There is growing speculation that eight treasures stolen from the Louvre Museum in Paris, France, by a four-person theft ring using a ladder truck may already have been dismantled for sale. Intact gemstones are easy to spot and carry a high risk of detection, making them that much harder to move or dispose of.
On the 21st (local time), the Washington Post (WP) reported, "In art theft cases, reselling can be harder than stealing," and added, "The Louvre's jewels give thieves more options. Gemstones can be divided into small pieces, and metals can be melted down so each item can effectively be sold by the component."
Art thefts from famous museums are fairly common. The Louvre Museum also had Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece "Monalisa" stolen in 1911. However, paintings have value only when they exist in intact form, so thieves are less likely to damage them. In contrast, jewelry carries significant value as raw materials themselves and is easily damaged.
Moreover, this incident is already known worldwide, and since France has requested cooperation across Europe, it is impossible for the thieves to dispose of the jewels in their current, traceable state. Leila Amineddoleh, an adjunct professor specializing in art and cultural heritage at Fordham University School of Law in the United States, said, "No one can wear that tiara in public," adding, "The jewels are probably already being dismantled."
Erin Thompson, an art crime expert at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in the United States, also said, "If thieves care only about the material value of the jewels, they will change their form as quickly as possible to reduce the risk of detection," and added, "The thieves need to find a corrupt jeweler to re-cut the stones so their original forms are unrecognizable, and if they are a systematic organization, it is highly likely they lined up such a person in advance."
Because jewels can still be disposed of after dismantling, most jewelry stolen from famous museums in the past has not been recovered. In 2019, a toilet-shaped work titled "America" by Maurizio Cattelan, made of 98 kilograms of 18K gold, was stolen from Blenheim Palace, where former U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill was born. The perpetrator was caught, but the work was reportedly cut up and sold.
In the same year, only some of the more than 100 jewels stolen from the Dresden State Art Collections in Germany were recovered. One of the Dresden thieves had been convicted in 2017 for stealing a 100-kilogram gold coin from Berlin's Bode Museum, and the BBC reported that this coin, too, was believed to have been broken up or melted down.
Also, the championship rings of former New York Yankees star player Yogi Berra that disappeared from the Yogi Berra Museum in the United States were found to have been dismantled in the thief's garage and sold for $12,000 (about 17.16 million won).
Thefts targeting museum jewelry are expected to increase further. According to Agence France-Presse (AFP), on the 16th last month, a Chinese woman in her 20s was arrested after stealing and fleeing with four gold nuggets weighing a total of 6 kilograms from the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. The gold nuggets she stole were natural gold, known to be rarer and therefore more valuable than standard gold bullion.
Tim Carpenter, who led art crime investigations for 17 years at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the United States, said, "In recent years, criminal organizations have been changing strategies," adding, "They have started targeting gold, precious metals, and jewelry instead of artworks, because jewelry has an independent market value by weight."