Inside the heist that shocked the world

By Catherine Porter

PARIS — Holly Barker and her husband, Jake, were third in line at the Louvre the morning of Oct. 19.

The couple from Indianapolis had a plan — head straight for the Mona Lisa, before the crowds, then shoot toward Delacroix’s ‘Liberty Leading the People’ and a famous painting of Napoleon by Jacques-Louis David. Fourth stop was a place they had heard was a mini version of Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors: the Apollo Gallery, with its collection of royal jewels.

It was 9:32 when Holly Barker stepped inside the gilded hall and took a photo. As she stopped to admire a wedding gift that Napoleon had given his second wife — a necklace glittering with 32 emeralds and more than 1,100 diamonds — she heard the first of three loud bangs. It was 9:34, and masked thieves were about to barge through the window.

The room froze, suspended for a moment of confusion, according to her husband, who locked eyes with her. Then they heard a piercing sound from the balcony outside: The thieves were firing up a disc grinder that could cut through reinforced glass.

“The attendant said ‘Everyone get out,’” said Barker, a middle-school teacher who participated in enough active-shooter drills to convince her this was a terrorist attack.

She and her husband clasped hands and rushed from the gallery with the 20 or so other visitors. They turned back only once, as the same attendant pulled the doors closed and shouted “Run!”

It would be about 90 minutes before the Barkers learned they had been witness to the biggest heist at the world’s most famous museum since 1911, when the Mona Lisa was stolen.

Daring Entry, Frantic Exit

More than a week after the burglary, in which thieves made off with more than $100 million worth of jewels in broad daylight, the country is still reeling, stunned by its brazenness, shocked by the clear security failures, and less and less hopeful the jewellery will be recovered intact.

Much is still unknown by the public, including whether the thieves scouted the location as experts say museum robbers do, and whether they had any help from an accomplice within the museum.

But a picture of the crime has started to emerge, in testimony by French authorities, interviews with Louvre staff and local media reports. It suggests that the thieves had a careful plan, which included stealing the truck-mounted electric ladder they used to reach the second floor. They posed as workmen, complete with yellow vests and seemed to have an exact idea of which cases they wanted to break into. (One was the case Barker had been admiring.)

And they cut hand-sized holes with specialized tools that the Louvre’s own firefighting manual says are efficient for opening cases if there’s a blaze. Experts said the cases that display museums’ most valuable items are normally designed to withstand some 140 hammer blows or axe strikes, enough to exhaust a thief, and they called the use of disc grinders innovative.

Still, information leaking out also shows that in the end, the thieves were as frazzled as they had been careful. In their rush to escape, they left a trove of evidence that led the police directly to two of them so far.

On Saturday (25) night, the police arrested the two men they believe entered the gallery, and late Wednesday (29) night formally charged them with thefts committed by an organized gang and criminal association. They caught one man at Charles de Gaulle airport, the Paris prosecutor said, as he was attempting to leave with a one-way ticket to Algeria. The second was arrested 40 minutes later near his home in a Paris suburb. Their two accomplices remain at large.

“How do you do all that, and then get caught at the airport?” asked Brian Ledsinger of Houston, who was also in the Apollo Gallery when the thieves broke in. “They were amateurs who were also smart.”

A Critical Lapse; Minutes Lost

For the Louvre, the fatal flaw was the weaknesses in its security system, especially its perimeter cameras, the museum’s director, Laurence des Cars, admitted to the French Senate last week. The outdoor cameras are very old, she told a hearing, and so scarce that they don’t cover the entire facade.

On a recent visit to the museum, a New York Times reporter counted about 25 cameras on the museum’s perimeter, only five of which were on the outer walls rather than inner courtyards. The British Museum says it has several dozen surveying its much smaller perimeter. In response to questions, the Louvre said it would not comment on the external cameras.

But perhaps most important, the site the thieves targeted was covered by a single outdoor security camera — and it was aimed west of the balcony, so it did not capture the break-in, the museum director said.

Had the camera been positioned differently, it could have shown security guards in the museum’s control room the thieves ascending to the balcony on the electric ladder. Instead, the guards were blind for the four critical minutes it took the intruders to get in place before they began cutting the window, delaying calls to the police.

But on Wednesday, a police official acknowledged in testimony to the Senate that they, too, had a role in protecting the museum’s perimeter and had suffered their own lapse. Vincent Annereau, the head of the Paris police crime prevention service, said the police have seven street cameras around the Louvre, and one had captured the thieves’ arrival, but no one noticed or suspected a problem until they received alerts that a burglary was in progress. He blamed the oversight on the fact that construction work is commonplace in Paris and that the police do not have artificial intelligence to help monitor the cameras.

Based on the timing of the break-in provided by various officials, including the museum’s director, it seems likely that the police missed the intruders by less than a minute. It took officers just three minutes to arrive after they were notified by museum staff and a passing cyclist, the Paris police chief said. But they had been notified only after the thieves began to carve into the display cases — and the intruders rushed away with eight precious items less than three minutes later.

How the Heist Went Down

Four thieves arrived at 9:30 and parked their truck. Two ascended the ladder. The others remained with the getaway vehicles: two motor scooters.

After barging into the gallery, the first thief headed directly to the display case where Holly Barker had been moments before, according to a report in the French newspaper Le Parisien that summarized confidential museum surveillance footage of the crime that its reporter saw. The targeted case was not the closest to the window, but fifth in a line that stretched down the 200-foot gallery. Alongside Napoleon’s wedding gift, it contained a sapphire necklace and matching tiara and earrings that had belonged to France’s last queen, Marie-Amelie.

The second thief, who was wearing a motorcycle helmet, attacked the neighbouring case.

By the Louvre’s standards, the cases were relatively new, built in 2019 with reinforced glass that can withstand bullets. In the event of a fire, they were also designed to be broken by firefighters, a former senior member of Louvre’s firefighting unit told the Times.

Alarms began sounding in the guards’ control room when the window was breached, and new alerts were sent as the thieves attacked the two cases, according to the museum director’s testimony. From that room, the museum’s chief operations manager called the closest police station, just over half a mile away, the Louvre’s head of security, Dominique Buffin, told senators last week. The manager also pressed an emergency alert button, alerting the central police prefecture as well.

The footage seen by Le Parisien showed what happened next in the gallery, the newspaper reported. The thieves remained calm while working, even as two museum guards tried to scare them off. One approached with a metal pole, but one of the intruders waved him back.

Then the burglars’ composure seemed to crack; they got sloppy. One dropped some jewellery and stopped to stuff it back into his bag, but the burglars left a glove and jewelled brooch behind. The footage also showed the helmeted thief diving headfirst into the ladder’s basket, the newspaper reported.

The Paris prosecutor’s office declined to comment on Le Parisien’s report.

A video posted on the social platform X and corroborated by Storyful, a company that reviews social media content, appears to show the suspects escaping by riding down the mechanical ladder.

A museum attendant told the French television channel BFM that he and some colleagues had heard an alert and rushed outside from the museum’s lobby and down to the street toward where the thieves had parked. They arrived just as the motor scooters drove away.

The guard said they found holes in the truck’s gas tank and a blowtorch nearby — a sign that the thieves had likely hoped to burn the truck to destroy evidence.

Instead, they left behind a cache of evidence, including power tools, gloves, a motorcycle helmet and one of the yellow vests they wore, authorities say.

They also dropped the crown of Empress Eugénie.

“Even when well-prepared, thieves often make mistakes due to rushing,” said Olivier Halnais, the head of the national union of forensic police officers.

He described what was left behind as a treasure trove for investigators, saying a helmet, for instance, would be “very rich” with DNA from sweat and saliva droplets, and that samples could be matched with the millions in a national database.

Laure Beccuau, the Paris prosecutor, said Wednesday that investigators had processed 150 forensic samples, including DNA traces and fingerprints, at the crime scene and on objects left behind. One of the thief’s DNA samples was found on the broken window and other things, she said. The other’s was on a motor scooter found by police.

The more than 100 officers on the case have been racing to catch the perpetrators before they could break the jewellery into individual stones and melt the metals down for sale. So far, no recovery has been announced.

That has left a profound sense of loss, at the Louvre and beyond.

In a written response to questions, the museum’s decorative arts director, Olivier Gabet, said he had entered the Apollo Gallery the night of the heist to help the police. He was “overwhelmed by the icy silence of the place,” and struck by the sight of the stands where the precious objects had rested. They were mostly empty, though he said the thieves had missed a few items.

Ledsinger, the Houston resident, was evacuated before he got to see the snatched jewels. “That’s world history,” he said of the items. “That’s why we are there, to see and experience and to immerse ourselves in what it was like back then.”

Barker said she keeps watching the news back in Indianapolis, hoping the jewels — including the emerald and diamond necklace she admired — are recovered intact.

“I think I’m one of the last people to see that necklace and admire it,” she said.

-New York Times