PARIS (AP) — Thieves ripped a safe from the wall of a hotel room near the Cannes Film Festival and made off with around $1 million worth of jewelry, in a brazen late-night burglary just hours after the screening of a film about break-ins at the homes of Hollywood celebrities, French officials said yesterday.
The apparently well-planned robbery at the Novotel hotel took place in the room of an employee of Chopard, the Swiss-based watch and jewelry maker and festival sponsor that was hosting a splashy gala event in a far ritzier hotel around the same time, officials said.
Chopard has loaned jewelry to A-list stars who walk on the festival’s famed red carpet under rapid-fire flashes of photographers’ cameras. Already this year model Carla Delevingne and actress Julianne Moore have walked the carpet in Chopard gems.
“The jewels stolen are not part of the collection of jewels that are worn by actresses during the Cannes film festival,” Chopard spokeswoman Raffaella Rossiello told reporters in a brief statement Friday.
Cmdr. Bernard Mascarelli, a judicial police spokesman in the nearby city of Nice, said he didn’t know the exact type of jewelry taken, or its exact value. “Numbers have been put forward that we’re still trying to verify, but the figure of $1 million … we’re in that range,” he said. Jean-Michel Caillau, a state prosecutor in nearby Grasse who is leading the investigation, said early estimates were that the loot could have been worth as much as $1.4 million.
