Le Heist

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Hey, it's Natalie.

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From the New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitroff.

This is the Daily.

The world's biggest museum, a symbol of France, now a crime scene.

Over the weekend, a group of thieves staged a remarkable heist at one of the world's most famous museums.

Officials in Paris say the masked crooks used a basket lift and cutting tools to just break into a gallery.

Stealing some of the most precious and culturally significant jewels in Europe in the middle of Paris in broad daylight.

It's like a scene from a film.

Yeah, you could not make it up.

I thought it was a joke.

Like, no, not possible.

As new details emerge about the brazen theft at the Louvre, the response in France has been a mix of shock, disbelief, and fascination.

This is the heist of the decade, you know.

It's as bad as it gets.

How could the world's most visited museum be robbed with such brazen audacity?

Today, my colleague Catherine Porter explains how the robbery happened and why so many feel as though they may have just lost a piece of their history for good.

It's Wednesday, October 22nd.

Catherine, hi.

How are you?

This is probably the only taping where I've literally been like, I need us to begin so I can ask my questions right now.

I mean, that's not true.

It's not the only one.

But this is a very special episode, and I need to talk to you about this story.

I have read everything about this heist,

and I'm not satisfied still.

I am, I am ready for you okay good just to start tell me exactly how a group of jewel thieves broke into the louvre and stole these very precious items just start from the beginning tell me exactly what happened as far as we know as far as we know this heist started at 930 last Sunday morning.

Typical, kind of quiet Paris morning.

And what we know is this truck that had a ladder attached to it rolls up to the Louvre with two motorcycles.

Now you might wonder why is there a truck with a ladder on it, but in Paris it's pretty common sight because this is how you move your furniture in and out of your apartments because of how skinny the halls are.

So

it rolls up, parks right up against the building on the sidewalk, and two people pop out

and they set out traffic pylons around the truck and they have fluorescent vests on like public workers do.

So like anybody looking at this from the outside might think this is a completely normal scene.

Nothing to see here.

Nothing necessarily to see except for the two men that then went up this electric ladder to the balcony on the second floor were masked.

So that might have tipped you off if you were there, but to be honest, this is the quiet side of the Louvre.

It's near the Seine, not a lot of foot traffic.

So they go up the mechanical elevator in a kind of bucket, like a cherry picker.

They get to this balcony onto the second floor of the Louvre, and they use what are known as angle grinders.

Which is what exactly?

Kind of like electric hand saw

to saw through the window that leads into what's known as the Apollo Gallery.

It's this golden, long,

beautiful

wing of the Louvre that literally was built by Louis XIV as a model for his Hall of Mirrors.

And it houses the royal jewels of France.

Is this like a very popular part of the Louvre?

It certainly sounds as though it's iconic.

Super iconic.

It's not as popular, obviously, as the Mona Lisa,

but it's pretty close.

You know, when you go in there, it's often quite crowded.

It's really opulent.

There's paintings on the ceilings, on the walls by famous people like Delacroix.

There are hanging tapestries.

There are sculptures, and these cases down the middle that hold the crown jewels.

The thieves break in using the saw.

We hear from people who work in the Louvre that there was an explosion of glass and there were a number of security guards inside who really quickly evacuated the room.

So they didn't approach the thieves.

No.

The protocol in the Louvre and most museums is if you are confronted with an intruder that has things that seem like they could be weapons, your priority is protect people.

So they did what they were instructed to do, what they've been trained to do.

They got people out and very, very quickly.

And how many people were there at the time?

I mean, 9.30 a.m.

on a Sunday does not seem like the ideal time to rob the most famous museum in the world.

Was it crowded?

Well, we don't know how many people were in that room.

That's like one of the details that has not surfaced yet or been disclosed by investigators.

We do know that the Louvre is like the most visited museum in the world.

Up to 30,000 people visit every day.

We've seen videos and spoken to people who were quite frantic, not knowing why they were being evacuated.

Many were running to get out.

I mean, there was huge fear at first that either there was a fire or this was a terrorist attack.

So the thieves are inside.

What happens next?

What we know is that they go like directly to two cases that are in the middle of the line of cases and they use their power saws to cut into them and break them open.

I had heard there was some video footage taken of the thieves stealing the pieces.

Do we know anything about how they were acting, what they were doing, their general demeanor at the time?

Yeah, we've seen those videos.

They were given, I guess, to a local French TV station.

They're quite blurry, but you see clearly one of the two men wearing something over his head, like a black covering on his head.

He's got his yellow vest on, and he just, he looks incredibly calm.

Like there's no franticness.

He's just sawing away.

What we have been told by the chief Paris prosecutor who's in charge of leading the investigation into this is that these are seasoned.

They think that they're part of a gang.

They clearly knew what they were coming for.

They were pretty precise and fast, and they didn't seem panicked at all.

But all this was, you know, fairly quick.

Our timeline shows that they arrived outside the building at 9:30.

They got up to that window on the top of the mechanical ladder.

Four minutes later, they broke in and they were out within four minutes and down and gone.

So,

amazing.

That's pretty fast.

I mean, I know in terms of heists, it's not the fastest.

There have been many faster.

People who study this stuff say it's not crazy fast, but it was fast enough that they escaped and

they have not been found.

So, okay, let's talk about that escape.

I'm trying to imagine it.

What does it actually look like?

You know, they jump out the window that they came in.

They go down the same bucket ladder to the bottom.

We understand also that they at this point attempt to

set fire to the truck, to the bucket itself.

We don't know why.

There's been lots of speculation they were trying to remove any kind of DNA or fingerprints, basically.

And at this point, what we know is that some security guard or guards come chasing towards them on the ground.

They drop a couple things, including one of their security vests and the bottle that they were using to spray gas onto the this cherry bin to light it on fire and they jump on the back of two waiting motorcycles and speed away

one you know very juicy detail is that they dropped one of the nine things they originally grabbed right and it was this incredibly precious crown, an imperial crown that was made for the last Empress of France who was married to Napoleon III.

I can tell you a little bit about it.

I have been learning a ton about these types of things.

You're like the world's expert in crown jewels now.

Well, not before this, but I have become one.

Hold on.

So this crown had eight golden eagles on it, 1,354 regular diamonds, and then 1,136 rose-cut diamonds, as well as 56 pretty sizable emeralds.

Okay, so they dropped this crown, but they did manage to get eight items.

Take me through what those were.

What were some of the biggest gets?

So,

you know, again, my crash course and learning about royal jewelry.

A lot of these items stem from either Napoleon III

or Napoleon himself.

So I'll take you through a couple.

There was this incredible emerald necklace and earring set that Napoleon gave to his second wife for their wedding in 1810.

Wow.

So that's just one.

Then there's this decorative bow that was worn by Empress Eugenie that has

more than 2,000 diamonds.

Oh my God, I saw a picture of that one.

It was like hard to look at.

It was so shiny, even just in the pictures, you know?

And there's like a pearl

kind of tiara that's also incredibly jaw-dropping.

But Natalie, one thing that points to that these thieves knew what they were doing is they didn't go for what was really the most expensive item in those cases.

They went for these items and there's a lots of discussion about, you know, maybe they thought these ones would be easier to break down and easier to

smell and break apart and sell in small pieces.

But, you know, among those cases is this incredible diamond that's known as the Regent

that was bought by the Duke of Orleans in like the early 1700s and was on the centerpiece of Louis XV's crown and then later was on Napoleon's sword, on Louis XVI's crown.

And it's like the size of a plum.

Wow.

But lots of jewelry experts say it would be just far too easy to identify and really hard to pawn off.

So we have a sense that this is more of a commodity grab than an attempt to get beautiful heritage pieces for some kind of kooky specialist collector who wants to hold things alone in a vault.

Right.

And so if you're going for commodities, you're looking for things that can be quickly disassembled and sold in small pieces.

Right.

These are thieves, the idea is who are looking to sell these things and make money, not mount them in their homes.

I can imagine it's a lot easier, right, to sell a single diamond than a distinctive necklace, for example.

Right.

Well, you can't sell that distinctive necklace because it's already been traced.

You know, like Interpol has put it on its list.

You would get caught very, very quickly.

But the idea of what experts are telling us is

that you would break it down into small pieces, maybe carve some of the larger stones into smaller stones so they're less identifiable.

You know, one expert says you string them into a different kind of necklace and sell it and pawn it off that way.

But certainly if you try and auction anything off, people will be on the alert looking for these things.

Can I ask, you know, everybody's been talking about these crown jewels as priceless, but obviously there is a price that you can attach to these things, right?

Do we know what was the worth of the things they stole?

Yeah, we just found out.

Up until now, there's been lots of speculation about how much they might have escaped with, but the head of the investigation just went on public radio literally minutes ago and said that the estimation they have is they're worth 88 million euros.

Whoa, which is a ton.

But she also said this interesting thing.

She said, look, you know, if you were to break them apart and melt them down, they'd be worth a lot less.

In some ways, almost beseeching to the thieves, like, please don't do this.

You know, you're not going to make as much money as how we read it in the office.

For what purpose, do you think?

Out of a desire to keep these precious items intact?

Yeah, I mean, even if they're worth 88 million euros, I think to the country of France and

the history of the country, they're worth a ton more.

Historically, symbolically, culturally, these things are priceless.

And so I think, in some ways, a lot of people have been talking about, you know, how much they'd be worth, but really, the loss is more emotional for the country than I think it is financial.

We'll be right back.

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So, I want to ask just about the reaction to some of this.

If the assumption is that these thieves are going to break these things down, maybe melt down the gold, sell it for parts, make as much money as possible,

how are French people responding to that possibility?

It is the history of this country that could be disappeared.

I think the predominant reaction has been shock and not that at the idea of these things being melted melted down per se, but just at the whole of what happened on Sunday morning.

The fact that these people could that easily get into the Louvre has caused

a lot of different kinds of emotional reactions.

There's been anger, people are stunned, some people are quite emotional about it.

The country's justice minister, he said that this is a certain sign of a failure.

We have failed.

It has been politicized.

There's been people, particularly on the right wing of the spectrum, blaming the government for not putting enough money into security.

There's been questions about what is the security of the Louvre.

And there's just been sort of people bemoaning the fact that this could happen in the center of the city, in

the most famous, most visited, most coveted, most protected museum in France and likely the world.

Right.

The reaction that you're describing sounds like it's one of a sense of

self-questioning that's happening because of

just how highly trafficked this area was.

How could this possibly occur?

Right.

Yeah.

There's that sense and also just the sense of tragedy.

This country watched the Notre Dame almost burned down and people lined the banks of the Seine with tears in their eyes, you know, many of them kneeling watching it.

I think French people living here, they are

very critical culturally.

They're people who like to strike.

They like to complain.

They're pretty critical,

but they love their history.

If you go into a French bookstore, like one out of every four books is a history book.

People know their history.

They visit the museums.

This is like a very important cultural place in French people's hearts.

And

I think people are appalled, shocked, and really grieving to a degree.

The thing that's really interesting is that, you know, France doesn't actually have a huge amount of royal jewels like this because of the revolution.

Explain that.

So, you know, the revolution, which ended in the beheading of the king and queen at the time, at that time, the Louvre was sacked.

A lot of things were stolen, including some of the jewels.

But then, you know, France has a really ambivalent relationship with its royal history.

It's a very proud republic.

And during one of those republics, they decided that they were going to take what was left of the royal jewels and auction them off.

And that's what they did in the late 1800s.

They auctioned off tons of these jewels.

And incredibly, the lion's share of them were bought by an American who was a founder of Tiffany's.

Oh, wow.

So, you know, the Louvre has been spending decades now trying to get them back.

In reading about this story, I learned that this is one of several thefts from French museums this year.

Can you tell me about some of those other episodes?

Like, what is going on?

Yeah, even this week, there was a small museum that was burgled twice in a row and we were looking at like should we do a story on this so it was funny that when this happened I was like oh my god but yeah last month someone went into the natural history museum which is only a couple subway stops away from the Louvre and using kind of similar tools cut into some cases and took out a bunch of molten raw gold and made off with them.

The same month, last month, a museum down in Limoges, southwest of Paris.

Thieves broke into a museum and stole some ancient china.

In November of last year, thieves using bats went in during the day also to a quite famous museum not far away from where I'm sitting.

So, you know, there's definitely a streak of these right now in France.

Is there an understanding that these robberies are connected in any way?

I mean, I'm just wondering, it does feel like it's out of another era that you have this string of museum robberies, you know, and I'm wondering if the thieves either are in any way working together even loosely or are targeting the museums for similar reasons.

There's no indication that people are working together.

Yes, this seems very old-fashioned, except for in one way.

This happened in broad daylight, you know, when people were in the museum.

Right.

And that's pretty new.

There's a modern art museum here that was famously burgled in the middle of the night and a man made off with five very famous tableaus.

And he did it in a classic way.

Like when you're thinking about the movie in your head, which here is known as Lupin, it's a very famous series.

If you haven't seen it,

I've seen it.

Yeah.

I feel like I'm watching it in real life right now.

But, you know, like it's, it's secret.

Yeah.

And often that's at night or in some way that people don't see it happening.

This is like very brazen in that we do know that, you know, there's CCTV cameras all around the Louvre.

There were people there even.

So it's a little bit different.

And the lead investigator is talking about this being like incredibly organized.

She doesn't think there was just four people.

She thinks that there's many more involved in this.

So we don't know anything about these four guys who broke into the Louvre though.

So, you know, it's hard to say what kind of connections, but clearly they're either copycatting or there's some ring that's sponsoring them.

Those are questions that we hope to be able to answer in the weeks to come.

What are the next steps in the investigation?

Like, what are the investigators telling you about the manhunt for these guys, about their investigative strategies?

Do we know how they're going about trying to catch them?

No, what we do know is that there were 60 police investigators on the case.

Now we know that's up to 100.

We know that they've been using dna methods fingerprinting they've been using surveillance cameras we know that the truck was left behind yeah they didn't manage to burn it they didn't manage to burn it we know that they had just recently basically stolen it and so investigators are speaking to the person they stole it from but that's the gist of what we've been told by investigators they are being incredibly tight-lipped about it at this point i think they will speak more once and if they find them but there's a real feeling that there's a race against time to try and get them before these precious jewels are broken apart and secreted away.

My final question for you, Catherine, is: do you think it's possible?

And it sounds like it might be, that these thieves actually pulled this off?

Like that they could get away with it?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's possible that we will never see those

again.

But I think France has a pretty good record of capturing some of these people.

In fact, the person who is said to have broken into the Natural History Museum was just charged today.

She was captured in Barcelona.

I think, given the amount of cameras and evidence that the cops have, that they will be able to trace who these men were.

If someone tries to sell, you know, that beautiful diamond bow that we were talking about earlier, then no doubt they'll get caught and it will be returned.

And that is the best case scenario.

But if they take each of those thousand-plus diamonds off and make something entirely different out of it, maybe a tiara, I don't know, an anklet, a bracelet for a very rich person, then who would notice at first?

You would need to be an expert to be able to trace those diamonds to that bow.

So it seems much less likely,

in this case, that these beautiful pieces of French heritage will make their way back.

Catherine, thanks so much.

You're welcome, Natalie.

It was such a pleasure to be talking to you.

We'll be right back.

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That's it for the daily.

I'm Natalie Kitroeth.

See you tomorrow.

We all have moments when we could have done better.

Like cutting your own hair.

Yikes.

Or forgetting sunscreen so now you look like a tomato.

Ouch.

Could have done better.

Same goes for where you invest.

Level up and invest smarter with Schwab.

Get market insights, education, and human help when you need it.

Learn more at schwab.com.