A NEW LEVEL OF BOLDNESS
Is France a soft touch? Three heists in the space of a year does start to look careless.
Louvre employees have warned about staff shortages before and they went on strike in June. But nowhere looks secure. In January, robbers blew up the door to the Drents Museum in the Netherlands to loot artefacts, including a gold helmet from around 450BC.
Some thieves have started to break down stolen gold in the getaway van, ready for smelting, according to accounts from the art-dealing fraternity. A US$6 million gold toilet was ripped out of England’s Blenheim Palace a few years back, ostensibly for its metal value.
The shambolic nature of the Louvre caper suggests a new level of boldness for even the lower reaches of organised crime as they look for a slice of a booming market for illicit art and antiquities, estimated at US$2 billion to US$6 billion.
Like cybercrime and digital currency scams, it’s all an unhappy byproduct of our increasingly cashless existence. With fewer banks to rob and less money held in shop registers, those who like to do their thieving in the real world have been turning to newly loaded cryptocurrency entrepreneurs or looking for easily lifted items like top-end watches. Art exhibits now find themselves at the more rarefied end of this unpleasant business.
This will only add to the misery of small museums, three out of five of whom say they’re worried about their future as footfall declines and costs rise. How can they fund extra security in that environment? What makes the Louvre a “slap in the face” for all museums, as art detective Christopher Marinello puts it, is that if it can happen to the grand old lady of such establishments, what hope do others have? It has already been slated to receive a lavish €800 million makeover. The less exalted won’t be so lucky.