#museum-security

#museum-security

Entrenched in the terror of the Zodiac and Zebra killings, San Franciscans endured the tragedy of the Jonestown Massacre and the assassinations of George Moscone and Harvey Milk. Patty Hearst made headlines, someone tried to shoot President Gerald Ford at the St. Francis Hotel, all while Mayor Dianne Feinstein tried to keep the city together. It would be easy, then, for one not to remember that the largest art heist in San Francisco's history also happened in the '70s.

It took less than 10 minutes. At 9.30am on Sunday, four men arrived in a truck outside the Louvre in Paris, driving right up under a balcony and setting up a ladder with a furniture hoist. Two of them casually climbed up to the balcony and cut through the reinforced glass of a window; on the other side of the glass was the Apollo gallery, the most ornate and arguably the most beautiful room in the museum, Helen Pidd hears.

In the early hours of Tuesday morning, an apparently well-planned criminal operation targeted the museum's geology and mineralogy gallery. Cleaning staff detected the break-in later that day and museum teams saw that four to six pieces of gold were missing. The thieves are believed to have used an angle grinder and blowtorch to force their way into the riverside museum that sits on the edge of Paris's Jardin des Plantes. It is an unprecedented theft from the high-security museum. A museum spokesperson said