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TeaHe High-profile robbery But louvre It looks like a scene from a Hollywood movie in Paris on October 19, 2025: a gang of thieves steal dazzling royal jewels displayed in one of the world’s most famous museums.
But as the officers were busy in pursuit, The robbers still have more work to do: How can they take advantage of their potential?
Most stolen works are never found. In the art crime courses I teach, I often mention that the recovery rate is less than 10%. This is especially troubling when you consider that 50,000 to 100,000 artworks are stolen globally each year – the actual number may be higher due to under-reporting – the majority of which are stolen. Europe,
That said, it’s actually quite difficult to make money from stolen art works. Yet the types of items that have been stolen louvre – Eight pieces of priceless jewelery – could give these thieves an edge.
a narrow market of buyers
Stolen paintings cannot be sold on the art market because thieves cannot convey the ownership rights, known as “good title”, which belong to the legal owner. Furthermore, no reputable auction house or dealer will knowingly sell stolen art, nor will responsible collectors purchase stolen property.
But this does not mean that the stolen painting has no value.
In 2002, thieves broke into Amsterdam Van Gogh Museum Through the terrace and departed with “View of the sea at Scheveningen” and “The congregation leaving the Reformed Church at Nuenen”. In 2016, Italian police recovered relatively safe artifacts from a Mafia safe house in Naples. It is unclear whether the Mafia actually purchased the work, but it is common for criminal syndicates to put up valuable assets as some sort of collateral.
At other times, stolen works unwittingly end up in the hands of collectors.
In 1960s New York City, an employee of the Guggenheim Museum steals a Marc Chagall painting from storage. But the crime was not discovered until the list was taken years later. Unable to locate the work, the museum removed it from its records.
Meanwhile, collectors Jules and Rachel Lubell purchased the piece from a gallery for US$17,000. When the couple requested that an auction house review the work for an estimate, a former Guggenheim employee at Sotheby’s identified it as the missing painting.
Guggenheim demanded that the painting be returned, and a contentious court battle ensued. Ultimately, the parties settled the matter, and the painting was returned to the museum after an undisclosed sum was paid to the collectors.
Some people deliberately buy stolen art. After World War II, stolen works circulated on the market, with buyers fully aware of the widespread looting that had taken place across Europe.
Eventually, international laws were developed that gave original owners the opportunity to recover looted property, even decades after the fact. For example, in the US, the law also allows descendants of the original owners to regain ownership of stolen works, provided they can produce sufficient evidence to prove their claims.
Easy to earn from jewelery and gold
louvre However, the theft did not involve paintings. The thieves brought back jeweled wealth: a sapphire crown; A necklace and single earring from a matching set belonging to 19th-century French queens Marie-Amélie and Hortense; a stunning matching set of earrings and a necklace that belonged to Empress Marie-Louise, Napoleon Bonaparte’s second wife; a diamond brooch; and Queen Eugenie’s tiara and her corsage-bow brooch.
About the author
Leila Aminadouleh is an assistant professor of law at New York University.
This article is republished from Conversation Under Creative Commons license. read the original article,
These centuries-old, exquisitely crafted masterpieces have unique historical and cultural value. But even if each one were broken into pieces and sold piece by piece, their price would still be very high. Thieves may sell precious gems and metals to unscrupulous dealers and jewelers who may remodel and sell them. Even at a fraction of their value – the price received for looted art is always much lower than the price received for legitimately obtained art – the gems are worth millions of dollars.
Although it is difficult to sell stolen goods on the legitimate market, there is an underground market for looted artefacts. These pieces may be sold behind the scenes, in private meetings, or even on the dark web, where participants cannot be identified. Studies have also shown that stolen – and sometimes counterfeit – art and antiquities often appear on Facebook and mainstream e-commerce sites like eBay. After making a sale, the seller can delete their online store and disappear.
Sensational attraction of robbery
While films like “The Thomas Crown Affair” feature dramatic robberies committed by impossibly charming bandits, most art crimes are far more mundane.
Art theft is typically a crime of opportunity, and occurs not in the heavily guarded halls of cultural institutions, but in storage units or when works are in transit.
Most large museums and cultural institutions do not display all the objects in their care. Instead, they sit in storage. Less than 10% of the Louvre’s collection is on display at any one time – only 35,000 of the museum’s 600,000 objects. The rest may remain invisible for years, even decades.
Works in storage may have been inadvertently misplaced – such as Andy Warhol’s rare silkscreen “Princess Beatrix”, which was accidentally discarded along with 45 other works during the renovation of a Dutch town hall – or simply stolen by staff. According to the FBI, approximately 90% of museum thefts occur inside jobs.
In fact, a few days before the Louvre crime, a picasso The work, “Still Life with Guitar”, worth $650,000, disappeared while traveling 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. This incident received very little attention.
To me, the biggest mistake thieves made was not leaving the crown they dropped or the vest they threw away, essentially leaving clues for the authorities.
Rather, it was the brazen nature of the robbery itself – which captured the world’s attention, but ensuring that French spies, independent detectives and international law enforcement will be on the lookout for new pieces of gold, gems and royal glitter to be offered for sale for years to come.