Determined criminals will steal anything. Here are a handful of the most expensive items ever nabbed by thieves.
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Priceless French jewels
On the morning of Oct. 19, 2025, four thieves armed only with angle grinders smashed a second-story window at the Louvre and made off with jewels the museum and French officials describe as “priceless.” The robbery took just six or seven minutes and targeted an area that houses the French crown jewels. The list of the eight stolen 19th-century objects included: a tiara, necklace and single earring from a sapphire set that belonged to queens Marie-Amélie and Hortense; an emerald necklace and emerald earrings from Empress Marie Louise; a reliquary brooch; and a pearl-and-diamond tiara (pictured above) that belonged to Napoleon III’s wife, Empress Eugénie.
One more item was originally taken, Empress Eugénie’s crown, but the thieves accidentally dropped it (and damaged it) during their escape. “It’s worth several tens of millions of euros—just this crown,” Drouot auction house president Alexandre Giquello told Reuters. “And it’s not, in my opinion, the most important item.” The quartet of thieves absconded with the rest via two motorbikes.
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The Mona Lisa
The world’s most famous painting with a secret message was stolen from the Louvre over a century ago. The criminal, Vincenzo Perugia, was a handyman working at the museum, and he had two handy accomplices. In 1911, he hid in a closet until the museum closed and then simply took off with the near-priceless work of art.
The painting stayed missing for two years, until Perugia attempted to sell it to an art dealer in Italy. It was recovered and returned to the Louvre in 1913. This enigmatic painting, worth $2 billion, tops the list of the most expensive things ever stolen, but after the recent Louvre jewel heist, it remains to be seen whether it will retain that distinction.
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The Empire State Building
No, the Empire State Building wasn’t actually picked up and carried away, but the 102-story skyscraper was indeed stolen. In December 2008, the New York Daily News stole the $1.89 billion building by filing fake paperwork with the city to transfer the deed. The journalists did it to prove that there was a loophole in the law regarding the city’s way of recording transactions. The newspaper returned the building to its rightful owner, and the law was tightened up.
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The Davidoff-Morini Stradivarius
There’s no more famous name in music than Stradivarius, and in October 1995, a $3 million violin known as the Davidoff-Morini Stradivarius was stolen from the apartment of concert violinist Erica Morini. The violin, originally named for renowned cellist Karl Davidoff, was made in 1727 by Antonio Stradivari. At the time of the theft, Morini was 91, and she died shortly after her prized possession was stolen. The violin still hasn’t been found, and it’s on the FBI’s Top 10 Art Crimes list.
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Dorothy’s ruby red slippers
Dorothy’s ruby red shoes, which she famously clicks together to take her back home in The Wizard of Oz, were stolen from the Judy Garland Museum in Minnesota in 2005. At the time, the shoes were worth $2 million to $3 million, and an anonymous donor from Arizona offered a $1 million prize for their recovery. In September 2018, the FBI announced that it had recovered the stolen slippers, and the value soared to $3.5 million. When they sold in 2024, this historic Wizard of Oz keepsake fetched $28 million ($32.5 million with taxes and fees), making it the most valuable movie memorabilia ever sold.
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The Scream
There are four versions of this famous painting by Edvard Munch. The most famous of the four, worth $120 million, was finished in 1893 and is housed at the National Gallery in Oslo, Norway. Thieves first stole the painting in 1994 when it was housed at an exhibition connected with the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer. The painting was recovered, but it was stolen again by thieves who brazenly threatened staffers with guns while museumgoers looked on. The painting was recovered alongside another Munch piece, Madonna. The artwork was stolen at the same time as Scream, but the police kept mum on the details.
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Dinosaur bones
Yes, you read that right—criminals have managed to steal dinosaurs. Eric Prokopi stole the skeletons of more than half a dozen dinosaurs from Mongolia and smuggled them back to the U.S. Wondering why someone would want to steal something so bizarre? Reports from the investigations revealed that the bones were worth over $1 million. Prokopi was caught by the FBI and sentenced to three months in jail. The dinosaur bones were returned to Mongolia.
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A 3,000-pound bell
In 2005, a Vietnamese copper bell was stolen from a Buddhist monastery in Tacoma, Washington. The police believe that the thief just came in with a forklift and stole it while the monks were deep in meditation. The bell was recovered three years later, when the particularly dumb criminal allowed the storage unit that housed it (and tons of other stolen goods) to get sold at auction. Naturally, the thief tried to reclaim the priceless bell for a measly $500.
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Seven Fabergé eggs
The House of Fabergé created 50 jewel-encrusted eggs for the Russian royal family from 1885 until the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. The eggs were lost during the revolution, eventually turning up on the black market and other places. (One egg worth a reported $33 million was found at a flea market by a Midwestern scrap-metal dealer who paid $14,000 for it.) The rest of the eggs remain hidden treasures that could be anywhere. And judging by the value of the scrap dealer’s found objet d’art, those missing eggs could be among the most expensive things ever stolen.
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The Saliera
The Saliera, also called the Cellini Salt Cellar, is a 10-inch gold sculpture made by the 16th-century artist Benvenuto Cellini for King Francis I of France. This gorgeous sculpture is also practical, as it was made to hold salt. (Saliera means “salt cellar” in Italian.) The sculpture is worth about $57 million, making it high on the list of the most expensive things ever stolen. The thief, who spirited the salt cellar away from a museum in Vienna in 2003, kept the Saliera for a few years before turning himself in to police.
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The Concert
This famous painting by Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer was stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990 in what is considered the most daring and consequential art heist of all time. Twelve other paintings were also stolen in the heist, but The Concert is the most famous and the most expensive, valued at $200 million. All 13 stolen paintings have been collectively valued at more than $500 million. To this day, this strange mystery of the art world remains unsolved, and the Gardner displays the empty frames as a reminder of the theft.
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The Amber Room
Sometimes referred to as the “Eighth Wonder of the World,” the Amber Room was a chamber room built for Frederick, King of Prussia, in the early 18th century. Made from 6 tons of amber and backed by gold leaf, the chamber was dismantled and stolen by the Nazis in 1941 and moved to Königsberg Castle in East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). According to the BBC, various attempts to find the original intact Amber Room didn’t pan out, so the Russians decided to recreate it. Currently, a reproduction of the famed chamber is on display at the Catherine Palace in the Tsarskoye Selo State Museum and Heritage Site in St. Petersburg.
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Sources:
- NPR: “Masked thieves steal ‘priceless’ jewels from the Louvre Museum”
- BBC: “Everything we know about the Louvre jewellery heist”
- ABC: “Picasso painting worth an estimated $650,000 vanishes on the way to Spanish museum”
- NPR: “The Theft That Made The ‘Mona Lisa’ A Masterpiece”
- Daily Beast: “Who Stole Erica Morini’s $3.5 Million Stradivarius Violin?”
- FBI: “Theft of the Davidoff-Morini Stradivarius”
- New York Times: “‘Wizard of Oz’ Ruby Slippers Sell at Auction for a Record $28 Million”
- New York Times: “Stolen Munch Paintings Are Recovered”
- BBC: “US fossils dealer jailed for dinosaur smuggling”
- Seattle PI: “Bell heralds break in theft case”
- Barneby’s: “Flea Market Fabergé: The Third Imperial Egg”
- Los Angeles Times: “Masterpiece Is Stolen From a Vienna Museum”
- Artnet: “The Hunt: The World’s Most Valuable Stolen Painting”
- BBC: “Russia’s ‘eighth wonder of the world’”
