Why French Museums Keep Getting Robbed

0:04Almost exactly a month ago, thieves raided the Louvre Museum in Paris and in broad daylight made off with millions of dollars worth of jewels. They apparently used a mobile exterior freight elevator, if you will, to get up to the Apollo room. Two people dressed in workers' vests, cutting the glass and grabbing the jewels. Getting away with an estimated$102 million worth of jewelry in just seven minutes. While the world's eyes were still on the Louvre, the mayor of a small French town got some surprising news. She received a call from the director of the local museum who informed them that the local museum had been robbed too, that a collection of gold coins had disappeared during the night.

0:54And the museum is called the Musée des Lumières, Denis Diderot, and so it's a museum which is dedicated to this French philosopher, and the museum is really kept by the city. Langres is a town of roughly 8 ,000 people, about a three-and-a-half-hour drive from Paris. The robbery at the museum there, happening so soon after the Louvre heist, hit the local community hard. The Louvre heist happened, like, on a Sunday morning, and that robbery was on the evening of that same Sunday, so just less than 24 hours. Oh, wow. Basically the same day. Basically the same day, yeah. Two museum robberies within a day of each other.

1:35And it turns out, those heists were just the tip of the iceberg.

1:41Since September, six museums were hit, but one of them was hit twice, so that would make seven. And over the past year, it would be nine in France alone. You heard that right. Nine heists in a single year. Seven of them just in the past two months. Our colleague Noemi Biserbe has been tracking these robberies. And what did you think when you figured out this, when you started seeing this pattern? I was really surprised, actually, that, well, it had become so common, actually, in France, because the Louvre gets robbed, everybody's paying attention. But actually, it's been happening throughout the year in many places across France and has really started spreading to the rest of Europe.

2:24And now in France itself, we've seen this trend pick up over the past year and really accelerate in recent months. But the question is, why?

2:37Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Monday, November 17th.

2:50Coming up on the show, museum heists are on the rise in France.

3:08So Noemi, you said there have been seven heists in France in the past couple of months. Can you walk me through some of them? In September, a thief stole from a museum in Limoges, a city in central France. That same month, the Museum of Natural History in central Paris was hit too. Weeks later, the Musée du Désert, which is like a museum in a tiny village in the south of France, was robbed. And that same week, the Jacques Chirac Museum was hit not once but twice on the same week by what prosecutors think are two separate groups of thieves. Oh my goodness. So, I just want to understand, what is it that thieves want from these museums?

3:50Well, what they're looking for is basically stuff that they can sell. and you can't sell art which is very recognizable and so that basically rules out paintings and sculptures and so on. But you can melt stuff. You can steal gold, melt it and resell it. You can steal a beautiful diamond necklace which is very recognizable but break it into pieces and sell it off quite easily. So that's really what they're looking for. They're looking for melt value. Melt value. That's the money that thieves can get by melting, cutting, or altering the stolen items before selling them. I'm curious, these medals and jewels have always been valuable.

4:38And presumably these collections have sort of been sitting at these museums for years. Why are these heists happening now? Well, I think that one factor is that the price of gold has increased quite significantly, buoyed by anxiety over geopolitics, inflation, and the Federal Reserve independence. Gold and silver prices have both reached all-time highs this year, and that's after a major surge over the last decade. But Noemi says another reason heists have taken off is that Thief saw it could be done, and relatively easily. It started in 2017, with a heist at the Bode Museum in Berlin. This 20-year-old member of a Lebanese-German crime family called Wissam Remo, he stole a coin known as the big maple leaf, which was valued at more than 3 million euros.

5:283 million euros. Wow. Yes, nearly$4 million. They actually hold the coin on a roller board and dropped it out the window. And then they carried it across a bridge in a wheelbarrow. Okay, hold on. How big is this coin? I was like picturing a coin. Why do you need a wheelbarrow for it. It's massive. I think that, yeah, it's 220 pound coin. Oh my. And also made of like, I think it's 99.999 % gold, which makes it like a rarity. So it was a pretty spectacular heist. That's so brazen. And just as a side note, why was it called the Big Maple Leaf? Because it was forged by the Royal Canadian Mint. And so it became known as the Big Maple Leaf.

6:19The heist seemed straight out of the movie Ocean's Eleven. The thieves, led by Wissam Remo, identified a weak spot in the museum, a second-floor window that was disconnected from the alarm system. The thieves also had an inside man. According to court documents, an acquaintance of the Remo family had taken a job as a museum guard. And one evening, before clocking out, the guard left the window open for Remo's team. And then what did they do? They just cut up this gold coin? Yeah, so they, well, they cut, like, the coin in smaller pieces to set it off. Okay. And actually, police found, like, their clothes and car and homes sprinkled with this gold dust of extraordinary purity.

7:05It was an incredible heist. Police eventually tracked down Remo and his accomplices. But while awaiting trial, Remo went and pulled off a second, even bigger heist at a different museum. In that case, he made off with 21 pieces of jewelry encrusted with more than 4 ,300 diamonds, a haul valued at more than 116 million euros. Remo and other family members were convicted of both heists. The group returned some of the stolen jewels as part of a plea bargain. Remo was sentenced to 10 years and nine months in prison for both robberies. You've had like these spectacular heists, which have allowed this realization, which is that, well, actually, if these guys can pull it off, well, maybe we can too.

7:53That's according to my sources. So it's also like people get inspired by these deaths. It's like a copycat situation. Exactly. It creates copycats. And we've seen that very clearly in France, like this acceleration. And why museums versus jewelry stores or other private collections? Museums have actually pieces which are much more valuable than any jewelry store. And what they figured out is that it's actually much easier to rob a museum than to rob a jewelry store, which, unlike museums, has very heavy security. Many of Europe's museums are in historic palaces and mansions, places that were built centuries ago to house noble families.

8:36not to counter modern security threats. And museums trying to upgrade the security of historic buildings have to go through tons of red tape. There are very specific rules about what you can do and not do. Like their facades and stuff like that. Exactly. You need permits to be able to implement these changes. In the wake of all these robberies, and especially since the Louvre was hit, museum heists have become a major headache for the French government. What they're doing about it is next.

9:21After the Louvre heist, it became clear to French officials that the problem of museum thefts wasn't going away. I think that this probably was a real eye-opener for everyone and for French authorities. France's most famous museum was robbed in broad daylight by four thieves who entered the museum and made off with$102 million in jewels from the Galerie d 'Apollon. Preliminary charges have been brought against four people in connection with the Louvre heist. The jewels have not been recovered. The Louvre is now reviewing its security measures and has plans to invest massively in upgrades. A recent government report has argued that the Louvre has invested a lot of money in acquiring new art.

10:09And that sometimes that has been at the detriment of the very basic security of these work of art. For the Louvre, it will be very manageable because the Louvre is a very rich museum. They have the resources to do that. I think that the challenge will really be for other smaller museums, which do not have this kind of revenue.

10:32And there are a lot of these smaller museums all throughout France. The country is home to about 1 ,200 museums, many of which aren't flooded by millions of visitors a year like the Louvre. Instead, they rely on a combination of ticket sales and funding from local government, private donors, and community fundraisers. That means investing in security won't be as simple. So what is the government's plan to address this? Well, they're still trying to examine all of the art which is out there and the collections which are out there in France and try to build the proper list of national treasures.

11:10And from there, they will decide what to do. And we know that's going to be difficult because, well, France's finances are not in great shape right now. France has a massive deficit and it's struggling to even agree on a budget. before the end of the year. Sounds familiar. Yeah. So they are in a difficult spot right now. Uh-huh. And so given that, I mean, how does the government decide which museums, which treasures are the priority? I think that you have to examine, well, their sheer value, but also like what they mean to our history. And it's going to be a very difficult decision to make. for French people, protecting these museums, it's also about protecting their heritage and passing it on to future generations.

12:03And that's very important to French people. And when you have as many museums as you do in France, I think that it's hard to make choices. A lot of people never really thought about these things before these robberies happened and realize how deeply it affected them. Meanwhile, back in the small town of Lang, residents are dealing with what they see as a huge loss. These coins had a very special value in people's mind there because the history of this treasure is kind of interesting. This museum is relatively recent. It was opened roughly 10 years ago. And actually, when they did the work to renovate this beautiful building and to create the museum inside that building, one of the construction workers found that treasure while doing the renovation work.

12:59And the rule is in France that basically if you find a treasure, half of it is yours. Finders keepers? Yes. What? Half of it. Still? Still? And so this worker got half of the treasure and the other half went to the city. And that's how it ended up in that museum. But because of this story, people felt like this was sort of the town's treasure. And it had like beyond its sheer value. It had like a very strong sentimental value to people in Longue.

13:40Given all the problems happening nationally, does that put Long in kind of a tough spot? What are their options? Well, when I actually spoke to the chief of staff of the mayor, he was saying that they had been discussing now for a while several security improvements, including a metal shutter in front of the main entrance. and while those plans had been delayed essentially for financial reasons. So I can guess that now those changes will be implemented. Maybe a bit too late, but... Yeah. Were those thieves ever caught? From long, no. They have not been caught yet. They're still on the loose. They're still out there.

14:21They're still out there.

14:35That's all for today, Monday, November 17th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by Stacey Mitri and Bertrand Benoit.

14:49Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.