The museum’s unarmed security guards watched the heist unfold. Under strict orders not to engage with the intruders, all they could do was call the police and monitor the thieves on grainy security footage from a nearby room. In eight chaotic minutes, it was over.
Around 5 a.m. on Nov. 25, 2019, the thieves set fire to a circuit breaker directly across the street from their target. The fire disabled the alarm system, turned off the surrounding streetlights and cut all power to the Grünes Gewölbe museum − the Green Vault in Dresden, Germany − plunging the whole area into darkness.
Moments later, two black-clad hooded figures emerged from the shadows and sprinted toward a small window on the museum’s ground floor with an iron grille over it. Days earlier, the thieves had used a hydraulic tool to cut through a large section of the iron bars and then reattached them with glue to avoid suspicion. On the night of the heist itself, they used a small ax to smash through the window and crawl inside. Using flashlights to light their way, they headed straight to display cases housing one of Europe’s largest collections of fine art, historic jewels and artifact treasures with priceless cultural value.
They escaped with a stash that included a 62-carat diamond, a diamond-encrusted sword, a brooch with 660 gemstones, a diamond hat clasp and epaulette, and a Maltese cross of red rubies. The value of the items was estimated at more than $130 million.
The heist in Dresden’s Green Vault was Europe’s most notorious smash-and-grab art theft − until the Louvre Museum in Paris was ransacked Oct. 19.
Thieves made off with eight items of Napoleonic and royal jewelry worth an estimated $100 million in broad daylight, according to French officials. At least seven suspects have been arrested, and a manhunt was continuing for other suspects involved in a crime that French President Emmanuel Macron has described as an attack on “our history.” The Paris prosecutor has said the jewels have not yet been recovered.
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But the raid in Paris last month is far from the first museum heist. The one in Dresden eventually was solved through German police work with help from an Israeli security and intelligence firm.
In fact, such heists are part of a broader trend of increasingly professionalized art, museum and jewelry thefts by criminal networks in recent years. And they are happening far more in Europe than in the United States, according to police data, independent studies and former and current investigators who spoke to USA TODAY.
“Europe is under siege,” said Christopher Marinello, whose London-and-Rome-based firm Art Recovery International has recovered stolen and missing works of art valued at more than $600 million on behalf of museums, collectors, dealers, artists, governments, insurance companies and religious institutions.
The theft of artwork and other culturally important items often unfolds in an underground world involving highly trained bandits with ties to organized crime. To crack the cases, investigators rely on secret informants, monitor the black market and hidden parts of the internet to see if the missing items have been offered for sale, and even pose as buyers to catch the culprits and, with luck, retrieve the stolen goods.
In 2021, there were nearly 10,000 reported crimes involving cultural property all over the world, according to Interpol, the international police agency based in Lyon, France. More than half took place in Europe, where 18,000 objects such as rare coins, paintings, sculptures and archaeological objects were stolen from public and private collections. Just 772 items were taken that year in North and South America, said the report, which did not break out the statistics for individual countries.
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A separate report published in April by the International Journal of Cultural Property cited 40 of the most significant art heists of the past three decades. Thirty-one happened in Europe. Only two took place in the United States (at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990 and the Jewish Museum in New York in 2001).
Why art thefts happen more often in Europe
Marinello and other security experts said several factors have combined to make Europe fertile ground for heists and cultural theft. These include relatively porous and proximate borders, meager investment in museum security, light prison sentences for convicted thieves, and a preponderance of gangs with ties to Eastern Europe, where law enforcement is comparatively “sparse” compared with elsewhere in Europe.
Eastern Europe is also physically closer to newer generations of wealthy buyers in the Middle East and Asia. Marinello said that all 15 of the watches he has recovered recently − some worth up to $600,000 or more − have surfaced in places such as Estonia, Romania, Slovakia and Serbia.
But those aren’t the only reasons these types of thefts happen more often in Europe.
Investigators and other experts note that many of the museums in Europe are huge, ancient buildings and are therefore fiendishly difficult to secure because they were never intended to serve as museums.
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The Green Vault theft in Dresden took place on the grounds of the Dresden Royal Palace, a sprawling castle complex that was once home to kings and is one of the oldest buildings in the city. It dates to the 15th century.
Criminal police investigate the environment outside the Residenzschloss palace that houses the Gruenes Gewoelbe (Green Vault) collection of treasures on Nov.25, 2019 in Dresden, Germany. Thieves, apparently after having sabotaged the electricity supply, broke into the museum through a window early this morning and reportedly made off with jewels, diamonds and other precious stones worth one billion Euros, making it the biggest heist in post-World War II German history.
Just two men, one van and 50 seconds were needed for Norway’s 19th-century National Gallery − subsequently merged with the hyper-modern National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design − to temporarily lose Edvard Munch’s painting “The Scream” to thieves in the early hours of Feb. 12, 1994. It was stolen as the country was preparing for the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics.
A truck-mounted ladder, a couple of small chainsaws and box cutters were all it took for the masked thieves in Paris to slip through the window of the Louvre’s Galerie d’Apollon − Gallery of Apollo − on Oct. 19 and make off with an emerald-studded necklace and a pair of earrings given by Napoleon I to his second wife, Empress Marie-Louise, on their wedding night. They also stole a tiara that belonged to Napoleon III’s third wife, Empress Eugénie. It is dotted with more than 200 pearls and nearly 2,000 diamonds.
The Louvre’s grandiosity, as in other heist cases in Europe, was not a friend to its security.
The Louvre, the world’s most-visited museum, is a former palace along the Seine River in central Paris that was converted to a museum by the French government in 1793 after the French Revolution. Its collection contains more than 500,000 works, including a dizzying array of paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints and jewelry. About 35,000 of the items are on display at any particular time in the museum’s eight departments.
The Louvre’s size alone makes it hard to secure every room. It has more than 780,000 square feet of public exhibition space. That’s more than double the size of the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, whose collection includes the Hope Diamond and other precious jewels. The Louvre’s building structure is adorned with windows of various shapes and sizes.
“If you’ve ever been (at the Louvre), you’ve seen how exhausting it can be to spend a day in that museum,” said Ronnie Walker, a former FBI agent who specialized in recovering stolen art items.
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The Louvre’s director, Laurence des Cars, testified before the French Senate after the heist that there was inadequate security camera coverage outside the museum’s walls. The balcony where the thieves entered the Gallery of Apollo was not monitored by any cameras. The one surveillance camera in the area where the thieves parked their truck was pointed the wrong way. An internal audit also showed that some rooms inside the museum itself were not covered by security cameras.
Walker said that while it would be technically possible to equip every room in the Louvre with closed-circuit television cameras, the cost and the manpower needed to monitor such a security system would render any such endeavor highly impractical. “Even if they had every square inch of that museum covered with CCTV, it wouldn’t have prevented what happened. It would have just documented it,” Walker said, noting that American museums are often purpose-built with security in mind.
Security guard Paul Daley stands guard at the door of the Dutch Room of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston on March 21, 1990. Twelve priceless works of art were stolen from the museum March 18, including Rembrandt’s “The Storm on the Sea of Galilee,” which hung in the empty wall space seen in the right background.
Dave Bass is a former FBI agent who was an original member of the agency’s Art Crime Team. Since its founding in 2004, the unit has recovered more than 20,000 items valued at more than $1 billion, according to the FBI’s website. When museums are built in modern times, Bass said, a lot of thought goes into the security perimeter. New museums are often placed at a distance from streets or alleys, creating a barrier that makes it harder for thieves to quickly enter the building, steal valuable items and flee.
“In the case of the Louvre,” Bass said, “you literally have a wall separating the contents of the museum from the street outside. That’s not an ideal perimeter.”
Walker said that it would not be as easy to pull up a bucket truck or construction ladder outside U.S. museums as it was at the Louvre. More modern U.S. museums, he said, tend to be smaller than the grand museums of Europe, are often boxlike structures with few windows, and typically are designed with a more open floor plan, which makes it a lot easier for security guards to watch for trouble.
American art theft exceptionalism?
Still, that does not mean the United States is immune to heists.
The Holy Grail of unsolved art thefts is, in fact, an American one, according to investigators such as Geoffrey Kelly, who for two decades led the FBI’s investigation into the 1990 theft at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, which opened in 1903 as a Venetian-style palazzo.
The stolen works, including Rembrandt’s painting “Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee” and works from Vermeer and a Manet, are valued at $500 million, which makes the heist the largest art theft in American history.
A visitor to Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Aug. 29, looks at the frame that held Rembrandt Van Rijn’s painting “Lady and Gentleman in Black”. The painting was one of 13 artworks stolen from the museum March 18, 1990 in one of the largest art heists ever. Two previously convicted criminals have recently offered to lead investigators to the paintings in return for parole, immunity and the $5 million reward.
Kelly retired in 2024 and is now a partner at Argus Cultural Property Consultants.
No one has been charged with the Boston theft despite a $10 million reward. The FBI announced in 2013 that it believes the thieves were two local criminals who died shortly after the heist.
It declined to identify them. None of the artwork has been recovered.
Anthony Amore, an art theft expert who is now the museum’s director of security, said the investigation continues and authorities are still receiving leads.
Art investigations are different from those of other crimes, Amore and other experts said, because catching the culprits isn’t the main objective.
“When someone steals money from a bank, it’s just money. You want to catch the individuals to stop them from doing it again,” said Robert Wittman, who as founder and senior investigator for the FBI’s Art Crime Team helped recover stolen art and cultural property worth millions.
“But when someone steals a valuable painting or unique jewelry, with all its cultural heritage and history, it becomes more important to recover the stolen art and jewelry than it is to actually catch anybody.”
Wittman, who helped recover stolen works by Rembrandt, Norman Rockwell and Francisco de Goya, said missing art is not just property.
“It wasn’t a Ford, or it wasn’t a Chevrolet,” he said. “It was a Monet.”
Museum security is a ‘never-ending debate’
Security funding remains an issue for many museums everywhere. Most museums in the United States are privately owned and funded, while the Louvre is owned by and receives substantial funding from the French government. Private donations and sponsorships and the Louvre’s activities, like merchandizing and licensing and hosting private events and galas, also feed the museum’s budget.
Even so, “museums are not cash-rich like people think,” Amore said.
“They don’t have all the money in the world to spend on security.”
So decisions must be made. Priorities must be set.
A French CRS riot police officer patrols near the glass Pyramid of the Louvre Museum, after French police arrested suspects in the Louvre heist case, in Paris, France October 27, 2025.
“There’s this never-ending debate between museum leadership and their security department director, and that debate is: How do we secure our collection, and how do we maintain public access and fulfill our mission?” said Bass, the former FBI agent from the agency’s art crime team.
Bass recently teamed up with Walker, his former FBI colleague, to form the Art Legacy Institute, an educational and research nonprofit that works to help artists protect their work from fraud, forgery or misattribution, which happens when a piece of artwork is incorrectly credited to a particular artist or time period. Fraud and forgery is a common problem in the art world, with some experts estimating that up to half of the art on the market today could involve forgeries or misattributions.
The job of a museum, Walker said, is to be open to the public so everyone can enjoy the historically significant items in its collection.
“Ultimately,” he said, “their mission is education. And if they want to be 100% secure, they’re not going to be a very good museum.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Why are so many museum heists happening in Europe?
