It's been one month since the audacious, daylight robbery at the Louvre Museum, where a four-man gang, using a construction lift and power tools, made off with an estimated €88 - €102 million ($100M+ USD) worth of priceless French Crown Jewels. The haul included tiaras, necklaces, and brooches once belonging to Empress Eugénie and other French royalty.
While four suspects, described as small-time criminals from the Paris suburbs, have been arrested and charged, the most critical question remains unanswered: Where are the jewels?
This package explores the two most likely—and most feared—fates for this irreplaceable cultural heritage. Art crime experts weigh in on the possibility that the historical pieces have already been "broken down"—melted for gold or stripped of their gems to be re-cut and sold on the dark market for a fraction of their value, making them untraceable. We also investigate the theory that the pieces were stolen "to order" for an elite, private collector who wishes to own a unique, uninsurable piece of history.
00:00I'm going to have a photo of the entire picture, not a little detail.
00:15Yeah, it's there where maybe even there's still some cashier cabochon.
00:22Emeralds and the famous reliquaire broche.
00:28No respectable person, jeweler, dealer, auction house would touch these jewels.
00:43They are simply too hot to handle, which unfortunately leads us to believe that in order to hide the crime, the criminals will have to break them down.
00:55What's going on?
00:58Well, that's right.
01:00We don't really know where the stones come from.
01:29I have no power and I have no knowledge of the avant and the after.
01:38So we do a job very particular, it's that everything is made to the word, to the confidence.
01:45When I say that it's something, I have to be sure at 300%.
01:50100% I don't say that.
01:59There we are talking about art.
02:14I don't know, it's like if tomorrow you do the joconde, you make a big mark on the marker and you put a big cuter.
02:23Or it's like if tomorrow you do the joconde and you try to do the joconde.
02:29I don't know, I see it like this.
02:32If you remove that hysterical part, maybe you can decrease the price, I don't know, by two, three or four.
02:50It's like huge because this kind of, actually you have some nice pieces of gemstones and some nice diamonds also.
03:11But they are not all, for all of them, like top stones.
03:16It's not top stones.
03:17So you will have to recut, you will lose weight and so on.
03:20You need to have a good connection.
03:37And if they are fraud, if they are bad people, they are not connected to that market.
03:44So it will be very, very difficult for them to sell and because they probably not have the knowledge for having a good price for this, for negotiating, because it's a very specific work.
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04:11Sometimes you have the impression that it's easy.
04:13I don't know, we have to take a bullet, we take a train, we go to Anvers, we go to Paris, we go to I don't know.
04:21Because it's already necessary to have knowledge.
04:25I mean, tomorrow we call a diamond, a diamond, a diamond like me.
04:29Well, I don't say yes all right.
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05:49know upstanding jewel jewelers who won't you know who will raise questions and want to know
05:54the provenance of of the collection but there's always somebody who's willing to not ask any
05:59questions which one which one is the do you have any d market so the fact that it's the most
06:15important place where you can sell and buy jewels and especially diamonds so most of what they
06:25took from the loo are small diamonds all diamonds so they are not marked you cannot follow them the
06:32small diamonds i think they are lost like charles x's sword which was mostly small diamonds big pieces
06:45we may have some luck because somebody may want to have it for himself hidden in his cave
06:54looking at them because he wants to have something that was from the emperor some something nice
07:01something's unique
07:15It happened in 1976, same place, almost the same ways with the Charles X, the King of
07:44France swerve, it was never recovered, it happens everywhere all the time, in most of the old
07:51museums, over 100 heist for the last 10 years, no surprise, unfortunately it was not even surprising.
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