In 1990, two men dressed as police spent 81 minutes inside Boston's Gardner Museum. They cut Vermeers and Rembrandts out of their frames. This year a crew in Parma, Italy, was in and out in under three minutes. Thieves have gotten faster. They've also changed what they want.
The Journal's Kelly Crow counts more than 14 museums robbed since early 2025, from Wales to Sicily. The big one was the Louvre, about a year ago. Thieves took France's crown jewels, worth at least $101 million. French police arrested eight people last October. The jewels are still missing. Chris Marinello runs Art Recovery International, a London firm that hunts stolen art. He calls the Louvre "a wake-up call."
Gold goes, paintings come back
Here's the turn. In 10 of the European break-ins since, thieves skipped the paintings. They took gold, bronze and gems. Gold prices have soared, and gold keeps its value once it's melted. Investigators say crooked jewelers will cut a big stone into smaller ones that can't be traced. On Oct. 5, a crew in central France carried off a 330-pound bronze book cover set with gold and gems, designed by Salvador Dalí. Two museums, in Parma and in Cagnes-sur-Mer, France, lost seven paintings between them this year. Police returned every one. "You can't melt down a Renoir," Marinello says.
The weak spots are often digital. In July, a cyberattack nobody noticed shut off the alarms and cameras at Paris's Museum of Natural History. Two months later robbers sawed through an exit door and took about 13 pounds of gold, worth around $2 million. An audit found the Louvre's own security systems ran on one weak password. The password was LOUVRE. The museum says it changed it right away. It's also building a cyber unit and plans cameras around its whole perimeter within a year. It still welcomes about 30,000 visitors a day. "Museums are not fortresses," it said.
The cost shows up as empty rooms. The Louvre reopened its Apollo Gallery with every remaining jewel removed. A museum in Villena, Spain, has been closed since Aug. 27, after a three-minute theft of Bronze-Age gold. Vienna's Museum of Applied Arts lost a 1939 Van Cleef & Arpels necklace with 673 diamonds the same day. It reopened the exhibit the next day on purpose, to show faith in its security. France's Lalique Museum lost 27 works in July. It reopens Nov. 28 with photographs where the early jewelry used to sit.
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Insurance and Consumer Protection · M11. The thieves are telling us what's valuable in a hurry, and it's the stuff that melts. Gold is insurance in 46 of our model books, through the IAU fund, and nothing was added. Paper gold in a brokerage account can't be sawed out of a case. Gold at home can. The museums' fixes are plain ones. Change the password. Film the whole fence. Keep less on display.
The piece of your plan this story touches is the jewelry and gold line on your homeowners or renters policy. A standard policy usually caps what it pays for stolen jewelry, coins and precious metals. That cap is often far below what a ring or a coin set is worth at today's gold prices. This week, find your last appraisal and check its date. If there isn't one, or it's older than the run-up in gold, ask your insurer about a scheduled rider. Put a photo of each piece in the same folder. One more lesson from the Louvre. Make sure your brokerage password isn't your last name. Bring the appraisal and your policy's jewelry limit to your next review with us. It's an easy check now and a hard one after a break-in.