A gang of jewel thieves pulled off one of the boldest museum robberies in recent memory. It’s something out of a heist movie, and one that isn’t even particularly clever: the thieves stole crown jewels from the Louvre in Paris. That reads like a plot masterminded by ChatGPT.
The Louvre, unquestionably the most famous art gallery on the face of the Earth, the place that houses the Mona Lisa, had literal Crown Jewels stolen from it in a heist that took just under four minutes.
The crew showed up with one of those basket lifts city workers drive out to fix a streetlamp, and used it to scale the Louvre’s Seine-facing wall. They sliced through a window with one of those disc cutters that you see thieves in heist movies using to cut holes in glass.
Once inside, the thieves made a beeline for the Apollon Gallery, where they smashed the glass display cases, grabbed the jewels, and headed back outside, where they hopped on motorcycles and made off with priceless Napoleonic Crown Diamonds.
Eight crown jewels are gone, including Empress Eugénie’s diamond corsage bow and pieces from two separate 19th-century imperial French queens. One shattered crown was recovered nearby. No one was hurt.
This happened after the museum had opened for the day, with visitors inside, and just a few halls away from the Mona Lisa.
The theft exposes glaring cracks in the museum’s security infrastructure. Not surprising, given that just this past June, I wrote about how the Louvre’s 30,000 daily visitors have left the staff overwhelmed and overworked. The famed Museum has been chronically understaffed on top of it.
Pair that with construction zones that can double as stealthy escape routes, and it makes sense why unions have been sounding alarms for months about overcrowding and an inability to fully guarantee the safety and security of its priceless artifacts. Something like this seems like it was bound to happen sooner or later.
Investigators are combing through CCTV footage and interviewing the overworked staff as they piece together what happened and how it went down.
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