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.

The 17th episode of Law & Order’s 25th season, “Beyond Measure,” takes its cues from the recent Louvre Museum heist that dominated international news for several weeks. Thieves made off with $102 million worth of jewels and escaped via a cherry picker, leaving behind a global manhunt.

In the episode, detectives Vincent Riley and Theo Walker chase the shooters through the Brooklyn Museum, which serves as stand-in for the show’s fictional Atlas Museum of Art. At the museum's Beaux-Arts Court—a recognisable skylit space with glass tile floor and archways—Riley and Walker find a bleeding security guard and a missing 16th-century Crown of Popoyan, valued at $75 million.

The episode weaves in ongoing lawsuits from Indigenous Colombian groups who believe the crown belongs to them. A “rabble-rousing” Colombian activist is briefly a suspect, telling 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 an e-bike is caught, moments before he can board a flight to Miami and then Yemen. For now, thanks to a questionable deal between the defendant’s lawyer and the DA, brokered by the Archbishop, the crown remains the property of the Vatican and will go back on view at the Brooklyn Museum.