France is not the only one affected by the epidemic of museum robberies, the Oakland Museum of California was the victim of a theft on October 15, 2025: a thousand objects were taken by the robbers, making it one of the most significant thefts of cultural property in the history of California. The theft was only made public two weeks after the incident so as not to interfere with the investigation.
It was around half past three in the morning, in an external reserve of the museum, that the thieves entered. The list is long and covers multiple categories: photographs, daguerreotypes, jewelry, ornaments, indigenous baskets and tools, carved ivories, laptops and digital cameras. For the museum’s general director, Lori Fogarty, it’s a shock: “It was devastating. It feels like a real violation. It feels like someone has entered your home. »
The museum, founded in 1969, is the result of a merger of three institutions: the Oakland Public Museum, the Oakland Art Gallery and the Snow Museum of Natural History. It holds one of the richest collections on California history, with more than two million objects in its reserves, including 4,000 on display in its 10,000 m² of exhibition spaces. The collection includes 90,000 works of art by California artists from the 19th century to the present, as well as 100,000 natural specimens. The rest being historical objects and photographs, including 5,000 Native American baskets.
An investigation is underway, led by the Oakland police in collaboration with the FBI, since art theft is considered a federal crime. They discovered that the alarm and security system apparently had not been triggered, since the theft was not discovered until the next day. This suggests precise knowledge of the location, as John Romero, former Los Angeles police captain, confirms: “If it’s a nondescript building, made entirely of bricks, which is very difficult for anyone to guess from the outside, it’s almost always an employee, a former employee, a contractor or a supplier. » Especially since the building is made available to researchers.
It seems that the objects were stolen more or less randomly and that it was not a carefully planned theft. The police are actively monitoring the resale sites but no suspects have yet been arrested.
This is not the first time that the museum has been the victim of theft. At the end of 2012 and the beginning of 2013, two robberies took place. For the first, the thief(s) had taken gold nuggets and pistols dating from the gold rush. The second concerned a chest of gold jewelry from the 19th century, resold for 690,000 euros. A suspect was arrested for the two thefts: André Tardy Franklin. He was sentenced in 2014 to four years in prison for the second theft. He was not convicted for the gold nuggets.
