It’s 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.
“Beyond Measure,” the 17th episode of Law & Order’s 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—or something for every art crime enthusiast.
In 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’s fictional Atlas Museum of Art. In the museum’s skylit Beaux-Arts Court—immediately recognizable by its glass tile floor and archways—a 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’s 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.
The 16th-century Crown of Popoyan, we learn, is made up of “five pounds of the purest gold and 450 emeralds”; 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.)
A “rabble-rousing” Colombian activist, who is briefly a suspect, tells us that Indigenous artisans spent six years making the crown, only to have it “snatched away” after 400 years because “the Church suddenly decided that Colombians are not sophisticated enough to guard it.”
Eventually, 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’t have an extradition agreement with the US. Beepers and Morse code are also involved.
For now, thanks to a questionable deal between the defendant’s 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 Brooklyn Museum Atlas Museum of Art.
This Law & Order episode, however, seems to depart drastically from the Vatican’s current stance. In 2023, Pope Francis apologized for the Catholic Church’s role in colonialism and called restitution “the right gesture.” Last fall, the Vatican repatriated 62 objects from its ethnographic collections to multiple Indigenous tribes of Canada.
