A Brazen Theft from France’s Most Famous Museum

0:00Today on State of the World, a brazen theft from France's most famous museum. You're listening to State of the World from NPR. We bring you the day's most vital international stories up close where they're happening. I'm Greg Dixon. In some ways, it sounds like it's a story from a heist movie. But this museum robbery seems far less complicated than something coming out of Hollywood. Over the course of just seven minutes, four men broke into the world's most visited art museum, Paris's Louvre Museum. They crawled through a window in broad daylight on Sunday morning. In a few minutes, we'll hear from an expert on what it takes to catch a jewel thief.

0:44First, NPR's Eleanor Beardsley in Paris tells us what was stolen and how French reaction has gone quickly from shock to anger.

0:56BFM News aired a special report breaking down what happened Sunday morning at the Louvre. At 9.30 a.m. in a wing far from the crowds around the Mona Lisa, four men drove a moving truck onto the sidewalk, raised its extendable ladder, and two climbed through an upper floor window into the antiques gallery.

1:19Cell phone video taken by a visitor shows the back of one of the men wearing a yellow reflective vest and cutting into one of the glass cases with an electric saw. No one is around him or tries to stop him. The two men climbed back out the window where their accomplices were waiting on scooters. They zoomed away and have yet to be caught. The attack of the Louvre is a terrible, terrible shock for the French people because the Louvre Museum is the best of the best, the museum of the museum. That's Pierre-Jean Chalancin, one of the top Napoleonic-era collectors in France. The thieves got away with tiaras, crowns, earrings and necklaces from the 19th century, the time of Emperor Napoleon III, who was the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte.

2:04In dollar terms, the booty is worth hundreds of millions, but its value is inestimable for French history and culture, says Chalonson. And we can't imagine that diamond from Marie-Louise, from Queen Hortense, and Imperatrice Eugénie was stolen like this. You know, it's a joke. The thieves dropped the gold-eagled crown of Empress Eugénie. It's said to be slightly dented, but its 1 ,300-plus diamonds and 56 emeralds are intact. They also left behind the small circular saw used to cut the glass cases. Investigators suspect a well-organized criminal gang. Time is of the essence, as experts say the jewels could be dismantled and the gold melted down to sell.

2:50Didier Rikner runs a website called La Tribune de l 'Art. He's been writing about mismanagement at the Louvre for a while. He says apparently the alarm in the gallery was broken. There was an alarm, but it was just one minute before they left the museum. So it was not when they entered the museum. So I think this alarm didn't work. Other experts speculate the windows may not have had an alarm at all. The political blame game has started. Far-right opposition leader Jordan Bardella called the heist an unbearable humiliation for France. Just how far will the deterioration of the state go, he asked on Twitter.

3:29In January, President Emmanuel Macron announced a nearly billion-dollar project to bring the Louvre up to modern standards, including for security. The Louvre was closed today, but that didn't stop curious onlookers and disappointed tourists from showing up to try and make sense of things. It's the school vacation and Caroline Larive brought her kids to Paris from their small town in western France. She says she can't believe it was so easy to break in and steal the jewels.

4:12Nine-year-old Alexandre says he's disappointed he won't be able to see the Mona Lisa in person. Eleanor Beardsley in PR News, Paris. To understand how the investigation of this theft might unfold, we're going to hear now from Ronnie Walker. He was part of the FBI's art crime team for 20 years. Now he's the president of the Art Legacy Institute. That's a nonprofit founded with other former investigators to help artists protect their work from misattribution and theft. He spoke to NPR's Michelle Martin. Based on your experience, any theories about who would do something like this? It's going to be a group of individuals that are financially motivated.

4:51So what we're hoping is that their motivation is to ransom these items back intact and not break them up and sell them, which is probably the more typical thing that would happen. If you're on a team investigating this, what are your first steps? First steps are just get a better understanding of what happened in that eight minutes. Collect the evidence that was left behind. Start reaching out to my sources and the community. And then continue doing publicity to make sure that the thieves have no place to hide. You worked undercover. You were telling me that you posed as a buyer to recover lost artwork in the past.

5:26That was one of your missions. Is that an option on a case like this? You hope it becomes an option. That's going to mean that the authorities have an opportunity to seize these things. But more times than not, the recovery is going to come through good citizens making observations and reporting them to authorities. As you've pointed out, these jewels are different from other objects that have been stolen from museums like paintings. They don't have to be intact to have value. What if the thieves dismantle them? Is there still any opportunity or any option to recover them? Oh, absolutely. I mean, what we have here are eight historically important objects, but they're made up of over 8 ,000 gemstones.

6:04If they break these up and dismantle them and sell them piece by piece, that's 8 ,000 opportunities for law enforcement to get their hands on them. Huh. And what if they've left the country with them? They probably have. You think so? You're pretty sure about that? I would think so. I think it's a very likely scenario, and the French authorities have great relationships with their counterparts in the region as well as in the United States. If they find their way to the U.S., the FBI will be involved. Some rooms at the Louvre had no security cameras at all. Some really popular rooms were only partially covered by cameras.

6:39The alarm went off when the thieves left, not when they entered. Are you surprised by that? Is that level of security typical for a museum of the Louvre's caliber? It's not uncommon. Museums, especially historically important museums that have been around for as long as the Louvre, didn't have state-of-the-art security when they were built. And upgrades can be expensive and budgets are always tight. And so, I don't know how to put this. Before we let you go, you know, this kind of theft is often glamorized. I'm kind of thinking about how many movies I've seen where a theft like this is glamorized.

7:15But I have to say, it's a gut punch. Maybe some people think this isn't that big of a deal, like nobody was hurt. But could you just talk about what it means to have something like this stolen, particularly from a place that is meant to be enjoyed by the public? It is. It's a theft against the French people, but it's also a theft against all of us. I took my daughter to this museum. We looked at those gyms. And, you know, her daughter someday, her children may not have that same opportunity. It's an important piece of our collective history that's now lost. And that is Ronnie Walker. He's a former FBI agent.

7:52He specialized in working undercover to recover stolen art items, and he's now president of the Art Legacy Institute. Ronnie Walker, thanks so much for talking with us. Thank you.

8:05That's the State of the World from NPR. Thanks for listening.