The morning after the heist, burglar Yunice Abbas went home to catch up on some sleep.
When he woke up, his wife was glued to the TV. The headline news of the day was that American reality TV star Kim Kardashian, then 35, had been tied up and robbed at gunpoint in a luxury Paris apartment.
All her jewellery, worth about $10m (£7.5m), and including the engagement ring her then-husband and rapper Kanye West gifted her, which alone was worth $4m (£3m), had been taken.
Yunice Abbas’ wife glared at him. “This has you written all over it,” she grumbled.
She was right. The 62-year-old had dabbled in crime his whole life, from petty offences to bank heists.
The Kardashian robbery, he later wrote in a memoir, was going to be his last job before retirement.
But a series of blunders meant the heist was doomed from the start and in early 2017 – three months after the robbery – Abbas and several of his alleged accomplices were arrested.
Ten of them will now be appearing in court in Paris in a trial set to last just under three weeks.
Out of those, five are accused of taking part in the heist, and six are accused of being accessories to the crime.
Most of them were born in the 1950s, leading French media to dub them the “grandpa robbers”.
Abbas and a 68-year-old man, Aomar Ait Khedache, have confessed; the others have not.
One has since passed away, and another, aged 81, will be excused as he is suffering from advanced dementia.
By the time the trial starts, almost nine years will have gone by since the heist.
On the night between 2 and 3 October 2016, Abbas and four accomplices allegedly staked out Kardashian’s discreet suite in Hotel de Pourtalès, in the glitzy Madeleine neighbourhood in Paris, not far from the Opéra and Place Vendome.
At around 03:00 local time, they burst into the hotel’s entrance hall, dressed as policemen and wielding a gun.
They threatened and handcuffed Abderrahmane Ouatiki, an Algerian PhD student who regularly took up shifts as night receptionist, and marched him up to Kardashian’s room.
She was resting on her bed, tired from days of attending Paris Fashion Week events, when she heard stomping up the stairs.
She called out for her sister Kourtney and her stylist Stephanie, but when they didn’t answer she panicked.
“I knew someone was there to get me,” she recalled in an interview with US interviewer David Letterman years later. “You just feel it.”
Kim dialled 911 but the number, of course, didn’t work outside of the US. As she was calling her then-security guard Pascal Duvier – who had accompanied her sister to a club – the men burst in, pushed her on the bed and started shouting.
