No Stupid Questions

Melted down and gems re cut.

It’s a bad deal for everyone.

For normally stolen pieces, melted down and the gems refit.

This? Probably sitting in some 1%'ers private collection so they can play dress-up.

Small ones go to pawn shops.

Large ones like the french heist will likely have been paid by someone to get it.

The news says a lot of shit, that does not make it true.

Billionaires operate outside of the same society we do. Those kinds of awful people would appreciate such items regardless of legality.

Need i remind you of the global human trafficking and child sex abuse ring they ALL participated in?

There are lots of options. Honest jeweler buyers (likely including your local jewelry store and pawn shows - which might be dishonest in other ways but not that) are notified by the local police when jewelry is stolen and they consult the latest description list when buying and inform the police if anything is on that list.

So as a criminal your options are: use it yourself (either wear it, or as gifts to friends); sell in a different city where hopefully it isn't on the list; sell it to someone who doesn't care that it is stolen; sell to a fence (who will in turn sell it to someone); melt it down for the metals (gold and silver) and jewels.

Note that buyers of metals are also on the list of those watching for stolen goods. If you bring "a lot" of something to anyone buying metals expect questions. Metals are easy to melt and hard to trace, but if you are selling more than the average person is likely the police will be told to check you out. Often the point of a "fence" is to mix your illegal gold with legal gold and sell to locals jewelers who think everything is legal.

As other have said jewels are cut.

You lose a lot of value in all of the above. Jewelry is already way overpriced in general (that is the value is much less than you pay), and hiding your tracks is hard. It is really hard to make this type of crime pay because the police are good at their job.

I could imagine a deranged billionaire, like imagine a son of emerald miners who used his inherited wealth to buy EV or space companies, somebody who is quite short and self conscious about it, with a small penis feeling he needs to have children in triple figures before he flies to Mars. Anyways, a filthy rich guy like that who has everything and now wants a memento of Napoleon. He'll keep it in a secret basement and that's where he will go to masturbate looking at it.

It seems weirdly specific but I'm really just making it up.

I think this will stay in somebody's basement. Even if you took it apart, experts will be able to recognize parts of the jewelry even if they chopped it up, say, the gemstones that were part of it. There are probably easier ways to get the same amount of valuable materials that won't raise as many eyebrows when you try to fence them. So either these thieves are learning that lesson right now or a mad billionaire is masturbating next to it in his basement.

Its almost certain that a heist like this had a buyer. You dont steal something like this with no way of getting rid of it.

I ask cause the news says the the Louve thieves can never sell it because it so known?

Rich people buy expensive stolen artifacts all the time.

Either it's a "steal to order" or they'll melt the precious metals down (like they did with the Manching gold) and sell the stones to a corrupt stonecutter who will cut them in a different way to hide their origin .

Joke : Should stay in a British museum cuz obviously the French can't take care of those

They either already have a buyer set up before the heist (seems unlikely, things that probably just happen in movies) or far more likely, cut it up into unrecognizable gemstones then sell it

The value rarely is in the jewelry, but rather in the jewels themselves. So, if you had stolen, for example, a gold ring with a big diamond, you'd take out the diamond and either sell it as-is, or chop it into smaller diamonds and sell them, and probably have the gold smelted back into raw material again. From what I know, it apparently is common for gems (especially very valuable ones) to be given as gifts or traded and fitted into new settings, like rings, necklaces, crowns etc. over the course of centuries, not just stay in the same piece forever.

What I think is most likely in this case, is that some rich asshole wanted to have them for their private collection and hired someone to steal them.

[off topic?] .

https://thrillingdetective.com/2018/10/30/philip-st-ives/

Philip [Raymond in the movie] St. Ives is an ex-newspaperman who has become a professional go-between, acting as a middle man between the police and the underworld. Insurance companies would rather pay half the value of a policy to the crooks than all the money to the victims, and the victims [usually] want what was stolen back.

The movie is pretty good, and the stories are excellent.

Nice try, you can’t bait me that easily!

They probably already had someone who wanted to buy them.

I don't know if this is 100% true or not, but I in The Goldfinch stolen art is used as collateral for criminals. The items are known to be worth money and can be used as collateral for various criminal activies. So it can be passed around. Not sure how true that plot point is.

What's the artifact origin? Maybe they weren't stolen but returned?

The Louvre heist was done in broad daylight and nobody stopped them. If it hasn't occurred to anyone that this was orchestrated by people of the highest authority who are far above the law, I don't know what else to tell you. The value of those jewels can now be recirculated back into the economy instead of sitting uselessly in a glass case for eternity.