Heist at the Louvre Episode 1: Inside the Glass Cases

For me, it all began with the film Mission Impossible.

[upbeat music] In the mid-nineties when that movie first came out, it was instantly burned into my brain.

Good morning, Mr. Phelps.

This is your mission should you choose to accept it.

[upbeat music] Now, you might think Mission Impossible is a spy movie, but there's this moment where Tom Cruise kind of goes rogue.

If you've seen the movie, you know what I'm talking about.

He breaks into a locked vault, he hacks into a CIA computer, and right then it suddenly becomes my ultimate heist movie.

And that scene with the rope and the light-up floor and the bead of sweat, yeah, it's just as good today as it was then.

Now, if you haven't seen it, you kinda don't need to.

You know the heist formula already.

The good guys are the rebels forced to steal, cheat, lie, and even kill, but all for the right reasons, and they look good doing it.

Everyone has that one heist movie they can watch over and over again and never get bored, from The Italian Job- You're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off ... to Ocean's Eleven.

We're just supposed to walk out of there with a hundred and fifty million dollars in cash on us without getting stopped?

Yeah.

Heist movies can be classic, emotional, violent, but in all of them we get to live a little of our Robin Hood fantasies just for a couple of hours.

But what if fantasy became an ugly reality?

An urgent investigation is underway in Paris after a daring jewel heist at the Louvre earlier this morning.

Authorities say three people made off-

This story we're about to get into, it could've been a Hollywood screenplay.

On October nineteenth, twenty twenty-five, someone broke into the most famous museum in the world and stole some of the most famous jewels in the world.

We're gonna tell you how this heist happened, and track down some people closest to those suspected of being responsible.

Then we're joining the international hunt for the jewels, which takes us closer to home than you'd think.

And we'll be exploring a whole world of heists from real life that might help us understand this one a little bit better.

But even though this heist could've been created by a Hollywood screenwriter, it was all too real for the people who were there that day.

In this episode, we'll talk to the people who saw it all unfold in real time, because while those characters in the back of the shot in Ocean's Eleven ceased to exist after the cameras turned off, these people didn't, and what they experienced will stay with them for a long time.