grabbed diamond and gem encrusted treasures and fled. Two days later, the thieves are still at large. So I asked Philip Kennicott, the Post's senior art and architecture critic, about the question on all of our minds. How did they do?
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B
Didn't take lasers and precise measurements and grappling hooks and all of these kind of Hollywood techniques to get into this gallery. It just took a little bit of force and a little bit of planning.
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A
From the newsroom of the Washington Post, this is Post Reports. I'm Colby ekowitz. It's Tuesday, October 21st. Today, how thieves managed to seal thousands of diamonds and gems from the most visited museum in the world in broad daylight. And we'll hear from a former FBI agent who says that pulling off an Ocean's Eleven style heist is in fact easier than you might think.
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C
I mean, look, if you have the will and the desire and be fairly fearless, in other words, not worry about being caught, you can go anywhere and steal just about anything.
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A
Phil, thanks so much for joining me.
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B
It's my pleasure.
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A
So let's just start at the beginning. What happened at the Louvre on Sunday?
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B
So this is shocking and brazen. It's a theft during broad daylight at the most visited museum in the world in the center of Paris, the Louvre. It's 9:30 in the morning and there are actually people in the Louvre at the time. Visitors. Thieves approach the museum on the riverside. They use a mechanical ladder to gain access to a second floor balcony and thus a window leading into one of the most elaborate rooms in the entire louvre. It's a 17th century room known as the Gallery of Apollo. This is one of the most ornate rooms in the Louvre, which was for a long time a royal palace before it was a museum. And in the 17th century there's a fire in the Louvre. And this room is basically remade, it's redecorated. And the reason it's called the Gallery of Apollo is that they use mythological imagery from the story of Apollo to create a kind of metaphor for the king at the time, Louis xiv, the Sun King, and Apollo is the sun God. So the room is very ornate. It's gilded from top to bottom. There are paintings on the walls, paintings in the ceilings. So it's a prototype or an inspiration, in a way, of some very grand and maybe more famous spaces, like the hall of Mirrors at Versailles. The thieves gain access to this very elaborate gallery of Apollo, and then they have these specialized tools that let them get into the cases where the jewels are displayed, and they grab what they can carry. Maybe as a sign of the haste that they're under, they actually drop one of the key pieces, which is a crown that's been recovered, though somewhat damaged. It does seem that alarms go off, but it's not clear where and who hears them. In any case, they're not effective at deterring the theft. There are people in the room and they're sort of shocked, and they flee the room. It was all very quick. It was over in a matter of minutes. And it seemed they were out the window and back at street level and on mopeds or street bikes. With the jewels dissolving into the Paris landscape quite quickly.
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A
Do we know exactly what they made off with?
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B
So it's a collection of jewels, tiars, a crown, necklaces encrusted with diamonds and other precious stones. These are made mainly in the first part of the 19th century, and they belong to kind of the Napoleonic elite and some of the other major political figures in the first half of the 19th century, after the French Revolution, you.
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A
Know, you talked a little bit about the history of these jewels, of these gems from the time period. But, like, what is the significance for France, for Paris, of these jewels?
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B
You know, so the Louvre exists as a museum because France has a Revolution in 1789, and they get rid of their king and they take some of the wealth that was associated with the monarchy and some of the art, and they put it on display as possessions of the republic of the people. And so this is a moment in which there's not just a political change, but a cultural change. And so this theft, although it sounds like a Hollywood caper, and there's a lot of interest in it as a sort of narrative. It's a theft from the people of France, and the people of France have paid a dear price for these objects. You don't get jewelry like this without enormous concentrations of wealth, without an aristocracy, and the cost of that is paid by ordinary people. And many of these jewels date from a period of Time when France is modernizing, but it's also concentrating wealth. And it's not a particularly democratic. There are reforms that are happening, but there's a lot of cost. It's interesting, in a museum like the Louvre, most of the paintings and sculptures are, as we say, a document of barbarism. They exist because there are people who have the wealth to commission the best craftsmen, the best painters, the best sculptors to make them. But jewels really concentrate that paradox. The paradox that they wouldn't exist without a great deal of inequity and cruelty in society. And yet they are these beautiful things that still give us pleasure, that still have meaning. Well, jewels are kind of the quintessential of that paradox.
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A
Yeah, yeah. I mean, could you even put a price on that? Is there a dollar amount that you could even assign to these jewels?
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B
There are so many complicating factors. You know, a painting, if you steal a very famous painting, it's very, very difficult to resell it because the value of the painting is the painting itself, the thing that represents its provenance. And so the Mona Lisa is priceless in part because you could never sell it. You can never legitimately sell it. The jewels are slightly different. They can be broken down, the metal can be melted down. So they do have actual value on the market. I think the safest thing to say is that they're priceless. But apparently today there was a Paris prosecutor that has come up with an estimate of about 88 million euros. That would be around 102 million US dollars. But still, I think it's gonna be really difficult to pin that down. There are just so many ways in which the price of something like this can fluctuate. So if you're going to break these jewels down, you know, recut them so they don't look like 19th century stones and you can resell them more easily, you're going to have to find somebody who can do that work and who's not going to talk a lot. And so that's actually going to maybe reduce the value that the thieves can get for them. So a lot of factors in play.
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A
How are people in Paris, across France reacting to this?
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B
Yes, the French do seem to have opinions. And this is a period of time, you know, pretty significant political turmoil in France. There is a, you know, affordability crisis in Paris in particular is extremely expensive. And a lot of people are being squeezed into this kind of precariate class. You know, oftentimes fairly educated, skilled workers who can't get sufficient employment or stable enough employment. France is In a particularly unstable period politically right now, like. Like a lot of European countries, like a lot of democracies, they have a president who has been for quite some time, and he is not popular. They're going through prime ministers like a hungry guy eating crepes. At this point, they can't really get stability in the government. And so there's a lot of anger in France and a lot of disillusionment about the ability of the government to be functional. So there's a lot of discussion about it. Was the Louvre well enough guarded? Has it been well enough funded? Has it been sort of starved of the resources it needs to properly protect these things? French officials are obviously embarrassed and outraged by this. The French justice minister has said it puts a deplorable image of France to the public, and they're deeply concerned by how easily this seems to have taken place in the middle of Paris. He said, we failed. People were able to park furniture hoists in the middle of Paris, get people in it in several minutes to get priceless jewels.
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A
Has the Louvre said anything about how something like this could happen? Because I think that's another thing that has shocked people, is that a place like the Louvre that you would imagine would be so heavily protected, someone could somewhat easily, it seems, get inside and steal something and get away.
- [09:23]
B
Right. So the Louvre closed Sunday and Monday, and there was an investigation, an ongoing investigation. The French Ministry of Culture on Sunday put out a statement saying basically the guards had followed protocol that they put the thieves to flight and they protected the people in the gallery. And that's what we know so far.
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A
Phil, is this the first time that something has been stolen from the Louvre?
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B
No, it's not. I mean, there was a very famous, bizarre story in 1911. There was an Italian guy who had actually worked at the Louvre for a while who stole the Mona Lisa. It wasn't exactly an unknown painting at the time, but that theft, you know, shrouded it with a certain amount of mystery and romance. It was recovered a few years later.
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A
And the few years later.
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B
A few years later, yes. The thief seems to be a kind of hapless figure. It wasn't ultimately a loss of the painting, but it also seemed to have something to do with nationalism and kind of Italian pride. It's worth pointing out that the Louvre, a lot of what's in there is the result of theft, Napoleon's theft. I mean, he conquers much of Europe and he brings back treasures from Italy and stocks his galleries with it. So the Louvre is no stranger to theft.
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After the break, what might happen to these precious gems next? And what an expert in museum heist thinks about this latest caper. We'll be right back.
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Think.
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About why you listen to podcasts. It's like having a friend who makes you think or can help you wind down right? Well, the Washington Post has a lot of people you can turn to at any hour. You can read the most important and interesting stories. We can help you cook something delicious, give you advice on a tricky friendship. Rave about a movie or book that you shouldn't miss. When you become a Washington Post subscriber, do you have a companion for whatever part of your day needs it most? Get it all for just $4 every four weeks. That's for an entire year. After that, it's just $12 every four weeks. Cancel anytime. Go to washingtonpost.com subscribe that's washingtonpost.com subscribe.
- [12:53]
A
So Phil, it's been two days since this heist. The thieves have not been caught. What has been happening? How big of a hunt is this in Paris?
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B
So there was a great deal of urgency the moment people became aware of what happened. Because the jewels can be broken down, they can be, you know, recut. The metal can be repurposed, melted down. So there's a real sense of urgency to get these things back. My sense of this be an international scope at this point. They would want to get these to a place where there's a market for them, where there are skilled artisans who can perhaps do the work of recutting them. And that may not be in Paris. That may not be the place that they do it. So it's an enormous search right now.
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A
You know, Phil, I was so captivated by this story and so interested to understand, like, how a heist like this could happen and how one might investigate such a heist. So I actually called up an expert here in the United States.
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C
My name is Robert Whitman, and I'm the former senior investigator and founder of the FBI National Art Crime Team. During my career at the FBI, I recovered about $300 million, or the stolen art and cultural property in more than 20 countries.
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A
So I asked Whitman, you know, I wanted his professional opinion on this heist and on the chances that these thieves could get away with it.
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C
I thought, boy, that was an audacious theft. I thought these guys were real professionals. They must have really known what they were doing. But then the more I looked into it and the more I found out, I mean, the fact that they had dropped one of the crowns and damaged it, they left the ladder there that they had gone up on, and then they dropped their arc cutters. One of them lost his vest, the yellow construction vest that he was using as a disguise as a construction worker. That's not professional. I mean, dropping all this material, it's all forensic evidence.
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A
So this former FBI agent, you know, he thinks these guys are gonna get caught pretty soon. So in other heists over the years at museums, what has happened? Do people usually get caught, or are they usually more professional operators than this?
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B
So it's a very mixed story. One of the most famous and largest thefts from a museum is from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. And those works have never been recovered, and they include major paintings by Rembrandt. There was a case in Dresden, I think, in 2019, where jewels were stolen and a good portion of what was taken was recovered, but not all of it. So it's really mixed. And jewels, as people have noted, are easier to resell than paintings. Certainly a lot easier to resell than a Rembrandt painting that was famous for hanging in a museum for many, many years.
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A
You know, And I asked Mr. Whitman about this.
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C
The real art in an art heist, it isn't stealing it, it's selling it. Like you said, what are you going to do with it? In this case, there's only a couple of options. I mean, one option is that they would break it down into its parts and try to sell parts, which would be terrible. Okay. The second option would be that they sit tight and hopefully that the government of France offers a reward for recovery. The third option would be they throw it in the river so they don't want to get caught. And that's, again, that's a terrible option as well.
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A
I mean, Phil, other than, like, the Hollywood nature of a heist, why should people care that these jewels were stolen? There's so much going on in the world right now. I can imagine some people would say, okay, so what? There's a bunch of diamonds missing. What would you say to that?
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B
One of the losses that people don't take into account when we read these sort of romantic caper stories about a jewel theft is that there will be enormous pressure for the Louvre to make this gallery more secure, maybe to move those objects out of this gallery into someplace that can be better defended. And what happens is a loss of access. And we're kind of used to that, right? Every time there's a security breach, a public building, Supreme Court, or the Capitol, we get less access to it as the public. When that happens in a museum, you're working against the very purpose of a museum like the Louvre, which is about that democratic access, that public access to treasures. I mean, one of the reasons this story is so fascinating is that when you go into a museum, you encounter priceless object after priceless object. We're rarely in that kind of intimate proximity to things that just dwarf what any ordinary person will understand as wealth in their own lives. You know, jewel thefts, I think, are attractive to Hollywood because they change the lives of the people who do the stealing. It's like winning the lottery. You go from being, you know, an ordinary person to, you know, potentially enjoying enormous wealth, enormous status, Whether or not that actually happens for these thieves, and one hopes that it doesn't, that's the romance of it, right? Museums are meant to, in some ways, create a civilized, domesticated version of that romance. That wealth is ours for the moment that we're in those museums, in the hours we're among it, we own it, and in some ways, we belong to it. So the loss is to our sense of the commons, that we can own these things and we don't have to leave them in the hands of the people who will use them as forms of extravagance, as symbols of power, who will use them to cow us in our desire to be fully enfranchised in public space.
- [18:29]
A
Phil, thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate all your expertise.
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B
Thanks for having me.
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A
Phil Kennicott is the senior art and architecture critic for the Post. That's it for Post Reports. Thanks for listening. Today's show was produced by Emma Talkhoff, with help from Rennie Sirnofsky and Laura Benchoff. It was mixed by Sam Baer and edited by Ariel Plotnik. Thanks to editors Jonathan Fisher and Steven Johnson. Before WE go the last few weekends, we've been bringing you stories from our colleagues on the Optimist. This is the section here at the Post that covers the best of humanity, things that are going right in the world. We've had episodes about how to age gracefully, how to build community, how to be happier. And we've heard a lot of positive feedback from listeners about those episodes. You want more of those types of stories, so we're opening up the floor to you. Send us your questions about how to live a more optimistic life and we'll see if we can get you an answer. These could be questions like how do I learn to like people more? How do I get off my phone? Whatever you think might help you make the world a better place, ask us about it. Email us Odcasts Watch Post. I'm Colby Ekowitz. We'll be back tomorrow with more stories from the Washington Post.
- [19:59]
E
Think about why you listen to podcasts. It's like having a friend who makes you think or can help you wind down right? Well, the Washington Post has a lot of people you can turn to at any hour. You can read the most important and interesting stories. We can help you cook something delicious, give you advice on a tricky friendship. Rave about a movie or book that you shouldn't miss. When you become a Washington Post subscriber, you have a companion for whatever part of your day needs it most. Get it all for just $4 every four weeks. That's for an entire year. After that, it's just $12 every four weeks. Cancel anytime. Go to washingtonpost.com subscribe that's washingtonpost.com subscribe.