Investigators Find That Avoidable Security Failures Enabled Louvre Heist
A series of avoidable security failures enabled the Louvre heist thieves to evade police and make off with France’s crown jewels, according to a scathing investigation released Wednesday morning.
France’s Culture Ministry ordered the investigation after the robbery on 19 October, where thieves engaged in a brash smash and grab to steal nine pieces of jewelry from the Louvre’s Apollon Gallery.
The investigation results released in a French Sénat Culture Committee hearing this morning revealed that security agents at the Louvre lacked the screen capability to follow the thieves on video surveillance in real time. The agents also sent the police to the wrong location in the initial response, Le Monde reports. This misdirection was a critical failure since the investigation found that the thieves escaped from the Louvre only 30 seconds before police and private security personnel from Securitas arrived on the scene.
“Give or take 30 seconds, the Securitas [private security] guards or the police officers in a car could have prevented the thieves from escaping,” said Noël Corbin, head of the investigation, in the hearing.
Corbin highlighted that if the Louvre had a modern security camera system, better internal coordination, and more resistant display cases for the jewelry, the theft could have been prevented.
The investigation “highlights an overall failure of the museum, as well as its supervisory authority, to address security issues,” said French Sénat Culture Committee Head Laurent Lafon at the hearing. Security Management reached out to the committee to obtain a copy of the investigation's report, but a spokesperson said that it is not public at this time.
Six years before the heist, jewelry experts at Van Cleef & Arpels conducted an audit of the Louvre’s management and mentioned several security vulnerabilities that were exploited in the October heist. The 2019 report explicitly mentioned the riverside balcony to the Apollon Gallery as a weak point reachable by an extendable ladder—the method that the thieves used to breach the Louvre in October.
Corbin said that the Louvre director, Laurence des Cars, was not aware of the 2019 report, which was the work of her predecessor, The Guardian reports. French President Emmanual Macron appointed des Cars to lead the Louvre in 2021.
“The recommendations were not acted on and they would have enabled us to avoid this robbery,” Corbin said.
French authorities have arrested four individuals suspected of being the thieves who broke into the Apollon Gallery. They have not recovered any of the jewelry, though. While it might still be intact, Erin Thompson, professor of art crime at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told Security Management previously that jewelry is often disassembled, its settings melted down, and the stones recut for resale following a theft.
The investigation’s release comes at a challenging time for the Louvre. In November, France 24 reported that the country’s state auditor said that security upgrades at the Louvre were carried out at a “woefully inadequate pace” and that the museum prioritized “high-profile and attractive operations” instead of protecting itself.
Over the weekend, news broke that a water valve issue at the Louvre caused water damage to several hundred objects in the museum’s Egyptian antiquities section. And on Monday, several museum employee unions voted to authorize a strike to push for greater staffing and crowd control measures at the museum. The strike will begin next Monday—15 December.
“We are in a run-down museum which has shown its security weaknesses,” said Christian Galani, a CGT union official representing Louvre workers, in an interview with the Associated Press. The move to authorize a strike was unanimous and it will continue on a rolling basis. “We need a change of gear,” Galani added.
The Louvre and Securitas did not return Security Management’s requests for comment on this article.
