Criminals are growing bolder, stealing priceless art, jewels and truckloads of goods — but it's harder than it looks for them to cash in on their heists.

Why it matters: Because massive heists immediately dominate global news cycles, thieves quickly find themselves stuck with highly recognizable merchandise that even underground buyers are too afraid to touch.

Driving the news: Thieves smashed into a small museum in the Italian countryside late last month, stealing three paintings worth over $10 million — a Renoir, a Cézanne and a Matisse.

• The operation took three minutes, and authorities are still investigating.
• The theft follows a similar heist last year at Paris' Louvre Museum, where thieves stole $104 million worth of France's crown jewels. Police arrested several suspects, but the national treasures remain missing.

What they're saying: Geoffrey Kelly, an original member of the FBI's Art Crime Team, tells Axios that local criminals carry out most art thefts.

• He says they are "wowed by the big dollar signs," not highly trained specialists executing carefully planned heists like those depicted in Ocean's Eleven.
• "The trend is typically going to be smash-and-grabs," Kelly adds. "That's the easy part. Once you've stolen it, now you have to figure out how to monetize it. And it's really impossible."

Zoom in: Aging building infrastructure and the speed of smash-and-grab thefts make museum theft appear lucrative, Kelly says.

• Kelly recalls investigating Boston's infamous Gardner Museum heist in the 90s, when moving stolen Rembrandts was already difficult. Today, AI tools can identify stolen works in seconds, and even small auction houses and galleries won't purchase swiped goods.

Yes, but: Stolen art can also serve as leverage during trials.

• "We call that Get Out of Jail Free card," Christopher Marinello, CEO of Art Recovery International, tells Axios. He notes that thieves sometimes trade information about a stolen artwork's location for reduced sentences.

Cargo heists — including recent thefts of $400,000 worth of KitKat bars and, in a separate incident, lobsters — are often hit-or-miss operations, former FBI special agent Robert Wittman tells Axios.

• Thieves often don't know what they're stealing and struggle to resell perishable or traceable goods like food, as many of the items have identification labels.
• "[Whoever] decided to steal that [KitKat] truck, they were hoping for computers, cigarettes, alcohol, whiskey, something that they could move quickly and make a nice sting on," he says.

One major exception is jewelry theft, which remains lucrative because the items are harder to trace and easier to resell.

• Even though diamonds have identifiable "fingerprints" and luxury watches carry unique serial numbers, thieves can still profit, Scott Guginsky, executive vice president of the Jewelers' Security Alliance and a retired NYPD detective, tells Axios.
• Unlike with stolen paintings and sculptures, jewelry can be melted down for its metals or broken down for gemstones, Guginsky says. "You put it on your wrist... go through TSA, arrive in another country, ... and you sell it. It's gone."

Zoom out: Law enforcement uncovered more than 37,000 cultural objects, including artwork and archaeological artifacts, in 2024, per the United Nations.

• The body says these items are typically easier to snag during times of "political instability, war and social upheaval," and sometimes can land as currency on black markets.
• Kelly says that while rare black-market deals occur, raiders often abandon unsellable stolen artworks at police stations or museums. He joked that Hollywood likes to portray a "recluse billionaire who has all the illicit treasures of the world hidden in his underground lair."

The bottom line: In reality, there's not much evidence that secret bunker of stolen goods exists, Kelly says, and the risk of getting caught far outweighs a potential payday.

Go deeper: Exclusive: Organized retail crime growing in size and complexity, new NRF report says

President Trump's new budget lays bare the transformation of his presidency, pairing a historic surge in military spending with historic cuts to domestic programs.

Why it matters: The most powerful populist of this century is at risk of becoming what he ran against — a deficit-spending interventionist asking working-class Americans to shoulder the cost of war.

The timing couldn't be worse: Trump is bleeding support over the Iran war, hitting the lowest approval ratings of his second term as rising gas prices erode his economic credibility.

• Even as Trump insists the conflict will end soon, his $1.5 trillion budget request for the Pentagon — plus an additional $200 billion ask for Iran costs — would lock in a wartime level of spending.

Zoom in: At a closed-door Easter lunch on Wednesday — accidentally live-streamed and then scrubbed from the White House YouTube page — Trump spelled out the trade-off in the bluntest of terms.

• "We're fighting wars," Trump told guests. "We can't take care of daycare. Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country."
• He said the burden should be on the states, which may have to raise their taxes, and that it's "not possible" for the federal government to fund all of these programs.
• White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump was referring to fraud in federal programs, and that "his record proves he will always protect and strengthen Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid."

The big picture: Trump's new budget — more a statement of the White House's goals than a legislative draft — would reorient the U.S. government around military power at the expense of virtually everything else.

• Defense spending would rise 42% — a buildup the White House itself says exceeds the Reagan administration's and approaches the pace of spending just before World War II.
• The massive Pentagon budget is framed as a response to an increasingly dangerous world that predates the Iran war, and envisions permanent U.S. military dominance as a governing principle.

Non-defense spending, which includes categories such as public health, scientific research, housing and education, would take a 10% cut, or $73 billion.

• The steepest cuts would fall on the EPA, down 52%; the National Science Foundation, down 55%; and the Small Business Administration, down 67%.
• Agencies spared from the proposed cuts include the Justice Department, which would get a 13% increase to "maximize its capacity to bring violent criminals to justice."

Between the lines: The administration is using a familiar argument to justify the cuts: fraud, waste and abuse.

• In a Truth Social post Friday, Trump christened Vice President Vance his "Fraud Czar" — directing him to focus on Democrat-led states where, Trump claims, recovered fraud could balance the federal budget.
• A year ago, Elon Musk's DOGE made the same argument, initially promising $2 trillion in savings but ultimately falling far short. Independent analysts found their claimed savings were vastly overstated, and the political backlash made Musk a pariah.

What they're saying: "Savings are achieved by reducing or eliminating woke, weaponized, and wasteful programs, and by returning state and local responsibilities to their respective governments," the White House said in a fact sheet.

• White House officials point to examples such as grants for "environmental justice" projects and LGBTQ-focused programs as evidence of wasteful spending.
• "Under President Trump's bold leadership, every tool in the executive fiscal toolbox has been utilized to achieve real savings," White House budget director Russ Vought said in a letter laying out the budget.

What to watch: The combination of foreign adventurism and domestic austerity cuts against the political instincts that brought Trump to power.

• The coalition that delivered Trump his second term — working-class voters, older Americans, rural communities — relies disproportionately on the programs being compressed to fund the military.
• Congressional Republicans face a brutal choice: Back a budget that guts programs their working-class constituents depend on, or break with a president who's made loyalty the price of survival.