Paris Museum Heist Puts Spotlight on Security Concerns

Breaking into the world’s most-visited museum in broad daylight, taking eight pieces of priceless Napoleonic jewellery and disappearing into Paris traffic on humble scooters may seem like the boldest of crimes, carried out for international notoriety and subsequent Hollywood film treatments.

Experts who study patterns in international art crime, however, see Sunday morning’s heist at the Louvre as a more practical matter: the most recent in a series of quick-hit thefts focused more on the monetary worth of precious stones or metals than the historical importance, perpetuating a pattern that has appeared over the last decade in Germany, Britain and the US. The venue, they propose, would have been of secondary concern 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,” stated Christopher A Marinello. “It's straightforward: it’s because these days a high-end boutique is better protected.”

A spate of violent jewellery shop thefts mean that many stores have beefed up their security in recent years, with armed guards on their premises and wares no longer kept on display overnight. Museums, on the other hand, look more exposed, in part because of the in-built reason of being accessible institutions in historic buildings, and also the current economic climate in many western countries.

“After the pandemic, governments across the world have reduced spending on police and the arts funding,” said Marinello. “With criminals entering the Louvre, it demonstrates how vulnerable our museums have become. This is a horrible time to be a museum.”

The robbery of the objects – featuring jewelry pieces made up of precious stones and hundreds of gems, the crown of Empress Eugénie featuring nearly 2,000 diamonds and a extremely expensive diadem once possessed by a royal that the thieves dropped by the street on their way out – has naturally 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 2019 burglary of jewellery from a German institution worth over €113m, the taking of a multi-million pound valuable object from Blenheim Palace the same year, the recent robbery of a large gold coin from Berlin’s Bode Museum or even a spate of robberies of sports memorabilia 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 remain intact, specialists say, the criminals would find it hard to find a buyer. “There’s no way to trade something as immediately identifiable as the Louvre’s jewels on the legal marketplace”, commented an art crime researcher of the a relevant organization.

“They are too well-known, especially given the cultural authorities has published photos of the items. Even a private collector or an sales venue would want to see documentation confirming proper ownership before touching such striking pieces.”

In the past, institutions were often reluctant to go public about the loss of famous art pieces and would stay silent out of embarrassment. Now, as cultural robberies are more widely publicised, the keeping and selling of taken items is dangerous for any criminal.

“Taking a Picasso, it has to stay complete or it becomes worthless, and you have to devise a scheme 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 collect a reward.”

For comparable factors, an art detective said it was highly improbable that the theft 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 go to jail. You can't display it to your friends, you cannot bequeath it to your children.”

Modifying taken items by melting down or reshaping does reduce the value. When it comes to diamonds, it also comes with considerable risk because contemporary methods give gems a bigger and brighter 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 evidence of the theft. “My guess is that the Louvre thieves will try to bring the stolen goods to locations with diamond expertise like a country, another nation or even as close as Antwerp, and locate an expert to remove the stones,” suggested Marinello.

The heist at the Louvre has already brought up concerns about protective steps at the institution, with a unauthorized official review expected to be released soon pointing out “significant” and “ongoing” delays in updating equipment and observing that security cameras were lacking in many rooms. But security experts say showing precious items in historic buildings with a steady stream of visitors comes with dangers that are impossible to eliminate completely.

“Older structures are much harder to protect,” explained Erin Thompson. “They often have large accessible windows that allows for thieves to escape, and there may be building protection statutes in place that mean you can’t fit them with proper bulletproof glass.”

The most solid security systems for structures should be designed “as a stronghold”, said Peter Stürmann. “It should include several layers to deter attackers.”

Modern buildings are equipped with state-of-the-art surveillance systems or in-built vibration sensors that raise alarm about a broken glass in real time, but old museums may be reluctant to alter their exteriors. Detection devices can be hard to install to stuccoed ceilings. Sensors may also have to be disabled during the daytime as crowds stomp through a museum.

The schedule of the robbery, which occurred 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. Frequently when guards change their shifts and before the museum is full of visitors who actually act as extra protection.”

Technological progress may have thrown up new devices that can raise the alarm more rapidly and efficiently, but it has also provided robbers new methods with which to bypass security measures. In Paris, the robbers accessed the museum’s upper level with a mobile equipment and breached a window with a battery-powered disc cutter.

An author said the discussion in France about the historic building had primarily focused on visitor management in the past decade, and less on security.

The museum has an in-house brigade of about fifty permanent emergency personnel, but their mission is mostly to safeguard the collection from blazes and water damage. “There is no rapid-response unit,” Sciolino said. “In the end, the security of the Louvre all comes down to government support and money, and currently France lacks sufficient money.”