The Louvre daytime heist that shocked the world

Well, Erin, thanks so much for joining us.

Could we have you just introduce yourselves to us? I see you described as an art crime professor.

What does that mean?

It means I've gone to way too much school (laughs).

I have a PhD in art history, and then I went to law school, and now I look at various intersections between art and crime, so forgery, fraud, theft.

I could teach you how to steal a masterpiece, but then I'd have to catch you.

(laughs) I love that.

(laughs) So just a couple minutes after the museum opened, the guards suddenly encountered intruders in the Apollo Gallery, which is a large ornate gallery stuffed full of the French Crown Jewels, and they had come up through a cherry picker, a basket lift parked on the street below.

If you want to be lifted up to change the bulb on a street lamp, for example-

Oh, I see.

... you'll see this type of equipment.

They used it to lift themselves up to an upper story window and get access.

How many of them are we talking about? You're saying, "They." How many?

We know there were at least four men involved.

Two of them put on construction worker reflective vests and operated the equipment, which is always, uh, good to know that if you act confident and have a reflective vest, you can really get away with a-

(laughs)

... huge amount of things.

People will just assume-

Yeah, the high-vis vest is a good hiding-in-plain-sight, uh, tactic, isn't it?

Exactly.

So once they got to the right level, they used an angle grinder to break through the window, which indicates that it was probably of fortified glass of some sort, bulletproof strengthened.

Hmm.

So they, like, smashed a window.

They cut an opening in the window.

As soon as the glass breaks, alarms go off, and the timer starts ticking from when you can get out of the museum and escape before the police cordon off the street.