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One year after thieves cut into the Louvre Museum in Paris, police have four main suspects in jail awaiting trial, but no clear lead on the stolen crown jewels.
The thieves, disguised as workmen, used industrial disc-cutters to enter the museum on Oct. 19 last year. They left with eight items worth an estimated $100 million, including a brooch and a crown that belonged to Eugenie, the wife of Napoleon III. President Emmanuel Macron described the robbery as an attack on France’s history.
CCTV footage shows the 19th-century gems last seen in an underground lock-up in Aubervilliers, a suburb in northern Paris where all the suspects live. A 100-strong investigation team has searched the suspects’ homes and their families’ homes, including cellars, garages and attics, without result. Police arrested all four men within 10 days of the heist.
Law enforcement and private art theft experts who spoke to AFP believe the best chance of recovery is that the thieves acted alone and stored the loot in the Paris region. “There was a short period of time where they may have hidden them in a wall or buried them,” said Christopher Marinello of Art Recovery International, a private agency.
Dutch art detective Arthur Brand said one suspect could still confess in exchange for a more lenient sentence if the jewels were hidden or handed to a “fence” for safekeeping. “You only need one to talk, and in many cases, one talks,” he told AFP.
Another possibility is that the gang acted on orders from a ringleader or middleman linked to organized crime, to whom they handed the jewels after the robbery. Corrado Catesi, head of Interpol's stolen art unit, said such groups can both commit crimes and supply people to sell the objects.
Two suspects in custody have claimed a ringleader was part of their team. Investigators are treating the claim with skepticism, a source close to the case told AFP.
In the worst case, the jewels left France or reached a local contact in the underground precious stones business. Brand said the items are mainly diamonds, which would have to be dismantled, recut and sold. He named Antwerp, the Belgian diamond hub, as the most likely destination. Marinello listed Tel Aviv in Israel and India as other possibilities.
Tobias Kormind, managing director of 77 Diamonds, Europe’s largest online diamond jeweler, said re-entering the legitimate supply chain after recutting is “fairly straightforward”. He said even top diamond laboratories such as the GIA would struggle to flag a freshly polished diamond as stolen unless it had ultra-distinctive internal inclusions.
Brand cited cases in which stolen jewels were recovered, including after a 2022 raid on the TEFAF art fair in the Netherlands and the 2019 break-in at the Green Vault museum in Dresden, a city in eastern Germany. He said the Louvre jewels may still resurface, possibly if someone talks before the court case.
The jewels remain listed as missing in Interpol’s database of stolen artworks. Catesi said objects can take anywhere from three months to 40 years to recover.
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