🔗 Share this article

Breaking into the world’s most-visited museum in broad daylight, taking eight pieces of priceless historical gems and vanishing into the city traffic on humble scooters may seem like the most audacious of crimes, carried out for international notoriety and subsequent movie adaptations.

Experts who study patterns in international art crime, however, see the recent heist at the Louvre as a more practical matter: the most recent in a string of quick-hit thefts focused more on the material value of precious stones or metals than the historical importance, continuing a trend that has appeared over the last decade in Europe, Britain and the US. The location, they propose, would have been of lesser importance to the thieves.

“You may ask why criminals who want to take valuable jewellery are breaking into a globally renowned museum rather than a Cartier store,” stated Christopher A Marinello. “It's straightforward: it’s because nowadays a Cartier store is better protected.”

A spate of aggressive jewellery shop thefts indicate that many outlets have beefed up their security in recent years, with security personnel on their locations and wares no longer shown overnight. Museums, meanwhile, look more exposed, in part because of the in-built factor of being accessible institutions in historic buildings, and also the financial situation in many developed nations.

“Since Covid, governments across the world have cut back on police and the culture sector,” noted Marinello. “With criminals entering the Louvre, it shows how at risk our institutions have become. This is a difficult time to be a museum.”

The theft of the items – featuring necklaces made up of eight sapphires and hundreds of gems, the tiara of Empress Eugénie featuring nearly 2,000 diamonds and a extremely expensive crown once owned by Napoleon III’s wife that the robbers dropped by the roadside on their way out – has inevitably been compared with the 1911 theft of the famous painting from the same museum, performed by the Italian handyman Vincenzo Peruggia.

Better comparisons may be the recent theft of jewellery from Dresden’s Green Vault Museum worth over millions, the taking of a multi-million pound gold toilet from a UK landmark the that year, the recent robbery of a valuable item from a European museum or even a spate of robberies of collector items from American institutions.

“There’s a simple pattern here,” said Marinello. “Smash, grab, and melt it down as quickly as possible.”

If the items were to stay whole, experts say, the criminals would struggle to find a buyer. “There’s no way to sell something as recognizable as the museum's gems on the licit market”, said an art crime researcher of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art.

“They are too well-known, especially given the cultural authorities has published photos of the items. Even a individual buyer or an auction house would want to see documentation establishing legal possession before handling such striking pieces.”

In the past, institutions were often hesitant to announce publicly about the loss of well-known works of art and would remain quiet out of shame. Now, as cultural robberies are more widely publicised, the storage and selling of taken items is dangerous for any criminal.

“If you steal a Picasso, it has to remain intact or it becomes worthless, and you have to devise a plan to keep it in hiding, maybe by passing it around dangerous individuals,” noted Marinello. “There's ongoing risk to the danger of an accomplice informing authorities to collect a ransom.”

For comparable factors, an investigator said it was vanishingly unlikely that the robbery had been ordered. “Stolen to order is something from films,” he said. “No one would handle these items. It's global news and in all the media. If you buy this, if you are apprehended, you go to jail. You cannot show it to your acquaintances, you cannot leave it to your family.”

Altering stolen works by dismantling or reshaping does reduce the worth. When it comes to diamonds, it also comes with significant danger because contemporary methods give stones a larger and brighter appearance, and antique-cut stones would either attract notice or barter the price down for a coverup.

Importantly, however, dismantling or reshaping eliminates the evidence of the crime. “My guess is that the robbers will try to bring the items to places with diamond expertise like a country, another nation or even as nearby as Antwerp, and locate an expert to remove the gems,” suggested Marinello.

The heist at the Louvre has already brought up concerns about protective steps at the museum, with a unauthorized official review expected to be published next month pointing out “significant” and “persistent” delays in updating equipment and observing that security cameras were lacking in many rooms. But specialists say displaying precious items in older structures with a constant flow of guests comes with risks that are impossible to eliminate completely.

“Historic buildings are much harder to protect,” said Erin Thompson. “They often have nice big street-facing windows that makes it easy for thieves to escape, and there may be building protection statutes in place that mean you can’t fit them with secure windows.”

The best security systems for structures should be conceptualised “as a stronghold”, noted a security advisor. “It should include several layers to repel intruders.”

Modern buildings are equipped with advanced surveillance systems or integrated vibration sensors that raise alarm about a smashed window in real time, but historic institutions may be reluctant to alter their appearance. Laser scanners can be hard to fit to decorated surfaces. Motion and sound detectors may also have to be turned off during the daytime as hordes of visitors stomp through a museum.

The timing of the robbery, which took place between morning hours in Paris, was common of modern robberies, Stürmann said. “There’s a good reason why thefts tend to happen at either start or end of day. It’s often when security change their shifts and prior to the museum is full of visitors who actually act as extra protection.”

Advances in technology may have introduced new gadgets that can notify more quickly and effectively, but it has also provided thieves new methods with which to circumvent security measures. In the city, the thieves reached the museum’s upper level with a mobile equipment and breached a glass pane with a electric tool.

Elaine Sciolino said the discussion in the country about the historic building had primarily focused on crowd control in recent years, and not as much on security.

The institution has an in-house brigade of about fifty full-time emergency personnel, but their purpose is mainly to protect the collection from fires and flooding. “There isn't a rapid-response unit,” Sciolino said. “In the end, the safety of the Louvre all comes down to government support and money, and at present France simply has no resources.”