What was with the multiple break-ins?

[deleted]

This is an easy explanation if you were paying attention. Here's what happened...

When Sartet takes Samuel to that Diner, we see Sartet talking with a guy in the restaurant, presumably a mob boss. Following this scene, Samuel sees him talking with quite a few other people as well. Sartet was using his connections to stage these events. He also got the fat guy (Marconi, I think) to call Werner and lure him out of the police station while these crimes began happening, so they could sneak into his office to get the video.

I think this was one of two cases in the film I noticed where they did what arty film intellectuals call "hommage"--i.e. paying tribute to some other film genius by quotation or allusion. One has been mentioned in another thread--showing on TV in the background the same opera aria from La Wally that was key to the plot of Diva. This other case reminds me of Le Millon, the 1931 Rene Clair comedy where the nerdy hero helps a "good" type of criminal escape from the police. Our hero then loses his valuable lottery ticket. The "good" criminal friend enlists the benign underworld crime network of Paris to help him find the ticket. In Point Blank we have a "good" criminal, a safecracker (steals only from the rich), who is fighting for his life against murderous corrupt cops. He meets the presumptive godfather of Paris crime in a restaurant and apparently arranges a coordinated wave of petty crime to distract the police, allowing him and his innocent friend to penetrate police headquarters and secure the video exposing the corrupt police.