22,000, packages of uncut diamonds weighing about two hundred carats, and a creatively designed brooch depicting a bird in its nest made of gold and diamonds.Linus: Smash-and-grab job, huh?
Rusty: Slightly more complicated than that.
—Ocean’s Eleven (2001)
Near midnight on Saturday, the lookout gave the all-clear. The only people walking the streets of the Diamond District were those taking a shortcut to the bars and restaurants on the plaza outside the central train station. The police were stationed inside their small kiosk at the corner of Schupstraat and Lange Herentalsestraat, but they may well have been watching the tennis match on a small portable television for all the interest they were showing the light foot traffic on the district’s streets.
It was too risky to walk to the Diamond District with all their gear, so the thieves piled in a car and left the apartment on Charlottalei at 11:47 p.m. Detectives believe the infiltration crew consisted of at least Notarbartolo, Finotto, and D’Onorio, but they never ruled out that there was perhaps one more person they couldn’t identify.
Pietro Tavano drove the thieves to the Diamond Center. Compared to the others, he didn’t possess any well-honed burglary skill but was instead a trusted friend and a reliable “job man,” someone who could be counted on to keep his head and hold down the fort. That was precisely the driver’s job on that night.
The trip took about three minutes. The route followed the one Notarbartolo had taken on foot for the past two years. They must have passed the local police station with a bit of extra trepidation; they were all well aware that, if anything went wrong, they’d be in police custody before long. Someone would have been on the phone with the lookout posted somewhere within view of both the police kiosk and the Diamond Center’s garage doors. As the car, filled with burglary tools and adrenaline, approached the intersection of Schupstraat and Lange Herentalsestraat, the men snapped rubber gloves over hands that were damp with nervous perspiration.
The garage door rolled open as the car was still cruising past the police kiosk. Because the police were stationed only a few dozen paces from the side entrance to the Diamond Center, the lookout watched to make sure that the police didn’t react to the sound of the door opening. Tavano pulled to the curb and seamlessly delivered the thieves like a special forces operation inserting soldiers behind enemy lines. They shouldered their bags and ducked under the garage door as the car pulled away. It took only a moment or two. Then, the car’s taillights turned a far corner and the garage door rolled down once again.
Inside, the booming echo of the door faded into the recesses of the empty garage. They paused for a few moments as complete silence returned. The lookout whispered through the phone that their entry into the Diamond Center had gone unnoticed; the street outside was as quiet and sleepy as it had been before.
Meanwhile, after dropping off his associates, Tavano drove the three-quarters of a mile back to Charlottalei 33. He parked near the apartment and went inside to monitor a police radio. If the men on the inside accidentally set off an alarm, he’d know it as soon as the police did. Tavano could then call his colleagues to give them at least a few minutes’ warning that the mission was blown and the cops were on the way.
If that happened, the thieves would have to make an on-the-spot decision to either bolt out of the building through the garage and hope to slip through what would be a rapidly tightening noose of heavily armed law enforcement, or to flee to the fifth floor and hide in Notarbartolo’s office. Either option was a desperate move. Attempting escape through the garage would almost certainly mean running squarely into the arms of the police, while running upstairs only delayed the inevitable. The building’s security cameras would lead the police directly to office number 516. Now that they were inside the Diamond Center, there would be no escape if things went wrong.
They didn’t linger in the garage. Of all the places in the Diamond Center, it was here that they had the greatest risk of encountering one of the concierges or some workaholic diamantaire who simply couldn’t stay away from his office, even on Valentine’s Day weekend. As it turned out, as much as two years of meticulous planning was meant to minimize every risk, blind luck was also on their side: They missed running into Jacques Plompteux by a matter of minutes. Although he was supposed to be on duty around the clock that weekend, he later admitted to the police that he’d left the building around midnight to meet his brother-in-law for drinks on the plaza.
The thieves moved quickly to the C Block door. The time had come to use the key that they had fabricated especially for this lock. One of the thieves inserted it into the keyway and dragged it across the pins while light pressure was applied to the plug. The rest held their collective breaths. The door opened without a hitch; the custom-made key had worked flawlessly.
Had anyone been watching the Diamond Center’s internal security cameras, they would have seen three or four shadowy figures lugging heavy bags through the darkened hallways. Fortunately for the thieves, no one watched the live feeds at night or on the weekend. The guard booths were empty, the monitors turned off.
Notarbartolo led the others through the Diamond Center’s dark and silent corridors since he was most familiar with the building. Having long tailored his actions to the knowledge that the video cameras were watching his every move, it was a new sensation for him to be freely walking within their sight while overtly committing a crime. The thieves made as little noise as possible as they moved swiftly to the stairwell door in the main corridor, opening it carefully to reduce the noise the latch would make in the echoey confines of the stairwell shaft. When they were all through the door, they closed it just as gently.
At 12:14 a.m., Notarbartolo spoke to Tavano on the phone, updating him on their progress and learning that the police radio traffic gave no indication that anyone knew they were inside the building. The bottom of the stairwell outside the vault foyer was a good place to take a quick breather; there were no cameras there and the stairs reaching fifteen floors above them were silent. So far, so good.
Like D’Onorio had done earlier that week, the men entered the dark foyer and shrouded the video camera before turning on the lights. They dropped their equipment and began unzipping bags. D’Onorio withdrew the metal plate and delicately placed it over the two magnets composing the alarm. He grasped the magnets and pulled them straight outward from where the tape anchored them to the door and the door frame. As they came off, there was the harsh sound of peeling tape, but the magnets never broke contact with each other. Just as on Monday night, the alarm was kept intact, but it now dangled from the wiring out of the way so that the vault door could be opened without sounding the alarm.
Next, the men moved to the corner of the room to the left of the door. The ceiling was composed of thin white slats that created a false ceiling to accommodate wiring and ventilation equipment above them. They bent one of these slats to the side, presumably to remove something that may have been placed there by D’Onorio on the night of February 10. If that was the case, D’Onorio had apparently been much more careful about placing it than they were about removing it; the ceiling slats weren’t damaged until the break-in. That it was a video camera in the ceiling was the investigators’ best theory. There was nothing else above these slats that would have interested the thieves, such as alarm wiring or video cables. One theory was that the camera might have been used to record the combination dial on the vault door. This would explain the mystery of how the thieves obtained the combination.
This theory has its detractors. The most convincing argument against it is that an outer cover encircled the combination dial and shielded the numbers from view; the concierge had to stand directly over the dial to peer down through a small window in the top of the cover to see the numbers as he entered the code; the numbers were visible only through this window. This would almost certainly have obscured the view from overhead since the concierge’s head would have been between the hidden camera and the dial.
However, because the video camera would have been to the left rather than directly above the combination dial, it might be possible that it was angled perfectly to see the numbers. It would have been easier to achieve the right angle using a flexible fiber-optic lens no wider in diameter than one’s pinky than a standard off-the-shelf video camera.
Thieves associated with the School of Turin have been known to use such technology. For example, during a jewelry store robbery in Turin only a few months before the Diamond Center heist, the perpetrators drilled through a safe door’s keyhole to insert a fiber-optic camera that allowed them to read the combination off the back of the lock mechanism. By connecting such a camera to a laptop computer, D’Onorio may have been able to calibrate the view precisely.
A further problem, though, was that even if the camera had somehow been positioned so that the concierge’s head didn’t block its view of the top of the dial, the window of the dial used a distorted lens so that the numbers were only visible at a precise distance. Any camera that captured the image from a distance would be distorted beyond recognition. As Paul De Vos, the locksmith who had worked with the vault since its installation three decades before, later explained, “In my opinion, there is no way that a camera was installed somewhere to see the number combination when someone [dialed] it in. It is just impossible to see it when not holding your eye exactly in front of it.”
Another possibility was that Notarbartolo had discovered the combination some other way and the video camera was a means of making sure that nothing had changed prior to the night of the heist. Only four people knew the combination to the door—Jorge Dias De Sousa, Jacques Plompteux, Julie Boost, and Marcel Grünberger, although Grünberger later told police he’d forgotten it. According to Detective Agim De Bruycker, one concierge (De Bruycker did not indicate which) admitted that he kept the combination written down on a piece of paper he kept in his wallet. Police also considered the possibility that Notarbartolo discovered this and obtained the combination by having someone pick the concierge’s pocket.
Perhaps the most intriguing hypothesis—suggested by insurance investigator Denice Oliver and admitted as possible by police detectives—was that the combination was never erased from the wheel. For the combination lock to be of any use at all, the concierges should have given the wheel numerous spins to clear the code each night when the door was locked. It would only open again once the code was dialed correctly—four twists to the right, three to the left, two to the right, and one more to the left. If the door was shut and locked with the key, but the combination not erased, then it would only take the key to open it again.
Unlike other vault doors, the Diamond Center’s LIPS door did not automatically clear the code when it was closed. Known as “auto scramble,” such a feature would have forced the concierges to enter the combination each time they opened the vault door. Pieter De Vlaam, the manager of testing and certification for LIPS, explained that “the auto-scramble function is rarely used as it requires a complicated link between the lock and the bolt work. Mechanical combination locks require disciplined use—procedures ensuring that the lock is closed; the code is frequently changed. This explains the emergence of electronic locks that can impose all of this. In other words, it is quite possible that the guards relied on the key only. A combination in that case is [as] effective as a safety belt [that is] not strapped on.”
If the concierges did not use the combination, it would have been obvious on those occasions when Notarbartolo stayed late in the vault to observe the door-locking procedure. It also would have been another eureka moment when watching any hidden video of the vault door.
And so, whether by high-tech means of fiber-optic espionage, low-tech means of copying the combination from someone who had carelessly written it down, or the lax habits of complacent concierges who didn’t deem it necessary to fully lock the door, the combination dial had the correct code on it when the LIPS door was opened in the early morning hours of Sunday, February 16.
It was only then that police believe the School of Turin ran into a roadblock, albeit a minor one: a fabricated key the men hoped would unlock the storage room to the left of the vault door didn’t work. But that was the beauty of having a two-foot crowbar as backup; investigators later surmised that it was simpler for them to break the door down than to pick the lock by hand, which would have wasted precious time. The flimsy door cracked easily around the lock, the sound of splintering wood like rifle fire in the tiled foyer. The men forced the door open, sidestepping the water bottles and paint cans strewn about the storage room to apply the crowbar again to the lock box on the wall. The entire key, pipe and stamp combined, hung inside, just as Notarbartolo said it would.
The key slid into the door, and with a few twists of the handle, the large bolts anchoring it into the doorframe retracted from their moorings. The LIPS vault door was unlocked.
The next moments must have been ones of deep breathing and focus. One of the men likely kept his hands on the sabotaged magnetic alarm to ensure that it was out of the way of the opening door. Another had the crowbar in his hands, ready to force open the day gate. All wore headlamps, although they were turned off. With everyone in place and ready, the lights were switched off and the foyer plunged into pure darkness.
Despite the enormous expense, the untold man-hours, and the centuries of technological advancement intended to keep men like the School of Turin out of the vault room, the foot-thick door swung open smoothly on its hinges. A bomb couldn’t have breached that door without destroying the whole building, but they had managed to open it with a combination of patience, ingenuity, and determination. The door worked exactly as it had been designed; it was the human security surrounding it that had failed.
For the men who had never been in the vault before, it would have been a weird sensation knowing that the treasure room lay just ahead in the darkness, maddeningly out of sight until they could ensure that its alarms were disabled.
No one but the thieves themselves knows for sure if the darkness was total. Because of the light sensor, using flashlights or headlamps was out of the question. But they may have used a red-lens flashlight; red is at one extreme of the visible spectrum of light, the closest to infrared, which is invisible to the human eye. Having practiced with light sensors in the months leading to the heist, they might have discovered that the sensors wouldn’t detect the lower frequency of red light, or that, even if they did, the red light took longer to provoke the electrical reaction that would set off the alarm. They may also have used one or more night vision devices, expensive high-tech goggles used by hunters and soldiers to see in the dark.
The latch on the day gate was pried loose with a loud clang, and the gate was pushed into the room. The thieves used a can of paint from the storage room to prop it open so that the pneumatic hinges couldn’t close it again. The rubber electrical tape in hand before the lights went out, one of them—Finotto would have been the obvious choice because of his height—walked to the center of the room, reached to the ceiling, and masked the light sensor with two or three overlapping strips of tape.
They were now free to turn on the lights. As their eyes adjusted to the sudden stark assault of the fluorescent tubes, it was the first time any of the thieves besides Notarbartolo had seen the inside of the vault in person. Everything they knew of this room came from Notarbartolo’s surreptitious handheld video recordings. Now here they were, crouched on the threshold like stormtroopers prepared to assault an enemy stronghold.
They were still for a long moment, listening intently for any faint echoes of pounding footsteps from the floors above. Nothing happened. The thieves realized that they were still safe and went back to work, this time with the Styrofoam panel and its handle. The handle was from a glorified dust mop of comic proportions, used to clean cobwebs from the distant corners of vaulted ceilings. The dust mop part had been discarded long ago; now its telescoping handle was attached to the Styrofoam.
Holding the panel before him toward the motion detector, one of the men crept into the safe room like a hunter wielding a spear at a lion. Even though the motion detector had been masked with the aerosol spray to reduce its ability to detect the infrared energy of their body heat, he reduced his movements to slow motion. The movement of the panel would have triggered the sensor’s microwave radar as it was inched forward, but the alarm wouldn’t sound unless the infrared detector also went off. They both had to be triggered simultaneously for the alarm to go off.
The panel fit perfectly over the small white device. A few dollars’ worth of expanded polystyrene foam, a ten-dollar duster, a scrap of metal, some strips of black tape, and a can of aerosol spray had neutralized the Diamond Center’s alarms. The total spent on these materials was less than it would cost for all the thieves to have lunch at one of the restaurants on the nearby plaza.
Notarbartolo called Tavano at 12:33 a.m. to report that they were inside the vault. From what Tavano could tell of the police radio chatter, the thieves were still undetected.
Before the thieves got down to the untested business of opening the safe deposit boxes, there was one more task. During his many trips to the vault, Notarbartolo had noticed a mass of wires running above the ceiling slats just inside the door of the vault and was worried that they led to some other alarm that was too well hidden to notice.
They dismantled part of the ceiling and took a look. The bundle of multicolored wires was pulled partially out of the ceiling, and, as Peys later said, “tampered with.” The thieves spent little time with them, however, perhaps quickly discerning what the detectives would later learn from the building staff and the security company: that the wires were not part of the alarm system. In fact, during the investigation, no one could remember what they were for.
“We asked everybody what the meaning of that was and nobody knew,” Peys explained. “Nobody could tell us. That tampering had no use at all, it had nothing with the alarm, nothing with the light, nothing with any detector.” Satisfied that the wires posed no threat, the thieves left the wires hanging loose and didn’t bother replacing the ceiling slat.
Time was ticking away and the bulk of their effort was still ahead of them. They carried their heavy bags from the foyer into the vault and began unpacking their supplies. Soon, the floor was scattered with duffel bags, backpacks, water bottles, and all manner of tools.
Since each box required a key and a combination to open, the thieves had long ago rejected the subtle approach; there was simply no way to crack the code and pick the locks on almost two hundred individual safes in just a few hours. Drilling would be time consuming and risk creating vibrations that could be sensed by the seismic detector. Just in case their device didn’t work, however, they also had the power inverter, the heavy battery, drills, and an arc welder to cut through the safe deposit box doors. But their invented tool was their best bet.
In the middle of the vault floor, they assembled their specially designed pulling device. The device consisted of a long square aluminum rod about a foot long, which was fitted with two rectangular metal legs each about four or five inches long. When placed on the ground, this frame looked like a crude toy bridge.
Through a slot in the center of the bridge between the two legs, the thieves inserted a long steel bolt with a flat metal tip on the end with a hole through it. Then another piece of metal shaped like a clamp was attached to the flat end of the bolt with a hinge that allowed the clamp to rotate independently on the end of the bolt.
To the other end of the bolt—the part that protruded through the top of the bridge—they screwed a stout metal plug about the size and shape of a large flashlight battery. On opposite sides of this, they attached two slim metal tubes parallel to the bridge. These tubes created a handle; twisted to the right, the clamp attached to the bolt was pushed away from the bridge, and twisted to the left, the clamp was pulled toward it. The final attachment was a steel prong with a small lip that was inserted into the clamp. The prong was modeled after Notarbartolo’s safe deposit box key and worked as a hook that would pull the door open.
The tool resembled an oversized corkscrew, and it worked on the same principle. Once fully assembled, it was aligned over one of the safe deposit box doors, with the legs bracing it above and below the door. Although the doors were different heights, the legs were adjustable, meaning the device would be able to open the tall safes as easily as the letterbox-sized ones. The prong was inserted into the keyhole and twisted so that the lip rotated inside the keyway behind the plug. The handle was turned to the left and the bolt slowly drew back the clamp holding the prong, causing it to pull outward on the key plug. Once it bound tightly against the key plug and the handle became more and more difficult to turn, the tension was enough that they could let go of the contraption and it stayed attached to the door, with the “bridge” design now perpendicular to the floor. At that point, it was just a matter of applying enough force to the handle to bend the deadbolt as the door was pulled outward.
Since he was by far the most muscular of the men, Finotto was the likely choice to crank on the handle, twisting it mightily as if he were tightening rusty lug nuts on a car. The door didn’t warp, but it began opening, pulled by the steel pin inserted into the plug. There was the sound of wrenching metal as the deadbolt bent and scraped against its housing. Then came the loud crack of plastic from inside the box as the faceplate gave way.
Finally—BANG. The box popped open with the sound of a firecracker, but they did not worry too much about the noise. The seismic sensors wouldn’t be triggered by isolated thumps, otherwise they would go off every time someone dropped a gold bar. And Jacques’ apartment was six stories up from the vault level and in a different building, so it was impossible for him to hear. Although Jorge Dias De Sousa was off duty, there was a chance he was in his own apartment, but his was four stories from where the heist was taking place, on the second floor of B Block.
The group of eager thieves crowded forward to see what the box contained. After lovingly unfolding white diamond papers, the School of Turin finally held diamonds in their gloved hands. The polished ones refracted the dull white light of the vault into a disco ball –like assortment of rainbow colors.
As they forced open each new box, the loot began to pile up. One box contained seventeen stones, all of them just under two carats except for a larger one that was closer to three carats. The same box also held a small container with a white gold chain, a silk Chinese bag containing old heirloom jewelry, a bracelet, a few ladies’ watches, a pair of diamond earrings, two Bulgari watches (both a man’s and a woman’s), a diamond-studded bracelet in a plastic bag, and another bag with a variety of white and yellow gold rings studded with diamonds. Finally, it contained a wad of U.S. currency totaling $8,000.
They moved the tool to another box and broke it open with another loud bang. There they found a brooch with marquise-cut diamonds, a brick of pure gold, a gold medallion inscribed with the name “Frans,” gold earrings, gold cufflinks, and a gold men’s Rolex. There were also two other gold watches (one decorated with twenty diamonds), gold pendants embedded with amethyst and pearls, and gold coins, some imprinted with the seal of Baudouin of Belgium, the king from 1951 to 1993. This box also contained a treasure of gemstones, many in their certification blister packs from the HRD and the GIA. Carefully wrapped diamond papers contained dozens of loose stones as well, in marquise, heart, pear, and brilliant cuts, ranging in size from a half carat to more than four carats. Part of this collection included a rare hexagonal one-carat black diamond as well as numerous industrial diamonds.
The thieves quickly settled into a well-organized routine. One of them opened the safe deposit boxes as quickly as he could while the others sorted the loot, their work punctuated by the loud popping of the doors springing open. Diamonds were thrown together into the same bag; watches, jewelry, and cash went into their own bags. They knew they had to be selective, so Notarbartolo took on the role of impromptu gem evaluator, deciding quickly which stones to take and which to discard. There was no point in wasting space with industrial diamonds when they had their pick of the far more precious gemstones.
If the adrenaline had waned in the time it took them to get down to the business of opening the boxes, it was now surely surging again. For the School of Turin, this was the Christmas morning of a lifetime, each newly opened box investigated with held breath and wide eyes.
One box contained nothing but diamonds—one hundred and forty of them. They were poured into the canvas tote bag like gravel into a sandbag. Another box was stuffed with fat bundles of dollars and euros, twenty Napoleonic gold coins, a matching set of men’s and women’s gold watches and bracelets, several gold chains with gold pendants, a long string of pearls, and three heavy bars of solid gold. A third box held stock certificates, gold European Currency Units—the predecessor to the euro—a gold tie pin, a brooch with rubies, a brooch with diamonds, a diamond armband, and a matching diamond bracelet and earring set. There were gold necklaces, bracelets, and rings in several small boxes. There was also an envelope with the name “Estelle” printed on the outside that contained several gold pieces.
The thieves emptied this envelope and tossed it on the floor in the middle of the room, as they did with all the other containers found inside the safe deposit boxes, from cardboard cigar boxes to expensive velvet jewelry cases. The vault was soon littered with empty silk bags, felt-covered ring boxes, metal fireproof drawers, leather handbags, canvas shoulder bags, briefcases, and even Tupperware containers. To this growing pile, the thieves added pictures, letters, business invoices, transaction ledgers, company documents, cheap jewelry, personal items, credit cards, at least one passport and even a load of bullets. Though valuable enough to the tenant to store in a subterranean vault, these items were of little value to the thieves when compared to the diamonds and cash they were gathering.
Unless the safe deposit boxes contained business information, the thieves didn’t know from whom they were stealing. Their victims included individuals as well as large companies. They stole a gold cigarette box, a wedding ring, a tourmaline clip with embedded emeralds, and a cache of diamonds weighing about ten carats, among other items, from a box owned by Fay Vidal, the IDH Diamonds employee who was nearing retirement. They even plundered the box owned by Julie Boost, the building’s manager, who stored valuable jewelry, including a white gold watch with diamonds, gold necklaces, three diamond rings, and a gold brooch.
As frequently as the School of Turin hit upon personal boxes, they also cracked those belonging to the big diamond companies. These were virtually spilling over with glittering, dazzling stones, which often represented the entire assets of the company that owned them. The thieves stole every carat.
One such box held one hundred and twelve huge rough diamonds, the size of skipping stones. They were the De Beers specials from the most recent Sight, found in a box belonging to Pluczenik Diamond Company, one of the biggest De Beers Sightholders. Exclusive Diamonds lost three hundred and eighty-one carats’ worth of loose stones while another company, Emrusadiam, lost nearly three thousand carats. The thieves stole from Diabel a package of nine diamonds worth $31,000, another box of seventeen diamonds worth $68,000, and a cornucopia of loose colored stones known as fancies, ranging from brown cognacs to yellow canaries. Capital Diamonds later estimated it lost more than a half-million dollars’ worth of diamonds. The bags in which the thieves poured these diamonds began filling quickly because many of the polished stones were in their blister packs, which took up space but which were valuable because they proved authenticity.
Just as the thieves could guess when they were stealing from a wholesaler, it was also obvious when they opened a box owned by a jewelry firm, as these overflowed with gleaming rings, necklaces, and bracelets. One box produced a 100-gram gold Cartier bracelet that, in the value of the gold alone, was worth about $10,000; a gold necklace with a pendant spelling “Sony”; and a ring with the initials “J.H.” In another box, they found a custom diamond-studded cigarette lighter, a gold Star of David, and a package of Israeli bonds. Another box stored a stash of about a million U.S. dollars.
The School of Turin opened forty boxes, then fifty, then sixty. The thieves stopped only to switch off the duty of cranking the boxes open with the pulling tool, which required a lot of exertion. They drank bottled water they had brought with them, throwing the empties on the pile of discarded bags and boxes. Their work surely raised the temperature in the vault, but, so long as the Styrofoam stayed in place on the motion detector to mask their movement, they didn’t worry about setting off the alarm. Regular phone calls to their colleagues on the outside confirmed that the streets of Antwerp were as quiet and sleepy as ever. No one had any idea what they were up to in the subterranean vault.
The only sign of movement at the building occurred around two in the morning when Jacques Plompteux returned to the Diamond Center with his brother-in-law after their night out drinking. As they entered, they virtually traced the School of Turin’s footsteps through the garage and through the door leading to C Block. Jacques later told police that they went straight to his apartment and then to bed while the biggest heist in history was taking place several floors below. Half an hour later, Jorge—who was not on duty and who had been having dinner at his parents’ house, followed by drinks with a friend—also returned to the Diamond Center. He later reported to the police that he didn’t see or hear anything unusual when he returned to his apartment that night.
Down on the vault level, there was a sudden snag in the plan: the pulling tool broke with the unmistakable high-pitched ping of shearing metal. The steel prong used to pull the doors outward from the keyhole had broken in half without so much as budging the door they were attempting to pry open. It was only a momentary problem; the School of Turin wasn’t to be outdone by equipment failure, and, from one of their bags, they pulled out another metal prong. They’d had several made just in case the tool wore down and broke after enough use.
What they didn’t know was that stressed steel had nothing to do with the prong’s wearing down. The safe deposit box on which their tool broke was one of several that locksmith Paul De Vos had upgraded over the years—this newer door did not have a plastic faceplate covering the internal lock mechanism, but a reinforced steel faceplate. Had the Diamond Center acted on De Vos’s earlier suggestion that all the safe doors be replaced with sturdier ones, the pulling tool wouldn’t have worked at all.
For the thieves, it was a mystery. While most doors opened with relatively little resistance, a few didn’t budge at all. They discarded the prongs that snapped in half in the pile of empty boxes on the vault floor and moved on to try other safe deposit box doors. Although they were quickly amassing an enormous fortune in the bags at their feet, they had no intention of stopping until they opened every door they could before it was time to leave.
Some of the boxes had contents worth as much as any jewelry store they’d ever robbed in Turin. Some had more. From one, they grabbed a platinum ring with more than seven carats of stones, a four-carat marquise diamond, a pearl necklace, gold bracelets, gold necklaces, an envelope with 22,000, packages of uncut diamonds weighing about two hundred carats, and a creatively designed brooch depicting a bird in its nest made of gold and diamonds.
The vault looked like a bomb had gone off, with shrapnel made of gems and gold. Safe deposit box doors stood agape around the room. On the floor was a riot of empty bags and boxes, in addition to bracelets, rings, gold ingots, and loose diamonds. As their bags were crammed with ever more treasure, they needed to be selective about what they could take with them. To make room for the most valuable items, they had to sacrifice some that were worth less.
A metal prong broke off in the keyhole for box number 25. This may well have been the last of their backups. It was shortly before dawn and they had been working hard in a state of heightened anxiety for many hours. They had broken into one hundred and nine of the Diamond Center’s one hundred and eighty-nine deposit boxes. Notarbartolo’s own safe deposit box was among those that were not breached, part of a large section of still-locked doors that the School of Turin hadn’t gotten around to breaking open.
The thieves had been awake since whatever fitful sleep they’d been able to get Friday night. Adrenaline—and the euphoria of stealing as yet uncounted millions of dollars in diamonds—could only last so long. They were approaching the giddiness of full-blown fatigue, and there were many risks ahead. They needed to make their escape while it was still dark outside. They didn’t want to risk there being any traffic on the street or any early risers walking their dogs before church. Besides, it was best to exit while the concierges were likely to be sound asleep; neither of them was likely to get up early on a Sunday morning.
Leaving, however, was easier said than done. They had a heavy load of tools and treasure to sneak out of the building. Some tools were sacrificed to make space for more loot; they left the crowbar, for example, amid the debris from the boxes. That was a surprising deviation from the discipline they’d honed throughout every other aspect of the heist. On a normal job, they would carry out with them everything they had brought in. The School of Turin knew that investigators would carefully examine anything left behind for clues, and its standard mode of operation was to give the police as little as possible to go on. The men had been careful to ensure that the items they planned to leave behind—such as the Styrofoam and the tape on the light detector—had been thoroughly cleaned to eliminate fingerprints or other clues.
But after several hours of looting, they had a true embarrassment of riches on their hands: they’d stolen more than they could carry. They only wanted to make one trip out of the building in order to minimize their exposure and they wanted to do it while it was still early. And there was so much worth stealing that, in the end, they had to make tough decisions; should they take the crowbar or leave it behind so they could steal another brick of gold?
The bags were zipped closed and arranged at the door to the stairwell. They took a last look around at their handiwork, surely with a tinge of regret at the millions of dollars’ worth of gems and jewels scattered on the floor that they simply couldn’t take with them. Then they called their friends on the outside to tell them they were coming out.
At the Charlottalei apartment, Tavano put on his coat, grabbed the car keys, and took the elevator to the ground floor. The lookout on the street near the Diamond District reported that the coast was clear. The thieves had the go-ahead to vacate the vault. They didn’t even attempt to cover their tracks; they left the doors wide open and the lights on. There was no point wasting time trying to disguise the crime since it was going to be apparent to the first person who came down to the vault Monday morning.
The thieves retraced their steps as carefully and quietly as they could with the loads they carried. The bag of diamonds alone weighed at least forty-four pounds, as much as a microwave oven. On the way to the garage, one of the men ducked off toward the Schupstraat entrance and, using another fabricated key, opened the door to the security control room. He ejected the tapes that had recorded their crime from the two VCRs, placing them in his backpack, and replaced them with blanks. He looked through the archive of the previous month’s tapes and stole the four tapes that had recorded the happenings of February 10, the day D’Onorio snuck into the building and sabotaged the magnetic alarm. They were not hard to find as the tapes were labeled by date and organized accordingly. He exited the control room quickly, locked the door behind him, and rejoined the others.
The final task was a coordinated, smooth withdrawal from the Diamond Center. Again, the thieves were on the phone with both Tavano and the lookout. As the car pulled to the curb, the lookout gave the green light and they opened the garage door. After the sweaty work in the vault, the predawn winter air was bitingly cold as the men swiftly left the building. The car sagged on its springs as heavy bags of stolen diamonds, cash, gold, and jewels were dumped in the trunk, no more than fifty feet from where police officers pulling the graveyard shift sat bundled in heavy coats in the police kiosk around the corner on Schupstraat.
The thieves piled into the car and disappeared down the street.
The temptation to shout in exhilaration must have been overwhelming. But considering that it was dawn on a Sunday, they wisely refrained from waking Notarbartolo’s neighbors. Exhaustion was creeping in, but it couldn’t overcome the powerful, otherworldly high that made them lightheaded. The thrill of having gotten away with the heist of the century was better than falling in love. It was better than every holiday and birthday they’d ever had.
The men beamed at each other, the intense focus of the past several hours bleeding off into a faint awe that they had pulled it off. They wasted little time pouring the king’s ransom of treasure onto the large, reddish rug in the middle of the floor to tally their ill-gotten gains and divide the loot into parcels that would be taken separately back to Italy. No one seemed to mind this part of the job.
Like the winners in a game of Monopoly, they sorted and counted stacks of multicolored cash. Most of it was American currency, because diamond prices are set to the U.S. dollar throughout the world. There were also euros, Swiss francs, British pounds, Indian rupees, Australian dollars, outdated Belgian francs, and Israeli new sheqalim. They decided that they should throw away the more obscure currencies that would be hard to redeem without risking questions. The rupees were tossed into a large garbage bag that was already being filled with the equipment from the job, including the dismantled pulling tool that had served them so well, the alligator clips they used to test the wires in the ceiling, rolls of duct tape, and other material that could tie them to the heist.
They sorted the government bonds and stock certificates which came from around the world, most from Belgium but a few from as far away as Israel. The watches took up a lot of space because most were stolen with their original packages so as to make them easier to sell. The diamond earrings were piled so high they looked like a glittering snowdrift on the rug. The men passed jewelry back and forth to one another, admiring the settings in a ring or studying the emeralds, rubies, and sapphires in the bracelets and necklaces.
What surely entranced them the most, however, was the staggering cache of diamonds they’d stolen, so many that their weight strained the seams of the bag. They were poured carefully onto the rug. There were thousands of rough and polished diamonds—many of the latter were in their blister packs while others were wrapped in diamond papers. The men hadn’t taken the time in the vault to open these paper packages, so they peeled apart the folds on the living room floor to discover what they contained. Some had great stones, which were added to the pile of diamonds on the carpet.
Others contained comparatively worthless pebbles, such as a package that was filled with hundreds of emerald pointers, tiny green rocks in a marquise shape that were four or five hundredths of a carat. Static caused them to pop off the surface of the inner layer when the package was opened and a few jumped onto the rug; this was a common problem with tiny stones and merchants often took special care when opening such packages of pointers.
The members of the School of Turin weren’t as delicate. They didn’t even notice the little emerald stones that were quickly lost in the fibers of the rug. All they cared about was that the package’s contents were worthless compared to the other items they’d stolen. The paper was crumpled up—pointers and all—and tossed in one of the trash bags. “Even though this little collection of emeralds still had some value,” as Peys later explained, “at that moment, in comparison to what else they had, it was rubbish. It’s like having an envelope with tens of thousands of dollars and one with small coins.”
It took a few hours to account for all that they’d stolen and to repack it into several bags that would be divided for the trip back to Italy. Notarbartolo marveled at everything they had to take from the apartment. Not only were there several bags of priceless loot, but he’d packed most of his personal belongings as well. He made himself a sandwich from the bread and salami left over from Finotto’s shopping trip, ate all but a few bites of his sandwich and threw the rest in the kitchen trash can.
They faced a long drive back to Italy; Notarbartolo was going southwest through France, while other thieves were heading east through Germany, and some toward Brussels and the airport. Since no one in Antwerp knew where Notarbartolo lived (his apartment wasn’t listed on his lease at the Diamond Center and he paid his rent in cash), they could have rested for a bit before heading out.
When they were ready to go, the little elevator in the Charlottalei apartment building made numerous trips to and from the seventh floor that day as the men emptied the apartment of anything related to the heist and loaded it into their cars. Transporting the luggage to the cars was no problem, but it looked a little suspicious when they began filling one of the cars with teeming garbage bags.
The heist had produced a lot of waste. They threw away the tools and equipment along with the loot they didn’t want to take with them, including diamonds that they deemed not worth trying to sell, the emerald pointers, and the obscure currencies. They also threw their rubber gloves and the stolen security tapes (all of them dismantled with their tape unspooled) into garbage bags to be brought to the cars.
As an afterthought, on the way out the door, someone also grabbed the household garbage in the kitchen trash can. They had reused the bag from Finotto’s trip to the Delhaize supermarket, still containing the receipt, as a trash bag. He stuffed that bag, a white plastic shopping bag emblazoned with the Delhaize logo, a black and red design featuring the stylized image of a lion, into one of the larger bags. In all, there were four large black plastic bags that filled the trunk and back seat of one of the cars.
They said their farewells without a hint of mistrust that one of them would be tempted to vanish before they could properly divide the loot, a task they would do Monday in a location far removed from their usual haunts around Turin. In a movie, this would be the point where a conniving double-cross would occur, but many of these men knew each other from childhood. They knew each other’s wives and children. And as much as they were thieves, they considered themselves men of honor. It’s true that they had just wiped out scores of businesses and destroyed the livelihoods of innocent strangers, but there was nothing personal about it. Stealing from faceless strangers was one thing; stealing from a trusted colleague was quite another.
They went their separate ways, knowing all they needed to do was drive cautiously and arrive at the rendezvous point on time before they could say that they’d gotten away with the biggest job they—or anyone—had ever pulled.
Only one of them needed to make a final stop before he was free to escape from Belgium: the driver heading toward the Brussels airport, about thirty minutes to the south, had to find a place to dump the garbage where it would never be found. Just a few exits from the airport, with the jets clearly visible as they took off and banked over the Belgian capital, he found what looked to be the perfect place.