Our Fascination With Art Heists

**Kousha Navadar** (0:10)
It's The Brian Lehrer Show, I'm Kousha Navadar filling in for Brian today here on WNYC.
So you probably remember back in October when a duo of thieves broke into the Apollo Gallery at the Louvre Museum in Paris and made out with a little over $100 million worth of French crown jewels.
Here's what I found equally interesting. In the aftermath of the heist, some corners of the internet were celebrating the burglars, getting related to Robin Hood and the Louvre was the butt of the joke. The Apollo Gallery reopened last week after being closed for nine months after the robbery, and right now it is conspicuously empty of all jewels. The cultural response isn't all that surprising. It sounds like something out of a Hitchcock movie or Ocean's Eleven. In a few minutes, a ragtag team broke into the Louvre through a window with smash cases, snagged jewels and vanished.
They were caught eight days later. But we kept talking about it. Where does our cultural fascination for heists come from? And who gets to decide the value of art in the first place? Our guest today, Jo Piazza, has a new novel called The Parisian Heist, which traces the real life story of Vincent van Gogh's sister-in-law, who was the driving force behind van Gogh's rise to fame only after death. And she braids that story with a fictional tale of a contemporary all-female art heist at the Musée d'Orsay. We're also joined by Anthony Amore, who helped Jo research this book. He is one of the country's leading experts on art crime and serves as the Director of Security at the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum in Boston, which, interesting note, was the site of the biggest and still unsolved art heist in history back in the early 90s. Anthony, Jo, welcome to WNYC.

**Anthony Amore** (1:59)
Thank you.

**Jo Piazza** (1:59)
Hi. Thanks so much for having us.

**Kousha Navadar** (2:01)
Great to have you here. And listeners, we want to hear from you. What is it about heist stories that fascinate you? What do you remember about the Louvre heist or any heist you can remember and what made you pay attention? Have you ever successfully committed a heist or unsuccessfully? You can be honest. We're taking your calls and texts at 212-433-9692.
That's 212-433-WNYC. So Jo, while we wait for these calls to come in, let's talk about the history of the heist as we understand it today. When did these kinds of glamorous burglary cases enter the public imagination?

**Jo Piazza** (2:41)
Yeah, I mean, there have been art heists and jewelry heists as long as we've coveted art and jewelry as a society, right? But they've become this kind of glamorous mythological crime, really, in the past 50 years. And I would say that's because every movie that we have involving a heist makes it seem like a very sophisticated and sexy crime. I mean, I know that when I was trying to decide what kind of storyline I wanted to add to the Parisian heist before it was even called that, I wanted to write an all-female art heist. I've been obsessed with heists since the old Thomas Crown Affair, and then obviously the Ocean's movies. I mean, they do make them seem so glamorous, so sexy.
And also, in a lot of ways, and Anthony and I talked a lot about this when we were doing the research for the book, they can seem like a victimless crime. Because like you said, after the Louvre heist, all of these people are saying, oh, well, it's like Robin Hood. It's robbing from the rich to give to the poor. But the fact of the matter is, these museums are mostly nonprofit institutions that exist so that we can see the art, so that the public can enjoy it. And it's not locked away in some billionaires' climate-controlled chamber, or even worse, you know, in their bathroom.

**Kousha Navadar** (4:07)
I think that point, the victimless crime, is something that I'd never quite put a finger on, but you said it really well there, and I think that is so accurate. Anthony, I want to talk about the Louvre Heist for a minute, because we think of these museums as secure, and it seems impossible that folks could pull off a scheme of this magnitude in broad daylight, no less. So how does something like this happen?
Are they doing backflips around motion sensors, like in The Second Ocean's Eleven?

**Anthony Amore** (4:34)
No, they certainly are not. They used brute force in the theft at... The Louvre, as you've probably seen from videos of the thieves up on the balcony breaking through the glass and then breaking through the cases with heavy tools to do so.