Paris Museum Heist Puts Focus on Security Concerns

Entering the planet's most popular museum in broad daylight, grabbing eight items of invaluable historical gems and vanishing into Paris traffic on humble scooters may seem like the boldest of crimes, carried out for international notoriety and subsequent Hollywood film treatments.

Specialists who observe trends in international art crime, however, see the recent heist at the Louvre as something more prosaic: the most recent in a string of smash-and-grab thefts centered more on the material value of precious stones or metals than the historical importance, continuing a trend that has appeared over the last ten years in Europe, the UK and the US. The location, they suggest, would have been of secondary concern to the criminals.

“You may ask why criminals who want to take valuable jewellery are entering a world-famous museum rather than a luxury jewelry store,” said an expert in art recovery. “It's straightforward: it’s because these days a high-end boutique is better protected.”

A series of violent retail store thefts mean that many stores have strengthened their protection in the past few years, with armed guards on their locations and wares no longer shown overnight. Cultural institutions, meanwhile, look vulnerable, in part because of the inherent reason of being accessible institutions in older structures, and partly the current economic climate in many western countries.

“Since Covid, authorities across the globe have reduced spending on law enforcement and the arts funding,” 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 items – including jewelry pieces made up of eight sapphires and 631 diamonds, the tiara of a historical figure featuring thousands of diamonds and a hugely valuable crown once possessed by a royal that the thieves dropped by the roadside on their way out – has naturally been compared with the historical theft of the famous painting from the Louvre, carried out by the Italian handyman the thief.

Better comparisons may be the recent theft of valuables from Dresden’s Green Vault Museum worth over millions, the theft of a £4.75m gold toilet from a UK landmark the that year, the recent robbery of a large gold coin from a European museum or even a series of robberies of sports memorabilia from American institutions.

“It's a clear trend here,” explained Marinello. “Break in, take items, and dismantle them as quickly as possible.”

If the items were to remain intact, experts say, the criminals would find it hard to sell them. “There’s no way to trade something as immediately identifiable as the Louvre’s jewels on the licit market”, commented an art crime researcher 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 private collector or an sales venue would want to see paperwork establishing proper ownership before handling such remarkable pieces.”

In the previous years, museums were often reluctant to go public about the disappearance of famous works of art and would remain quiet out of embarrassment. These days, as cultural robberies are more widely publicised, the storage and selling of taken items is risky business for any lawbreaker.

“Taking a famous painting, it has to remain intact or it becomes worthless, and you have to devise a plan to conceal it, maybe by passing it around difficult criminal actors,” noted Marinello. “There's ongoing risk to the danger of an partner informing authorities to collect a ransom.”

For similar reasons, an investigator said it was highly improbable that the robbery had been ordered. “Stolen to order is something from films,” he said. “Nobody would touch this. It's global news and in all the newspapers. If you acquire these, if you get caught, you go to jail. You can't display it to your acquaintances, you cannot leave it to your family.”

Altering taken items by dismantling or re-cutting does reduce the value. When it comes to diamonds, it also comes with considerable risk because modern methods give gems a bigger and lighter appearance, and antique-cut stones would either attract notice or barter the price down for a coverup.

Crucially, however, melting down or re-cutting removes the proof of the crime. “My guess is that the robbers will try to bring the items to places with diamond expertise like a country, India or even as close as Antwerp, and locate an expert to remove the gems,” suggested Marinello.

The heist at the Louvre has already raised questions about security measures at the museum, with a leaked official review expected to be released soon criticising “significant” and “ongoing” slow progress in modernizing systems and observing that surveillance were missing in multiple areas. But security experts say showing precious items in historic buildings with a steady stream of guests comes with dangers that are impossible to eliminate completely.

“Historic buildings are much harder to protect,” explained an art crime professor. “They often have large accessible windows that allows for thieves to escape, and there may be building protection statutes in place that mean you are unable to install them with secure windows.”

The most solid protective measures for structures should be conceptualised “like a fortress”, said Peter Stürmann. “There should be multiple levels to repel intruders.”

Contemporary structures are fitted with advanced surveillance systems or in-built vibration sensors that raise alarm about a broken glass in real time, but historic institutions may be reluctant to uglify their exteriors. Detection devices can be hard to install to stuccoed ceilings. Motion and sound detectors may also have to be disabled during the daytime as crowds walk through a museum.

The timing of the Louvre raid, which occurred between morning hours in Paris, was typical of recent thefts, Stürmann said. “There’s a good reason why robberies tend to happen at either start or end of day. Frequently when security rotate and prior to the museum is full of visitors who actually act as extra protection.”

Advances in technology may have introduced new devices that can notify more quickly and efficiently, but it has also provided thieves new tools with which to circumvent protections. In the city, the thieves reached the museum’s first-floor window with a vehicle-mounted ladder and cut through a glass pane with a battery-powered disc cutter.

An author said the conversation in France about the historic building had mostly focused on crowd control in the past decade, and not as much on protection.

The institution has an in-house brigade of about fifty full-time firefighters, but their mission is mostly to safeguard the collection from fires and flooding. “There is no quick reaction team,” Sciolino said. “Ultimately, the safety of the Louvre all comes down to political will and funding, and at present France simply has no resources.”