Conor here: French media reported yesterday that two suspects from the poor Paris suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis have been arrested and that they may have been aided by a security guard at the Louvre. No word on the whereabouts of Crown Jewels, the loss of which some have breathlessly compared to the burning of Notre-Dame Cathedral in 2019.
As commenters discussed in Links shortly after news broke of the Louvre hesitation, it’s entirely possible—if not likely—that the thieves were working in the service of some very wealthy “collector.” If it were just jewels and gold they were after, there would seemingly be easier, lower profile targets. The following piece provides some more details on the stolen art trade.
By Leila Amineddoleh, Adjunct Professor of Law at New York University. Originally published at The Conversation.
The high-profile heist at the Louvre in Paris on Oct 19, 2025, played out like a scene from a Hollywood movie: a gang of thieves steal an assortment of dazzling royal jewels on display at one of the world’s most famous museums.
But with the authorities hot in pursuit, the robbers still have more work to do: How can they capitalize on their haul?
Most stolen works are never found. In the art crime courses I teach, I often point out that the recovery rate is below 10%. This is particularly disturbing when you consider that between 50,000 and 100,000 artworks are stolen each year globally – the actual number may be higher due to underreporting – with the majority stolen from Europe.
That said, it’s quite difficult to actually make money off stolen works of art. Yet the types of objects stolen from the Louvre – eight pieces of priceless jewelry – could give these thieves an upper hand.
A Narrow Market of Buyers
Pilfered paintings can’t be sold on the art market because thieves can’t convey what’s known as “good title,” the ownership rights that belong to a legal owner. Furthermore, no reputable auction house or dealer would knowingly sell stolen art, nor would responsible collectors purchase stolen property.
But that doesn’t mean stolen paintings don’t have value.
In 2002, thieves broke into Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum through the roof and departed with “View of the Sea at Scheveningen” and “Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen” in tow. In 2016, Italian police recovered the relatively unscathed artworks from a Mafia safehouse in Naples. It isn’t clear whether the Mafia actually purchased the works, but it’s common for criminal syndicates to hold onto valuable assets as collateral of some sort.
Van Gogh’s 1884-85 oil on canvas painting ‘Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen’ was one of two of the artist’s works stolen from Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum in 2002. Van Gogh Museum
Other times, stolen works do unwittingly end up in the hands of collectors.
In the 1960s in New York City, an employee of the Guggenheim Museum stole a Marc Chagall painting from storage. But the crime wasn’t even discovered until an inventory was taken years later. Unable to locate the work, the museum simply removed it from its records.
In the meantime, collectors Jules and Rachel Lubell bought the piece for US$17,000 from a gallery. When the couple requested that an auction house review the work for an estimate, a former Guggenheim employee at Sotheby’s recognized it as the missing painting.
Guggenheim demanded that the painting be returned, and a contentious court battle ensued. In the end, the parties settled the case, and the painting was returned to the museum after an undisclosed sum was paid to the collectors.
Some people do knowingly buy stolen art. After World War II, stolen works circulated on the market, with buyers fully aware of the widespread plunder that had just taken place across Europe.
Eventually, international laws were developed that gave the original owners the opportunity to recover looted property, even decades after the fact. In the U.S., for example, the law even allows descendants of the original owners to regain ownership of stolen works, provided they can offer enough evidence to prove their claims.
Jewels and Gold Easier to Monetize
The Louvre theft didn’t involve paintings, though. The thieves came away with bejeweled property: a sapphire diadem; a necklace and single earring from a matching set linked to 19th-century French queens Marie-Amélie and Hortense; an opulent matching set of earrings and a necklace that belonged to Empress Marie-Louise, Napoleon Bonaparte’s second wife; a diamond brooch; and Empress Eugénie’s diadem and her corsage-bow brooch.
These centuries-old, exquisitely crafted works have unique historic and cultural value. But even if each one were broken to bits and sold for parts, they would still be worth a lot of money. Thieves can peddle the precious gemstones and metals to unscrupulous dealers and jewelers, who could reshape and sell them. Even at a fraction of their value – the price received for looted art is always far lower than that received for legitimately sourced art – the gems are worth millions of dollars.
While difficult to sell stolen goods on the legitimate market, there is an underground market for looted artworks. The pieces may be sold in backrooms, in private meetings or even on the dark web, where participants cannot be identified. Studies have also revealed that stolen – and sometimes forged – art and antiquities often appear on mainstream e-commerce sites like Facebook and eBay. After making a sale, the vendor may delete his or her online store and disappear.
A Heist’s Sensational Allure
While films like “The Thomas Crown Affair” feature dramatic heists pulled off by impossibly attractive bandits, most art crimes are far more mundane.
Art theft is usually a crime of opportunity, and it tends to take place not in the heavily guarded halls of cultural institutions, but in storage units or while works are in transit.
Most large museums and cultural institutions do not display all the objects within their care. Instead, they sit in storage. Less than 10% of the Louvre’s collection is ever on display at one time – only about 35,000 of the museum’s 600,000 objects. The rest can remain unseen for years, even decades.
Works in storage can be unintentionally misplaced – like Andy Warhol’s rare silkscreen “Princess Beatrix,” which was likely accidentally discarded, along with 45 other works, during the renovation of a Dutch town hall – or simply pilfered by employees. According to the FBI, around 90% of museum heists are inside jobs.
In fact, days before the Louvre crime, a Picasso work valued at $650,000, “Still Life with Guitar,” went missing during its journey from Madrid to Granada. The painting was part of a shipment including other works by the Spanish master, but when the shipping packages were opened, the piece was missing. The incident received much less public attention.
To me, the biggest mistake the thieves made wasn’t abandoning the crown they dropped or the vest they discarded, essentially leaving clues for the authorities.
Rather, it was the brazen nature of the heist itself – one that captured the world’s attention, all but ensuring that French detectives, independent sleuths and international law enforcement will be on the lookout for new pieces of gold, gems and royal bling being offered up for sale in the years to come.
Time to call in Inspector Clouseau!
The whole subject of provenance in art was explored, indeed, sent up a bit, in the 1988 film “The Moderns.” It’s about the Paris art scene in the 1920s. Philip K Dick used the ambiguity of “real versus fake” in some of his plots. Who are the Replicants in “Blade Runner?”
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moderns
The real crime here is hiding in plain sight. It is the theft of resources from the French public by Napoleon and his heirs.
Stay safe.
A few years ago, a Brueghel (Younger) was stolen from a church in Liguria. But the carabinieri had heard a rumour of the planned heist, and replaced it by a fake….
I do love a good art heist or forgery story. Huxley’s Those Barren Leaves is a good one, and available for free at Project Gutenberg – https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/74437
If you’re in the mood for more of a doorstopper, The Recognitions by William Gaddis is a tremendous read touching on the same themes as Bladerunner. Bit of a slog, but the payoff is worth it.
And for a real life version, there is Mark Landis, who forged paintings for decades in the style of other famous artists. He didn’t do it for the money and donated all the paintings to museums so they never could charge him with any crime.
” “It obviously isn’t a crime to give a picture to a museum, and they treated me like royalty. One thing led to another, and I kept doing it for 30 years,” says Mark Landis, one of the most prolific art forgers in US history.
“Have you ever been treated like royalty? Let me tell you, it’s pretty good.” “
Thanks for the tips. You might want to check out Caveat Emptor by Ken Perenyi. It’s a scream. I still see his fakes at marine auctions. His James Buttersworths and Antonio Jacobsens pop up frequently.
And thank you! Somehow that one had escaped my notice – just added it to the reading list.
Another on my list that I haven’t gotten to yet is The Art Forger which is fiction, but is centered around the real life robbery at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.
If anyone has a chance to visit that museum, do take it. I believe you need to make a reservation ahead of time but admission isn’t particularly expensive and might be free. It is absolutely packed with all kinds of artwork that Gardner collected, and it was a collection intended to be enjoyed by the public – there are a lot worse things filthy rich people could do with their money. I believe it was stipulated in her will that nothing in the museum could be changed, so there is just a large blank space on the walls where the Rembrandts used to be. Given that the thieves were never caught, I like to think that the void is a reminder of what happened pour encourager les autres in a literal sense of the words, rather than the usual ironic one ;)
Mark Hoffman was a master forger of LDS documents, paper currency, etc., except everybody thought it was the real deal, with the ‘White Salamander Letter’ pitting Mormons against Jack Mormons in a bidding war, the former buying it to bury it (its never good to have a cold blooded serpent lead you to the Plates of Moroni) while the latter wanted it to expose the details.
Anyhow this all takes place in the early 1980’s in Salt Lake City, and ends with Hoffman planting bombs all over SLC, killing a few and maiming others including himself, in 1985.
The Mormon Murders: A True Story of Greed, Forgery, Deceit and Death is a hellova book, and an outsiders glimpse at the inner workings of the LDS church at the highest levels, 40 years ago.
Osimo has an empty frame where the Lotto used to be. But unlike the Gardner, they also let it go on tour (I saw the empty frame in a Lotto exhibition in Macerata).
Frederick Forsyth came out with a decent story called “The Art of the Matter”-
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19456812-the-art-of-the-matter
Orson Wells’s F For Fake is a treatment of art forgery and authenticity that no reader of this site should pass up. It should be a Sunday Movie here.
hans van meegeren was another art forger, whose improbable success is most engagingly told by edward dolnick in “the forgers spell”. even more satisfying: van meegerens forgeries were snapped up at high prices by hermann goerring who, if i remember rightly, was engaged in a bidding war with hitler for some of them.
Mark Landis’ adventures were the subject of the documentary Art and Craft in 2011. I believe it is now available on Apple TV.
https://artandcraftfilm.com
Stolen coins were hard to fence if they were especially rare, and photos existed of them.
To be a numismatist you needed to be really nearsighted in order to glimpse items rarely larger than a few inches in diameter, have a memory of coins you’ve seen, bought or sold, and that was in the pre-internet days-so it had to be all in your noggin. There were hundreds of sharp numismatists back in the day, and this was everybody’s modus operandi, information was King.
You’d never know if run of the mill stuff was stolen and sold, but the good stuff was pretty identifiable~
I was surprised that Gronkowski is a coin collector, and he got robbed some years back, and the coins stolen were 1879 and 1896 Morgan Silver Dollars, which are no big deal and worth around $50 each, but these were special Proof strikings with a mirror surface-and they surfaced a short time later…
https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2018/03/28/court-documents-detail-how-gronks-house-was-robbed-and-how-the-alleged-thieves-were-caught/
p.s.
It was amazing how often stolen coins were attempted to be sold locally, the thieves oblivious to the idea of it being a small community of coin dealers-who all knew each other.
Our pre-internet internet was a nationwide teletype system called CoinNet established in the early 1960’s, I was using it quite a bit still into the late 80’s and early 90’s. You’d get news of purloined coins, coast to coast.
It seemed obvious from the word go that this was a “contracted” theft – funded or sanctioned by some very rich collector who wanted something spiffy for this basement. Given the unimaginable difficulty of “fencing” even the dis-aggregated components of the items stolen from the Louvre, it would take a person of truly unimaginable stupidity to think they’d just get out with the goods and go hock them on the black market. I don’t even understand why virtually no-one opining on the matter didn’t jump straight to that conclusion.
yup. The “collector” presumably has a big interest in Napoleon and wanted some sort of personal link to N.B.
Presumably some figure in European organized crime or an oligarch from the shadier parts of Europe.
Musk is a puny person with delusions of grandeur, he seems like the type to idolize Napoleon.
How did he get those Russian rocket manuals?
A heist of this scale is going to have to rely on the 6 Ps – Proper Planning Prevents P*** Poor Performance. I would suggest that a key factor would be to have the stolen goods in your hands for a very minimum time. So you would arrange for a buyer in advance and straight after the theft – within an hour – you would have the handover with proper precautions taken of course. The money would be deposited into different banks in different places in different amounts over time, preferably under the cover of a legit business front organization set up for this purpose that can be wound down afterwards. It would be better if the thieves had no criminal records except for things like parking tickets. If the thieves are part of the underworld, it may not take long for other crims to work out who did that job. And a group of them may come a calling with a blowtorch and bolt-cutters to persuade them to hand over that money. It happens. There are all sorts of factors that comes with an operation this size – transport, communications, supplies, security, etc. – that it can be almost like a military operation. And hopefully you have not got a gang member that live-streams the whole thing for clicks and likes.
“…a gang member that live-streams the whole thing for clicks and likes.”
I am always amazed my the number of stupid people who commit crimes, record them and then post them online. They’d have saved everyone a lot of time and effort if they had just driven themselves to the police station and turned themselves in. I’m always left wondering what were they thinking was going to happen after they posted the evidence.
A guy robbed the bank I worked in once. He was out the door on the sidewalk making a getaway when the branch manager yelled ‘stop’ at him from inside the building. For some reason, he did, at which point the dye pack went off and he was immediately apprehended, looking like a giant smurf.
I work for an FI and I’m always amazed at how ill informed people are when they decided to rob a bank. In this day an age a teller keeps very little cash in their drawer if they even have one. Most of our tellers can’t access cash unless a transaction is processed and then a cash machine dispenses it. In the event of a robbery they can hit a button but only like $200 comes out. And if you did rob a teller with a cash drawer you’re going to get that die pack. Not only do you end up covered in blue die, but the money basically becomes useless.
AND the kicker is, when you get caught you’re now facing real prison time for what might have been $1,500 on the high end. You’d be better off robbing the corner store with the odds of getting the same amount of cash but if you get caught facing far far less in prison time.
I was in a Bank of America that got robbed takeover style, circa 1990.
3 fellows dressed in masks and long sleeved shirts and gloves ran into the bank with guns held high, one of them vaulting the teller counter (would’ve given him a 5.8 if it were an Olympic event) and I stood there petrified.
There was an off-duty policeman in line waiting to do banking, and he looked at the parking lot and a car was parked backwards in one of the spots, and the bank robbers got $800 and we’re ID’d as being in a maroon colored Buick and were caught a few miles later on the 60 freeway.
Not that I want to give anybody advice regarding a life of crime, post offices offer the same draconian judgment as a bank were you to rob them and get caught, and most have scant security and take in money all day long, in particular when selling money orders.
Even 25 years ago, if the bank was doing it right, the most any thief would get from a single teller drawer is $2,500.00. Even robbing the vault isn’t worth it unless you can get at the safe deposit boxes and have a pretty good idea that something really valuable is in there. Banks don’t keep all that much cash in their vaults on a regular basis.
An addendum to Bill Black’s book title “The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One” – working in one does help a lot too if you want to get at the real money.
PS – anybody heard from Bill Black lately? We used to see references to him all the time here, but it’s been a while.
That’s how the Hind Rajab foundation gets their evidence
“This is particularly disturbing when you consider that between 50,000 and 100,000 artworks are stolen each year globally – the actual number may be higher due to underreporting – with the majority stolen from Europe.”
A recent issue of Millennium magazine (part of the Fatto Quotidiano mini-Empire) had as its theme stolen art and those who steal it or deal in it. Italy has a special squad of carabinieri whose job is art investigation and recovery. They have been highly successful in recovering art – although even then clear title isn’t always easy to establish.
Ho, ho! “Furthermore, no reputable auction house or dealer would knowingly sell stolen art, nor would responsible collectors purchase stolen property.”
Sure.
There is a weird and interesting scandal going on here in the Undisclosed Region and the Agnelli family and hundreds of pieces of missing art. Of special interest is a Monet painting being contested. It turns out that there are three of the same paintings floating around (one original and two copies commissioned by the Agnelli family), including one sold through a reputable auction house to an unsuspecting collector (who now likely has ended up with a copy).
https://www.open.online/2025/10/13/famiglia-agnelli-dipinto-monet-scomparso-indagine/
Given the era that these baubles are from, that is, after the 1798 conquest – with looting – of the Venetian Republic by the French, I wonder where so many fine gems came from…
And for the other Italians here: There’s always the “distinguished” career of Vittorio Sgarbi to contemplate.
Sgarbi. After the theft from the museum in Verona, he announced that it was probably by Al Qaeda. Then they found the paintings somewhere in East Europe…..
Sgarbi: Here in the Undisclosed Region, Sgarbi knew somehow to go to a frazione of Pinerolo (or his minions knew) to make off with a painting that was then hidden, “restored,” and given the image of a torch. And then he had the gall to show the obviously stolen painting:
https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2023/12/15/sgarbi-e-il-quadro-che-sembra-rubato-le-parole-del-restauratore-nellanticipazione-dellinchiesta-congiunta-de-il-fatto-quotidiano-e-report/7384159/
If one thinks about it, the biggest theft is likely the European countries of their colonial possessions and their art.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/20/uk-museums-honest-stolen-goods-imperialism-theft-repatriation
As far as the recent Louvre theft, it would make sense that they are working for a rich collector. It’s less likely that the stole goods are going to be sold in any visible market, because of the high profile nature of the theft.
Some French commentators have noted that this is reflective of the state of France right now, which is in decline and perhaps in a pre-collapse state.
In September 1792, a group of thieves, led by Paul Miette, conducted a large scale heist around the time of the French Revolution. Its a fascinating analogy. History never repeats, but perhaps it rhymes.
Not every art thief wants to sell the loot. Some just like nice decorations for their apartment. The thief in that case took items ion broad daylight, snicked them under an overcoat,. and walked right out the front door of the museums past all the guards!
In this robbery, seven minutes seems like a long time for no cops to show up given the brazenness of the break in – there must be a police station very close to the Louvre, no? My tinfoil hat (and unlikely) theory on this one, since I find it hard to believe they got away so easily – this was all part of a movie scene, the museum directors were in on it and didn’t tell staff so the robbery would look authentic, and the “robbery” will appear in the next big caper flick coming to a theater near you in 2027. Jewels are already returned in basement storage and will go on display after the movie opens!
Our library had the book about thief in your link (the article is by the author). He was eventually caught but made it look easy until he was. He had an accomplice to distract the guards while snatching things.
Speaking of our library they seem to be branching out into the gallery craze. Not to be unkind but most of these displayed works nobody would want to steal.
That lost Picasso was found –
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/24/world/europe/spain-picasso-missing.html