Researching and reporting on the 2003 Antwerp Diamond Center heist presented unique challenges. Most significantly, Belgium’s justice system is not tilted in favor of public disclosure. Court records, police reports, and other documents are not readily available in most instances, and it is illegal for police detectives to discuss their investigations with journalists. This is the only criminal case in which detectives were permitted to break with that protocol.
The story in these pages was assembled from many sources in several countries. Key documents were discovered in a variety of places, as if collected during a scavenger hunt, and interviews with important characters took place in locales ranging from seedy public parks and taverns to ultramodern prisons and ritzy diamond offices. Assembling this book has been much like assembling a puzzle, the pieces of which were found throughout Europe, sometimes in unlikely places. What emerged was not only a spectacular story about the heist of the century, but also a wide array of conflicting details, divergent opinions, and incongruous theories.
Most facts about the diamond heist are clear and indisputable. Others are less so. Even some detectives disagree about the precise course of events. We strove to present the most accurate representation of the crime as possible through deduction, logic, common sense, and triangulation of facts from reliable sources. Where there is a dispute as to what happened, it is noted in the text or in the endnotes.
With a crime such as this—one that produced equal parts awe and conjecture to the degree that it has achieved mythical proportions—it’s fitting that there remains some mystery as to precisely how it was pulled off. Only a small group of men know for sure, and to date not one of them has provided a full and credible explanation, if they’ve spoken about it at all.
Scott Andrew Selby and Greg Campbell
October 2009