LOUVRE HEIST TOP FIVE

Counting down my favorite things about the most important story in the world.

brian grubb

22 Oct 2025 — 7 min read

HENSON

Nothing will ever top the toilet heist. I’m sorry, but there’s no getting around that. An artist made a toilet out of solid gold and called the exhibit “America,” then the toilet ended up going to the childhood home of Winston Churchill, then the caretaker of the home said he had no plans to add security because he didn’t think anyone would want to steal a solid gold toilet, then — DAYS LATER — a bunch of guys showed up and ripped the gold toilet out of the wall and disappeared into the night. That’s just perfect, beginning to end. It’s important to remember that.

Still, the Louvre heist gets close. Some guys showed up at 9 a.m. in a truck with a ladder attached, went in through the window, grabbed a bunch of priceless jewels, and then escaped on scooters through the streets of Paris. They had little handheld buzzsaws. No one got hurt. The whole thing happened during seven minutes of broad daylight and allowed every headline editor in the world to break out the word “brazen” in a variety of languages. No toilets were stolen, not even one made of silver or bronze, but still, solid business all around.

As you can imagine, this story has derailed my entire week. The morning it happened, I woke up to over 70 notifications from people who wanted to bring it to my attention. This was… awesome. I really mean that. I was scrolling and cackling and then scrolling some more. I consider it one of my greatest achievements in life that I have posted about heists so many times that now people see a heist and immediately think “I gotta tell Brian.” It’s all I’ve ever wanted.

I have spent the last few days reading, well, everything about the Louvre heist. So many open tabs. Just an unwieldy number of open tabs. At one point, I had to close a few because I needed to pay a bill and the website for my medical provider was running unbearably slow under the weight I was putting on my browser. I regret nothing.

Below, please find my five favorite things about (or even just kind of related to) the Louvre heist. The image at the top of this page is Diana Rigg in The Great Muppet Caper. In the business, we call this a tease.

FIVE: It confirmed one of my longest-held beliefs

My position, dating back many years, is that you can get into almost any building if you carry yourself like an annoyed employee and have any two of these three things in your possession:

Hard hat
Walkie-talkie
Clipboard

These guys showed up on a work truck, the kind seen throughout Paris and used for lifting furniture up into high-rise buildings, and made off with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of jewels that were on display in the Louvre. Some people called me crazy when I told them my theory. Some people said I had seen too many movies.

Well, look who is vindicated now. Kind of. I suppose I didn’t have “truck with a big ladder on it” on my list. I think it falls under the same umbrella, though. There’s probably a formula I can work out. Like, maybe one ladder truck equals a hard hat and a walkie-talkie. The important thing here is that I was right, or at least close enough to being right to be smug about it.

FOUR: The camera was facing the wrong way!

The museum’s director got hauled in front of the French Senate and had to field questions from politicians for two hours. She did a pretty good job, or at least as good a job as anyone can do when their museum just got looted by some guys who had a truck and a couple scooters. She correctly pointed out that the museum was long overdue for renovations and that the security system was outdated, especially considering what it was supposed to protect.

That said, this bullet point from the BBC rundown of the hearing sure did make me laugh.

Sole camera pointing wrong way: The only camera monitoring the Gallery of Apollo, where the jewellery was displayed, was pointing away from a balcony the thieves climbed over to break in, she said

I have this image in my head. It’s very clear. I see two idiots in a control room sitting on wheeled desk chairs, spinning around and flicking wads of paper at each other while pondering which cartoon characters they would sleep with if they woke up as cartoons the next morning, stopping every few minutes to look at the camera that was pointed in the wrong direction before declaring “all clear” and getting back to those other important duties.

I would love to see those guys testify in front of the French Senate.

THREE: It's a great opportunity to talk about The Great Muppet Caper

Pretty much the whole time I was reading about this heist, with its trucks and ladders and scooters and stolen diamonds, I was thinking “boy, this is a real Muppet-ass heist, isn’t it?” And then I stopped and started thinking about The Great Muppet Caper for a while.

God, what a perfect movie that is. Charles Grodin plays a slimeball named Nicky Holiday who is hellbent on stealing a jewel called “The Baseball Diamond.“ Kermit and Fozzie play identical twins, even though one is very much a frog and the other is very much a bear. Peter Falk shows up. There’s an extended sequence where Miss Piggy is the star of an elaborate synchronized swimming performance. I feel like I didn’t sell Grodin’s performance well enough in that first sentence. Here, look at this guy.

We spend a chunk of every holiday season talking about how great The Muppet Christmas Carol is, for good reason, because it is great. But we should also spend a lot of time talking about how great this movie is, too. It’s funny and charming and has a kind of anarchic sense of humor running through it that I’m not sure I fully appreciated until I went back and watched it again as an adult.

Yes, I watched this movie dozens of times as a child. Yes, it probably explains how I ended up the way I am. No, I do not see a problem with any of that.

TWO: Everyone is really just having a lot of fun with it

There have been so many things written about this Louvre heist. So, so many. And, like, good. Journalists gotta be weary right now, man. There are newsroom cuts galore and lots of heavy stuff to cover and everyone is really just yelling a lot. I imagine they saw “group of goofs pull off wild diamond heist” and were like “YES! YES! I WILL WRITE ABOUT THAT! PLEASE!” and then their editors saw the traffic spike for Louvre heist articles and were like “BLOG, YOU IDIOTS. BLOG LIKE THE WIND.”

Here are some of my favorites so far.

The New York Times got the graphics department to make an interactive map
The New York Post ran some wild speculation that the heist was commissioned by a mysterious collector who wanted the items for his private collection (and people say I'VE seen too many movies???)
A site called The Court Jeweler did a whole breakdown of exactly what was stolen
NPR crushed the search traffic angle with a list of OTHER heists at the Louvre
The Independent posted the greatest Op-Ed ever written: "I was part of a diamond heist. Here’s how the Louvre was looted"

Terrific work by everyone here.

ONE: Joan and Jim had a nice vacation

The day the heist happened, the BBC was out interviewing… pretty much anyone who wanted to talk to them about the Louvre heist. They found an American couple named Joan and Jim who had been in Paris on vacation. Here’s what Joan and Jim had to say about the whole thing.

"I knew something was up because of the way they swept the whole museum," says Joan.

"But it's great," Jim adds. "This is our last day of a long trip and it's the most exciting part today."

I am so happy for them.

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