Reported by Neil Vigdor

(Excerpt shared below. To read full report, go to: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/25/world/europe/louvre-heist-jewelry-thieves.html)

So what do former jewelry thieves make of the brazen heist that the entire world can’t stop talking about?

Some gave their, ahem, professional insight into last Sunday’s break-in at the Louvre in Paris, where intruders breached a second-floor window of the world’s most-visited museum and got away with more than $100 million in royal jewels and crown diamonds.

In no more than seven minutes. Take that, “Ocean’s Eleven.”

“I know the adrenaline rush,” said Larry Lawton, who served more than 11 years in federal prison for a string of jewelry store robberies on the East Coast in the 1980s and 1990s. “I know how you have to time it. You can get discombobulated if you don’t understand what you’re doing.”

Mr. Lawton, 64, whom the authorities connected to more than $18 million in stolen jewels, said he was asleep at his home in Florida when a friend called to say that the famed museum had just been hit.

“The first thing people got to know, you have to know you can get away with it before you rob it,” said Mr. Lawton, whose memoir, “Gangster Redemption,” traced his passage from criminal to motivational speaker and criminal justice reform advocate.

Any thief worth his or her salt, he said, would know to have a fence lined up in advance to unload the stolen jewels.