Heist at the Louvre Episode 2: Hundred-Million-Dollar Questions

Hi, this is James Longman, back with another episode of the latest True Crime series from ABC Audio and 2020, Heist at the Louvre. Remember, you can listen to the entire series, ad-free, and access so much more from 2020 on Apple podcasts when you subscribe to 2020 True Crime Plus. Just click the link in the description to start your free trial today, terms apply. And now, here's the episode. Last October's brazen daytime Heist at the Louvre was shocking. Now, nearly a year out, there are still critical questions to be answered. Where did they go? And second, where did they come from? In this series, I'll take you inside the events of that day, like you've never heard them before, through the eyes of the people who lived them. On the pavements, I saw something shiny. You did see the crown. Yes, exactly. Heist at the Louvre, a new series from ABC Audio, available now, ad-free on Amazon Music. There's something so spooky about being in a place that's normally crowded with people and finding it almost empty. You feel like a big kid doing something you're not meant to. I've heard about the Heist hours after it happened on the morning of October 19th, 2025, and I was soon on the train to Paris. Now, you know a story's big when you overhear conversations about it all around you. I remember really clearly an elderly couple near me on the train discussing whether they thought it was an inside job. When I arrived in Paris, the Louvre was still closed to tourists, but I was allowed inside. It is extraordinary to be inside the Louvre that is completely deserted. No visitors, and that is the Apollo Gallery. A makeshift barrier had been put over the gallery doorway to prevent anyone from going in. And I can see right through into the main area. It's a huge, vaulted gallery, incredible, gilted ceilings that came in through the window at the far end. At the time, we knew the basic outline of the crime according to police. The window they entered through, the jewels they stole, they get away on motorbike. But exact details of what happened inside that room, well, they wouldn't be seen by the public until months after the heist. That's when security footage surfaced, video from inside the room that morning in October. It had no sound and only a couple of angles, but it showed two people standing next to two display cases, each of them using an angle grinder and cutting into the glass. Both cut most of the way in and then slammed their elbows and shoulders into the glass. Until eventually, it gave way. They were in. They grabbed the jewellery and stuffed it into a small pouch. The crime took minutes. The repercussions would last a lot longer. Almost immediately after the thieves left, the investigation began. In the gallery and the street outside, investigators looked for clues to track down the jewels and the people who took them. We're going to talk about what they found at that crime scene. But the scrutiny didn't end there. Attention focused on the museum itself. New shocking revelations about the security at the Louvre or lack thereof, according to ABC News. In this episode, what that scrutiny revealed, historical problems, visible vulnerabilities and mistakes at the most famous museum in the world. From ABC Audio, this is Heist at the Louvre. Episode two. Hundred million dollar questions. Within days of the robbery, some in the French media were calling it "cast du siècle, heist of the century." Tim Carpenter disagrees. In terms of crime, there was anything super sexy or unusual about this crime. It was just a brute force attack. Tim is the former head of the FBI's art crime unit. Since 2004, according to the FBI's own statistics, this unit has chased down over 20,000 pieces worth over a billion dollars. They found a Norman Rockwell painting stolen from a private home in New Jersey 50 years ago, thanks to an anonymous tip. They tracked down a Monet, looted by the Nazis during World War 2, and that ended up in an auction in Texas in 2024. Now, a lot of people don't know that the FBI has an art crime unit. In fact, when he first joined the agency, Tim didn't even know. So imagine my surprise when I learn about this team and, of course, I'm jumping up and down, pushing everybody out of the way. I want to be on that team and part of that program. The reason Tim was so excited about this unit, long before he was an FBI agent, he was a budding teenage artist. But instead of going to art school, he joined the military, and most of his career, he was a bomb technician. People really had a hard time reconciling. Well, you got this guy that's doing all this weapons of mass destruction, explosives, and ID stuff, and then he's the art nerd over here on the side. Tim worked in the art crime unit for two decades, until he went into the private sector a few years ago. Now he advises museums on how to improve their security systems. Tim says this wasn't the heist of the century. It was a smashing grab. You give them credit for doing their homework and having a great plan, but their execution was amateurish, right? So they made some mistakes. And frankly, they knew it. I think as they were leaving, you know, they're adrenaline's high, they're in a panic. They're trying to get out through loop. I think as they got down the road, they already knew that they had screwed up. We don't know what doubt filled the minds of our thieves as they sped away into the Parisian streets. Or if they had any doubts at all, what we do know is that they left a lot of clues behind them. Now the ongoing investigation in Paris is top secret. All the details of how French police approached the case, they might never be made public. But Tim says he thinks he knows the first steps they would have taken. He says immediately there were signs that looked promising for investigators. The thieves had left items behind. Police said there was a walkie-talkie, a blanket, a glove, a helmet and a couple of angle grinders. From those items and the crime scene, investigators said they were able to get 150 samples of DNA and fingerprints. Now they have likely been run through a database similar to the CODIS system in the US, where DNA from convicted criminals is stored. From that, investigators would be able to see if the thieves were previously known to French police. But investigators aren't just looking at physical evidence. The law of investigation looked closely at cell tower data in those early days too. If he was running this investigation, Tim said he'd be contacting every cell phone tower operator in range of the law of that day and asking for their data. "Say we want to know every device that connected to that tower in the last 72 hours at that pulls, you might imagine, that's probably a pretty big list and then you just got to do investigative work." Finding the data that came from the thief's phones among the noise of tens of thousands of loo visitors is a bit like finding a needle in a haystack. But Tim says it's possible if you know how to look. It's about establishing patterns, which of these devices have been in the Louvre multiple times in the last month. Okay, which of those are staff. So if I know that the subjects, in this case, they came in on a scooter and I'm doing camera coverage and all of these things, right? And I can maybe establish a line of direction because it's an onion. You just start peeling the layers back. Finding out where the thieves came from might reveal their identities and finding out where they went might reveal where the jewels had gone. And in cases like this, that's what Tim says he really cares about. I would always tell people like an art theft case, our objective is probably not primarily not the arrest of the subject. We want to do that. We want to hold people accountable and charge the criminals, but our primary concern in the theft case is the safer cover of the artwork. And so in that way, it's a lot like a kidnapping investigation. Investigators would have to follow the clues to find the kidnappers. Then they'd have to get them to talk to reveal where the jewels had gone after they left the Louvre. And they would have to hope that they weren't too late. This has been a lot of work for French investigators and they've been under a lot of pressure to get to the jewels before they're lost forever. Their investigation, as we'll find out later, has got results. That DNA evidence led investigators to some names, some possible answers to the who of the crime and we'll get to that later. But ultimately, there have been some questions that they haven't been able to answer. Questions about how this happened in the first place. As the police investigation moved outwards from the Louvre, criticism turned inwards. Something had led the thieves to believe that they could successfully steal from the most famous museum in the world. And they were right. Investigators say that the jewels that were stolen from the Louvre in October 2025 had an estimated worth of a hundred million dollars. But curiously, they weren't the most precious or most culturally valuable ones in the Apollo gallery. - There's a diamond that's called the Regency Diamond that's 140 carrots, that was not stolen. - This is Elaine Chalino, she's the ex-Paris bureau chief of the New York Times and author of Adventures in the Louvre. - There's another diamond that's called the Sassy, that's 55 carrots, that was not stolen. So what they did is they stole the post-French revolutionary bling bling showy jewels. - Elaine says the jewels that were stolen were less historic and less famous than some of the others in the room, but still impressive. - One of the jewels that you had was a diamond and emerald necklace and earrings that Napoleon gave to his second wife, Marie Louise. So those probably are the most historically important jewels because they had been purchased by Napoleon Bonaparte. - Theaves also took a pearl and diamond tiara that was once owned by Empress Eugenie. - She was the wife of Napoleon III and Eugenie was kind of like, she was called like the influencer of her day. And then these other weird kind of jewels that nobody ever paid any attention to, like the diamond and sapphire necklace and earrings worn by Queen Hortense and Queen Mackie Amelie, I have to tell you, I never even heard of Queen Hortense or Queen Mary Amelie before the jewels were stolen, but they had nice jewelry. - These pieces were encrusted with thousands of diamonds, sapphires and emeralds, set in gold and silver chains and crowns and they were stuffed into the thieves bags as if they were worth nothing. The thieves formula was simple but effective. They smashed, grabbed and they got away. So how could this have happened? Well, there's three previous heists all involving the Louvre that might help explain. To get to these heists, we're gonna have to dive into some deep Louvre history. - The Louvre was built in 1190 by Philly Bugust. He was a king and he was one of the great military strategists of his time and he wanted to build a fortress to protect the sand against invaders. - Elaine told me that all the kings of France that came after added little bits to the building, an extension here, a turret there. Louis XIV built the Apollo gallery, his tribute to the Roman sun god in the 1600s, which was ironic, says Elaine, because the building was less than sunny. - Well, first of all, it was always wet 'cause it's right near the sand, just like your basement is always wet. It was always damp, wet, cold, dark. So that's why Louis XIV decides to leave Paris. He hated Paris. He hated Parisians, Parisians hated him. He goes to Versailles, he builds Versailles and he leaves the Louvre unfinished. So it's an unfinished mess of a building. - Some artists moved into the Louvre and used the halls as workshops, but it didn't really resemble the Louvre of today until after the French Revolution. And that brings us to Heist number one in Louvre history. We'll call it The Drunken Mistake. - I have to confess, as an Englishman, when I heard the crown jewels of France had been stolen, I thought, what crown jewels? They had a revolution. Who's crown jewels? - You're absolutely right when you say what crown jewels are France because France has very few crown jewels. It had a lot of crown jewels once upon a time, but during the French Revolution, in 1792, there was a theft of a lot of the crown jewels. - Back then, the jewels were stored near the Louvre in a royal storehouse, and one night during a period of violent unrest, some thieves broke in. - For several nights, they drink the carouse and they steal a lot of the crown jewels. Most of the crown jewels, those crown jewels came back. But there was one crown jewel that didn't come back. It was called the French Blue. It was a very famous, huge diamond that had belonged to Louis XIV. It ends up being recut from like 70 carats down to 45 carats. It eventually gets sold to a jeweler who donates it to the Smithsonian. - If anyone's planning a trip to DC, you can still see this French crown jewel in the Natural History Museum. Except now, it's called the Hope Diamond. - I think that's an incredible story. You've got a French crown jewel that is sitting in the preeminent American Museum. - The Hope Diamond isn't the only French crown jewel that ended up in the US. After the revolution, the new Republic of France wanted to sell a lot of the old royal jewelry. No kings, no need for crown jewels. They held an auction in 1887, and many of the remaining jewels were sold over a third of them, in fact, to Charles Tiffany, who, in turn, marketed them to some very rich Americans. - There's great pictures of some of these Americans like wearing crowns and, you know, at their parties and things, you know, wearing the crown of Princess Blablar, Queen Blablar, whatever. - So we're talking kind of great gaspies socialites with diamonds. - I mean, there was one, but she put like a crown jewel necklace on her dog. And Charles Tiffany was smart. He like wrapped all of the crown jewels in these beautiful leather boxes with gold writing, saying the crown jewels of France. - A few years ago, Elaine found out that Tiffany's still had some of these crown jewels hidden away in a warehouse in New Jersey. - And I sweet-talked Tiffany's into taking the crown jewels out of the storage facility and bringing them to their big headquarters on Fifth Avenue. I actually touched the crown jewels of France that belonged to Tiffany's right now. - Goodness me. - From the head of a French emperors to a storage facility in New Jersey. - Interesting. - That's brilliant. Elaine says that the Louvre has been trying to find these far-flung jewels ever since they were sold off with some success. Over the last 40 years, they've managed to track a few of them down and buy them back. But the journey of these jewels seemingly wasn't over just yet. Elaine says that some of them were in the display cases raided in October 2025. The same year that France held their crown jewel auction, 1887, the Louvre began to display the nation's remaining collection in the Apollo Gallery. They showed the older, more valuable pieces and the newer post-revolutionary ones. In some ways, it was symbolic. The jewels belonged to the people of France, not just for the private enjoyment of a monarch or emperor. By the early 20th century, the Louvre had fully transformed into a museum for the people. Elaine says everyone was invited in. - Anybody could come into the Louvre no matter what your social standing was, as long as you weren't drunk and didn't bring your dog. - The Louvre was popular, but nowhere near the tourist magnet it is today. And back then, the Mona Lisa was just one painting hanging on the wall with many others, which brings us to heist number two. The Italian Job. In the summer of 1911, an ex-Louvre employee, an Italian man called Vincenzo Perugia, entered through the front door of the museum. He hid in a closet until the halls were quiet. Then he went to the gallery where the Mona Lisa was hung. With no one around, he grabbed the Mona Lisa off the wall. He took her home and concealed her in the false bottom of a trunk. - He kept her hidden for a couple of years, and then when he tried to sell her, he was caught and the Mona Lisa came back to the Louvre. - If this theft hadn't happened, Elaine says, the Mona Lisa may never have reached the fridge magnet tote bag pop art status she has now. - The story of the Mona Lisa became a global story. In fact, if you can believe it, the lead of the New York Times, the day after the theft was about the theft of the Mona Lisa. - When he was later questioned about this theft, Perugia said he'd fend in love with her. (funky music) He wasn't the only one. (funky music) While the Mona Lisa was missing, visitors came from all over the world to stare at the empty patch of wall where she used to hang. Ever since she returned, the Louvre star and the Mona Lisa's have only gotten brighter, decade by decade. Even back in the 1980s, the museum was struggling to cope with the growing number of tourists flooding through the doors. I spoke to someone who worked in the Louvre back then and he said that they did a huge renovation project and that was meant to make it fit for the future. According to the museum, this grand design was meant to manage four million visitors a year, but little did they know that current figures would be more than double that number. The Louvre needs further renovation, but Elaine says to transform a castle into a museum is one thing. To bring such a huge historic building into the 21st century, that is a whole new challenge. - The Louvre was and is a mess. Everything's leaking. You go to just about any room at the Louvre and there's leaks because it's old plumbing. You're dealing with different centuries and different eras and different plumbing. And it will cost millions and millions of dollars To put in the proper kind of security, you have to go through five different offices in the French system to be able to put an electrical wire into or a hole into a medieval wall. Now no one denies that the Louvre has a hard task ahead of it. It's not just a building, it represents ideals, politics, national pride. Not to mention the stakes of getting it wrong, a huge, deciding what parts to change and how all of that takes real time. But soon what Louvre management did or didn't do to protect the building and its treasures wouldn't just be a history story, it would become, as the French president himself would call it, a national embarrassment. One of the people I met in Paris to talk about the Louvre heist was Alain Bauer. I'm a professor of criminology, I'm kind of a very special kind of professor because I'm the one and only in France. Alain first learned of the robbery when an alert came through on his phone the morning of October 19th. And what did you feel in that moment? No surprise, really, no. The reason the heist doesn't surprise him, he says, is because he could see it coming. He says the Louvre has been dealing with security problems for years. Other people felt that way too. As the French government dealt with a shock that something like this could even happen at a national institution, they launched an inquiry into the museum security. They found flaws that had been exploited by the heisters. At a Senate hearing the inquiry committee pointed to the fact that while there were security cameras watching the exterior of the Apollo gallery, they weren't actually equipped with a high-tech system that you need to detect and capture suspicious activity. And they weren't enough screens for security staff to monitor the live feed. In fact, according to a national audit report in 2024, only 39% of all the Louvre galleries had any monitoring by security cameras at all. There was like less camera around the Louvre than in the middle of a village on the northern France. And there was worse. A Louvre employee told ABC News just after the heist that one of the security passwords at the museum was just one word, Louvre. We did ask the Louvre about this and they said that while the Louvre was used as a security password, they say they only used it once and that it was part of a test. But there was another security report that was mentioned by the state inquiry and this is kind of mind-blowing. The security report identified the exact window that these thieves had entered through as a possible target. And they did that back in 2019. Now, that window used to have bars on it, but in the early 2000s, they were removed. And the Louvre says that's because that window was a key evacuation route if there was a fire. At a state inquiry hearing, the Senate committee chief said that in a heist where the police arrived seconds after the thieves left, those bars could have made all the difference. Alas says, time and time again, Louvre management has prioritized the museum's accessibility over its ability to protect itself. Security is a nightmare for them. It's something they don't like. It's like we would say it's a hot potato. What can I do with it? Can I give it to somebody else as soon as possible and forget about it? Because I want my museum to be the most magnificent, the most visible, the most open to everybody. The French Senate inquiry said that too. It just took the Louvre so long to upgrade their security that they have blind spots, while they just had too many of them. And they were way too visible. In December of 2025, the Louvre director at the time, Laurent Steakard, addressed the Senate committee with her response. She said she was unaware of the earlier security audit that highlighted the vulnerability of the gallery window and she promised that a metal grill would be reinstalled before the end of the year. And she said that during her tenure as Louvre director, she'd been proactive in increasing the number of security cameras. She also told the committee that a master plan to improve museum security had been in the works for years, and she said that a robust framework was now in place. At the end of the hearing, the president of the inquiry committee asked Steakard, "Is there anything you regret, anything that could have been done at the museum before the heist that wasn't done?" She said she wished the museum upgrades had happened faster. The Senate inquiry focused on failings at an executive level. But the former head of the FBI Art Crime Unit, Tim Carpenter, says that as an investigator, you have to look at possible weak points even lower down the chain, and he wonders if the Louvre heisters might have had "inside help." If it's my case, I'm going to spend considerable time looking at the staff. FBI statistics have been clear for decades on this, right? The vast majority, somewhere in the neighborhood of about 80% of all museums and thefts are internal, or have some internal component. We're all guilty of it. Every organization, every institution, every person is guilty of misplaced trust. Even the FBI has hired the occasional spy, right? Every organization can fall victim to misplaced trust. Museums do it frequently. Elaine Chilino also had a concern that internal information might have helped the thieves. When she heard the details of how they had accessed the display cases, something rang a bell. She knew someone who worked for the Sepper Pompier, firefighters who have a post inside the Louvre. I called up somebody I knew from the firefighters and said, "Capitan, can we have lunch and just talk about this?" And he said, "Sure," blah, blah, blah. So the two of us are having lunch. And I said, "How in the world did the thieves get into these cases?" And he said, "Well, it was easy." And I said, "Well, what do you mean?" And he said, "Well, the cases have to be strong enough to withstand a hatchet or something thrown at it last stone or a hammer, but they have to be easy enough for us to get into them to protect an object against fire, fraud, or terrorism." Elaine asked him what tool the firefighters are supposed to use to get into the cases. "A Discours," he said, "an angle grinder." And I said, "Really?" As the exact same tool that was used by the thieves, not only that, but the firefighters manual contains detailed instructions on exactly how to cut into the display cases quickly. And I said, "Is your manual unclassified?" He said, "Yes." I said, "Can I have a copy of your manual?" He said, "Sure." So he sends me a copy of the manual, and there are all the tools listed, and there's the Discours, and it says, "If it casts, which means efficient, Faisila are truly easy to use, battery-operated, and it's all right there." Now, we have to make clear, there has been no report of firefighters helping the thieves carry out their crime, and we haven't seen any evidence that the thieves had access to this manual, and the prosecutor who's in charge of the case has publicly stated, "They saw no evidence that it was an inside job. In fact, as a French government minister put it a few days after the incident, it wouldn't have been difficult for someone to work out for themselves, and an angle grinder would make sure work of a glass case." But the point is, while initially you might be surprised that thieves were able to break into such a prestigious building, actually with just a little knowledge of the museum inner workings, it wouldn't have been as difficult as you might think. Which is perhaps why the public outcry that followed the heist felt to me, at least, like it wasn't all about the jewels. The act of theft, I guess, has now, has here, has struck a chord with French people. I mean, it's less maybe about what was taken, and more the fact that it was done to the Louvre. Oh, 100%. I mean, the cultural impact of the theft is extraordinary. I mean, President Macron called it an attack on our heritage and an attack on our history. And if you put it into context, there have been two national crises involving cultural institutions of France in recent years. One was the fire of Notre Dame in 2019, and the second one was the theft of the Crown Jewels last October. With Notre Dame, you had not only a national sense of tragedy and mourning, but it was universal. I mean, around the world, people wept. What was different is that no one was to blame for the fire in Notre Dame. You don't have footage of Arson, it's going into Notre Dame and setting the edifice on fire. With the Louvre, you do have footage. You know how it happened. You know that there was a problem with security. It was all revealed. There were official reports that said there were lapses and security for years, and that's why it became a national humiliation. Now, we asked the Louvre to comment on some of the things we found out in the course of our reporting, and they have addressed a few points. First of all, they say that bars have now been put back on the Apollo Gallery window. They were put back on a few months after the heist, and they wanted to point out that the glass in the Crown Jewel's display cases had actually been replaced before the heist, with even thicker glass than had been recommended by one of the security reports. And they say they take public safety seriously. Still, the Senate Committee concluded that the failings at the Louvre were an accumulation of deficiencies. A month later, after a string of additional controversies, the Louvre director, Lars Dekar, resigned. So I guess what I've come to understand is that in some ways, this was just a smash and grab, but it did require a specific set of circumstances to all come together in one moment. There was a museum overflowing with visitors in desperate need of an upgrade. A gallery with security blind spots have been ignored or unknown by management. And the jewels known for their incredible beauty dripping with diamonds, but all stored in a room without bars on the windows. And of course, on top of all that, Alan Bauer says there was an extra special ingredient. So they had luck, by the way, they had luck, lucky is a part of the game. The thieves didn't have to be slick professionals to carry out this heist. They just needed the right conditions and they seemed to have them. What happens next? Because a thief who got lucky now has a hundred million dollars worth of jewelry to get rid of. I said there were three old Louvre heists that help us understand this case. This last one helps to explain the situation our thieves might have found themselves in as they sped away on those motorbikes. We'll call heist number three, hot property. I have brought with me an article that I wrote about what happened in December 1976. This heist took place in the freezing early hours of the morning. Three mass burglars break into the Louvre dawn. They climb up a cleaning crew scaffolding, so it's kind of similar to what happened with the theft last October. They smash the unbarred windows, they clubbed two guards. They break a glass showcase and they grab a diamond-studded sword that had belonged to Charles X. The sword was taken from the same room as our 2025 heist, the Apollo Gallery, and just like our jewels, after it left the building, it disappeared. And third, it took us a sword and left. Bye-bye. Somebody maybe one day will be nice enough to give it back or something will happen and police or firemen discover fake war and we'll find it back. The sword was three feet long and covered with diamonds, not exactly something you could take to your local pawn shop. The thieves back then would likely have had the same problem the thieves do today, finding a place to put it. This brings us to the question at the heart of this entire investigation. Where are the jewels? That sword has never been recovered and no one has ever been convicted of stealing it. So that's where that story and ours might differ a little bit because the DNA from the crime scene had led investigators to a break in the case. Within weeks of the heist, I heard the news. Police had made arrests of not one suspected thief, but four. Police now have, they believe, the fourth of the four suspected robbers are in custody. The rest made a went back to Paris to find out who the suspected thieves were and what they had to say. And as it turns out, they have very different stories, even from each other about the day of the heist. My client contests to have been at the Louvre these days. Oh, he says he wasn't even there. No, not at the Louvre. And in the next episode, we start digging for answers. Heist at the Louvre is a production of ABC audio, hosted by me, James Longman, produced by Madeline Wood, Emily Schutz, and Aisha Elhamar Castano. Edited by Nora Richie, our supervising producer is Susie Liu, mixing by Evan Viola. All thanks to Katie Dendas, John Capodineus, Indra Delay Sahan, Iman Varocua, Michelle Margulis, and Susanda Canto. Josh Cohan is our director of podcast programming, Aiman McNiff is our executive producer.