The Louvre heist is a tale too good to muddy with the facts
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Pedro Elías Garzon Delvaux is a regular 15-year-old schoolboy, if by regular, you mean a 15-year-old with a penchant for waistcoats and fedora hats. Setting out on a half-term walk with his mother and grandfather, he was snapped by a press photographer while passing by the Louvre. Hours after last month’s jewel theft, the internet found its sleuth. The New York Times ran the image with the headline: “Is This Dapper Man Going to Crack the Louvre Heist Case?”
Alas, it was merely Pedro Elías in cosplay. Though the reaction very much delighted him. “I like to experiment with various outfits from the 20th century,” he writes over email. “I am [also] a great fan of Sherlock Holmes and Lamb [from the Slow Horses series],” says the teenager, who can be found in various guises via Instagram and who, as with so many stylish young gentlemen, is a fan of the Financial Times. “We didn’t know about the heist and found out a few seconds before the picture was taken. My grandmother was a curator and former student of the École du Louvre.”
Having unwittingly captured the imagination of the internet, he spent the rest of his school holidays enjoying the “craziness” it inspired. He was especially taken “by the comic [illustrations] dedicated to this old-world detective and the AI movies inspired by the character everybody was imagining”.
Pedro Elías harbours no ambitions to become a detective. “I would be more interested in becoming a diplomat,” he says. As for being mistaken for a 40-year-old sleuth, he writes: “It’s really funny. It also says something about how people see you when you dress up.”
The real Louvre sleuths were a fleet of rather more discreet detectives, who used an advanced DNA database to analyse 150 forensic samples left at the scene of the crime. What was at first seen as an audacious crime in the spirit of an old-school thriller has since been revealed as très banal. The theft of some €88mn worth of jewellery from the museum’s Apollo Gallery, including a diadem worn by Empress Eugénie, was not the product of a professional hit job, months in the planning, but the work of petty criminals so sloppy in their execution they left behind crucial evidence in their haste to make a getaway.
Four suspects have now been charged in the case. But the internet is not willing to let the story rest. An extremely tenuous image, widely circulated on Facebook, shows two of the most handsome mugshots since Hugh Grant got in that scrape with a sex worker 30 years ago. The photos are not the men in question, but the internet cast an idealised version of the case nonetheless. “Hang these pictures in the Louvre,” wrote Raven Smith, a columnist and influencer. “If prison doesn’t happen,” observed another, “they can always do the Louis Vuitton show.”
Heist dramas still occupy an outsize grip on our imagination. From Snatch to Inception and, my favourite, The Thomas Crown Affair (Faye Dunaway version), there seems to be no limit to our appetite for theft. A few days following the drama at the Louvre, Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind was released in cinemas. In a peculiar parallel with real-life drama, it too depicts the story of an amateurish opportunist whose criminal mastery involves him walking into a local museum and grabbing artworks off the walls.
The Louvre heist has all the makings of a blockbuster: a French Ocean’s Onze, Douze or even Treize. And when the facts have stood in the way of romantic interpretation, the people have filled the blanks with dramatic flourishes worthy of a Guy Ritchie film. Why are we so enraptured by such stories? Is it the cat-and-mouse style of the hunt? Do we love the idea of small men getting away with millions? Or are we just intrigued by how the burglary is done?
Sherlock Holmes still looms large in his deerstalker. His first case was published by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1887: the third instalment of Enola Holmes (the Netflix spin-off based on the exploits of Holmes’s baby sister) is expected to land soon.
The best heist stories blend comic touches, eccentric characters and, crucially, breathtaking incompetence. In their 2021 Netflix documentary series Heist, the directors Derek Doneen, Nick Frew and Martin Desmond Roe told three major crime stories from the perspective of the perpetrators. The stories were too outlandish to present as fictions, the plots were wild and strange. In order that audiences would “root for the bad guys”, Doneen told the Guardian, they selected heists with no fatalities. Roe’s assessment of our continued interest was that, faced with a room with $100mn in it and no guards, we can’t help but imagine how we would act. Most people “wouldn’t do it”, he concluded, but we still admire those who do.
In the inevitable dramatisation of the Louvre story, I hope the facts will not get in the way. At the very least I nominate the lead detective to be a 15-year-old schoolboy in a tie and waistcoat. Who solves major crimes while doing his prep.
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