Austrian police are searching for a pair of brazen thieves who made off with a diamond necklace \u2014 once owned by an Egyptian queen and worth millions \u2014 by smashing a display case at a Vienna museum in broad daylight. <\/p>\n
But unloading the hot rocks stolen last week from the Museum of Applied Arts, known as MAK, could be their undoing, art heist experts said Monday. <\/p>\n
\u201cJust like with paintings, it\u2019s hard to sell well-known pieces of jewelry,\u201d said Anthony Amore<\/a>, a Boston-based art theft expert and investigator. \u201cThe Catch-22 is nobody will buy it intact. So it would not surprise me if their aim is to take the piece apart and sell the jewels individually.\u201d<\/p>\n Robert Wittman<\/a>, who once led the FBI\u2019s Art Crime Team and is now a security consultant, agreed.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat I expect they aim to do is pop the diamonds out of the settings and melt it down,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n If they do, they will dramatically reduce the value of a one-of-a-kind piece that Sotheby\u2019s auction house in New York <\/a>sold in 2015 for $4.3 million, the experts said. <\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re better thieves than businessmen,\u201d Wittman said. \u201cWhat gives this piece its value is not just the diamonds, but the provenance, the history of the piece. They take this piece apart and they\u2019ll be lucky to get a couple hundred thousand, if that.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s if the thieves can find a buyer for the baubles, the experts said.<\/p>\n \u201cAnybody who knows anything about diamonds is going to know where these diamonds came from,\u201d Wittman said. <\/p>\n The robbery bore little resemblance to jewel heists depicted in movies like \u201cThe Thomas Crown Affair\u201d or \u201cOcean\u2019s 8.\u201d The thieves didn\u2019t scale the walls after hours or short-circuit the security system to get inside the museum. <\/p>\n Instead, according to police<\/a>, they bought tickets, strolled in with their faces uncovered and made their way to an exhibition of works from the French luxury jeweler Van Cleef & Arpels.<\/p>\n There, the 200-carat platinum necklace encrusted with 673 diamonds, which once belonged to Queen Consort Nazli of Egypt, was on display. She wore it at the 1939 wedding of her daughter and Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the future shah of Iran, according to the museum.<\/p>\n The thieves managed to get a hammer past security and used it to smash the glass case, grab the jewels and flee, police said. <\/p>\n The museum\u2019s surveillance system caught the whole thing on camera, police said. <\/p>\n