So you’ve robbed the Louvre… now what?

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Speaker 1 This podcast was produced on the lands of the Wabakal and Gadigal people. Say you've gone to all the trouble of breaking into the Louvre.

Speaker 5 Thieves roll up in a stolen moving truck, extending the ladder, and climb to the first floor.

Speaker 1 You've climbed up onto the balcony. You've used your disc cutter to get into the museum.

Speaker 5 Four intruders, one in a high-vis vest, slipped into a room glittering with French crown jewels.

Speaker 1 Right in front of you is the 140-karat Regent diamond, which was once in the hilt of Napoleon's sword. It's worth $60 million

Speaker 1 on its own. And yet, you grab a bunch of other stuff.

Speaker 5 A jewel-encrusted brooch, decorative bow, and a diamond tiara once worn by Empress Eugenie, wife of Napoleon III.

Speaker 1 Why not take the big diamond? Did the guys pulling off this Louvre heist not know it was there? Did they not see it? Did they not want it? Well, we don't know because we can't see. And that's because.

Speaker 4 The closest camera was pointing away from the window used to enter the Apollo gallery.

Speaker 1 Now, like a lot of people, I love a heist movie, and those movies have told me that $60 million diamonds are protected not only by cameras, but by laser grids, pressure pads, infrared and vibration sensors, that kind of thing.

Speaker 1 But it turns out the Louvre doesn't have any of that.

Speaker 1 In fact, the staff have been warning us for months that the place is in a bit of a state.

Speaker 7 The Louvre also has been troubled by dangerous temperature swings, outdated infrastructure, and foot traffic far beyond what the museum can handle.

Speaker 1 The Louvre staff say the place is falling apart.

Speaker 1 Auditors found that while the museum spent 105 million euros on buying new artworks in the last six years, only 3 million was spent on security upgrades.

Speaker 1 And the Louvre could really do with an upgrade. One security audit in 2014 found that the password for the security system was Louvre.

Speaker 1 Many of the security cameras are analog and there are still 249 rooms in the museum with no security cameras in them at all.

Speaker 1 In the Denin wing, which houses the Mona Lisa and the French Crown Jewels, 87 of the 148 rooms have no cameras in them.

Speaker 1 Security staff say that they are overworked because they have to monitor all of those rooms manually.

Speaker 1 So it's perhaps no surprise that in October, a group of bumbling thieves were able to pull off a smash and grab heist.

Speaker 4 In their rush to escape, the intruders dropped a few gold and emerald pieces before taking off on motorbikes and left behind a helmet.

Speaker 1 These guys were less Ocean's 11 and more Ocean 7-Eleven. It wasn't a great look.
In the days after the heist, the director of the Louvre offered her resignation, but it wasn't accepted.

Speaker 1 Investigations are ongoing and at least four arrests have been made. But how can security at the world's most visited museum be so lax?

Speaker 1 And why would you steal a bunch of tiaras and leave the biggest diamond in France behind?

Speaker 1 Well, it turns out that the real world of art theft is very, very different to the fictional version. And it's different in ways that you definitely wouldn't expect.
I'm Matt Bevan.

Speaker 1 And this is If You're Listening.

Speaker 1 Every so often an art gallery director comes along who really wants you to know that they're an art gallery director.

Speaker 10 And there's that unmistakable voice, that unmistakable bow tie. It's unmistakably Patrick McCakey, the flamboyant director, the passionate steward of the city's most valued treasures.

Speaker 1 He was one of the most recognisable personalities in the Australian art world in the second half of the 20th century.

Speaker 9 He said, look, here are the most fantastic objects in the land, and they're in Melbourne, in this great gallery, and look at this great

Speaker 9 exhibition, and this is the story.

Speaker 1 He was an art critic for the Melbourne Age, an art historian, and during the 80s, the director of the National Gallery of Victoria.

Speaker 9 Now, I think the National Gallery of Victoria is not just one of the great heartbeats of Melbourne, it is the heartbeat of Melbourne.

Speaker 1 In 1985, McCakey made the most expensive acquisition in the gallery's history.

Speaker 12 This is the weeping woman. In acidic green and purple, the painting portrays a woman convulsed by grief.

Speaker 1 For more details on Picasso's The Weeping Woman, we cross now to

Speaker 1 Hannah Gadsby.

Speaker 3 This is one of a series of weeping women that Picasso painted in 1937.

Speaker 1 Yes, that is past Hannah Gadsby. Before they became a Netflix superstar, they did a very lo-fi ABC art series where we made them talk a lot about someone we now know they hate, Picasso.

Speaker 3 It echoes a figure from his epic painting Guernica, a reaction against the violence of the Spanish Civil War. Finally, a man who can see women for how they really are.

Speaker 1 Green and pointy.

Speaker 1 Now, the NGV paid $1.6 million for this Picasso painting, about five and a half million in today's money.

Speaker 1 And despite that being pretty much just the price guide of a four-bedroom detached house in Sydney these days, the purchase sparked quite a bit of controversy.

Speaker 12 When an Australian gallery pays more than a million dollars for a painting it makes headlines.

Speaker 1 But McCakie wasn't fast. He said it was to be expected.

Speaker 11 Well I mean we'd be terribly lucky if it went without any brouhaha at all.

Speaker 11 No I mean I think I mean you know someone asked me earlier today we live in a Philistine nation but a civilised city so we're unlucky here.

Speaker 1 We live in a Philistine nation but a civilized city. What an exceptionally Melbourne thing to say.

Speaker 1 McCaky was thrilled with the unveiling and he was riding high for nine months afterwards. But then the Arts Minister Race Matthews had an unexpected visitor.

Speaker 14 I came out of cabinet at lunchtime on Monday and Patrick McCakey was waiting for me, white-faced, to tell me that the Picasso had gone.

Speaker 1 So it was Monday lunchtime when the painting was reported stolen.

Speaker 13 The gallery says the painting, Weeping Woman, disappeared sometime on Saturday night.

Speaker 1 So why did it take over 36 hours for the staff to figure out the painting was gone?

Speaker 1 Well after the thieves removed the painting from the frame using a security screwdriver they left behind a little note.

Speaker 4 Removed to the ACT.

Speaker 15 Security guards saw that and thought oh it's gone to Canberra.

Speaker 1 If you're not Australian, the ACT is the shortened form of the Australian Capital Territory where there's several big and important galleries.

Speaker 1 So it kind of maybe made sense that the painting had been taken to a gallery in Canberra. But it turns out that was not the case.

Speaker 16 Gallery officials first became aware the painting was missing when contacted by journalists from media organisations in Melbourne.

Speaker 16 The Age and Herald newspapers and Channel 9 receive ransom notes from a group calling itself the Australian Cultural Terrorists, or ACT.

Speaker 1 The ransom note from these cultural terrorists was addressed to Race Matthews, the Arts Minister, and it was, well, not very nice.

Speaker 14 And I'd have to say that the tenor of the letter was, on the one hand, personally abusive, old swamp gas, they called me,

Speaker 14 and on the other hand,

Speaker 14 fairly undergraduate humour.

Speaker 1 The letter referred to the minister as Rank Matthews, a tired old bag of swamp gas and a pompous fathead.

Speaker 17 And it said, We've stolen the Picasso as a protest against the niggardly funding of the fine arts in this heck state and against the clumsy, unimaginative stupidity of the distribution of that funding.

Speaker 1 Their beef was that instead of assisting local artists, the government was spending almost all of the arts budget on purchasing, storing, and displaying works from foreign or dead artists, or both in the case of Picasso.

Speaker 1 Very little will end up in the hands of struggling artists. The group gave the government seven days to respond or they would destroy the painting.

Speaker 1 Initially, Patrick McCakey kept finding ways to make matters worse.

Speaker 1 Concerned about public perception that security at the gallery was lacking, he removed all the chairs that the security guards sit on during their shifts.

Speaker 4 The 70 attendants at the gallery left two. The attendants objected to increased security measures, which meant they could no longer sit down on the job.

Speaker 1 They objected quite forcefully.

Speaker 11 Gallery attendants who were ordered not to sit down on duty in future have gone on an indefinite strike.

Speaker 1 The theft and the strike made national news. Artists in the edgy community of Fitzroy in Melbourne were thrilled by the entire thing.

Speaker 13 I just jumped up in the air and thought it was great but

Speaker 1 I think that might be the general attitude by a lot of young artists anyway.

Speaker 1 Nobody could identify who the Australian cultural terrorists were, but local artists said that they supported what they'd done.

Speaker 13 You ever thought about stealing it yourself? Yes, I have. But I mean I think everybody thinks those sort of things anyway.
I mean, it's such an easy painting to steal because it's small.

Speaker 13 Once you take the frame off, you can put it under an overcoat or something.

Speaker 1 In Adelaide, a group of artists painted 19 replicas of Picasso's original. Their point was, you don't have to pay millions of dollars for foreign art.

Speaker 1 The police major crime squad went to the exhibition just to make sure that none of the paintings there was the original. In my opinion, though, I don't think Picasso was there.

Speaker 1 The situation was grim. The ransom letter had demanded the establishment of new government-funded arts prizes totalling $25,000 a year.

Speaker 11 The government refused, but a local engineering company offered to provide two art prizes of $5,000 each in 1987 for artists under 30.

Speaker 1 It apparently wasn't enough. The painting remained at large.

Speaker 13 There has been no more from the group claiming responsibility and threatening to destroy the painting next weekend if the demand for a bigger arts budget is not met.

Speaker 1 We'll tell you what happened to the weeping woman in a second, but I think it's worth pausing for a moment here to consider the situation.

Speaker 1 It sounds like this whole escapade was a bit of an aberration, right? A bit out of the ordinary. Surely this isn't how art heists usually play out.

Speaker 1 Well, stealing art as a protest is a lot more common than you might think. In 1961, a Goya painting of the Duke of Wellington was stolen in in London as a protest against the cost of TV licenses.

Speaker 1 Around the same time several artworks were stolen for ransom by Irish nationalists with thieves demanding the release of IRA prisoners.

Speaker 1 Then there are of course also the people who steal artworks and ransom them for financial reasons.

Speaker 19 The children's playground in Carlingford was the site for an early morning rendezvous that probably saved one of Australia's great art treasures.

Speaker 1 Charcoal burners by Tom Roberts was stolen from the art gallery of Ballarat in 1978.

Speaker 19 The burglars then contacted a Sydney art dealer to collect ransom money for the painting that's worth about $100,000.

Speaker 19 The Sydney dealer handed over the $4,000 ransom money here on Friday morning.

Speaker 1 So you go to all the effort of stealing a painting, you successfully stay out of reach of the police, and then you ransom the painting back for 4% of its value? It hardly seems worth it, right?

Speaker 1 Well, it's actually among the best possible outcomes for art thieves. Selling it to anyone other than its rightful owner is incredibly difficult.

Speaker 8 I think it'd have to be sold really through a sort of rather unscrupulous dealer because certainly it couldn't come up for auction.

Speaker 1 Sue Hewitt from the auction house Christie's told the ABC that you can find people who will help you sell stolen art, but you are not going to make much profit.

Speaker 15 Are there dealers who are well-known fencers?

Speaker 8 I'm sure there are.

Speaker 15 So you've no doubt there would be a market for it. Oh Oh yes, but there's certainly nothing like its true market value.

Speaker 1 Say I was to steal the Mona Lisa today and get away cleanly, leaving no trace, which, given the apparent state of the Louvre's security, I potentially could do quite easily.

Speaker 1 Presuming that I'm not just doing it for the lols and I actually want to gain something from my heist by selling it on the black market, I would need to find a dodgy art dealer and they would need to find a buyer.

Speaker 1 The more famous the artwork is, the harder that process is. For a piece that's that's as famous as the Mona Lisa, it would be basically impossible.

Speaker 18 They simply can't sell it. It's far too well known ever to sell it to a collector.

Speaker 1 Collectors aren't buying famously stolen artwork. Organized criminals aren't either.
They know how hard it is to offload.

Speaker 1 In fact, anyone who actually is willing to buy the Mona Lisa off you is probably an undercover cop.

Speaker 1 Even for artwork that isn't particularly famous, some estimates say that the black market price generally hovers around 7-10% of the open market value.

Speaker 1 A 1998 study of thieves in New South Wales found that the most common ways of disposing of stolen art was trading it for drugs or selling it very cheaply to family or friends. Hardly a big score.

Speaker 1 And that's because the value of an artwork is almost entirely subjective. They have no real inherent value.

Speaker 1 For most works, the frame, canvas, and paint might be worth $1,000 at best, mostly for the frame. I don't understand why framing things is so expensive.

Speaker 1 If you're breaking into someone's house, you're better off leaving the artworks alone and stealing their TV, their computers, and their jewelry instead.

Speaker 1 I mean, one could argue that that is exactly what Ocean 7-Eleven did at the Louvre in October. They ignored artworks and the 140-karat Regent Diamond and grabbed these instead.

Speaker 5 A jewel-encrusted brooch, decorative bow, and a diamond tiara once worn by Empress Eugenie, wife of Napoleon III.

Speaker 1 Instead of stealing one giant diamond, they stole jewelry encrusted with thousands of little ones, which is much easier to break into pieces and sell.

Speaker 20 People who go after gems,

Speaker 20 precious metals, they're in it for the sake of disguising, melting down, recutting these materials and reselling them.

Speaker 1 The Mona Lisa and the Regent Diamond are basically unsellable, but the 1,354 diamonds in the Empress's tiara aren't.

Speaker 1 Now, as someone whose idea of extreme wealth was formed by cartoons, I would have thought that stealing a literal gold crown studded with more than a thousand diamonds would set you up for life, but it turns out that diamonds aren't worth what they used to be.

Speaker 1 The price of diamonds has fallen 40% since 2021. So they've almost halved in value.
And that's before you get to the inevitable discount you need to apply when selling stolen goods.

Speaker 1 You can't just walk into a reputable jeweler, dump 1,354 diamonds on the counter, and say, you can't ask me any questions, but I would like market price for these diamonds, please.

Speaker 1 Everywhere you turn, you're copying a massive loss. But do you know who would be willing to pay you big money for the stuff you nicked? The gallery you nicked it from.

Speaker 19 A lot of the international thefts in the last couple of years are in fact have been ransom demands.

Speaker 1 That doesn't necessarily mean that you should call the Louvre as soon as you get home from the heist and let them know that they can have their crown jewels back for 10 million euros.

Speaker 1 Sometimes it's better to save it for a rainy day. There are many cases of famous artworks being held by criminals as collateral or as get-out-of-jail free cards.

Speaker 1 Say that a year after I steal the crown jewels, I try to pull off a bank heist. If I get arrested, I can tell the police, hey, if you reduce my sentence, I'll tell you where the crown jewels are.

Speaker 1 That might be an offer too good for the French government to refuse. Watch this space, I guess.
In the meantime, let's go back to 80s Melbourne.

Speaker 11 The fate of Picasso's Weeping Woman, stolen from Melbourne's National Gallery a week ago, is not known. The deadline set for the destruction of the painting passed at 10 o'clock last night.

Speaker 1 Any chance of getting the painting seemed hopeless. But when Patrick McCakey was asked about it, he had a little glimmer in his eye.

Speaker 1 He later wrote that he'd been traveling around the Fitzroy arts community and pointedly mentioning that if the painting was returned safely, there would be no need for any further police investigation.

Speaker 1 According to his retelling, he found himself in the studio of one artist who had press clippings, photos, and headlines about the theft of the weeping woman pinned up all over the walls.

Speaker 1 McCakey told the artist, who had what I would argue sounds like a conspiracy room, that he would very much like it if someone was to pop the painting into a luggage locker at Spencer Street station.

Speaker 10 It was a phone call last night to the Age newspaper that led police across the road to a locker at the Spencer Street station.

Speaker 1 It took a while before the station master could get the locker open.

Speaker 10 Gallery director Patrick McAkey paced anxiously for the hour it took forensic experts to arrive and remove the parcel.

Speaker 1 Attached to the painting was a note that read, Of course, we never looked to have our demands met.

Speaker 1 Our intention was always to bring to public attention the plight of a group which lacks any of the legitimate means of blackmailing governments.

Speaker 1 Once the painting was authenticated, an excited and frankly a little tipsy McCakie announced at a celebration that there would be increased security from now on.

Speaker 11 It is going to be bulbed to the wall and placed behind glass. If you want to take the thing next time, you will have to take the entire air conditioning done.

Speaker 1 To date, nobody has been charged for the theft and the weeping woman remains firmly bolted to that wall.

Speaker 21 The $50,000 reward remains uncollected, the police file is still open and the group's promise to strike again remains unfulfilled.

Speaker 1 In a way, this has got to be one of the most successful art heists in history. They managed to get an entire country talking about arts funding and that is not easy to do.

Speaker 1 I mean, I'm still talking about it nearly 40 years later. The painting was returned, unharmed, and most of the Melbourne art community saw it as a bit of a fun caper.

Speaker 1 The arts minister, Race Matthews, who was also the police minister at the time, did his best to ruin the party.

Speaker 10 The irony of the whole matter, he says, is that money that may have gone to the arts must now be spent on gallery security.

Speaker 1 Very droll, Minister Swampgass. But he wanted to make it clear that the ransom demand had not been met.

Speaker 1 That's certainly not to say that these kinds of art ransoms are never paid. They're just rarely publicised.

Speaker 1 Usually the gallery just goes a little bit quiet for a while and then issues a statement saying that they're delighted to announce that they recovered the painting after all.

Speaker 1 The crown jewels stolen from the Louvre were theoretically worth 88 million Euros, and since then they have almost certainly increased in value.

Speaker 1 But the thieves won't get anything like that valuation on the black market. The only people who truly value it are the people you stole it from, which is a bit of a bind to be in, really.

Speaker 1 As of this moment, there is no public reporting of a ransom demand from the Louvre thieves, but police have got several of them in custody. A deal may very well be on the table.

Speaker 1 In the meantime, the Louvre might want to start investing in some security cameras.

Speaker 1 This episode of If You're Listening was written by Cara Jensen-McKinnon and me, Matt Bevan. It was produced by Adair Shepherd.
Supervising producer is Cara Jensen-McKinnon.

Speaker 1 On Tuesday's episode, Cara and I will be answering more of your questions that you've sent into our email address, if you're listening at abc.net.au.

Speaker 1 In our last QA, we talked a lot about Donald Trump and Mudd, and tomorrow, look, to be honest, we will probably be talking about mud again, but we'll try and look at parts of the world that are not America.

Speaker 1 We'll do our best. I'll see you then.