Dr Marc Balcells is giving a lecture in Barcelona for Deep Dive on Wednesday 25 November 2026. Deep Dive is a Barcelona lecture series where professors and experts give talks in bars: someone who really knows their subject talks for fifty minutes, and then everyone stays to discuss it over a drink. Past speakers include researchers from CIDOB, the Hospital del Mar Research Institute and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and several of its lectures have sold out.
Balcells is a criminologist and a professor in the Faculty of Law and Political Science at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), where he directs the bachelor's degree in Criminology. He holds a doctorate from the City University of New York. He studies crimes against cultural heritage: art theft, forgery, archaeological looting and the illegal trade in antiquities. For his book Arqueomàfia (La Campana, 2025) he interviewed tomb robbers, prosecutors and police in Italy. In 2025 he co-authored a study of three decades of museum heists in the International Journal of Cultural Property.
His lecture, "How to Rob a Museum", goes inside museum heists, stolen masterpieces and the black market for art. A Vermeer missing since 1990. A Caravaggio gone since 1969. The Louvre's crown jewels stolen in broad daylight. These five answers are a preview.
Five questions he has been asked before, answered with his own published words. Most were given in Catalan or Spanish and are translated here.
Hollywood has done us a lot of harm here: the thief who always gets away. In all the years I have spent researching this, I have found only one pure art thief, one person who did nothing but steal art.
The real professionals don't go after the big museums. They went from hermitage to hermitage, from one small museum to another small museum. Hitting a museum like the Louvre today is just stupid. It means you don't know how to be a cultural heritage thief. The pieces are instantly known to everyone. Every station and port is on alert. Europol, Interpol and the police of half the world are looking for them.
Sources: El Temps, 28 Aug 2026; COPE, 29 Oct 2025. Translated from Catalan and Spanish.
Mostly by force. Thieves used to get into a museum at night without setting off the alarms. Now we see robberies like the Louvre: a mechanical ladder and angle grinders. Or, at Villena, a hole knocked through the wall. It is old school robbery, like the Marseille gangs who came in through a hole from below. As I argued in a 2025 scientific article, art robberies are becoming more and more violent.
Our study of heists from 1990 to 2022 found that thieves mainly beat security through brute force, not complex or technological methods. They are willing to trigger sensors for the sake of a quick attack. Security guards and poorly kept sensors are never enough to deter them.
A museum is vulnerable by nature. At the Louvre it came out that the password was LOUVRE in capital letters, the security plans had not been updated for decades, and the cameras either did not work or did not point where they should. Now imagine a small museum. Most museums are not prepared for an attack this violent. They worry about a visitor walking off with something, not about someone breaking through the wall.
Sources: El Temps, 28 Aug 2026 (translated from Catalan); Clopés and Balcells, International Journal of Cultural Property, 2025 (English original).
If there is one thing criminologists have been able to rule out in recent years, it is that. Of all the cases we know, proven thefts to order are the exception to the rule.
The idea comes from Hollywood, once again. When Goya's portrait of the Duke of Wellington was stolen from the National Gallery in London, the first Bond film used it: when Sean Connery reaches Dr. No's hideout, the painting is there. That is what we call "the Dr. No scenario", a commissioned theft of a work that can never be shown to anyone. That collector does not exist in reality.
Reality is much more prosaic. Criminals are rational, but their rationality is limited. They think: I will break through the wall and take the treasure. But what do you do with it if you have no contacts and no buyer?
Sources: El Temps, 28 Aug 2026; COPE, 29 Oct 2025. Translated from Catalan and Spanish.
If I steal a Van Gogh, it's a Van Gogh. I can't dispose of it through any other channel than an illicit art market. But when I am stealing jewelry, I can move it through an illicit market as precious stones.
The latest robberies at big institutions are thefts of cultural heritage in our eyes. In the thieves' eyes they are thefts of jewels or gold. Perhaps the Louvre thieves are not trying to sell the Empress's crown, but the stones taken out of it. The worst scenario is that the gold gets melted down, and then its value as heritage is lost.
Many times in the history of art theft, the thieves did not know what they were doing. The Mona Lisa thieves in 1911 were not experts and had no contacts, so they kept the painting under the bed.
And the legal art market has a big problem: very little regulation. It is a silent market of secret deals. When you cannot tell whether a piece has a legal or illegal origin, we are not talking about a black market. We are talking about a grey market.
Sources: Reuters, via BusinessWorld, 22 Oct 2025 (English original); El Temps, 28 Aug 2026 (translated from Catalan).
Historically, some cases have been solved in days and others never. Caravaggio's Nativity with Saint Francis and Saint Lawrence has not been seen since it was taken in Palermo in 1969. The Louvre pieces have not turned up either.
With crimes against cultural heritage, the police's priority is to recover the piece rather than to catch the criminal. You only have to see how few people in prison have committed these crimes.
Fortunately, Spain's Policía Nacional, Guardia Civil and Mossos have good cultural heritage units, and they work well with the Carabinieri, the Gendarmes, Scotland Yard, the FBI, Interpol and Europol. That is much better than a country without that kind of specialised police.
Sources: El Temps, 28 Aug 2026; UPF Focus, 5 Oct 2022. Translated from Catalan.
There, the Treasure of Villena would go into the police statistics next to a PlayStation stolen in the neighbourhood.
Doors 18:30 · Lecture 19:00 · Venue to be announced · In English