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CNN Special Reports

The Heist, The Louvre's Stolen Crown Jewels. Aired 8-9p ET

Aired October 26, 2025 - 20:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[20:00:00]

GRAPHICS: On October 19, 2025, thieves struck the Louvre in one of the boldest robberies in French history. Six days later, suspects were arrested. The investigation continues. This is the story of the heist that shook the Louvre.

ELAINE SCIOLINO, AUTHOR, ADVENTURES IN THE LOUVRE: Well, the Louvre is the center of Paris. I can't think of another building in all of France that sums up the history of the country.

MELISSA BELL, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: It is a part of what France is, and I think it speaks well beyond France as well. It's one of those rare monuments that's known by the entire world. And it represents such an important part of the country's culture. And suddenly the country had been robbed.

FREDRICKA WHITFIELD, CNN ANCHOR: All right, let's begin with breaking news out of Paris. Investigators are searching for the thieves who broke into the Louvre.

BELL: It was the most brazen of heists.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Full masked robbers.

RICHARD QUEST, CNN INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: If you made it up, people would say it couldn't happen. Well, it did.

SCIOLINO: Nobody expected a theft in broad daylight on a Sunday morning.

ROBERT WITTMAN, FBI ART CRIME TEAM: It all sounds like a movie. Something from Hollywood, but it's not.

SCIOLINO: A seven-minute attack that some commentators are calling the theft of the century.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I just like trying to figure out what's happening, when I saw the museum staff start running and saying, get out, get out.

JAKE TAPPER, CNN ANCHOR: Now the manhunt is on as experts worry the crime might never be solved.

SCIOLINO: The theft was a dagger into the heart of France. It comes at a moment where France is extremely weak, where you have a president who is barely holding on, and suddenly the very symbol of the country gets attacked.

GRAPHICS: Sunday, October 19, 2025.

FREDERIC SERRIER, SECURITY GUARD, THE LOUVRE: I like working Sundays because all the traffic, everything is smooth. Everybody is sleeping. I had to go to the Louvre at 9:00 because it's the opening of the -- of the museum every day.

My job is to welcome people from all over the world. In those times there are 30,000 people a day visiting the museum. I was at the entrance. I was just in time at 9:00. With my flashlight, I had everything, my radio. It was a normal day. So I had no idea that something was wrong of course.

WITTMAN: At 9:30 in the morning, individuals drove up in a truck.

BELL: Most people would have assumed that they're workmen doing their job. They were wearing yellow vests. They had a truck with a ladder that looked genuine.

SCIOLINO: You see them all over Paris because French entryways are too narrow. And you've got to bring the piano up one of these little movers.

WITTMAN: They propped the ladder up onto the balcony of this gallery in the Louvre. And they went into the balcony and they broke a window. The window alarm went off, but they ignored it, and they ran in.

SERRIER: I heard an alert on my radio given by a colleague in the Galerie d'Apollon. She was saying, it's urgent, it's urgent. It's very, very urgent.

WITTMAN: They had these angle cutters that they had bought from a hardware store.

BELL: And this is what you use to cut glass it turns out rather effectively.

SERRIER: They didn't know that there were thieves. Many thought that they were terrorists because the Louvre Museum is a very big monument and unfortunately we had this in mind. So can you imagine people in the Galerie d'Apollon seeing intruders entering by the windows? They were very afraid. They were very afraid.

WITTMAN: And they threatened the guards with the angle cutters to hold them back.

[20:05:02]

KIM PHAM, GENERAL ADMINISTRATOR, LOUVRE MUSEUM (through text translation): The security team on the site had the initial reaction to evacuate the public from the room. Their first instinct was to get the public away from the robbers equipped with power tools.

BELL: The guards then evacuate people as they're trained to do, and get them out of the museum as quickly as they can. SERRIER: They told the visitors, get out, get out, get out.

OLIVIER GABET, CURATOR, LOUVRE MUSEUM: The showcases were not broken. The showcases were cut. So there's a small space to get the object because it never fall down. And that to strip from the showcases whatever was closest to them.

WITTMAN: These pieces were hundreds of years old and contained over $102 million worth of gems and valuable diamonds.

BELL: By 9:37, the country had been robbed.

WITTMAN: They grabbed the pieces and then they made their egress. They ran back out the balcony window, went down the ladders and took their jewelry with them.

BELL: We have footage of them escaping. You can see them getting onto the ladder and getting back onto their truck. And they tried to set their truck on fire to try and destroy the evidence. They failed because the security guards had intervened, and they had to flee quicker than they'd planned. They got away on motorcycles, high speed scooters, we understand, making their way down that bank of the River Seine.

SERRIER: I run, I run, I run like I've never run. Just -- I miss them just for, I don't know, 10 seconds something like this. It was very, very organized. It was in seven minutes. In seven minutes.

BELL: Immediately, the 24-hour news channels went completely on what was happening at the Louvre.

To try and figure out what had happened, what had been gone missing, how it had happened. And so the French media appetite was immediate and substantial.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: How could the world's most visited museum be robbed with such brazen audacity.?

BELL: On the night itself, we stayed outside and did lives until well into the night, and we had so many people come up to us and talk about how shocked they were that this could have happened.

This burglary happened in a context where there was a great deal of anger and distrust amongst politicians.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Nationwide, anti-government protests.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Tens of thousands have taken to streets nationwide.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Blocked roads and started fires.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: 80,000 police have been deployed to handle the protests.

BELL: And so very quickly it turned into a lot of mudslinging, a lot of mockery, I think also of the people in charge, that they should have allowed it to happen. President Macron is not well liked. His popularity levels are at historic lows.

FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN ANCHOR: In France the prime minister and his government lost a vote of no confidence.

BELL: There has been now for more than a decade this debate about national identity. Little by little, the discourse and narrative from the far-right has migrated to the center of French politics.

MARINE LE PEN, FAR-RIGHT LEADER (through text translation): Those who come to France came to find French values not to transform it into their home countries. Or if they wanted to live, if they wanted to live like they did at home, they should've stayed at home.

BELL: The issue of immigration, what it means to be French, how to protect ourselves, how to close borders. And so this burglary happened in a context where there was a great deal of anger and distrust about how the people in charge couldn't even keep our national treasures safe. There's a certain amount of embarrassment there, and a sense that France's image in the world was already stained by how things have been going politically.

ISA SOARES, CNN INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: French police says the first 48 hours are key to track down the thieves, who so far are still on the run.

BELL: So the police that are involved in this investigation are the BRB.

WITTMAN: The Brigade Against Banditry that specializes in these types of crimes, in robberies.

ROSEMARY CHURCH, CNN INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Around 100 investigators are now working on the case.

BELL: Very quickly, attention turned to what they'd left behind and they obviously left more behind than they'd planned.

WITTMAN: They left the angle cutters there. That right off the bat, we have forensic evidence now. There's reports that they dropped a bottle of some liquid. There's going to be DNA evidence on that. One of the thieves dropped his yellow viz vest.

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BELL: And they found a blowtorch, which they had tried to burn the truck with. They found a glove, a motorcycle, helmets. They'd also found fairly quickly one of the scooters they'd made their getaway on.

WITTMAN: They dropped one of the crowns. The crown of Eugenie, the wife of Napoleon III. And they actually left it on the street.

GABET: The crown was found on the ground outside the Louvre. Clearly, she's damaged. SERRIER: I think any public worker in the Louvre was thinking, what a

mess. What did we do wrong to -- for that to happen? It was terrible to know that something, something was, was stolen in the museum.

GABET: When I arrived at the Galerie d'Apollon, I approached the two showcases and my first -- my first impression was like, war scene, war scene. You know, barbaric things. War scene. And so you feel very hurt because it's something that belongs to all the nation.

SCIOLINO: This is truly an event that is going to have ramifications for the Louvre and for France for years if not decades. It's a story way beyond a heist in a museum.

BELL: But it's not the first time that there's been a fairly high profile theft in a French museum.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BELL: Paris is the most visited city in the world.

SORAYA NADIA MCDONALD, WRITER AND CULTURE CRITIC: Iconic landmarks. The Arc de Triomphe, the Torre Eifel. You're going to go to the Champs-Elysees.

DOMETI PONGO, CULTURE JOURNALIST: Every time I go to Paris, I have to sit at the Louvre. The Louvre gets almost nine million visitors a year.

BELL: It's in the very center of Paris. And it represents such an important part of the country's history, its culture, its heart.

PONGO: The Louvre began as a fortress, and it became literally the home to the monarchs.

SCIOLINO: If you walk through the corridors of the Louvre, you will see all of the signs of the kings. The centuries of French history in graffiti.

PONGO: Now it's the greatest museum in the world.

SERRIER: The building of the Louvre is a piece of art.

MCDONALD: It does still feel like a palace that very rich people used to live in.

SCIOLINO: The Louvre, unlike a museum like the Met in New York, was never built as a museum. Imagine you had a house and over the centuries it had about 20 different people putting additions on your house. It would make no sense. And that's what the Louvre is. I mean, there are 25 different levels in the Louvre.

[20:15:02]

PONGO: There's literally no way you can see the entire museum in one sitting. SCIOLINO: If you were to walk through every single room of the Louvre,

it would take you 18,000 steps, nine miles. It's overcrowded. It's busy. You can never find a security guard who can tell you which way to go if you want to see a certain painting by Rembrandt or Vermeer. It's tough, but it's worth it.

PONGO: If you could put a value on the artifacts in that building. $45 billion is the estimate spread across 400 rooms.

MCDONALD: It's not just a place that has French antiquities. You have enormous sculptures that come from Egypt, artifacts from Asia.

SCIOLINO: Works of ancient Greece, the victory of Samothrace on top of the Daru staircase.

WITTMAN: The Venus de Milo.

SCIOLINO: Painting by Titian, the Italian called "The Man with a Glove." "Il Condottiere."

BELL: And then, of course, there's the d'Apollon room.

SCIOLINO: Which I think is the most beautiful room in the Louvre.

BELL: It's a very long room on the edge of the Louvre, on the Seine side.

SCIOLINO: It was created by Louis the 14th. It's like a mini Versailles. It's all in gold with all these carved cherubs and statues.

GABET: When you enter this gallery, you have certainly a wow effect, because you are overwhelmed by a sense of decor.

BELL: It holds all of those crown jewels.

SCIOLINO: It holds what's left of the crown jewels. If we look at the history of the crown jewels, it's one of tragedy and drama and loss because in the 1880s, during what is known as the Third Republic, which was anti-monarchical, the leaders of the Third Republic decided that France had too many crown jewels, and that the crown jewels were a symbol of the monarchy.

GABET: They did this incredibly stupid, dreadful decision to keep a few of the diamonds that we thought were important for the French history, and all the rest were sold in auction in Paris in 1887.

SCIOLINO: They probably auctioned off about 77,000 crown jewels. Charles Tiffany, the head of Tiffany's, bought a third of them. And all of these rich Gilded Age Americans, they wore them to parties. And ever since this auction, the Louvre has been trying to buy back the crown jewels.

BECKY ANDERSON, CNN INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: In France, eight of the nine priceless artifacts stolen from the Louvre on Sunday remain unaccounted for. MCDONALD: There are eight objects the thieves were able to

successfully make out.

SCIOLINO: But you know what's interesting is that they didn't try to steal the very old, historic gems. For example, there are two very big diamonds. The Regent diamond and the Sancy diamond, and they date from before the French Revolution. They're huge.

TOM MOSES, EXECUTIVE VP, GEMOLOGICAL INSTITUTE OF AMERICA: The Regent is 140 carats. The diamond the size of a plum.

SCIOLINO: The jewels that were stolen were newer jewels.

SERRIER: A wonderful tiara in pearls and diamonds.

MCDONALD: We're talking about sapphires. We're talking about diamonds. We're talking about emeralds. These are pieces that were reserved for very specific moments in royal life. There are ceremonial.

SERRIER: It's our responsibility to keep these jewels. It's our history.

MOSES: It tells the story of generations of monarchs and leaders and how they evolved. It's a legacy that can't be reproduced.

SERRIER: It's part of ourselves.

SCIOLINO: It's as serious a crime as the theft of the Mona Lisa in 1911.

ERIN THOMPSON, PROFESSOR OF ART CRIME, JOHN JAY COLLEGE: In 1911, an Italian man named Vincenzo Peruggia was working in Paris. He was hired by the Louvre to help make new higher security frames for the Mona Lisa and other paintings.

SCIOLINO: He was an Italian nationalist and thought that the Mona Lisa belonged in Italy. So on a Monday, when the museum was closed, he donned a worker's smock.

THOMPSON: He removed the Mona Lisa from the wall. He took it into a stairwell, removed it from the frame and wrapped it in his cloak and ran into problem number one, which was he was locked in the stairwell. Some other worker came by and said, oh, you're stuck, here let me open the door for you. Peruggia walked out of the museum.

[20:20:03]

The French police sprang into action. They interviewed everybody it seemed like who'd ever worked at the Louvre. They even suspected Picasso, who, you know, young, brash artists. Who knows what he might be capable of?

The public went wild. Thousands of people came to the museum just to stare at the empty spot in the wall where the Mona Lisa had once hung. SCIOLINO: "The New York Times" led the paper with the theft of the

Mona Lisa. I mean, it was like the lead of the paper on the front page. "La Gioconda," which is what she was called in Italian, has been stolen. And it went all over the world as a global story. And then two years later in Italy, when he tried to sell it, Peruggia was arrested. The Mona Lisa was shown in Italy as a sort of sign of thanks. And then it came back to France.

THOMPSON: And then this theft rocketed the portrait of this very obscure woman into the global consciousness.

SCIOLINO: The crown jewel of the Louvre is the Mona Lisa. That is what people come to see. She's a blessing, of course, because she brings in so many people. But she's also a curse because she makes it so difficult to get around.

SERRIER: Can you imagine working in the Louvre Museum with 30,000 people a day, answering the same questions all day long? Where is Mona Lisa? Where is Mona Lisa? Please where is Mona Lisa?

THOMPSON: Security technology has changed greatly since 1911. Now paintings are fastened to the wall, for example. They used to often be left loose on the idea that if a fire broke out, guards could grab paintings off the wall and evacuate with them. There are alarms that sound if you touch the frames. There are metal detectors at the entrances, but really all you can do is make it take a little bit longer for someone to snatch something in and run out no matter what the latest and greatest security technology you have is.

SERRIER: We are not police officers. We don't have any strength more than any citizens in France. We cannot arrest anybody.

LYNDA KINKADE, CNN INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Well, overtourism is having an ugly consequence at the world's most famous art museum. Staff at the Louvre refused to take up their posts on Monday in protest over unmanageable crowd sizes, chronic understaffing and work conditions.

SERRIER: There were strike on June the 16th to ask for more security agents in the museum, asking for less visitors in the museum. We had worries about the security problems in the museum, and we warned our presidency for this. Maybe unfortunately we haven't been heard for this.

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[20:28:06]

SERRIER: To lose a part of the collections of the museum is terrible because it's our job to keep it safe. To keep it for the next generations. We had concerns about security in the museum for years because we don't have enough security agents. In 10 years, we lost 250 jobs in the security in the Louvre. But what we could do, we did it. We did it.

GABET: Security is, I think, a permanent concern of museums.

WITTMAN: While there is a push and pull between security and the museum visitor experience, it has to be welcoming for people.

MOSES: For me, being in a museum, it's something that leaves a lasting impression.

GABET: There are repository of the most important things created since the beginning of humanity.

PONGO: When we talk about museums, the building itself is an experience as well as the art that sits within it.

MCDONALD: There can be something really special about the interaction that you can have with a painting or with a specific artist in a museum.

WITTMAN: And in fact, that might be why the museum exists. It is to bring people in, to have an up close and personal relationship with the artifact.

PONGO: Your main threat at a museum is a kid with sticky fingers. That kid who wants to touch everything.

SERRIER: Every day we are telling them to put their shoes on, please move on because there are many people behind you, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It's a very, very hard job to be a security agent in the museum.

[20:30:08]

PAULA NEWTON, CNN INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Climate activists threw soup on two of Vincent van Gogh's "Sunflowers" paintings in London.

PONGO: There was this trend for a while called souping, where people would throw, like, tomato soup on works of art.

THOMPSON: In 2022, Stop Oil activists threw tomato soup at a van Gogh painting of "Sunflowers." In 2024, the Mona Lisa was hit by climate activists.

WITTMAN: So there has to be a balance between these two different aspects. Museum visitor experience and security. During my 20-year career at the FBI recovered more than $300 million worth of stolen art and cultural property from more than 20 countries. Some of my top cases the National Museum in Stockholm, Sweden, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology. Many, many different types of thefts.

LARRY LAWTON, FORMER JEWEL THIEF: Museums easiest target on the planet for the money they have.

My name is Larry Lawton and I'm known as the biggest jewel robbery in the United States. I robbed between 15 million and 18 million. That's what the government said.

A lot of people are telling me today, you know, saying, hey, they only did it with a grinder and you could buy a grinder in Home Depot, but actually, you don't even need that in robberies, especially big robberies like this. You need two things, balls and brains. That's it.

WITTMAN: The general public has an idea in their mind about what museum security looks like. So we've seen movies like "The Thomas Crown Affair," where, you know, Pierce Brosnan, who played the villain, went into the museum. And then, I mean, the walls of the museum closed up, you know, and hid the artworks. That's not real.

Another one is "Entrapment," where Catherine Zeta-Jones is dancing between laser beams to get through the security system. That's not real. They don't exist, these things.

LAWSON: Hollywood has made it, like, impossible to rob something. Well, if it's impossible, I'm the new Tom Cruise.

WITTMAN: The reason it's not accurate is because good security is boring. What you have is electronic security. You have cameras, guards, usually who are within a line of sight of each other. That's the idea.

THOMPSON: And really, the best museum security in the world, all it can do is make it take longer to smash into a case, to grab something, and make it faster to call the police. No matter how good your security is.

LAWSON: You can go into a museum like the Met or the Louvre. You'll see a Rembrandt, you'll see art, you'll see vases. But when you see those diamonds, that's where you got to land.

PONGO: People just like shiny, pretty things. There is the sheer just beauty of it, of a sapphire, the ruby, of emerald.

MOSES: So I think we're just, you know, spellbound and captivated by, you know, looking into them and seeing the beauty.

LAWSON: Diamonds and emeralds and rubies are an object that you could hold in your hand and say, I am holding $1 million. To me, they're beautiful.

PONGO: And some of the most iconic movies, you know, the brooch in "Breakfast at Tiffany's." The Infinity stones in the Marvel series. You've got the blue stone in "The Titanic." They represent something that few of us ever get to touch, and our desire to make it.

WITTMAN: The ark of the psyche of the thieves before the heist would be all the planning.

LAWSON: The adrenaline is off the charts.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Thieves using a truck mounted ladder.

JESSICA DEAN, CNN ANCHOR: Entered the museum from outside.

WITTMAN: During the heist itself, they'd be just thinking about the mission and very excited.

KINKADE: Seven minutes. LAWSON: They had red diamonds, emeralds that were beautiful. I saw

Canary diamond. Man, I had a hard on.

WITTMAN: But that was quickly fade.

LAWSON: Great robbery. Got all this stuff. Now what?

PONGO: In real life, you can't just sell a crown. Like we all know what that is and what it looks like.

WITTMAN: There's probably three things that can happen. One, they get scared and they destroy the jewelry. That's terrible.

LAWSON: How are you getting rid of the crown jewels of a country? Where do you go with the crown jewels of France?

WITTMAN: Two, they could melt it down. Try to sell it for the parts.

LAWSON: If you get to that point where you're at a safe space, within 24 hours, every piece of clothing, every tag on every piece of jewelry was in an incinerator.

[20:35:03]

WITTMAN: Jewelry can be traceable. In this case, I think some of the gemstones could be very easily traceable because they're going to be well-documented.

THOMPSON: The smaller diamonds, they won't be able to be traceable back to these crowns. But the bigger gems, the real showstoppers, those are going to be instantly recognizable. They are often precisely weighed. They're in an old-fashioned cuts. They have noted microscopic imperfections. What you need to do is transform that piece you've stolen into unrecognizable raw materials.

LAWSON: Every time I did a job, my whole entire load of jewelry was broken down within 24 hours. Broken down. You will not know what it is. Pop the diamonds out and just put them aside.

THOMPSON: There are people who are skilled at cutting gems, but you need to find somebody who's not going to ask too many questions.

LAWSON: I didn't do this with mine because I had people to do it, because I would have left the country.

THOMPSON: Once these jewels are recut they can be sold on the legitimate market. Gold is easy. It has a relatively low melting point. You could have an electric crucible ordered online and in your house the next day, and melt it down in your garage. You could watch a YouTube video, but you probably don't even need to.

WITTMAN: The speculation is that they stole these specific pieces for value. In my 35 years of doing these investigations, it's always about the money. Everything is about the about the Benjamins, so to speak.

LAWSON: Let me explain to people what the black market in diamonds or most anything is. The black market is everywhere. But it means nothing if you don't know somebody who knows the black market or a place to get rid of the diamonds. Now, unless you are like me and had a fence, a fence is the middleman, takes stolen goods and gives you X amount of dollars and he sells them again. You're going to get penny.

WITTMAN: So many times the thieves who'd steal art material from a museum, they're better criminals than they are businessmen.

LAWSON: It's a shady business. It just is what it is.

WITTMAN: The third thing they could do is sit tight. I would suggest that maybe the country of France should put out a reward. Offer a reward leading to the recovery of the artifacts.

MOSES: I hope it is the case where they were being taken for someone else. And at least that way they will be preserved and hopefully ultimately recovered.

WITTMAN: There are many theories about this theft, and until these individuals are caught and the information is made known, we won't know. And you know, we may never know. It may never be answered why they did it.

PONGO: Do you know the type of person you have to be to be OK with buying an artifact hundreds of years old, stolen from a place like the Louvre? We don't know if these are underdogs who did this? Or mercenaries hired by, you know, nefarious foreign entities? But if we're writing a plot to this movie, there's some shadowy figure with a thick, indistinguishable accent waiting on his pickup.

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[20:43:22]

MCDONALD: Americans are obsessed with heist movies. You'll see it in the earliest days of motion picture cinema.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Mission, to liberate millions of dollars.

WITTMAN: There's a certain Robin Hood thought in the general public of stealing valuable pieces that only, quote, "rich people can have."

PONGO: Nine times out of 10, the viewers are rooting for thieves because there's this idea that they're these underdog who's just trying to get ahead.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm robbing a bank because they got money here. That's why I'm robbing it.

PONGO: Oh, this heist is definitely going to turn into a movie. Are you kidding me? There's a screenwriter right now putting this together, pitching this to Hollywood.

WITTMAN: The writers in Hollywood are very creative. But I found over the years a lot of those scenarios come from real life.

BELL: It was a plot that played out like a Hollywood movie.

WITTMAN: I woke up to the news last Sunday morning and my wife Donna said to me, hey, they robbed the Louvre.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Guys came in with yellow jackets.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: They chose a time when the museum was under construction.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Is it possible that it was an inside job?

WITTMAN: I thought, oh, this is a movie. This is a TV show.

PONGO: We watch any heist movie, they're usually a few beats they try to hit. There's the iconic scene where you kind of meet the crew.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: OK, everybody, let's get started.

PONGO: You're meeting everybody. They all have their job. You've got someone who's probably the brains. You've got the brute force.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Bro, why you ain't just shoot them right here?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Because it's better to leave the crime scene more spread out.

PONGO: In "Money Heist," they each have names related to a country. It's brilliant.

[20:45:04]

WITTMAN: There are a lot of theories about who these individuals were.

BELL: They were very well-prepared, no doubt very professional robbers.

LAWSON: Most likely this is one of the gangs that have been operating throughout Europe for the last several years.

PONGO: We don't know anything at this point, but based on what we've seen in movies, we romanticize them as crafty intelligent thieves who are down on their luck. Maybe they just have one last job. I think it's easier for viewers to align themselves with these robbers when they feel like the crime is victimless.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: All right, there.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well, just thought I'd watch.

MCDONALD: There is a long tradition of sort of an American fascination with all sorts of heists, but particularly when the things that they are stealing belong to people who are absurdly rich. There's not necessarily a whole lot of sympathy.

PONGO: You ask a room full of boys when they play cops and robbers, who wants to be the cops and who wants to be the robbers? LAWSON: I was always the robber. You kidding me? Larry is the robber.

Other people are the cops. And guess what? I won.

PONGO: Then comes the plan. There's the one smart guy who becomes cool in this band of thieves because he's got the plan. He's got the blueprint.

WITTMAN: You know, I do have some admiration for thieves who actually think things out. And don't go and try to do a shoplifting.

MCDONALD: That's when you have the original "Thomas Crown Affair," when you have this very famous go scene where you're kind of seeing how everything is happening.

WITTMAN: Look at this situation with the Louvre. One of these individuals had a great plan. He put together a plan. He got the truck, he got the ladder, he got the angle cutters.

PONGO: But there's usually that scene where they break down exactly how this is going to go.

WITTMAN: Hollywood takes a lot of liberty. I've been approached by some studios to do rewrites on scripts where they're doing a heist type of scenario, and to try to make it a little more realistic. 90 percent of what you see is not accurate, but they are entertaining. Real-life is, you know, much stranger than fiction actually.

BELL: It was the most brazen of heists here at the Louvre Museum. The most visited in the world.

PONGO: In the movies, you've got the heist itself, the brains of the operation makes the call like, OK, it's a go.

MCDONALD: Several things make heists sexy and appealing. One is just the mystery of how these folks, like, pulled the thing off. One of my favorite things about heist movies are the gadgets. Some sort of like mechanized grappling hook that allows you to, like, drop in from a ceiling. The big like, suction cup things, all of that stuff you're thinking about the logistics that are going to make it possible to pull something off.

SCIOLINO: Whoever perpetrated this crime knew what had to be done. I mean, this is easier than George Clooney and Brad Pitt in one of those "Oceans" movies. It's the way it was robbed. It was robbed really easily.

WITTMAN: "The Oceans 11," "Entrapment," "The Thomas Crown Affair," all of these are a treasure hunt. People love to think about treasure.

THOMPSON: In this case, it took about seven minutes. Overall, the men were inside the museum for about four minutes. That's actually pretty slow by the standards of such heists. Not to give you too many hints and tips, but ideal heist you're in and out in a matter of seconds before the police can arrive.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The state police have assured us we're going to have a rundown and capture by morning.

THOMPSON: "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" were able to outrun the lawmen because they would map out a getaway route with fresh horses.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Whatever they're selling, I don't want it.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Attention all cars cover all entrances and exits.

LAWSON: Now, as far as the Louvre, every day that these guys are on the street, it's interesting to me. I'm personally saying that the police suck.

THOMPSON: You have these guys speeding away on Vespas. It's kind of sexy, very Parisian.

PONGO: The getaway scene usually involves disguises that make the whole plot come together.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I knew this color would come in handy one day.

PONGO: In movies like "The Dark Knight," the thieves are going to leave in the school busses. "Inside Man," they're dressed up like folks who work at the facility, or "Lupin," where he dresses up like a janitor at the Louvre.

[20:50:00]

That's what makes the Louvre heist so interesting because they've got these construction jackets. But the getaway never happens exactly as it was planned.

BELL: The window used by the robbers to get out of the Louvre are now something of a tourist attraction in its own right.

SOARES: French police says the first 48 hours are key to track down the thieves.

ANDERSON: Authorities for now saying a well-plotted and very well- executed operation.

THOMPSON: When they left, they not only dropped one of the crowns they stole, but they left behind a motorcycle helmet.

LAWSON: I was appalled. I never dropped an earring. All of these networks calling these guys experts. What expert drops a crown jewel worth 20 million?

THOMPSON: Everybody loves royal bling. Everybody who has stared at jewelry in a museum has thought about how would I look in that? I think we're following this news because we are a little bit jealous at heart.

WITTMAN: This idea comes from a famous James Bond movie called "Dr. No." James Bond goes into Dr. No's caverns, and he sees a painting. Ever since then, there's been this Dr. No theory that there's this villain sitting somewhere looking at his stolen property. But when it comes to these million-dollar, well-known pieces, I've never seen it. Not in real life.

The aftermath in Hollywood movies, you'll see thieves, you know, popping champagne and smoking cigars and celebrating. That's not how it is in real life.

LAWSON: As far as the Louvre, how people are thinking this is going down would be lay low. You got to get out of the country and lay low with the diamonds.

MCDONALD: How does this story end? Oh, gosh, that's a loaded question.

LAWSON: I want to see France get their jewels back.

PONGO: I think they get away.

THOMPSON: It could be that somebody's girlfriend really had a yen for a crown.

MCDONALD: There are so many possibilities of what could happen. Who knows?

LAWSON: The only thing Hollywood gets right in a movie, only thing is the ending. They always get caught.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[20:56:35]

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: The museum's director --

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: There were no security cameras that were monitoring the balcony.

SOARES: How could the world's most visited museum be robbed with such brazen audacity?

LAURENCE DES CARS, LOUVRE MUSEUM DIRECTOR (through text translation): Mr. President, Senators, first of all, I'd like to thank you for inviting me to this committee today.

BELL: It took the director of the Louvre, Laurence des Cars, several days actually to speak out, but she went through a number of the deficiencies that had been identified, but still defending the record of the museum. The fact that the systems had functioned, the guards had done what they were expected to do.

DES CARS (through text translation): I would like to congratulate the teams of the Louvre Museum. They followed with responsiveness, accuracy and fearlessness, the safety protocol. Thanks to their professionalism, no one was hurt. In this nightmare, no human life was affected.

SERRIER: What is capital for me to say today is that my colleagues with the means we have did their job perfectly and we couldn't do more because, once again, we are not police officers and yes, we are protecting the pieces of art. But, first of all, we are protecting the people against violence like this.

PHAM (through text translation): Externally we had insufficient video surveillance. And yes, absolutely and resolutely, we are going to equip ourselves, with surveillance cameras that are much more modern and effective.

WITTMAN: I think as a result of this theft, there is a heightening of realization that there is a vulnerability for a lot of different museums.

GABET: So I guess that it's part also of this worldwide and also national emotion. If it can happen at the Louvre so what it means for, you know, other place.

MCDONALD: I am curious to see how this story ends. Does it end with Interpol? I don't know, you know, busting down someone's door? Does it end with, say, a sentimental jeweler who, you know, finds himself with this diadem in front of him or her, and who says, I just can't bring myself to dismantle this thing?

PONGO: There's a fear that these items will never be recovered.

WITTMAN: You have a worldwide interest. And what happened here because it's part of our all of our culture.

SERRIER: It's not only French paintings or French collection or French sculptures, it's the treasures from all over the world.

GABET: Museum are certainly one of the last places for freedom. It's a place for a certain promise because you are going to suddenly encounter a certain number of masterpieces and artworks.

SERRIER: You are walking along history of the world.

GABET: We talk about beauty, about mankind, about a certain sense of perfection. So it's a place of liberty and freedom and civic liberties. The way that you shape your taste and shape your high, you shape, you know, your own values.

[21:00:00]