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\n\tIt\u2019s Ash Wednesday in Brooklyn and two plainclothes detectives are getting coffee from a street cart. They continue walking down the street past a church. As they approach a museum, a commotion ensues. Someone has been shot, and the shooters are on the second floor of the museum, they are told.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cBeyond Measure,\u201d the 17th episode of Law & Order<\/em>\u2019s 25th season, was ripped from the many, many headlines related to the recent Louvre Museum heist, a story that dominated international news for several weeks last fall. In that heist, thieves made off with $102 million worth of jewels and escaped via a cherry picker, with a global manhunt ensuing. Though arrests have been made in the case, the jewels have yet to be recovered. (There is also a bit of a restitution\/repatriation side-plot\u2014or something for every art crime enthusiast.<\/p>\n \n\tIn the episode, detectives Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and Theo Walker (David Ajala) chase the shooters through the Brooklyn Museum, a stand-in for the show\u2019s fictional Atlas Museum of Art. In the museum\u2019s skylit Beaux-Arts Court\u2014immediately recognizable by its glass tile floor and archways\u2014a bejeweled crown is missing from its vitrine, and a security guard is bleeding out on the floor. Riley and Walker chase the thieves through the museum\u2019s Egyptian galleries until one escapes on an e-bike and the other is shot down, collapsing in a pile of snow in the parking lot.<\/p>\n \n\tThe 16th-century Crown of Popoyan, we learn, is made up of \u201cfive pounds of the purest gold and 450 emeralds\u201d; one stone alone is worth $15 million. The crown has apparently been on loan to the Atlas Museum from the Vatican, though it is the subject on ongoing lawsuits from Indigenous Colombian groups who believe the crown belongs to them and not the Catholic Church. (Here is where the repatriation concerns come in.)<\/p>\n \n\tA \u201crabble-rousing\u201d Colombian activist, who is briefly a suspect, tells us that Indigenous artisans spent six years making the crown, only to have it \u201csnatched away\u201d after 400 years because \u201cthe Church suddenly decided that Colombians are not sophisticated enough to guard it.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tEventually, the thief who got away on the e-bike is caught, only moments before he can board a flight to Miami, and then to Yemen, which apparently doesn\u2019t have an extradition agreement with the US. Beepers and Morse code are also involved.<\/p>\n \n\tFor now, thanks to a questionable deal between the defendant\u2019s lawyer and the DA, brokered by the Archbishop, the crown will remain the property of the Vatican, and will go back on view at the \n\tThis Law & Order <\/em>episode, however, seems to depart drastically from the Vatican\u2019s current stance. In 2023, Pope Francis apologized for the Catholic Church\u2019s role in colonialism and called restitution \u201cthe right gesture.\u201d Last fall, the Vatican repatriated 62 objects from its ethnographic collections to multiple Indigenous tribes of Canada.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/louvre-museum-jewel-heist-inspires-latest-law-and-order-episode-1234780938\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/GettyImages-2269666491.jpg?w=1024″] It\u2019s Ash Wednesday in Brooklyn and two plainclothes detectives are getting coffee from a street cart. They continue walking down the street past a church. As they approach a museum, a commotion ensues. Someone has been shot, and the shooters are on the second floor of the museum, they are told. \u201cBeyond […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1877801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1877801","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1877801"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1877801\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1877801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1877801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1877801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Brooklyn Museum<\/s> Atlas Museum of Art. <\/p>\n