It took no more than seven minutes for four masked men to snatch eight royal jewels from the Louvre’s Galerie d’Apollon on Sunday morning. But experts say the hard part—offloading the loot—has only just begun.
People may imagine there’s some mastermind, Bond villain-type waiting to receive these things, James Ratcliffe, director of recoveries and general counsel at the Art Loss Register, told ARTnews. The Art Loss Register, searches for, registers, and helps recover looted or stolen works of art says otherwise.
Related Articles
“History has taught us that there’s no mastermind villain out there,” Ratcliffe said, adding, “This is a case of risk and reward.”
The thieves, he said, were likely opportunists rather than specialists, emboldened by old security systems and a clear, high-value target. “It’s not necessarily difficult to get into historic institutions like the Louvre,” Ratcliffe said, noting that museums built for grandeur rather than defense are often difficult to secure.
According to French officials, the gang used a monte-meubles—a truck-mounted electric ladder common in Paris—to reach a second-floor window. After cutting through glass with grinders, they smashed two display cases and fled toward the Seine on electric scooters, leaving behind a damaged crown made for Empress Eugénie in 1855.
Ratcliffe believes that the fate of the jewels depends less on criminal ingenuity than on chemistry. “When something is made of gold and diamonds, there’s a temptation to melt it down,” he said. “And the price of gold right now makes that a quick, low-risk payoff.”
The price of gold has surged to historic highs this year, breaking past $4,000 per troy ounce and trading at around US $4,300 in mid-October 2025, marking a gain of over 50-60% year-to-date. Analysts attribute the rise to a mix of safe-haven demand amid geopolitical and economic uncertainty, growing expectations of Federal Reserve rate cuts, and heavy flows into gold-backed ETFs and central-bank purchases.
Erin Thompson, an art crime scholar at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, agreed. “You can walk into any jewelry district in the U.S. and sell gold by the pound,” she said. “No one’s asking questions.”
Thompson pointed to a 2024 article in The Atlantic about a man who stole sports trophies and championship rings from U.S. museums, selling them for scrap. “It’s not glamorous,” she said, “but that’s what usually happens.”
Thompson contrasted the Louvre’s vulnerabilities with institutions like the Getty, which she said “was designed after art thefts in the 1980s with fortress-level security in mind.” By comparison, she said, the Louvre’s age and layout make it beautiful but porous.
Thompson also noted that the heist resembled the 1994 theft of Edvard Munch’s The Scream in the Netherlands—another case where criminals “used brute force and broad daylight to grab headlines.”
Then, of course, there are the stones. Reports from France say that the thieves made off with eight pieces of treasure, including sapphire and emerald-inlaid necklaces, a tiara, and a diamond-encrusted reliquary brooch.
Many of the experts agreed that selling the jewels themselves will pose an even greater challenge than stealing them. Today, such gems are documented, photographed, and traceable through microscopic imperfections. These stones would likely need to be recut or reset before entering any market, a process that destroys much of their historical, effectively lowering their value.
Putting them down for resale would reduce their worth to a fraction of what they represented as royal heirlooms. Even if the thieves found a willing intermediary, the risk of detection is high; any large diamond or emerald up for sale in the next few months would more than likely trigger alarm bells and nervous sweating.
Jim Lynne, founder of ArtRisk Group and a retired FBI special agent who served three decades on the Bureau’s Major Theft Squad, said the Louvre robbery was notable for its use of everyday equipment. “The monte-meubles truck is interesting,” he said. “You see those on Paris streets every day moving furniture through upper-floor windows. Nobody looks twice.”
Lynne added that investigators will likely focus on who rented or accessed the equipment in the days before the break-in adding that the ladder vehicle may be the thieves undoing, especially since it appears the crooks tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to burn the vehicle after the heist.
Former Homeland Security art theft investigator Anthony Amore said the French government faces a delicate decision about whether to offer a public reward for information. “I would urge them to offer a reward for information that leads to the stolen goods, but not a reward to the thieves themselves. While that kind of reward may bring up images of a bag of cash and a handoff at the train station, Amore says the reality is a lot more clinical, if less exciting.
“It’s often done through a lawyer,” he said, “Someone who is representing the criminals and who is bound by attorney-client privilege.”
Robert Wittman, who runs a security and recovery consulting firm and helped found the FBI’s rapid deployment Art Crime Team said the real work starts after the heist, but added that the crooks may not be up for the job.
“When I first heard about the theft, I thought, ‘Wow, this is really a professional job. These guys are good,’” he said. “But the more we’ve learned, the less I think that. They left a lot of forensic evidence behind, and that’s one of the cardinal rules of a criminal — not to leave evidence.” And leave things being they did, including a crown covered in more that 2,400 diamonds and 56 emeralds and, of course, the truck mounted ladder they used to get into the building.
Wittman added that the reliance on brute force and carelessness suggested they were “better at theft than business,” emphasizing that “the real art in art theft is selling, not stealing.”
Sunday’s theft follows a turbulent year for the Louvre. In June, staff staged a walkout over overcrowding and “untenable” working conditions, citing safety risks for both visitors and art.
The robbery also echoes a string of thefts across France, including the September burglary at the Natural History Museum, where thieves used a blowtorch to steal $700,000 worth of gold nuggets, and a raid on a porcelain museum in Limoges that netted $7 million in damages.
“Organized crime today is targeting art objects,” France’s culture minister Rachida Dati said Monday after the heist. “Museums have become targets.”
Whether Sunday’s heist will go down as a spectacular failure or a lasting mystery remains to be seen. For now, the world’s most famous museum, which is closed until Wednesday, has come to represent not the best France has to offer but how even a national tragedy can be politicized, and has been reminded that even its most precious things can vanish in broad daylight.
