Heist

I'm LOUVREing It

The Louvre saw one of the raddest heists this side of prohibition.

Endeavorance

27 Oct 2025 — 7 min read

I stepped on a particularly crunchy leaf, but Stuff still Happened.

So what's up?

I'm Louvre-ing It

Last week, right after I finished recording the draft of Stuff Keeps Happening, I learned of a century-defining heist at the Louvre museum in France. Imagine my distress—how can I fit this in to the newsletter? I can't NOT talk about the heist of the century!

And so, I chose patience.

This week, let's take a look at what happened at the Louvre: how, what, and who?

The Haul

The thieves made out like… well, bandits. They targeted nine pieces of historic jewelry in the museum, though only made it out with eight. According to the Interpol report, one of the nine targeted pieces was found dropped on the floor. Still, the haul is valued at about €88 million, or a little over $100,000,000 USD.

As a side note, I truly love that their graphic reads, "1 item recovered, 8 still missing" as if they recovered something and didn't just find it on the ground in the museum.

Among the items stolen are:

Earrings, a necklace, and a tiara from Queen Maria Amalia and Queen Hortense's jewels
A necklace and earrings from Marie Louise's jewels
A tiara, brooch, and crown once worn by Empress Eugénie (the crown was the one found on the ground after the heist. Quite damaged, apparently)

The Crew

The heist was carried out by four suspects. Recent reports say that at least two suspects have been taken into custody, but there's scant details on if they're actually the guys, or how many exactly have been found.

The Timeline

It began on October 10th, several days prior to the heist, when the crew strong-armed a basket-lift style vehicle from a rental shop in a town about 12 miles from Paris. Hilariously, the town they got it from is called, "Louvres."

On the morning of October 19th, the squad rolled up to the museum, parked their maintenance lift on the sidewalk, donned a few high-vis vests, and all but waltzed in to the crown jewel museum display.

They arrived at 9:30am, triggered the first alarm at 9:34, and were gone by 9:38. During that four minute window, two of the thieves cut into display cases, grabbed the goods, and got out. Paris PD was only first notified at 9:36, meaning they would have had but two minutes to get to the Louvre and apprehend the suspects.

Of course, that didn't happen, and the gang got away with ease. But how, you ask?

The Getaway

After successfully yoinking the crown jewels, the two not-actually-construction-workers tossed their gear and high vis vests while making their way to their getaway drivers: two other dudes on scooters. Mind you, not like, Razor scooters, although that would probably have been the only way they could have farmed any further aura from all this.

A security guard from the Louvre claims they stopped one of the suspects from setting the lift vehicle ablaze, though for all I know that guy was just trying to save his job.

The Security

This all could only really happen due to some critical security oversights on the part of the Louvre and the French government.

Not only did they not have a security camera monitoring the spot where the thieves broke in, but the fact that they could just pull up and park a maintenance vehicle next to the literal fucking LOUVRE in broad daylight without so much as a raised eyebrow from staff is truly jaw-dropping levels of "lapse in security."

Now, we still don't have a clear picture of what happened. And we should always take statements from authority with the context of what they've got to lose. But, perhaps that lack of security was the point, as detectives involved in the investigation have signaled that the heist may have been an "inside job," with a security guard involved in some way, citing "digital forensic evidence" indicating communication between the guard and the theives.

The Fallout

I mean, it doesn't make France's government look great, but I feel like France's government was already doing pretty good at not looking great. Authorities in France are projecting confidence in apprehending all of the suspects and recovering all of the stolen crown jewels, but that's a bit of a long shot.

It's not likely that the thieves would just roll up to a pawn shop and throw the jewels up on the counter, asking for a price check. If they intend to fence the goods, they'll likely plan to break them down into parts, selling off individual gems and materials while spreading out the sales across time and countries. Or at least, that's what I'd do. Not that I have them right here with me as I write this or anything.

And so the world watched as one of France's most famous museums got absolutely rocked over the span of just eight short minutes. Royal jewelry made from questionably sourced materials stolen from a historic colonizer in a display so brazen it just hits different. Perhaps the historic value is simply lost on me—a simple man—but something about this whole thing just feels like a warm hug of a tale.

Anyway, what else is up?

SNAP in Peril

The US Federal Government—currently controlled entirely by the Republican party across all major branches—has announced that food assistance benefits (known as "SNAP" or "Food Stamps") will not be paid out for the month of November as the government remains shut down. Further, they will not be using the emergency funding available to them to provide the citizens of the country with nutrition assistance.

As of October 2025, 42 million US citizens rely on food assistance programs to secure enough food to survive, or about 12% of the population of the country. In some states, such as New Mexico, where nearly 1 in 4 residents are enrolled in nutrition benefit programs.

This is an actual screenshot of a dot-gov website

The agency that controls this is the US Department of Agriculture. Their response to a hunger crisis facing more than 1 in 10 citizens was to post yet another "I'm telling on you!!!" style message, blaming the Democrats and saying "the well has run dry" for assistive programs, despite legal analysts nationwide noting that the emergency funds are specifically for a case like this.

Also worth noting that the USDA's own posted plans for the shutdown included a statement that SNAP benefits would remain funded via the contingency funds. Mysteriously, that previously published PDF vanished from the USDA website this past Friday.

On the Topic of Hurting Citizens Intentionally…

Earlier this year in the western region of the state of Maryland, Allegany and Garrett counties sustained disastrous damage from torrential downpour. Rain pounded into a local river, flooding at a near-record level over just six hours.

FEMA—the US' disaster relief agency—estimated the damages to be $33.7 million, which is about three times the level for a disaster in Maryland to qualify for federal disaster relief. Despite this, the Trump administration has refused assistance multiple times, with the final appeal having recently been denied by the administration, leaving citizens of western Maryland out to dry.

Both affected counties voted for Trump approximately 70% to 30%.

While it would be easy to just stop at "they got what they voted for!" I want to instead use this as an example of how fucking stupid this party loyalty approach is. Trump has now directly fucked over millions of people who voted for him purely because their houses live within a set of lines colored blue.

In West Virginia, where storms in June brought similar wreckage, the Trump administration approved the disaster relief request within a month. In Maryland, the requests were denied multiple times over the course of the year.

West Virginia is a red state that shares much of Maryland's border. Western Maryland and West Virginia are deeply intertwined.

This isn't good for anyone, and it's the inverse of when "Red states" are hit with disasters. It's not a matter of told-ya-so. Even with that approach, that means 30% of the people living there are just fucked despite having "done the right thing" with their vote.

AWS Outage

On the 20th of October, we saw the latest in a long line of AWS outages, though this one was a DOOZY.

First off: what? Is that?

AWS stands for Amazon Web Services. It's a cloud computing infrastructure provider. Basically, Amazon rents out a TON of servers which run a bunch of different software that companies use to build their systems. Unfortunately for those companies, their services were fucked up for about 15 hours due to a truly classic problem: DNS issues.

Here's a bit of a metaphor for what happened.

Imagine a restaurant that has three different people working the reception desk. As customers come in, the receptionists take them to their tables based on an agreed-upon seating plan for the dining room.

Now, imagine receptionist A took a smoke break after getting tonight's seating plans, during which time they missed out on a revised seating plan from management.

Returning from their break, receptionist A sees a seating plan at the desk which doesn't match the one they were given. They assume it's an old plan, so they throw it away and put their now-out-of-date plan in it's place, and begin seating people based on the wrong plan.

And now management is fucking pissed.

That's essentially what happened, but instead of receptionists at a restaurant, it was servers routing data. The systems in charge of knowing where to send data mixed up their seating plans, and chaos ensued as nobody knew where to seat anyone. Or, send any data.

Ultimately, this meant basically half the internet dissolved for a long time. Worldwide outages, untold millions or billions of dollars lost. Fun times! Looking forward to the next outage. I'll bring popcorn.