🔗 Share this article

Breaking into the world’s most-visited art institution in the middle of the day, taking eight items of invaluable Napoleonic jewellery and vanishing into Paris traffic on humble scooters may seem like the most audacious of crimes, executed for international notoriety and subsequent Hollywood film treatments.

Specialists who study trends in international art crime, however, see the recent robbery at the Louvre as a more practical matter: the latest in a string of quick-hit thefts focused more on the material value of valuable gems or metals than the artifacts’ significance, continuing a trend that has appeared over the last decade in Germany, Britain and the US. The location, they propose, would have been of lesser importance to the criminals.

“You may ask why thieves who want to take expensive jewellery are breaking into a globally renowned museum rather than a Cartier store,” said Christopher A Marinello. “The answer is simple: it’s because nowadays a Cartier store is more secure.”

A series of aggressive retail store thefts indicate that many stores have strengthened their security in the past few years, with armed guards on their locations and wares no longer shown overnight. Museums, meanwhile, look more exposed, in part because of the inherent reason of being public-facing institutions in historic buildings, and also the current economic climate in many developed nations.

“After the pandemic, governments across the globe have cut back on law enforcement and the culture sector,” said Marinello. “With criminals entering the Louvre, it demonstrates how vulnerable our institutions have become. This is a difficult time to be a museum.”

The theft of the objects – featuring jewelry pieces made up of eight sapphires and hundreds of gems, the tiara of a historical figure featuring thousands of diamonds and a extremely expensive diadem once possessed by a royal that the thieves left by the street on their way out – has inevitably been compared with the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa from the same museum, performed by the Italian handyman the thief.

Better comparisons may be the 2019 theft of valuables from a German institution worth over millions, the taking of a multi-million pound gold toilet from a UK landmark the same year, the recent robbery of a valuable item from Berlin’s Bode Museum or even a spate of thefts of sports memorabilia from US mining museums.

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

If the items were to remain intact, specialists say, the thieves would struggle to sell them. “It's impossible to trade something as recognizable as the museum's gems on the licit market”, commented Lynda Albertson of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art.

“They would be immediately recognised, especially given the cultural authorities has published photos of the pieces. Even a individual buyer or an auction house would want to see paperwork establishing legal possession before handling such striking pieces.”

In the past, museums were often hesitant to announce publicly about the loss of famous works of art and would stay silent out of shame. These days, as art thefts are more widely publicised, the storage and selling of stolen art is risky business for any lawbreaker.

“If you steal a Picasso, it has to stay complete or it becomes valueless, and you have to devise a plan to conceal it, perhaps by passing it around difficult criminal actors,” said Marinello. “There's ongoing risk to the risk of an accomplice informing authorities to cash in a reward.”

For similar reasons, an investigator said it was vanishingly unlikely that the robbery had been commissioned. “Commissioned theft is something from Hollywood movies,” he said. “Nobody would touch this. It's global news and in all the newspapers. If you buy this, if you get caught, you end up in prison. You cannot show it to your friends, you cannot leave it to your children.”

Altering taken items by melting down or reshaping does lower the worth. When it comes to gems, it also comes with significant danger because contemporary cutting techniques give stones a bigger and lighter surface area, and antique-cut stones would either draw unwanted attention or barter the price down for a concealment.

Crucially, however, dismantling or reshaping removes the evidence of the theft. “My guess is that the robbers will try to bring the stolen goods to places with diamond expertise like a country, another nation or even as nearby as a city, and find someone to cut out the gems,” suggested Marinello.

The heist at the Louvre has already brought up concerns about protective steps at the museum, with a leaked official review expected to be published soon pointing out “considerable” and “persistent” slow progress in updating equipment and noting that surveillance were lacking in multiple areas. But specialists say showing precious items in older structures with a steady stream of guests comes with risks that are impossible to remove entirely.

“Older structures are much harder to protect,” explained Erin Thompson. “They often have large accessible windows that allows for criminals to escape, and there may be preservation laws in place that mean you are unable to install them with proper bulletproof glass.”

The most solid security systems for structures should be conceptualised “as a stronghold”, said Peter Stürmann. “It should include multiple levels to deter intruders.”

Modern buildings are equipped with advanced surveillance systems or in-built vibration sensors that raise alarm about a smashed window in real time, but old museums may be reluctant to uglify their appearance. Detection devices can be difficult to fit to decorated surfaces. Sensors may also have to be disabled during the day as hordes of visitors walk through a museum.

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

Technological progress may have introduced new devices that can notify more rapidly and efficiently, but it has also given thieves new methods with which to bypass security measures. In the city, the robbers reached the museum’s first-floor window with a mobile equipment and breached a glass pane with a electric tool.

Elaine Sciolino said the discussion in France about the historic building had primarily centered on crowd control in recent years, and not as much on protection.

The museum has an on-site brigade of about 50 full-time firefighters, but their mission is mostly to protect the artworks from blazes and flooding. “There isn't a rapid-response unit,” Sciolino said. “Ultimately, the security of the Louvre all depends on political will and funding, and at present the nation lacks sufficient money.”