Louvre robbery suspects will be caught, expert predicts, but France’s crown jewels likely lost forever

Paris — French authorities may well manage to track down and arrest the thieves who pulled off an audacious robbery of royal crown jewels from Paris’ iconic Louvre museum, but they’re unlikely to recover the national treasures, a criminologist told CBS News on Tuesday. The heist took place on Sunday, in broad daylight with tourists in the museum, but nobody was hurt.

“We will catch them,” Alain Bauer, a professor of criminology at France’s National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts, told CBS News.

But he added: “I don’t think we will capture the jewels.”

Bauer said a lot of DNA was left at the scene by the robbers, including on the crown of the empress Eugénie, which was left behind by the thieves as they made their getaway on motorcycles.

French police also recovered a large crane lift used by the thieves to access an upper floor window of the 230-year-old museum, along with a power saw, gloves, a walkie-talkie and a can of gasoline. Authorities have said the criminals may have intended to use the gas to burn their tools, but they ran out of time.

The criminals entered from the back side of the Louvre’s main building on Sunday — away from the main entrance with its famous glass pyramid — before cutting their way through a window using the power lift and saw. They then made their way straight for the Galerie d’Apollon, the large hall that housed the crown jewels. 

If the thieves were professional criminals, they may well be known to the police, with information available on French law enforcement databases, Bauer told CBS News. 

But “if they’re amateur, or in the middle, under control or subcontracted by somebody else, it may be a little more complicated,” he said. 

What are the jewels stolen from the Louvre worth?

The stolen French crown jewels are priceless in historical terms, but Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said Tuesday their estimated worth is 88 million euros, or $102 million.

“The wrongdoers who took these gems won’t earn 88 million euros if they had the very bad idea of disassembling these jewels,” Beccuau said in an interview with French broadcaster RTL. “We can perhaps hope that they’ll think about this and won’t destroy these jewels without rhyme or reason.”

Experts have told CBS News the jewels would still be worth millions of dollars if broken up and sold on the black market.

One of the stolen items is a tiara featuring 212 pearls and nearly 2,000 diamonds, commissioned by Emperor Napoleon III to celebrate his marriage to Eugénie de Montijo in 1853. Also swiped: a sapphire-and-diamond tiara and necklace set, a large diamond brooch, and an emerald necklace and earrings that were originally a wedding gift from Napoleon to his second wife, Empress Marie-Louise of Austria, in 1810.

The stunning theft was the most spectacular robbery at the Louvre museum since the Mona Lisa was stolen in 1911. The iconic painting by Leonardo da Vinci was located in Italy and returned to the Louvre several years later.

Sunday’s heist has been described as both a tragedy and a national embarrassment for France. 

“You know, you think, in the Louvre, of all places, don’t they have the best security on the planet?” one stunned American tourist told the French news agency AFP soon after the robbery, calling it “crazy.”

But security experts say the Louvre’s security vulnerabilities were extensive. A recent security audit noted that 35% of the rooms in the Denon Wing, where the jewels were kept, have no security cameras, according to a Radio France report.

France’s Justice Minister Gerald Darmanin told reporters on Monday that the country had fundamentally failed to secure its national treasures. 

“I know that we cannot secure totally all the sites. But what was sure was that we failed, because someone was capable of putting in a crane truck, in the open, in the streets of Paris, to have people walk up for a couple of minutes and take priceless jewels and give France a deplorable image,” Darmanin lamented.