🔗 Share this article

Entering the planet's most popular museum in broad daylight, grabbing eight pieces of priceless historical gems and disappearing into Paris traffic on humble scooters may seem like the most audacious of crimes, executed for international notoriety and subsequent movie adaptations.

Specialists who study trends in international art crime, however, see the recent heist at the Louvre as a more practical matter: the latest in a series of quick-hit thefts focused more on the material value of precious stones or materials than the historical importance, continuing a trend that has appeared over the last decade in Germany, Britain and the US. The location, they propose, would have been of secondary concern to the criminals.

“You may ask why thieves who want to steal expensive jewellery are breaking into a globally renowned museum rather than a luxury jewelry store,” stated an expert in art recovery. “It's straightforward: it’s because these days a high-end boutique is more secure.”

A series of aggressive jewellery shop thefts mean that many stores have strengthened their protection in recent years, with security personnel on their premises and merchandise no longer shown overnight. Museums, on the other hand, look vulnerable, partly because of the inherent reason of being accessible institutions in historic buildings, and also the financial situation in many developed nations.

“Since Covid, governments across the globe have cut back on law enforcement and the arts funding,” said Marinello. “If thieves can get into the Louvre, it shows how at risk our museums have become. This is a difficult time to be a museum.”

The theft of the objects – including necklaces made up of eight sapphires and 631 diamonds, the crown of a historical figure featuring thousands of diamonds and a extremely expensive diadem once owned by a royal that the thieves dropped by the roadside on their way out – has inevitably been compared with the 1911 theft of the famous painting from the Louvre, carried out by the worker Vincenzo Peruggia.

Better points of reference may be the 2019 theft of jewellery from Dresden’s Green Vault Museum worth over millions, the taking of a £4.75m valuable object from a UK landmark the that year, the recent robbery of a valuable item from Berlin’s Bode Museum or even a spate of thefts of collector items from US mining museums.

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

If the items were to stay whole, specialists say, the criminals would find it hard to find a buyer. “It's impossible to trade something as immediately identifiable as the Louvre’s jewels on the legal marketplace”, commented an art crime researcher of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art.

“They are too well-known, especially given the Ministry of Culture has published photos of the pieces. Even a individual buyer or an sales venue would want to see documentation confirming legal possession before handling such remarkable pieces.”

In the previous years, institutions were often reluctant to go public about the loss of famous art pieces and would remain quiet out of embarrassment. Now, as art thefts are more widely publicised, the storage and sale of stolen art is dangerous for any lawbreaker.

“Taking a Picasso, it has to remain intact or it becomes worthless, and you have to devise a scheme to keep it in hiding, maybe by moving it among difficult criminal actors,” said Marinello. “There's ongoing risk to the risk of an partner telling the police to cash in a ransom.”

For comparable factors, an art detective said it was highly improbable that the robbery had been commissioned. “Stolen to order is something from films,” he said. “No one would handle these items. It’s all around the world and in all the media. If you acquire these, if you are apprehended, you end up in prison. You cannot show it to your friends, you cannot bequeath it to your family.”

Modifying stolen works by melting down or reshaping does reduce the worth. When it comes to gems, it also comes with significant danger because modern methods give gems a bigger and lighter appearance, and older-style stones would either draw unwanted attention or reduce value for a coverup.

Crucially, however, melting down or re-cutting removes the proof of the theft. “My guess is that the Louvre thieves will try to take the stolen goods to places with diamond expertise like Israel, another nation or even as nearby as a city, and locate an expert to remove the stones,” suggested Marinello.

The robbery at the Louvre has already raised questions about protective steps at the museum, with a unauthorized official review expected to be released soon pointing out “considerable” and “ongoing” delays in modernizing equipment and noting that surveillance were missing in multiple areas. But security experts say displaying valuable objects in historic buildings with a steady stream of visitors comes with dangers that are not possible to eliminate completely.

“Historic buildings are much harder to protect,” explained Erin Thompson. “Many of them have nice big street-facing windows that makes it easy for criminals to get away, and there may be building protection statutes in place that mean you are unable to install them with secure windows.”

The best protective measures for structures should be conceptualised “like a fortress”, noted a security advisor. “There should be several layers to repel intruders.”

Modern buildings are equipped with advanced external CCTV cameras or in-built seismic detectors that alert about a broken glass in real time, but old museums may be hesitant to uglify their exteriors. Laser scanners can be hard to install to stuccoed ceilings. Motion and sound detectors may also have to be turned off during the day as crowds walk through a museum.

The schedule of the Louvre raid, which took place between 9.30am and 9.40am local time, was common of recent thefts, Stürmann said. “It's logical why thefts tend to happen at either opening or closing times. It’s often when guards change their shifts and before the museum is crowded who actually act as extra protection.”

Advances in technology may have introduced new gadgets that can notify more rapidly and efficiently, but it has also provided thieves new methods with which to bypass protections. In the city, the robbers accessed the museum’s first-floor window with a mobile equipment and cut through a window with a electric tool.

Elaine Sciolino said the conversation in the country about the historic building had mostly centered on crowd control in recent years, and not as much on security.

The institution has an on-site brigade of about fifty permanent emergency personnel, but their purpose is mostly to protect the artworks from fires and water damage. “There is no rapid-response unit,” Sciolino said. “In the end, the security of the Louvre all comes down to political will and money, and currently the nation simply has no money.”