A Brazen, 7-Minute Jewelry Heist at the Louvre

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1:02Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. What I immediately thought of was like, wow, this is, you know, like Ocean's Eleven kind of heist. Alan Katz is Bloomberg's Paris bureau chief. But it all happened so fast. And it does give you this idea that there were, you know, Brad Pitt and George Clooney definitely were hanging out somewhere really like thinking about this for a long time before they went through it. Sunday morning, around 9.30 on the right bank. The heist taking just minutes in broad daylight. We were just ready to go in to see the Mona Lisa. Tourists are there to see the world's most famous museum.

1:41Authorities say three to four robbers arrived at the museum in Paris, used a ladder at one point, and a freight elevator to reach the Apollo room. The suspect's making off with eight items. Elaborate diamond brooches, two diadems, and Napoleon's wife, Empress Eugenie's diamond-encrusted golden crown, which prosecutors say was recovered at the scene.

2:05I'm David Gurra, and this is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show, a brazen robbery at the Louvre. A look at who could have pulled off something out of a Hollywood caper, who they could be working for, and just how vulnerable museums are to theft.

2:27Can we start with just what a sensation this is? So this happened on a Sunday, and I'm curious sort of how quickly it reverberated around the country as a whole. I mean, pretty quickly, I have to say, I became aware of it probably around 9.45 or 9.50. So it was only really 15, 20 minutes after it happened. I was at home making breakfast for my kids, and I got alerts that started to pop up on my phone. and it was really pretty extraordinary because, you know, one of the things they did is they moved, we've been having trouble in the office, I have to say, trying to come up with the word for this in English.

3:00It's called a mont-charge in French, and it's the thing you use to move furniture in and out of apartments because French windows, they're these big, you know, windows that open sort of like double doors, and that's how it's much easier to actually use this sort of like a pneumatic lift thing to get furniture up to especially fourth, fifth, sixth floor apartments and move it in by the windows. And so they're really common in Paris, but still, usually you have to have a permit to put one outside on the road. And here, we're sitting outside the Louvre, you know, on Sunday morning at 930 when there's no work scheduled.

3:30So people, even cyclists, sort of stopped and immediately sort of like taking videos of it and calling the cops and being like, hey, what's going on here?

3:41Could I have you walk us through what happened over those seven minutes? Basically, they showed up on Sunday morning outside the Louvre and near this area, which is called the Apollo Gallery. And it's a part of the Louvre that has a bunch of jewels in it. And it's sort of Napoleonic mostly, but not entirely. And they used glass cutters. It's almost like a chainsaw, but at the end of it, instead of a saw, it's got these glass cutting discs to cut holes in the windows to get into the gallery and once in to cut holes in the cases. Now, they did this around 930 in the morning. So the Louvre was open, actually, at the time.

4:18And there were guards in the room, at least according to the culture ministry. The standard procedure is not to engage with thieves, but actually the priority is to get any visitors who might be in the room out of the room and try to sort of protect people's safety rather than try to protect the stuff that's being stolen. But you actually have some videos, some handheld videos from iPhones and the like of people sort of showing these guys in yellow sort of safety vests on, which sometimes workers have, especially when they're working on the road so that cars can see them. And it's the kind of thing that actually everyone has in their trunk by law.

4:51Everyone has in the trunk of their car to have to put on if your car gets stuck on the side of the road. They're very common vests. And yeah, you can see how they might look like regular old workers, except for the fact that they were inside the Louvre cutting open these cases and pulling out jewels. What do we know of what they were able to spirit out of the place? They got a series of jewels that were both Napoleonic and pre-Napoleonic brooches and tiaras and some earrings. They have lots of pearls and diamonds and emeralds on them, but the value is much more in their historic relevance rather than in the value of the gems themselves.

5:28The gems are worth a lot, and the gold in which a lot of these things are made of is worth a lot. And of course, a lot more now that gold is over$4 ,000 an ounce than when it was$40 an ounce 60 years ago. I've seen these referred to as priceless jewels and objects. Do we have some sense of, you know, in dollars or euros, what this haul would be worth? Priceless is definitely the term because these things literally can't be sold because there's only one of them. And everybody who is active in the art market will take one look at it and be like, oh, yeah, that's the thing that was stolen from the Louvre.

6:01And maybe they'd be willing to buy it from you, or maybe they would just call the police and have you arrested. So these things are not sellable in a traditional way, and therefore they can't be valued in a traditional way. There is no market for them. And that's what when people say priceless, that's what really they mean. The main value of them is as part of the history of France.

6:25you've now been listening to this podcast for about seven minutes the same amount of time it took this group of thieves to steal those priceless artifacts from the louvre after the break what's next for them for law enforcement and for the museum the caper part of this crime the risky snatch and grab in broad daylight, that part of the heist is done. But what comes next? What on earth are the thieves going to do with jewels that are this famous and this identifiable? Well, that depends on why they were taken in the first place. On Sunday, Paris prosecutor Laura Bacca told a local French TV station that the thieves were likely either on an assignment from a collector who would want to keep the goods intact, or working for someone who was just after their valuable stones and metals.

7:21Bloomberg's Alan Katz says, for now, we just don't know if the theft was to keep the jewels or to sell them. Let's say you're, I'm, you know, Mr. Evil Genius, right? And I want this particular tiara, right? I just love this tiara. It's my favorite tiara. I've always wanted it. And I can hire somebody to steal it, right? And maybe I've paid this group of, I believe it's four people, to steal this thing. and I'm paying them each, you know, I don't know,$25 ,000 or$50 ,000 or whatever, or promise them a million dollars each, who knows. But I'm paying for service to be rendered. The criminal tiara superfan would then, presumably, keep the crowns, earrings, and necklaces as they are, maybe in a secret room where they alone can enjoy them.

8:02But Alan says in the other scenario, these items were simply stolen for the value of their parts. You'd like take off the diamonds and the gold and you melt it all down and then you sell it, which would be terrible in terms of what would happen to the art, but I suppose not impossible. Is that stuff traceable? Depends on who does the melting down and the prying out of the gems, I suppose. The answer is jewels themselves are not particularly traceable, and neither is gold or platinum or any other metal if you melt it down. Molecules have no memory, so gold can't tell you what it used to be. But you have to find someone willing to do that.

8:43I'm sure those people exist. They probably exist in every single country in the world. But as a thief, I mean, is it really the easiest way to steal that particular quantity of gold or emeralds or diamonds? Maybe, I guess. I mean, it strikes you as a pretty risky way to sort of get like gold bullion. And then it begs the question of like, how big is like the art black market for stolen goods from museums? Because it's actually larger than you think, at least according to the FBI in the US. I think they have an estimate of four to six billion dollars worth of art being stolen a year, which strikes me as exceedingly high.

9:21What has the reaction been to this on Monday? Front page of every paper, people talking about it. So what do they make of what happened here on Sunday? It is definitely the thing that people are talking about. France, like the United States, is a highly politicized country. So some people have immediately made it out to be a political issue. And did our politicians fail in not having enough security at the Louvre and therefore they should be turfed out of office? Or is it to speak to a decline in France? The justice minister was on this morning talking about how it's in national humiliation. But also it's cool, right?

9:55It's pretty cool because no one was hurt. No one was shot at. And people are like, wow, actually, they did a pretty good job, these guys. And so you have that mix of as with the idea of sort of the gentleman thief. It takes planning. It takes skill. It takes daring. And you're not physically hurting anybody. And people sort of enjoy that too as a story. It's a great tale of a caper. I want to ask you to put this in context. So there's kind of the historical legacy. The Louvre has dealt with this before, and it's long past. But there have been other heists, other robberies at French museums. What do people make of how common this has become so much as it has?

10:36So one of the things that, especially a guy named Laurent Nunez, who's now the interior minister, but was for several years the head of the Paris police, one of the things he noted today was that this really is a rising form of crime. In other words, that it does appear to be that for whatever reason, whether it's the rising value of the underlying stuff these things are made of, you know, gold or jewels or whatever, or it's more to the point that people feel like museums in general are, and not just in France, because there's lots of theft of museums all over the world, but that museums are a good target because they are relatively poorly defended or secured and therefore you can actually steal stuff.

11:19pretty easily from them. There was somebody who was joking next to me saying that, you know, their typical Zara store in France has better security than Louvre does. I'm curious what the next steps are here for the Louvre in all likelihood. So we know that Emmanuel Macron has unveiled these plans to renovate the museum, to improve security. We should point out this is happening at a time when the museum faces budget cuts, production subsidies from the French government. As all the while, visitor numbers are continuing to go up. Where does the Louvre go from here? Well, the first thing it has to do before anything else, it has to reopen.

11:52It was closed yesterday and closed today. It's always closed on Tuesdays. So the French government has to make sure that it reopens on Wednesday. There are a lot of visitors, as you say, that I think there were 8.7 million in 2024. So that's a lot of people that go every year and a lot of disappointed people if they're not able to go see the Mona Lisa. But as you point out, it's a museum that has often had sort of budgetary issues. One of the issues has been its security. It's actually been, there have been reports about its poor security in the past and how it needs to be improved. And there have been plans to improve it that hadn't been put into place yet.

12:27That's one of the things that politicians in particular have been complaining about today. But it does need to figure out how it's going to manage its funding. And one of the things that you see a lot in French cultural centers, both museums, but also monuments, is there, you know, the ex-friends of the Louvre or the ex-friends of Versailles. And when I say X, it's a country. So to be like the American Friends of Versailles or the American Friends of Louvre or the Chinese Friends of the Musée d 'Orsay. And it's been noticeable in the last couple of years, year or two, I'd say, has been a return to a lot of emphasis on American money.

13:05So it seems to be that that's one of the ways that they're looking to bridge that gap.

13:13Alan, you and I are speaking at the end of the day in Paris, and I'm curious what we've heard from law enforcement about what's going to happen next in the investigation of what happened here, and also how optimistic they are that they're going to be able to catch the perpetrators. It's been surprisingly quiet today in terms of advances on the actual investigation. In the past, a lot of these museum thefts have taken quite some time to resolve, if they've been resolved at all. So I don't have the feeling that it's going to be solved very quickly, but I really don't know.

13:57This is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm David Gura. To get more from The Big Take and unlimited access to all of Bloomberg.com, subscribe today at Bloomberg.com slash podcast offer. If you like this episode, make sure to follow and review The Big Take wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps people find the show. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.

14:26Thank you.