On the menu today: Call Inspector Jacques Clousteau. See if Lady Gaga has an alibi. Put out an APB for Lupin, particularly the one from the Netflix series. (Don’t bother calling Robert Langdon, he’ll just give you a long, historically dubious and probably sacrilegious I’m-smarter-than-you lecture about symbols.) Does Wonder Woman still work there?
In a headline right out of those thrillers I love, a gang of thieves robbed jewels from the Louvre. Don’t let anyone tell you that the real world doesn’t have adventures anymore.
The Biggest, Most Shocking Museum Heist Since the Gardner Job in Boston
Thankfully, most human beings don’t have much appetite for violence and mayhem. They see no pleasure in murder, or brutality, or war crimes. But being a really good thief, who can sneak into any building, outsmart any security system, and outwit any detective? Heck, Cary Grant plays characters like that, as does George Clooney. The suave, daring, not-quite-so-immoral thief is a stock character in detective novels and thrillers and comic books.
According to the account in the English edition of El Pais, four guys in Paris just executed an astonishingly smooth, fast, and efficient heist of arguably the most famous museum in the world. Whether or not they ever catch these guys, in a matter of minutes, they became legends:
There were four thieves. Two on high-powered motorcycles, the other two in a four-wheeled vehicle. The museum had just opened. It was between 9:30 and 9:40 on Sunday morning, and there were already people inside. The robbers made their way to the Galerie Apolon façade facing the Seine and accessed a first-floor balcony using a truck-mounted electric ladder similar to those used for moving furniture through apartment windows. The hooded men threatened the officers in the gallery with the grinders, which they then used to break the display cases. They stole nine objects and fled the same way they had arrived: on motorcycles.
For my southern New England readers, when it says, “The hooded men threatened the officers in the gallery with the grinders,” it does not mean the thieves threatened the guards with sandwiches. They mean an angle grinder, which is a power tool used for cutting, grinding, polishing, and sharpening materials. Unlike the Venus de Milo, these thieves were armed:
The entire operation lasted about seven minutes. According to both Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez and Culture Minister Rachida Dati, it is clear that these were professional thieves, who “had previously reconnoitered the area” to determine their entry route. Prosecutor Laure Beccuau has suggested an organized group of thieves.
An investigation into organized crime has been opened, but the assailants have not yet been found. Of the nine stolen pieces, the police have found one, a crown that belonged to Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III, which they dropped during their hasty escape.
You can see and learn more about Eugénie’s crown here.
They stole a crown? Man, these guys really took the “No Kings” rally talk seriously.
According to the English edition of Le Monde, the thieves got away with the necklace from the sapphire set of Queen Marie-Amélie and Queen Hortense, made up of eight sapphires and 631 diamonds, as well as the tiara of Empress Eugénie, featuring nearly 2,000 diamonds and 212 pearls. (You can see the tiara here.)
My first thought after reading about the heist was to ask, was museum security on strike that day? Some sort of European Union generous working rules meant nobody had to watch the security monitors on a Sunday morning?
Actually, my snark might not be that far off, according to a report in Radio France, the French equivalent of National Public Radio, contending that longstanding security concerns at the Louvre have been downplayed and ignored:
We learned on Monday, October 20th, that a preliminary report from the Court of Auditors, which franceinfo was able to partially consult, reveals flaws in the security of the Louvre Museum. The full report is due to be published in early November.
The Court of Auditors notes in particular a delay, both considerable and persistent, in bringing the Louvre’s technical installations up to standard, both for fire safety and security. First, in terms of the number of cameras in the different sectors. While the Napoleon Hall, where visitors wait under the pyramid, is very well equipped, this is not the case everywhere. In the Denon sector, where the Apollo Gallery, burglarized on Sunday, and the Mona Lisa painting a few rooms away, are located, a third of the rooms have no cameras at all. In some other sectors, it’s even worse. In the largest sector, for example, the Richelieu sector, three-quarters of the rooms are without cameras.
If the Court of Auditors points out the persistent delay, it is because the situation has changed very little over the past 5 years. In total, 138 additional cameras have been installed since 2019, but currently, barely more than a third of the rooms have at least one camera. Beyond the delays, the Court of Auditors points to a lack of will on the part of the museum, especially given the annual operating budget at its disposal, namely 323 million euros. The amounts committed are “small in relation to the estimated needs,” writes the Court of Auditors. The institution regrets “this tendency to make the launch of work a budgetary adjustment variable.”
If you think you’re having a rough start to your week, imagine being the Louvre Museum official who put off installing more security cameras in the Apollo Gallery.
The Art Newspaper, an online and print publication that covers the international art world, has more details, indicating this heist may be part of a pattern in top-tier European museums:
The prosecutor’s office said that another jewel was found on the floor of the gallery. The thieves also left their tools behind, while jerricans of gasoline were found with the truck, which the perpetrators tried to set alight before they fled. According to the culture ministry, an employee of the Louvre prevented what could have been a disastrous fire.
Nunez announced that France’s police anti-gang brigade would lead the investigation into the robbery, adding that other similar heists had occurred in the past several months, “some led by foreign gangs.”
The Louvre robbery on Sunday recalls the 2019 theft of the Green Vault in Dresden, where jewels worth €100m were stolen using a similar modus operandi. Most were later recovered as part of a plea deal. Meanwhile, in France last November, men armed with bats and axes stole seven 18th century snuff-boxes from the Parisian Museum Cognacq-Jay. Police recently announced that five of these precious boxes, which had been lent by the Louvre, the Victoria and Albert Museum‘s Gilbert Collection and the British Royal Collection had been recovered. No other details were given on the investigation and two of the boxes, from the Gilbert Collection and the King’s Collection, are still missing.
Last September, gold nuggets worth €600,000 were stolen from the mineralogy gallery at the Natural History Museum in Paris. In the same month two Chinese dishes from the 14th and 15th centuries and a vase, worth €6.5m, were stolen from a porcelain museum in Limoges. “Museums are vulnerable and they have become targets,” warned Dati in her television interview yesterday.
The phrase “later recovered as part of a plea deal” may have jumped out at you. Apparently in criminal circles, stealing a famous work of art is seen as an insurance policy for if you ever get arrested and face a serious jail sentence. So, some stolen famous works of art may well be sitting in some old criminal’s basement or attic or storage unit, a tool for barter that was never used. That may explain why those stolen works of art never appeared on the black market.
Back in 2021, Netflix did an excellent docu-series about the 1990 heist of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston . . . not-so-creatively titled, This Is a Robbery. Despite a $10 million reward from the FBI, the stolen nine paintings have never been recovered, and no arrests have ever been made. Police and the FBI investigated whether figures in Boston organized crime wanted to have a famous painting or two as leverage in negotiations with law enforcement.
With that said, stealing from the Louvre just to have an insurance policy to get time off a potential jail sentence sounds like an awfully high risk for a modest reward. Beyond that, assuming the thieves don’t want to keep all those jewels for themselves, they’ll face the question of where, and with whom, they could safely fence the jewels.
If you’re wondering why this heist is being discussed in a newsletter that usually covers politics, this is a big deal politically in France. From the Daily Telegraph, over in the U.K.:
The heist has provoked a row over the apparent lack of security in France’s museums, with Gérald Darmanin, the justice minister, admitting to security flaws in protecting the world famous museum.
Mr Darmanin told Inter Radio: “What is certain is that we have failed, since people were able to park a furniture hoist in the middle of Paris, get people up it in several minutes to grab priceless jewels, and give France a terrible image.”
Somebody stealing jewels out of the Louvre strikes the French people the way we Americans would react to having the Smithsonian or National Archives robbed. (Those institutions have been robbed in the not-so-distant past, but those were inside jobs. A researcher stole Second World War dog tags and other documents from a National Archives facility in College Park, Md., back in 2017, and back in 1981, a Smithsonian security guard was convicted of stealing two swords, two gold medals, and a snuffbox from the National Museum of American History.)
If you haven’t noticed, French President Emmanuel Macron has had a brutal year. French unemployment and the national debt are up, the public is in denial about the country’s long-term fiscal outlook, Macron goes through prime ministers like tissue paper (five in two years), and his approval rating is in the teens. For Macron, the Louvre getting robbed in broad daylight is the biggest slap in the face, since . . . well, the last time his wife Brigitte slapped him in the face. (Also, a note for all of the Macron family lawyers: Brigitte Macron is a woman.)
The robbery of the Louvre was bad enough, but the reports of subpar security and warnings about it, the fact that the robbery occurred in broad daylight, the fact that the guards were subdued by the threat of power tools, and the fact that the thieves could escape so seemingly easily . . . it all makes the government of France look like the “pitiful, helpless giant” that Richard Nixon warned about in 1970. High unemployment comes and goes, people will forget the names of the prime ministers, but the day the Louvre got robbed? People will remember that for a long time.
ADDENDA: Sunday marked the 15-year anniversary of the Three Martini Lunch podcast, available wherever you get your podcasts, and now on YouTube as well. I don’t want to begrudge anyone else out there making other fine podcasts, but most of them are rookies compared to us. Greg and I have been doing this so long, our podcast almost qualifies for a learner’s permit in the state of Virginia.
In case you missed it this past weekend, Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner wants you to not hold him responsible for any of the controversial or incendiary things he wrote online when he was young, naïve, and foolish . . . five years ago . . . when he was 37 years old.