In the three weeks since the Louvre museum heist, as investigators sought to discover who was behind it and why the French crown jewels had been so easy to steal, another mystery persisted: who the “man in the fedora” was.
The handsome young man in a hat was photographed outside the museum that Sunday and went viral on social media, sparking theories about his identity.
Police moved quickly to arrest and charge four people for the crime, while the Louvre’s director admitted CCTV security was inadequate.
However, the man in the fedora remains an enigma…until now.
It turns out that the dandy is a local teenager who is a fan of Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot and happened to be at the scene of a real crime.
Pedro Elías Garzón Delvaux, a 15-year-old from Rambouillet, southwest of Paris, told the Associated Press (AP) news agency that he had planned to visit the Louvre with his family but discovered that the museum was closed.
“We didn’t know there had been a robbery,” he said.
While questioning officers about the closure, an AP photographer looking to capture the security cordon snapped a photo and included Pedro in the frame.
Pedro only realized the photo had gone viral four days later, when a friend sent him a screenshot asking, “Is that you?”
When he answered yes, the friend said he had five million views on TikTok. “I was a little surprised,” Pedro told the AP.
He was even more surprised when his mother called him to tell him that the photograph had appeared in The New York Times. It had a big impact on him, he said, because he reads that newspaper and “it’s not every day you’re in the New York Times.”
“People said, ‘You’ve become a star.’ I was surprised that with just one photo you can go viral in a few days.”
When asked why he wore an old-fashioned vest and fedora to the museum, Pedro said he started dressing this way recently, inspired by fictional statesmen and detectives of the 20th century.
“I like to be elegant,” he told the AP. “I go to school like this.”
As wild speculation about his photo circulated online (some wondering if he could be a real detective or a fake AI), Pedro remained silent for weeks.
“I didn’t want to immediately say it was me,” he said. “With this photo there is a mystery, so we have to make it last.”
