It’s Ash Wednesday in Brooklyn and two plainclothes detectives are getting espresso from a road cart. They proceed strolling down the road previous a church. As they method a museum, a commotion ensues. Somebody has been shot, and the shooters are on the second ground of the museum, they’re advised.
“Past Measure,” the seventeenth episode of Regulation & Order’s twenty fifth season, was ripped from the numerous, many headlines associated to the latest Louvre Museum heist, a narrative that dominated worldwide information for a number of weeks final fall. In that heist, thieves made off with $102 million value of jewels and escaped by way of a cherry picker, with a world manhunt ensuing. Although arrests have been made within the case, the jewels have but to be recovered. (There’s additionally a little bit of a restitution/repatriation side-plot—or one thing for each artwork crime fanatic.
Within the episode, detectives Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and Theo Walker (David Ajala) chase the shooters via the Brooklyn Museum, a stand-in for the present’s fictional Atlas Museum of Artwork. Within the museum’s skylit Beaux-Arts Courtroom—instantly recognizable by its glass tile ground and archways—a bejeweled crown is lacking from its vitrine, and a safety guard is bleeding out on the ground. Riley and Walker chase the thieves via the museum’s Egyptian galleries till one escapes on an e-bike and the opposite is shot down, collapsing in a pile of snow within the car parking zone.
The Sixteenth-century Crown of Popoyan, we study, is made up of “5 kilos of the purest gold and 450 emeralds”; one stone alone is value $15 million. The crown has apparently been on mortgage to the Atlas Museum from the Vatican, although it’s the topic on ongoing lawsuits from Indigenous Colombian teams who imagine the crown belongs to them and never the Catholic Church. (Right here is the place the repatriation considerations are available.)
A “rabble-rousing” Colombian activist, who’s briefly a suspect, tells us that Indigenous artisans spent six years making the crown, solely to have it “snatched away” after 400 years as a result of “the Church out of the blue determined that Colombians should not subtle sufficient to protect it.”
Finally, the thief who acquired away on the e-bike is caught, solely moments earlier than he can board a flight to Miami, after which to Yemen, which apparently doesn’t have an extradition settlement with the US. Beepers and Morse code are additionally concerned.
For now, due to a questionable deal between the defendant’s lawyer and the DA, brokered by the Archbishop, the crown will stay the property of the Vatican, and can return on view on the Brooklyn Museum Atlas Museum of Artwork.
This Regulation & Order episode, nonetheless, appears to depart drastically from the Vatican’s present stance. In 2023, Pope Francis apologized for the Catholic Church’s position in colonialism and referred to as restitution “the appropriate gesture.” Final fall, the Vatican repatriated 62 objects from its ethnographic collections to a number of Indigenous tribes of Canada.
