The brazen daytime heist at the Louvre was carried out by petty criminals rather than professionals from the world of organised crime, the Paris prosecutor has said, describing two of the suspects as a couple with children.
The assertion comes two weeks after thieves parked a stolen truck outside the world’s most-visited museum, used a furniture lift to reach the first floor, then smashed their way into one of the museum’s most ornate rooms. Less than seven minutes later, they escaped on scooters with crown jewels worth an estimated €88m (£76m).
So if this wasn’t organized crime, how they hell did they think they would fence priceless treasures?! Maybe they were cold-blooded enough to chop it all up into bits, get what they could, but FFS, no fence would touch that shit for years, if not a decade+.
You would have to have billionaire buyers lined up, kinda people who have the money to stash such goods in a private collection, and I doubt even the wealthiest would risk it. Who could they show it to?! I wouldn’t let my own wife know I had such a thing under our roof.
To paraphrase: If you’re going to steal the king’s shit, you better not fail selling it.
Their rich amoral friends on their private islands that don’t have law enforcement. But how random poor’s would ever get in touch with a billionaire to sell the jewels I don’t know.
Melt it down for raw value, I assume.
You can melt down jewels now?
A jeweler who won’t ask questions will cut them into smaller stones. Nobody’s checking their origins.
Yeah but it’s devastating to resale value. A gem twice the size can be worth orders of magnitude more than the other. Talking about reducing something worth probably a third or half billion dollars to maybe a few million in scrap value.
$5M > $0
“Bro toss some more diamonds and emeralds in the crucible”