Chapter 1: What is the story behind the Pink Panther jewel thief?
Teksting av Nicolai Winther On this episode of The Commercial Break.
We're too dumb to know. We're too dumb to care. We don't care. Because, you know, pattycake11707 just put out another reel that I like. About kitty cats. Or my favorite streamer is getting arrested for, you know, the little pot in his pocket.
I mean, it's unbelievable.
Well, listen. It's, you know, I don't have the answers. I wish I had the answers. I don't have the answers. Chrissy has the answers, but she won't tell me. Jeff's been giving her the secrets. Jeff's in the 1%.
The next episode of The Commercial Break starts now.
Oh yeah, cats and kittens, welcome back to the commercial break. I'm Brian Green, this is my dear friend and the co-host of this show, Kristen Joy Hoadley. Best to you, Kristen.
Best to you, Brian.
And best to you out there in the podcast universe. I had just me. I wanted to bring you into the group, too, on the camera. I know, I saw that. Yeah, I don't like you, so I'm taking you out. Goodbye Chrissy. Hi Chrissy. I'm back. There you are. Hi. Hi. I have been fascinated by this Louvre thievery that happened. The Louvre, if you don't mind.
The battleground of good and evil when Tom Hanks did it. Remember when Tom Hanks did that movie and it all ended at the Louvre?
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Chapter 2: How did the Louvre heist unfold?
I'm not a historian. But we walk into one of these churches. There's hundreds of people that are there. We're kind of walking around the perimeter of the church. And then you walk down these stairs next to this box, these very old stone stairs. And you walk down, and there is a piece of long glass, like a transom. And you look in that transom, and no shit. One of the saints...
A saint is entombed, and if I'm not mistaken, it's one of the apostles, I believe, is entombed in this fucking church. Now the question is, is that really his old bones? Like, roller old bones on down here? I don't know if those are really the old bones, or they're sitting in the Vatican somewhere, and they've put something else there to pretend that it is, because it's so valuable.
You know, this wasn't like a heavily guarded church. They had security, of course. But then we've also been to the church in Valencia, where the last cup of Christ is, supposedly. And, you know, that was a weird experience also. So the Louvre is another one of these priceless, invaluable places
Testaments to human art, human achievement, and, quite frankly, the riches that are amassed on behalf of some people, the Louvre. These guys take a cherry picker in the middle of the day, right as the Louvre is opening, they take a cherry picker, they ride that cherry picker to a glass window, they jump in, they steal some extraordinarily valuable jewels, crowns,
Yeah, Napoleon, right? It was all related to Napoleon.
You might be right about that. That might be the Napoleon wing of the building, so to speak. Or the Napoleon Hall, whatever you call it. And so they take all of this stuff. They're in, they're out, seven minutes. Let me give you a little... Oktober 19th, four thieves carried out a bold daylight raid in the museum's Galerie de Apollon, which is the houses of the French crown jewels.
They arrived at 9.30 a.m., they used a truck with a lifting platform, what we know as a cherry picker, parked it outside, raised a few floors into a balcony. broke a window. Two perpetrators used power tools to break through the glass window. They smashed the display cases inside, grabbed eight pieces of historically significant jewelry, tiaras, necklaces, and earrings.
They once belonged to French royalty, Queen Marie Amélie, Queen Hortensen, One of those stolen items was a crown worn by Empress Eugene that was later recovered outside the museum, but it was damaged. And the thieves fled on scooter and exited via the scene side of the facade onto the motorway. Within four minutes, they were in and out. Within eight minutes, they were on the highway and gone.
The audacity and the fact that they got away with it, that they actually were able to do it.
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Chapter 3: What are Freeports and how do they operate?
I love those movies. Yeah. Was it Jean Clouseau? Was Jean Clouseau the Pink Panther? Jean? Jean Clouseau? No, not Jean Clouseau. Jean Clouseau. Jacques Cousteau.
Jacques Cousteau.
He was in movies, too. And his pet turtle. Yeah, he was the explorer and... The pink belugan whale. They are known as the pink panthers, and for the last couple of decades, they have been wreaking havoc in the most friendly of ways across Europe, mainly across Europe.
Yes.
Now... What do we know about the Pink Panthers? Let me explain a little bit about the Pink Panthers. It's a group of very slick jewel thieves, essentially, is what they are. They target places by doing a lot of homework and looking like people who are meant to be there. High fashion, well-dressed, well-educated. They look like they fit the scene wherever they are.
And that's usually some high street somewhere. It's been in Paris. High street. High street. That's what they call it. Look at me. I'm one step closer to becoming a UK citizen.
You mean fancy?
Yeah, fancy. Yeah, fancy. Classy. High Street is the fancy street, right? The place where you go and you know what it is. It's Rodeo Drive, essentially, in whatever town. This has been in Paris and in the UK and all throughout Eastern and Western Europe. They have done this. They pick a jewelry store where they think they can get away with a lot of jewels in a short amount of time.
And they use manners and and fear, rather than bullets and violence. That's what they're known for. They walk in, they get in, they get out, usually less than a minute or two. They steal millions and millions of dollars worth of jewels, and they do it with the precision of a military operation, or like a Secret Service CIA operation.
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Chapter 4: How are jewels and art trafficked in the black market?
They know what they're doing. In Dubai, two Audi sedans smash through the glass in the doors of the Wafi Mall. Four masked men loot the graph jewelry store. Less than 88 seconds, they make out with $20 million in jewels. God. That's insane. I know. Saint... I can't say this. Saint-Tropez. Saint-Tropez. Saint-Tropez, France.
Robbers dressed as tourists stroll in and take six million dollars worth of jewels. They flee on speedboats because, yeah, why not? Let's throw boats in the mix. Milan, Italy, another graph store, $7 million. They used smoke bombs to disorient the security, but they were non-toxic, so no one got hurt. Cannes, France, Cannes, France, $136.
million dollars as they steal a suitcase full of gems from the behind the counter of a jewelry store. They knew what they were going in to do. 2014 through 18 there are dozens of copycats or connected robberies and then there's sporadic Germany, Switzerland and Balkans. These guys have never been caught and it fascinates the fuck out of me. Of course. First of all, how do they
Here's my question. What do they do with the jewel? Obviously they have a network of people that they must sell these to. And when you sell $136 million worth of retail value diamonds, you're not getting $136 million back. They're stolen. You have to get rid of them. Diamonds these days have barcodes just like every other thing on earth. They can be tracked and traced. Do they? Okay. Okay. Okay.
The barcode, essentially, for the diamond. It was traced. It can be tracked and insured. And so if someone else steals it and puts it in another ring, if you were ever to find the ring that somebody had, you would be able to track and trace that particular diamond to where it was sold, the chain of custody.
And the guy was telling us at the diamond store, he's like, this is how all of this is done now. Yeah, well, it makes sense.
When a guy comes in with a bag full of diamonds, when my guy comes in with a bag full of diamonds, you know, I imagine, for some reason, I imagine a Hasidic Jew, and I don't mean that, it's just what I imagine when I think of those New York jewelers, you know, coming in with a bag of diamonds, yeah, and then just like rolling them out on a table, and you're looking at them, you exchange the diamonds, and then you write down the serial numbers, and you, you know, whatever you do, I don't know what the fuck you do, you do something.
You write down the same numbers.
But, when you're stealing these kind of jewels, they're either probably raw diamonds, or old enough to not carry this kind. They didn't have that. Yeah. But the fact that these Pink Panthers know what they're stealing. They know what they're stealing.
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Chapter 5: What tactics do the Pink Panthers use in their heists?
Okay. And the paintings are trading for millions and millions of dollars. Kim K has some of this art. And if you look at some of this art, it's a little strange. It just is.
Speaking of stolen jewels, I was going to bring that up earlier. I remember she had that. She had like a million dollars worth of jewels stolen from Paris.
She did, right out, like walking down the street, right? No, it was out of her hotel room. Oh, that's right. Who was the... Remember we saw that one video of the lady who was robbed of her jewels, like right on the... Tried to be kidnapped off the street, and her dad got involved, and he almost died, and the whole... Anyway... This world is really weird.
And I start looking into Salma Hayek, when I'm doing some research for the Pink Panthers, I start looking into Salma Hayek, Gucci, this guy, you know, Penal, who's really like... The wealthiest of the wealthy. I mean, aristocrat.
Don't just be so fun.
Wealthy of the wealthy. Is it fun, though, is my question. Because when I start looking into Padal, and I start looking into Salma Hayek, I start realizing just how connected they are to all of the other aristocrats, these extraordinarily wealthy Bezos, Musks, Epsteins of the world. And it really started to like,
It started to make me realize that there is this crust on the top of our society right now that is largely driving the narrative, the conversations, the things we think about, the things we do.
I was just listening to something the other day, and they were talking about all of these people that own the media companies. Yes.
If you think for one second that Elon Musk bought Twitter because he is some champion of free speech, you're wrong-headed on this. Like Joe Rogan, I've heard him say this before, you know, thank you Elon for buying Twitter. Twitter. So now we can all say what we want to say. While I can appreciate that's an altruistic view on free speech, Joe, that's not why Elon bought Twitter.
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Chapter 6: Who are the key players in the world of art and jewelry theft?
Like the Jews who got all the, or the people in Europe who got all of the stuff taken from them. You know, it was like a whole, they had whole, I think, units dedicated to returning art.
Yes. Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, and then other people that buy it, criminal organizations using for money laundering, and then people who don't know the art is illegal.
Yeah.
It's a whole thing.
So, I have a friend on Facebook, I mean, I have a friend, and then we're on Facebook together, and a couple of weeks ago made a post about one of these art collectives, where you can buy into the collective for a piece of art, and then as it raises value, it's like stock, you're buying stock in this piece of art, and then as it raises value, your piece of this particular piece of art then raises value, and you can trade it in, and if there's supply or demand, all that other stuff.
And he had made $10,000 in a little over three years. He put in like $1,000. It was worth like his piece of this particular piece of art. It got traded at Christie's, and then the current value was like $12,000. Wow. So he made like $10,000 in three years. Now, not a ton of money, but what if he had put $100,000? Yeah, exactly. And it was $1.2 million. That's a big return on investment.
When you 10x your investment, that's huge.
Well, the art just keeps going up and up and up.
It really does. Listen, art is the new real estate. It's, you know... Didn't Snoop Dogg buy a piece of Meta World or something like that? Remember when he bought a house in Sims or something, didn't he?
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